Week 26 · 2025-06-23 → 2025-06-29 · 12 newsletters
Taste, Tokens, and Mamdani
ai-and-human-taste · creative-noticing · nyc-and-politics
Thirteen emails across seven days. This was a sparse week, mostly Substack essays rather than industry dispatches, and the through-lines reflect that: two writers wrestling with what humans still have over AI, two writers running creativity prompts that asked you to look up from the screen, and a small NYC cluster anchored on Zohran Mamdani's primary win. No macro thread, no breaking news cycle, just a handful of essayists working their corners.
Theme: AI and the Question of Human Taste
The week's most interesting cluster came from three writers approaching the same question from different angles: what exactly do humans still bring to the table as AI capabilities scale.
Mollick's practical frame. Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing opened the week with his periodic "which AI should you use" guide, and the framing shift was the news: it is no longer about the best model, it is about the best overall system. Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT. Pick one, pay the twenty dollars, get on with your life. The interesting move is that Mollick treats model choice as a settled question and pushes the reader toward what you actually do with the tool, which is the right posture for a moment when the model-of-the-week churn has stopped being useful.
Zhuo's taste argument. Julie Zhuo at The Looking Glass ran the deeper piece, a conversation with Notion's Ivan Zhao on whether taste is the human advantage. Zhao's three-component frame (capabilities, taste, agency) is the kind of model that gets repeated for a year. The honest line was Zhuo conceding that AI is winning the capabilities race, which leaves taste and agency as the contested ground. The piece does not pretend taste is a moat. It asks what taste actually is when the thing being tasted can be generated infinitely.
Mitcham's operator version. Max Mitcham at From the Ground Up ran the multi-agent workflow piece, walking through how he processed ten thousand social mentions by chaining specialized agents instead of stuffing everything into one context window. The headline is breathless but the underlying point is right: the unlock at scale is decomposition, not context size. From ten thousand mentions down to three thousand feature-relevant posts via a first-pass filter agent, then sentiment and context layered on top. This is the actual shape of agentic work in 2025, and it is mostly plumbing.
The take: Mollick is telling you the model wars are over for end users, Zhuo is asking what humans contribute after that, and Mitcham is showing you what the workflow looks like when you stop arguing about models and start building. Read together, the three pieces describe a field that has quietly moved past its adolescence into something closer to ordinary engineering.
Theme: Creative Noticing, Against the Algorithm
A surprisingly cohesive countertrend ran through the week: three writers all pushing back, in different registers, on the screen-first default.
Piera Luisa Gelardi at NoomaLooma ran a five-day micro-creativity challenge built around noticing. Day one was finding faces in objects, day two was color collecting, and the recap post showed it actually worked, with readers from NYC to Sydney to Athens sending in their found faces and color hunts. The wager is that creativity is a muscle of attention, not a feat of output, and that five minutes a day of looking sideways is enough to keep the muscle alive.
Maalvika ran "The Great Dating Overthink," a long piece on how the apps have turned dating into a discipline of preparation rather than encounter. The line that lands: Hinge is a mode of transportation, not the destination. The chorus of strangers in your head (the coworker, the friend's mom, the rideshare driver with theories) is the same chorus that turns every romantic interaction into a forensic exercise. The piece is sponsored by Hinge, which is its own kind of irony, but the argument holds.
Carly Ayres at AIR published Nicholas Negroponte reflecting on the fortieth anniversary of the MIT Media Lab, and the through-line connects: the Lab was designed for people who did not fit into departments, for the productive misfit, for peripheral vision over central planning. Negroponte's line about Bauhaus, Black Mountain, and Bell Labs as catalysts that attracted outsiders rather than institutions that organized knowledge is the right frame for what AIR is trying to build.
The take: three writers, none of them in conversation with each other, all arguing for the value of unscheduled attention. The dating overthink, the daily noticing prompt, and the manifesto for institutional weirdness are the same argument in three keys. In a week this thin on industry signal, the essayists working on attention itself were the ones doing the load-bearing work.
Theme: NYC, Politics, and the Things People Loved
Gabby Lord at OMGLORD opened her dispatch with a one-line celebration: "a sex pest does not win an important seat in politics." Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist, had just declared victory in the NYC Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday night, taking down Andrew Cuomo. The Mamdani win shows up again in Zach Everson at 1100 Pennsylvania, who tucks it into a parenthetical alongside the bombing of Iran, SCOTUS decisions, Trump's big bill, the USWNT's 4-0 win, and Bruce Springsteen releasing seven new albums. The grouping is the point: it was the week of a lot at once.
Everson's actual piece was a Heather Cox Richardson livestream walking through the breadth of Trump's crypto entanglements: stablecoins, memecoins, ETFs, tokens, NFTs, defi, bitcoin reserves, and a wallet on the way. He cites Molly White's Citation Needed mapping out the ventures as the must-save reference. The detail to remember is just the scope, that one administration's family business now spans the entire crypto stack, in parallel with the policy machinery that regulates it.
Carly Ayres ran a second post under good graf, her June "extremely online report," which captured the other public spectacle of the month: the Trump-Musk breakup. Musk calling Trump's tax plan a disgusting abomination, Trump threatening SpaceX contracts, Musk implying Trump was on the Epstein list. Ayres also covered the WWDC 2025 reveal of Apple's "Liquid Glass" design language, which she summarized via others as technically competent, spiritually lost. Designers were in the five stages of grief over readability before the keynote was even over.
Grace at The Friday Brief added the social-platform read on the same fight: X's daily-to-monthly active user ratio jumped to 45% in the wake of the Musk-Trump fallout, an eight-point lift. Brand stunt energy carried the rest of the brief, with Liquid Death featuring Ozzy, M&S launching a Wimbledon sando, and Greenpeace crashing Bezos's Venetian wedding.
The take: the political week was loud and the design week was loud, but the cleanest signal was Mamdani. A 33-year-old won a major primary against the establishment candidate, and three different writers from three different beats found it worth flagging. Watch the general.
Theme: Personal Notes Worth Keeping
Alec McNayr ran a small turnaround piece this week, calling himself out for too many inwardly focused posts and inviting readers to share what they are loving. His own list (a dentist who does not destroy his gums, Nate Bargatze's new book, Andor on its third rewatch, jumping on the back of shopping carts at Ralph's) is the kind of casual specificity that makes a personal Substack worth subscribing to. The move (notice you are talking too much about yourself, ask the reader instead) is one more newsletters should make.
Guillermo Flor at Don't Age ran the closing utility piece, a Whoop review built from a Reddit thread. The takeaways are predictable but useful: Whoop's edge is recovery and sleep tracking, the battery life makes it easier to wear overnight than an Apple Watch, and if you already own an Apple Watch the marginal value is questionable. Not earth-shattering, but the kind of piece that earns its slot for people in the market.
Three Takeaways from the Week
The week's most useful intellectual frame was Ivan Zhao's three-element model of human value: capabilities, taste, agency. The capabilities race is being lost. That leaves taste and agency as the contested terrain, which is the right ground to be working on as a builder, an essayist, or a person trying to do a job in 2025. Zhuo's piece is the one to come back to.
The countertrend in this thirteen-email week was attention. Three different essayists, none in conversation, all argued that the unscheduled noticing of ordinary things is the muscle worth keeping. In a moment when the dominant default is screen-mediated optimization, the writers pushing the other way (noticing faces in objects, going on a date without a forensic post-mortem, building institutions that reward peripheral vision) felt more on-trend than the AI dispatches did.
If you only revisit three pieces from the week, I would suggest Julie Zhuo's "When AI Has Better Taste Than You" for the cleanest frame on what humans bring next, Ethan Mollick's "Using AI Right Now: A Quick Guide" for settling the model-choice question so you can move on, and Maalvika's "The Great Dating Overthink" for the best piece of the week on what attention actually costs when you do not protect it.