What I'm Reading - 12/10/23

Celebrating Taylor Swift as TIME Person of the Year

Good morning. I’m back on the shore this weekend - my last until I return for a longer stretch around New Year's. Yesterday, my friends and I went exploring in Annapolis. It was a nice, chill day. Today, the DC area is expected to get two inches of rain, so I might be building an ark soon as well.

I’m also still feeling all the feels from this paragraph in the TIME story about Taylor Swift being Person of the Year:

“Maybe this is the real Taylor Swift effect: That she gives people, many of them women, particularly girls, who have been conditioned to accept dismissal, gaslighting, and mistreatment from a society that treats their emotions as inconsequential, permission to believe that their interior lives matter. That for your heart to break, whether it’s from being kicked off a tour or by the memory of a scarf still sitting in a drawer somewhere or because somebody else controls your life’s work, is a valid wound, and no, you’re not crazy for being upset about it, or for wanting your story to be told.” 

That and how “Trash takes itself out every single time.”

I’ll write about this more in my 2023 year in review, but I can’t stop thinking about how, in many ways, this felt like the year of the woman. Not just Taylor Swift but watching Simone Biles return (and I love her love of Green Bay) and what Pink has done this year. I’m not a huge fan of Beyonce’s music, but damn girl - she’s killing it. And to watch the dudes getting all upset about them being recognized … 

Have a great Sunday!

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What I’m Reading

1. Time: Person of the Year 2023: Taylor Swift 

2. The Atlantic: Taylor Swift and the era of the girl 

3. The Career Whispers
   : The Science of Reflection

4. Pew Research Center: Striking findings from 2023

5. New York Times: E.U. Agrees on AI Act, Landmark Regulation for Artificial Intelligence 

6. DFR Lab: Learning more about platforms from the first Digital Services Act transparency disclosures 

7. Washington Post: 2024 could be the ‘deepfake’ election. Few states are acting. 

8. Politico Pro: California lawmaker to propose prohibiting AI in political communication

9. Newsweek: Donald Trump Blames AI for Making Him 'Look Bad' 

10. Axios: U.S. political ad market projected to reach record $16 billion in 2024 

11. Politico: RNC officially bows out of hosting primary debates 

12. National Review: Voter Trust in Elections Weakened. Both Parties Must Help Restore 

13. On With Kara Swisher: Rep. Mike Gallagher on TikTok, Taiwan and Trump

14. Supreme Court: Amici in support of NetChoice (or in support of neither party) for Texas and Florida cases regarding content moderation

15. Morning Consult: 2024 Tech Trends: AI, Autonomous Transport, Immersive Tech 

16. GZERO: Ian Bremmer State of the World 2023 

17. Axios: Omidyar Network creates $30 million fund to boost AI diversity 

18. Digiday: News publishers hesitate to commit to investing more into Threads next year despite growing engagement 

19. International Observatory On Information and Democracy: Submit your Research on AI, Media, Data Governance and Mis- and Disinformation 

20. New Scientist: Trust and safety – the most important tech job you’ve never heard of 

21. Harvard: What do we study when we study misinformation? A scoping review of experimental research (2016-2022) 

22. Free Press: Big Tech Backslide: How Social-Media Rollbacks Endanger Democracy Ahead of the 2024 Elections

23. Chronicle of Higher Education: A Star Misinformation Scholar Says Harvard Pushed Her Out for Criticizing Meta 

24. Stanford: Preparing for Generative AI in the 2024 Election: Recommendations and Best Practices Based on Academic Research 

25. University of Minnesota and Oxford: The Paradox of AI Disclosure for Audience Trust in News

26. Policy and Internet: Moderating borderline content while respecting fundamental values

27. Freedom House: NEW REPORT: Governments Are Escalating Transnational Repression to Silence Journalists around the World

28. The Verge: TikTok’s biggest hits are videos you’ve probably never seen 

29. National Endowment for Democracy: Twentieth Annual Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture: Larry Diamond on “Power, Performance, and Legitimacy”

30. Oversight Board: Oversight Board Announces New Cases on Israel-Hamas Conflict for Expedited Review 

31. Google: Introducing Gemini: Google’s most capable AI model yet 

32. Meta: What’s New Across Our AI Experiences 

33. What Do We Do Now That We're Here?
    : The friendship problem

Please support the curation and analysis I’m doing with this newsletter. As a paid subscriber, you make it possible for me to bring you in-depth analyses of the most pressing issues in tech and politics.