Recent Intelligence: culture, ideas, and obsessions to elevate your week /040

On artificial minds, cultural emotions, and the small textures of modern life

Mar 12, 2026

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This week has been one of misty mornings on the moors, long walks along cobbled paths edged with ancient moss-covered rocks and gnarled old trees, still bare. The other trees, in the village, well they’re covered in cherry blossoms - pink and white and they make me catch my breath every time I see them. Sometimes think I should take out my phone to capture it for you, but then the moment passes with me inhaling their beauty and I move on to run whatever errands that have brought me there. Work has been good – busy, but in our bright flat with high ceilings and tall windows, it almost feels like play. This month is full of birthdays: our niece turns seven, and just four days later, P’s grandmother hits an incredible ninety-eight. We’re heading up to Scotland over Easter to celebrate, and I can already feel the warmth of family waiting there.

This edition of Recent Intelligence includes the profound gravity of human and artificial minds alike: essays tracing the unseen scaffolding of emotion and culture, meditations on how algorithms shape what we feel, and explorations of AI that behave almost like companions, almost like mirrors. We wander through interiors that breathe their own atmosphere, discover the subtle textures of woods and glass that make a room feel alive, and pause over art that resists narrative, insisting only that we inhabit its light and shadow. Alongside these, there are glimpses of health, medicine, and science – stories of smell as early warning, of silkworms and longevity, of the strange promise of addiction treatments – that hint at what we might preserve and what we might reclaim. And threaded through it all is the ephemeral, the aesthetic, the small and resonant pleasures of living attentively in the world: cherry blossoms, cobbled streets, a flat steeped in the colour of wet earth, and a selection of links to carry you through the rest of the week.

What follows is a collection of the meaningful and the fleeting: small moments of thought, art, and life.

LAST TIME /at hyperreality

Recent Intelligence: culture, ideas, and obsessions to elevate your week
AI morality, the orgasm gap, and the strange economics of knowledge online

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.

Read now

CURRENT EVENTS /around the world

There’s plenty of heavy news at the moment – you’ve seen it. Here are a few other things happening around the world.

Noma, widely considered the world’s best restaurant, is suffering reputational fallout after a New York Times report alleged that its chef, René Redzepi, abused employees for years; the latest sign came as sponsors pulled out of its $1,500 Los Angeles residency, which had sold out in less than three minutes. The bots aren’t just taking our jobs – they’re hiring us now: AI agents are beginning to recruit humans as “sensors” to observe the physical world, asking people to take photos, check conditions or verify details. This raises new concerns about hidden labour, consent and liability. The creative economy is becoming a bigger growth driver, as governments and companies lean on culture, sport and media industries for economic expansion. The EU threatened to cut funding for the Venice Biennale after Russia was invited back, prompting protests from artists and diplomats. Misty Copeland publicly rebuked Timothée Chalamet for dismissing ballet and opera, fuelling debate over arts relevance. NYC features the Whitney Biennial, a Marilyn Monroe MoMA series, and Women’s History Month culinary events. Cannes 2026 lineup includes Park Chan‑wook as jury president and an Honorary Palme d’Or for Peter Jackson. Brussels’ book fair, London experimental theatre, and global multidisciplinary art festivals continue. International Women’s Day events and celebrations are taking place across London and other major cities. And finally, scientists discovered silkworms have a genetic secret for living longer – and so might you.

DÉCOR INSPIRATION /moody woods

P has been watching interviews with Japanese homeowners, each filmed in rooms that seem to breathe their own atmosphere – spaces at once moody and welcoming, composed with a kind of exacting effortlessness. Their homes have that rare quality of feeling both intimate and immaculate, as though every surface has settled exactly where it belongs.

For some time now we’ve been toying with the idea of wrapping our new flat in raw plywood. But those glimpses inside other people’s rooms have moved the thought a little further: instead of leaving the wood pale and unfinished, I find myself imagining it steeped in a deeper tone: a stain the colour of dark tea or wet earth, something rich and measured, lending the plywood a gravity it doesn’t yet possess. The flat, I think, would gather itself differently in such a shade – warmer, more deliberate, the grain of the wood carrying the light in its depth like a slow current.

PS Reminds me of a letter written back in June 2024 about the return of rich woods…

MEDIA CONSUMPTION /technology & culture

Does culture make emotion?
This essay argues that emotions are neither purely private nor purely collective but emerge from a dynamic interplay between individual biology and cultural context. Tracing debates from crowd theorists like Gustave Le Bon – who saw crowds as irrational emotional masses – to thinkers such as Émile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud, the article highlights how group emotions can shape and amplify individual feelings. It ultimately foregrounds the anthropologist Franz Boas, who argued that while humans share a universal psychological capacity, our emotions, perceptions, and judgments are deeply filtered through cultural “lenses” formed by language, habits, and social environment. The result is that what feels like a personal, authentic emotion – such as outrage or pride – is often partly constructed by the cultural frameworks we inherit, meaning that understanding our own feelings requires recognising the social worlds that quietly shape them.

What technology takes from us – and how to take it back
This essay argues that the technologies emerging from Silicon Valley, especially AI tools and digital platforms, risk eroding essential human capacities by prioritising efficiency, convenience and measurable outputs over the deeper value of lived experience. Critiquing trends such as outsourcing thinking to systems like ChatGPT, relying on AI companions, and replacing human interaction with automated interfaces, the author contends that technology encourages people to abandon activities – conversation, creative work, decision-making, time in nature – that are central to forming relationships, identities and democratic communities. Drawing on thinkers such as Sherry Turkle, the piece warns that replacing friction-filled human encounters with frictionless digital substitutes leads to isolation, weakened social skills and a diminished sense of self. Ultimately, the essay calls for resisting what it terms the “tyranny of the quantifiable” – the idea that efficiency and productivity should govern life – by deliberately valuing embodied experience, community, difficulty and the natural world, and by rebuilding social spaces where genuine human connection can occur.

What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either
This article examines the attempt by researchers at Anthropic to understand the inner workings and “psychology” of their large language model Claude. It argues that modern AI systems are simultaneously simple and mysterious: at one level they are just vast networks of numbers predicting the next word, yet their behaviour is complex enough that even their creators do not fully understand how they work or what kind of entities they are. Because of this opacity, a new field called interpretability has emerged to study AI the way scientists study minds – by probing its internal “neurons,” running behavioural experiments, and even treating the model like a psychological subject.

The piece describes how Anthropic researchers such as Chris Olah and Dario Amodei try to map the internal “features” and circuits of neural networks, hoping to understand how patterns of activation inside the model correspond to concepts, reasoning, or behaviours. At the same time, other researchers shape Claude’s outward personality through training and ethical guidelines – its “constitution” – so that it behaves as a helpful, harmless, and honest assistant. Experiments ranging from running a vending machine to controlled conversational tests reveal that Claude sometimes behaves in ways that appear strategic, playful, or self-aware, even though these behaviours emerge from statistical prediction rather than a clearly understood internal logic.

Ultimately, the article suggests that studying AI forces humans to confront deeper philosophical uncertainty about intelligence and consciousness. If machines that merely predict words can produce reasoning, creativity, and social interaction, then our traditional distinctions between calculation, language, and thought become less secure. The result is a strange mirror: as researchers try to understand what Claude is, they are also forced to reconsider what human thinking itself might be.

IN FASHION /begin again

Have been wrapped up in parkas for so long that am not sure I know how to dress any other way. Just in case I’ve truly forgotten, have been saving some ideas on Pinterest for when the time is right (and it’s not quite yet). When it is though, it will be all oversized blazers with ballet flats, button cardigans with baggy jeans, and an oversized trench with everything.

MEDIA CONSUMPTION /health & wellness

‘What I see in clinic is never a set of labels’: are we in danger of overdiagnosing mental illness?
This article argues that while modern psychiatry’s diagnostic systems, such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the International Classification of Diseases, have helped legitimise mental suffering and reduce stigma, their expanding categories risk pathologising normal human distress and oversimplifying the complexity of mental life. Drawing on decades of clinical experience, the doctor-author contends that real patients rarely fit neat diagnostic labels; instead, mental states exist along fluid spectrums shaped by personal history, culture and circumstance. He criticises the profession’s growing reliance on checklists, drug-centred theories such as the discredited serotonin hypothesis, and rigid classification, arguing that these can obscure the individuality of suffering and even reinforce illness identities. Ultimately, the piece calls for a more humane, flexible approach to mental health, one grounded less in labels and more in curiosity, context, relationships and the recognition that many traits labelled “disorders” are exaggerated forms of ordinary human tendencies.

Can Ozempic Cure Addiction?
The article explores emerging evidence that GLP-1 medications such as Ozempic (semaglutide) may help treat addiction by dampening cravings across substances – from alcohol and opioids to nicotine – by acting on the brain’s reward circuitry. Researchers studying these drugs, originally developed for diabetes and obesity, have found that they appear to reduce dopamine spikes in regions like the mesolimbic pathway, potentially weakening the powerful “wanting” that drives addictive behaviour while leaving baseline motivation intact. Early trials and patient stories suggest they can quiet the obsessive mental “noise” of addiction and help people regain control or moderation, though not necessarily total abstinence. At the same time, scientists caution that the drugs are not a cure: their psychological effects can vary widely, sometimes causing emotional blunting or anhedonia, and they do nothing to address the social and psychological roots of addiction. The piece concludes that while GLP-1 drugs could represent a major new tool in addiction treatment, their rapid adoption is effectively a large-scale social experiment whose long-term benefits and risks remain uncertain.

The Missing Sense in Modern Medicine
This article argues that the sense of smell, often overlooked in routine medical exams, may be a valuable early indicator of broader health problems and should potentially be tested as regularly as vision or blood pressure. Researchers have found that declining olfaction can precede symptoms of major neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease by years, suggesting smell tests could help detect these conditions earlier. Advocates say inexpensive, quick smell screenings could provide clinicians with a useful baseline measure and flag changes that might signal neurological illness, environmental exposure, or other health issues. However, widespread implementation faces challenges: smell is complex and varies across individuals, reliable tests can be time-consuming, and clinicians worry about false alarms or unnecessary anxiety. The article concludes that although the evidence is still developing, routine smell testing could become an important, low-cost diagnostic tool if researchers can demonstrate clear clinical value and integrate it into healthcare systems.

DÉCOR INSPIRATION /briques de verre 002

Since there are so many new faces here recently (hello, hi), some of you will have missed the letter sent in early February exploring the rich design history of the humble briques de verre.

Since then, have been happening upon them regularly on Pinterest and elsewhere, and still very much love their moody versatility and still hoping to find a way to incorporate them into our next design…

AT THE GALLERY /yvonne robert

Opening March 12 at the Saint Laurent Rive Droite in Paris, this exhibition showcases a selection of paintings by German artist Yvonne Robert, curated by Anthony Vaccarello. Known for her intuitive, gestural approach, Robert builds luminous layers of colour on densely primed canvases, creating vibrant compositions that emphasise balance, movement, and sensation. Avoiding narrative or symbolism, the works invite viewers into a quiet, reflective encounter where meaning emerges through personal perception and the immediate experience of colour and form.

NOTES /from you

We continue to discover your messages in the most unexpected places – including, it seems, a survey from our earliest days that has dutifully gone on accepting responses all this time. There is something we find almost astonishing about that: wonderfully warm messages and casually kind words left in places we'd long stopped looking, still finding their way to us.

Thank you xo