Recent Intelligence: culture, ideas, and obsessions to elevate your week /039
AI morality, the orgasm gap, and the strange economics of knowledge online
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The snowdrops have faded, replaced by cherry blossoms, apple blooms, and hellebores. Early this week, the rain and gray skies gave way to golden sunlight. Everywhere, people embraced the season too soon – drinks on terraces, sunlit hours in parks, long hikes and bicycle rides. Everyone seemed happy. We’ve just navigated the two most stressful weeks of our lives, major changes behind us, and now we sit together, talking over drinks as I finish this letter to you, a little pause before the world rushes on again.
This edition of Recent Intelligence includes reflections on the fragile future of the open web, the deep power struggles shaping artificial intelligence, a rediscovery of the feminist research that transformed how we understand sexuality, and a meditation on how algorithms reshape creativity and identity online. Along the way, there are small aesthetic detours – interiors, photography, personal style, and a new London listening bar – before a handful of curious corners of the internet to wander through at the end.
What follows is a collection of the meaningful and the fleeting: small moments of thought, art, and life.
LAST TIME /at hyperreality
The Very Best of the Internets
Exploring the web beyond noise and algorithms: places that inspire thought, creativity, and a deeper sense of connection
For this reason, this week, I'm dedicating this letter to mapping the best of it – the web not as marketplace, not as theatre of outrage, not as algorithmic carnival, but as library, workshop, observatory, and refuge. Amid the noise, there remain corners that honour Berners-Lee's original vision: places where knowledge is shared freely, where learning requires no subscription, where the web still functions as it was meant to – as a public good, open to all. Corners built for curiosity rather than extraction, for depth rather than dopamine. What follows is a curated map of those places – proof that the better web still exists, waiting for those who seek it. The places that remind you it was always capable of enlarging your mind. You had just stopped looking.
SPRINGTIME /shopping
Below, for paid subscribers: A slower turn through the ideas threaded beneath this week’s letter. We begin with the strange ecology of the modern web – answer engines, disappearing sources, and the fragile economy of knowledge online – before moving into the people now tasked with teaching machines how to think and behave. From there the lens widens: the cultural aftershocks of feminist research that reshaped how intimacy is understood, the algorithmic pressures reshaping photography and identity, and the subtle homogenisation produced by endlessly optimised feeds. Woven through it all are small aesthetic countercurrents (personal websites, vinyl-only listening bars, photographs given room to breathe) small signs of a growing desire to reclaim slowness, authorship, and the pleasure of discovering things for oneself.