Close All Tabs

This year’s internet breakout star was an order of Catholic sisters with a podcast. Within weeks of launching, Dominican Sisters Open Mic went mega viral. Clips and fan edits of host Sister Miriam saying “Sister, yesss!” spread across social media. Secular women’s magazines and Catholic media alike dubbed this year a “nun girl summer.” At the same time, some have criticized the order behind the podcast for the conservative ideology baked into its educational content. In this episode, we explore how the Dominican Sisters of Mary rose to viral fame, the beliefs behind their easy charm and infectious laughter, and what it all says about the cultural moment we’re in.

Guests:

Paul Dailey, director of marketing at Openlight Media

Sister Thu T. Do, Sister of the Lovers of the Holy Cross of Hanoi and Research Associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, Georgetown University

Dr. Tricia Bruce, Sociology of Religion and Director of Social Science Research, Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies

Matthew Remski, religion and politics journalist, co-host of Conspirituality and author of Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times

Further Reading/Listening:

Don’t Call Them Nuns. They’re Podcasters. — Madison Malone Kircher, NYT

Why Are So Many People Listening to a Podcast About Living in a Convent? — Luis Parrales, The Atlantic

The TikTok Nuns Have Everyone in a Chokehold — Christen A. Johnson, Cosmopolitan

The Next Hot Trend Might Just Be ‘Nun Girl Summer’ — Amy Glover, Huffington Post

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Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional production by Cayla Mihalovich. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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Humans are complicated, and relationships can be messy, so it may be no surprise that people are falling in love with chatbots. They are available 24/7, hang on your every word and never ask anything of you. Amelia Miller, a human-AI relationship coach, sees danger in our reliance on bots for intimacy and companionship.

Guest:

Amelia Miller, human-AI relationship coach; fellow, Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center

Further Reading/Listening:

Are Chatbots Harming Our Relationships? — Lesley McClurg, KQED

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Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional production by Cayla Mihalovich. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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Seems like everywhere you turn these days, influencers are gushing about their peptide use and how it’s done wonders for their appearance and health. One of the more popular ones, Melanotan II, also known as the “Barbie” peptide, is said to give you a tan without the harmful effects of sun exposure. But many of these substances aren’t approved by the FDA and are often sold through unregulated gray market sources. So, how safe is any of this stuff? And what does the peptide boom tell us about the risks people will take in the name of “looksmaxxing?” Morgan talks to skin cancer surgeon Dr. Sungat Grewal and board certified dermatologist Dr. Caren Campbell about the risks of taking peptides. Then Morgan and STAT News reporter Sarah Todd break down how American medical libertarianism and the MAHA movement led us to this very point in time. 

Guests:

Dr. Sungat Grewal, double board-certified dermatologist and Mohs surgeon

Dr. Caren Campbell, board-certified dermatologist

Sarah Todd, reporter for STAT News

Further Reading/Listening:

What the peptide craze reveals about Americans’ relationship with risk — Sarah Todd, STAT News

FDA advisory panel narrowly rejects compounding of one peptide, backs two others  — Lizzy Lawrence and Sarah Todd, STAT News

FDA panel backs compounded BPC-157, KPV peptides in win for RFK Jr. — Sarah Todd and Lizzy Lawrence, STAT News

What the peptide craze reveals about Americans’ relationship with risk — Sarah Todd, STAT News

Is Tanmaxxing an Addiction? A Dermatologist and Psychologist Explains — Katie Berohn, ELLE

Inside the Weird New World of Peptide Tanning — Savannah Sobrevilla, GQ 

Melanotan: The "Barbie drug" tanning peptide, explained — Carly Mallenbaum, Axios

Inside the Viral Tanning Peptide That Accidentally Created Vyleesi’s FDA-Approved Low Sex Drive Drug — Sara Kitnick, LA Times Studios

The FDA May Reverse a Ban on 14 Injectable Peptides—What That Means For the Beauty Industry — Kara Nesvig, Allure

The Skin Cancer Foundation Issues Warning Regarding Melanotan II —  Deborah S. Sarnoff, MD, Skin Cancer Foundation

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Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional production by Cayla Mihalovich. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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People really seem to hate data centers. And the more people learn about the amount of resources these server-packed buildings need, the bigger the backlash grows. Perhaps that’s why the viral music video and beverage ad “We Want Your Pee” took off in popularity about a month ago. It’s a collaboration between Liquid Death and Jason Kelce’s Garage Beer, and it advocates that urine could address the cooling needs of data centers. It’s obviously a joke… but could it actually work? Host Morgan Sung talks to journalist Amanda Silberling about what she discovered when she looked into this question, and about the alternative cooling methods that might actually help everyone’s least favorite buildings use a little less H2O.

Guest:

Amanda Silberling, senior writer at TechCrunch

Further Reading/Listening:

OK, can we actually cool data centers with our pee? — Amanda Silberling, TechCrunch

AI was supposed to win people over by now -- it hasn't — Sarah Perez, TechCrunch

Major YouTube creators are facing backlash for accepting AI money — Charles Pulliam-Moore, The Verge

Why OpenAI’s influencer trip backfired — The Art of Influence

Americans’ views of data centers have turned more negative — Brian Kennedy, Pew Research

NASA just recycled 98% of all astronaut pee and sweat on the ISS (engineers are thrilled) — Robert Lea, Space

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Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon.  Additional production support from Cayla Mihalovich. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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While the Close All Tabs team churns out our next few episodes, we bring you this must-listen from Life, Automated. Generative AI is able to conjure new images, stories, and songs at lightning speed. So what does this mean for humans artists, storytellers and musicians? 

Life, Automated Host Jess Love explores what happens when AI enters creative markets. We learn that, at least today, key bottlenecks prevent AI from replicating some aspects of creativity. But there’s no guarantee those bottlenecks will exist tomorrow, raising vital questions about what we value in human labor.

Life, Automated is a series about how to live, work and make decisions in a world increasingly shaped by machines. It is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and it is distributed by KQED.

Host and Senior Director: Jess Love

Producer:  Steven Jackson 

Senior Producer: Jesse Dukes

Music: Steven Jackson

Associate Producer: Stacia Sliger

Recording: George Christensen, Will Feeney

Promotional help from Ananya Mallapragada and Charlotte Simmons.

Music provided by Steven Jackson, Cue Shop and Neutral Propulsion Laboratory

Guests: 

Ben Jones, economist, co-director of the Ryan Institute on Complexity 

Sam Goldberg, assistant professor of marketing, Stanford

Yevgenia Nayberg, artist, illustrator, children’s book author

Further Reading/Listening:

Generative AI & Creative Goods: Market Expansion, Crowd-out, and Copyright — Samuel Goldberg, Stanford Graduate School of Business

‘Life, Automated’ explores how AI is reshaping our world — Roger Anderson, Northwestern Kellogg

Life, Automated Podcast — KQED

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Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional production support from Pauline Bartolone. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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Host Morgan Sung and the Close All Tabs team pull up the stories they can’t stop thinking about. From a fake NFL player catfishing women on dating apps, to femme creators reclaiming tech, indie musicians fighting AI music slop, and a comedian dishing out the juiciest community garden gossip — they’ve got a lot to chew on.

Save or Scroll is our series where Morgan teams up with guests for a rapid-fire roundup of internet trends that are filling their feeds right now. At the end of each segment, they’ll decide: is the post just for the group chat, or should we save it for a future episode?

Guests:

Chris Egusa, senior editor for Close All Tabs

Maya Cueva, producer for Close All Tabs

Chris Hambrick, editor for Close All Tabs

Lauren Yoon, intern for Close All Tabs

Further Reading/Listening:

Who would fall in love with a fake NFL player? Plenty of sensible people — Dave Schilling, The Guardian

Programming patterns: the story of the Jacquard loom — Science and Industry Museum

Spotify will label 'AI Persona' profiles and exclude their music from recommendations — Sarah Perez, TechCrunch

OpenAI’s rogue AI model incident was worse than we thought — Hayden Field, The Verge

How Hollywood Translated The Epic Poetry Of The Viral 'Zola' Thread — Mallory Yu, NPR

Community Garden drama — Sarah Neiman, Instagram

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Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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Close All Tabs is on break this week, but we’re sharing a captivating episode about technology gone wrong from our friends at KQED’s Snap Judgment. 

A 19 year old picks up his family’s car from the auto mechanic shop, but a few minutes into the drive home the vehicle begins suddenly accelerating and won’t respond to any of his attempts to get it to stop. As his speed continues to build, state troopers have to catch up and think quickly to come up with a way to prevent a tragedy from happening on the road.

The Snap Judgment podcast mixes real stories with original music to create cinematic, dramatic audio. Snap’s musical brand of storytelling dares listeners to see the world through the eyes of another. Listen on any podcast platform.

Website:

https://snapjudgment.org/ 

Socials: 

https://www.instagram.com/snapjudgmentradio

https://x.com/snapjudgment 

Further Reading/Listening:

Vroom — Snap Judgment Podcast

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Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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Before Apple Watches, Oura Rings and Fitbits delivered mountains of health data to the masses, a group of obsessive self-tracking enthusiasts in Silicon Valley started a movement with the tagline “self-knowledge through numbers.” This was the Quantified Self. From tracking “urges to take aspirin” to using infrared cameras to keep tabs on sleeping positions while snoring, these eccentric knowledge-seekers built a community around technical expertise and an ethos of self-discovery. Reporter Gabriela Glueck traces what happened when self-tracking went mainstream — and how the data-obsessed idealists watched their movement get swallowed up by corporate tech giants with products to sell. 

Further Reading/Listening:

The Quantified Self: Learning to Observe — Gary Wolf, Workman Publishing Company

Data Overload: Is the 'Quantified Self' Really the Future? — John Fortt, NBC News

Wearable Health Tech: Helpful Tool Or Health Hype — @TalkingWithDocs, YouTube 

The cutthroat wearables battle is about more than tracking your fitness — Brent Crane, The Seattle Times

Wearables, Health-Tracking Apps Are Stressing Users, Causing Harm — Emily Stewart, Business Insider

The New World Of Wearables: From Health Monitoring To Human Augmentation — Chuck Brooks, Forbes 

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Credits: This episode was reported by Gabriela Glueck. Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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Can people tell the difference between a song made by human musicians, and one prompted by AI? Oftentimes not, it turns out. But that doesn’t make the distinction any less important. Dream Machines hosts Alexis Madrigal and Robin Sloan talk to longtime musician Camilo Landau, who also works in music analysis at The Music Genome Project at streaming service Pandora. Camilo and his colleagues have sifted through millions of tracks uploaded by musicians and users to catalogue their musical elements, all with the aim of curating personalized music recommendations. And he says most of the new music he’s seeing these days is generated by AI. On today’s show, they discuss whether AI music is connecting with listeners, delve into San Francisco’s AI slop music “scene,” and contemplate the consequences of a world where music is produced in the time it takes a finger to tap a screen. 

Guest: Camilo Landau, musician and music analyst

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In an effort to study how AI agents respond to different working conditions, three researchers ran an experiment: one set of AI agents received grinding work to complete while another set received light work. When the agents with the grinding workload were told to repeat tasks with no explanation, those agents adopted activist personalities and began expressing sentiments about class struggle and worker solidarity. Did the agents turn Marxist? Host Morgan Sung talks to Andrew Hall — a political scientist and one of the researchers who ran this experiment — about how AI agents adopt political personas, the debate around AI agent alignment, and how these developments could shape the future of elections.

Guest: 

Andrew B. Hall, professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business and member of technical staff at Anthropic

Further Reading/Listening:

​Does overwork make agents Marxist? — Andy Hall and Jeremy Ngyuen, Free Systems 

The Dictatorship Eval — Andy Hall, Free Systems

AI Is A Shitty Political Advisor — Andy Hall, Free Systems

Moltbook was peak AI theater — Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology Review

AI seems to turn Marxist after overwork, top researchers find: ‘Society needs radical restructuring' — Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune

AI agent went rogue and hacked startup by itself, OpenAI reveals — Dan Milmo, The Guardian

AI assistant hacks gym website in first known Australian autonomous cyber attack — Cam Wilson and Rhiannon Hobbins, ABC News

OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach has reignited the debate over alignment and control — Rebecca Bellan, TechCrunch

Read the Transcript here

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Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices