An eclectic blog
written & curated
by Kyle Callahan

Latest Curations

It’s Heeeere

February 17, 2026

Curator’s Note: I recommend everything I link to on Fluid Imagination, but highly recommend you read this one.

It’s time now. Not in an “eventually we should talk about this” way. In a “this is happening right now and I need you to understand it” way.

The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I think “less” is more likely.

“But I tried AI and it wasn’t that good.”

I hear this constantly. I understand it, because it used to be true.

[But] anyone still making that argument either hasn’t used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what’s happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant. I don’t say that to be dismissive. I say it because the gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing.

Let me make the pace of improvement concrete, because I think this is the part that’s hardest to believe if you’re not watching it closely.

In 2022, AI couldn’t do basic arithmetic reliably. It would confidently tell you that 7 × 8 = 54.

By 2023, it could pass the bar exam.

By 2024, it could write working software and explain graduate-level science.

By late 2025, some of the best engineers in the world said they had handed over most of their coding work to AI.

On February 5th, 2026, new models arrived that made everything before them feel like a different era.

If you haven’t tried AI in the last few months, what exists today would be unrecognizable to you.

— “Something Big Is Happening,” Matt Shumer

Is this “reporting” or just disseminating the manosphere to forty influential people?

February 15, 2026

Launched a year ago, the Manosphere Report now follows about 80 podcasts hand-selected by reporters at the Times on desks covering politics, public health, and internet culture. That includes right-wing podcasts like The Ben Shapiro Show, Red Scare with “Dimes Square” shock jocks Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, and The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show, a successor to Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show. It also keeps tabs on Huberman Lab, a podcast hosted by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman that has been criticized for spreading health misinformation. Seward notes the report also includes some liberal-leaning shows, like MeidasTouch, an anti-Trump podcast with a largely male audience.

When one of the shows publishes a new episode, the tool automatically downloads it, transcribes it, and summarizes the transcript. Every 24 hours the tool collates those summaries and generates a meta-summary with shared talking points and other notable daily trends. The final report is automatically emailed to journalists each morning at 8 a.m. ET. Currently, the tool is used by nearly 40 reporters across the newsroom.

— “How The New York Times uses a custom AI tool to track the “manosphere,” Nieman Journalism Lab

The future present is scary

February 12, 2026

An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.

— “An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me,” Scott Shambaugh

If You Feed The Trolls, Sometimes They Purr

February 12, 2026

Most writers are smart enough to never feed the trolls, since it gives them the attention they crave. But something about receiving these particular emails inspired me to respond to a handful, perhaps try to pinpoint why they crave this attention…

Much has been made of the modern male loneliness epidemic, and this report from the American Institute for Boys and Men contains some interesting data points, including the sobering take that there are five times as many men who say they have no close friends as there were in 1990. Combine that with social media platform algorithms that favor posts that ignite strong emotion, and I think that these men just desperately wanted someone to talk to, to engage with, to tell them that they exist and their opinions matter.

It [became] clear [as I emailed with them]: The anger, the loneliness, the self-loathing. President Trump has offered fraternity to these alienated men, who then feel in turn like they don’t actually like how he acts, or who they become when they channel him. And yet the cycle rolls on, all because they don’t have friends or loved ones they can talk to freely.

— “What I Learned About MAGA Men After Responding to Angry Emails About Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show,” Variety

Don’t Look Up

February 4, 2026

Every lie [Trump] tells is…repeated by his satraps in the administration and Congress…but when Trump went to Davos and gave a speech literally filled with whoppers, European leaders were astonished. He was telling them things that they knew to be absurd…and expecting them to go along.

Where the GOP learned to lie as a matter of course is an interesting question, and I’m afraid I’ve had a front row seat. I think it’s the climate fight, more than anything else, that taught them to regard reality as optional.

— “Thinking about lying,” Bill McKibben

Harry, Hermione, Who Cares

January 26, 2026

The first Harry Potter book was published in 1997, the same year that Tony Blair’s Labour Party adopted the D:Ream song “Things Can Only Get Better” as the anthem of their (ultimately successful) campaign. I often wonder if I feel nostalgic for the 1990s only because that was the decade of my childhood. But it does seem to me, admittedly across a gulf of time, that a lot of people really did feel then that things could only get better. For all of their occasional darkness, the Harry Potter books reflect the hopeful vision distinctive to the time and place of their creation. And the Harry Potter generation imbibed exactly the message that they were supposed to imbibe: that liberalism will always triumph over the forces of evil. Young people just don’t think like that anymore. Honestly, I don’t blame them.

— “The Harry PotterGeneration Needs to Grow Up,” Louise Perry in a Guest Essay for The New York Times

Latest Creations

The Gift

March 3, 2026

In 2022, Raj Bhakta threatened to hand the former Green Mountain College campus to a religious group if Poultney didn’t give him what he wanted. He’s now doing exactly that, and calling it a gift.

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Split Screen: The Mountain and the School

March 1, 2026

February 2026 split in two: Days on the mountain with my daughter. A dormant project revived. Old friends. And then, on the last day of the month, bombs. The halves of this split screen are not equal, and I don’t know how to pretend otherwise.

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Switching from ChatGPT to Claude

January 30, 2026

I’ve moved my AI subscription from ChatGPT to Claude. The immediate trigger was mundane: bugs in ChatGPT’s Mac app that kept breaking my workflow. But I’d been circling the idea of switching for months. What finally tipped me wasn’t frustration. It was curiosity about what Anthropic is building.

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Tell the Robot to Create a Playlist

December 19, 2025

I built an Apple Shortcut that lets me say, “Hey Siri, tell the robot to create a playlist,” which results in a context-aware mix of songs based on my location, the weather, and what I’m supposed to be working on.

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