We're a little over 6 years(!) since the first documented american case of covid. There is no way to convey how many changes to our world trickled out of that one event. A significant one, for many of us, is the way covid changed how we work. The nonprofit where I worked had a single zoom license only a few months before the pandemic hit. Soon, all our meetings were taking place online. I stopped going into the office altogether. It began to feel needless, the hours people spent commuting, when we could do great work at our own kitchen tables. This was work that at one time could only take place in an office. Now it’s possible to do it from anywhere with an internet connection.

But it didn't take long before businesses began their return to office policies. After months of doing it all in a nice shirt and sweatpants, the orders came to drive or transit back in. Not everyone could return to work, though. Some people bought or rented homes far outside cities they didn't imagine ever commuting to. The working world has long excluded people with disabilities or mobility issues. Some people weren't lucky enough to live near transit good enough to get them to their office jobs. If we all started meeting in person again, we'd be leaving some of our new colleagues behind.

I work from home because I want to. In fact, I left a job in part because they insisted I return to the office. At the same time, I like working in an office. I like the energy of people working in space together. We each build personal connections, even capital, when we meet with our coworkers in person. But there are reasons why people don’t go to the office. Knowing all this, I can hold two truths.

1. There is something valuable about in-person work that makes it worth doing.
2. Not everyone can work in person, and we shouldn't punish them for that fact.

I'll assume the push to return workers to offices is more than bailing out people who over-invested in real estate. Here are my ideas to make remote meetings as fulfilling as working in person.

create a level working field

In meetings, it's often one poor sap who has to keep an eye on the online folks. This means that everyone who connects to the video chat has to look at Phil's nostrils while he makes a point. Instead...

• Ask everyone who attends in person to log in to the meeting with their own computers. In-person attendees should join with video on but audio muted. Leave a computer unmuted in the center of the room or place microphones at both ends. This will limit audio feedback and ensure everyone is well-heard.
• Monitoring the chat is everyone's responsibility. If someone online raises their hand, anyone in the room should feel responsible to call attention to it.
• When collecting input from the room, leave space for people online. Ask folks for their thoughts at the beginning and ending of every feedback period.
• Assign 1-2 people per meeting to be the avatar for the person/people online. These folks will pair up with one online user or have them join a small-group meeting. Rotate this role every 20-30 minutes like you would a language interpreter. This ensures nobody feels like we're keeping them from fully participating all day.

unstructured time

I argue that the time spent between meetings is at least as valuable as the time spent in meetings. This is how we build connections with each other that don't revolve around business.

• Open the virtual room 5-10 minutes before the start of the meeting. Leave recording or transcript features off until the meeting officially starts.
• Getting right to business at the start of a meeting rarely happens in person. Build time for friendly interactions into your online meetings, too.

encourage online/offline participation

People online often feel neglected or even ignored during hybrid meetings. This can cause online participants to disengage or contribute less than people in the room.

• Invest in a video/projection system so that everyone in the room can see the people online.
• Reimagine your in-person movement activities. One example: instead of easel paper, project an empty presentation slide onto a wall. In-person participants can add sticky notes to the wall. Online folks can add colored rectangles to the same wall.

acknowledge lag

Limitations of technology can also create a divide between in-person and online folks. We need to acknowledge and account for it.

• Give everyone time to compose their thoughts before speaking. Schedule a moment of silent reflection or journaling after you ask each question. Paste your questions into the chat while you ask them.
• If we use a slide deck, share that with online participants. This allows them to see people in the room without having the whole screen taken up by what we share.

I facilitated a retreat several months ago that we designed to be only in-person. We had one person dialing in from out of town. A heavy rainstorm hit the morning of our session. The one virtual attendee we had planned turned into two, then four, then eight. We soon had as many people online as we did in person. We missed out on the contributions that our online folks could have shared. They felt cut out from the interactive pieces of our agenda. There was little I could do that day that I hadn't already tried. But I left the retreat confident that it could have gone better.

Virtual meetings are no longer optional. They're not a nice-to-have for people who can't meet in person. We have to accept that we may never meet some of our coworkers without a screen between us. They are just as vital to our future success; we exclude them at our own risk.

For every action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction. Sir Isaac Newton said this, presumably after a long day of scrolling whatever the social media platform of the time was. To wit, the moment I finished reading an excellent essay by Marisa Kabas about refusing to accept an AI-poisoned future of journalism, I encountered the following headline: “Esquire AI-Generated A Fake Interview With Live-Action One Piece Actor Mackenyu Because He Was Busy.” Either I’m losing my mind, or the world is. 

This isn’t one of those cases where a publication quietly leaned on AI and only copped to it after getting called out. Esquire Singapore fully admitted what it was doing when it published the story and used it as a supposed selling point! From the piece:

We were stoked to have some face time with the Japanese-American actor, but his schedule prevented it. So, we opted for e-mail correspondence. A list of queries was sent his way, and we waited. The silence continued until it was quickly replaced by a ticking clock as deadlines loomed.

We had the photospread, but nothing directly uttered by the 29-year-old. With a driving need for a feature, we had to be inventive. Harnessing our creative license, we pulled his verbatim from previous interviews and fed them through an AI programme to formulate new responses.

Are these the words we expect from Mackenyu? Or are they just replies from an echo chamber of celebrity-hood that we want to believe is from him?

Clearly the latter, you fools! You hacks! You credulous dipshits! 

This groundbreaking new approach to lying produced riveting exchanges like:

ESQ: Any advice on how to deal with pressure and expectations?

(AI) M: I separate pressure from weight. Pressure is external; like people's expectations. That I can't control, but the weight of family legacy… the goal isn’t to match my father. It's to make him proud, and maybe inspire someone else to do the same. Pressure can crush you, but weight can ground you.

And:

ESQ: What has fatherhood taught you?

(AI) M: That you can't rehearse it. (laughs) Everything else in my life I can prepare. Fatherhood has no script. No second take. You're just there, and you figure it out in real time. It's humbling in a way nothing else is.

You were talking to a chatbot! It did not laugh! Shut the fuck up! Also, as Kotaku notes, the chatbot certainly never knew Mackenyu’s father, deceased action star Sonny Chiba, and I cannot think of a single person in their right mind who would ask a predictive text generator a question so probing and personal about the feelings of a human being who’s very much still alive. That is deranged behavior! To be clear, I believe, on no uncertain terms, that the person who wrote this is deranged!

I cannot believe I even have to say this, but if you’re trying to publish an interview feature, and you’re unable to procure the interview in question, then you scrap the story. There is no “driving need” for a piece that supersedes that. The world was not crying out for this essential dollop of PR fluff. You can find interviews with Mackenyu, specifically, on numerous websites and, of course, YouTube. If anything, all Esquire has demonstrated here is that this kind of journalism matters so little that it can be farmed out to a robot homunculus and still pass muster.

It is bonkers to me that anyone thought this was a good idea—let alone that multiple people (if we include editors) presumably did. They should all hang their heads in shame forever, quit their jobs immediately, and give them to a few of the thousands of vastly more deserving reporters who, in a twist of fate that borders on maniacal, are currently out of work. These people would be better served casting away their old lives and embarking on a journey to find the actual One Piece, a treasure I’m well aware is fictional. Despite that rather substantial stumbling block, they would still find more success in that arena than in this one. 

This is what happens when AI rots journalists’ brains beyond the point that they can’t discern the difference between a good idea and a terrible one—to the point that they can only conceive of angles that involve AI.

That in mind, a salient section from Kabas’ piece:

If you want to work with machines, get a job that requires it. There are a whole lot more of those than there are writing jobs, so free up space for people who actually want to do the work. You’re not doing the world a favor by gifting it your human/AI hybrid. Journalism will not miss you if you leave. No one is making you be a journalist; it’s not one of those jobs parents force you to choose, like a doctor or a lawyer. Journalism, while romanticized in popular culture, is generally unglamorous and poorly paid, with progressively worse job opportunities (no thanks to AI.) I’m careful not to refer to it as a calling because that seems to excuse sacrificing mental health in service of craft, but I do believe that it’s a job that can’t be forced. It’s obvious to readers when your heart isn’t in it.

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AftermathLuke Plunkett

Everyone is trying to get to the bar. The name of the bar? The bar is called Erewhon.

This past January, I spent a long weekend in Los Angeles. I was excited to catch up with my friends and their dogs, to swap Mediterranean oak forest for chaparral and the faintly hallucinatory deep-winter warmth endemic to that biome, and to microdose the L.A. experience of encountering celebrities in mundane contexts. But mostly I wanted to go to Erewhon.

Erewhon is a chain of grocery stores with locations throughout the greater L.A. area. The chain gets its name (an anagram of "nowhere") from a satirical 1872 Samuel Butler novel about a "utopian" society that locks up the ill, forcing people to tend to their health and wellness under threat of imprisonment. Erewhon is known primarily for selling smoothies and a suite of ridiculous wellness products, all for outrageous amounts of money, though the items on offer at the store only go so far in explaining the broader Erewhon phenomenon and the chain's nimbus of mystical prestige. Most grocery stores, particularly in L.A., sell overpriced smoothies and serums, but only Erewhon attracts the paparazzi, carries itself like a luxury brand, and symbolizes something deeper about health and consumerism. So what distinguishes Erewhon?

This piece was originally published on How Things Work, a newsletter by Hamilton Nolan. If you enjoy this, or the author's previous work covering the NFL for Defector, you should subscribe to his newsletter right now.

Recently there has been a lot of commentary of the following type:

Recently there has been a lot of commentary of the following type:

BAD WRITER [touchily]: “Actually, I do use AI to help me write.”

Okay. That checks out. Carry on.

Want to use AI as a Valuable Part of Your Writing Process? What to use it to “generate pushback on my column thesis” and be “more comprehensible” and “craft unique angles” and offer “positive and negative feedback” and “scale the quantity” of your “output?”

Knock yourself out.

You have my blessing.

Hey buddy— go for it!

Some in the “real writer” community find this sort of rampant outsourcing of the writing process to AI to be distressing. Not me. Would I do it myself? No. I have self-respect. But I want to tell you, my friends, that you have my full support for all of it. Want to throw your dashed-off notes into ChatGPT and have it spit a draft back at you and then edit that and call it your own? Want to toss a few hastily written headlines at Claude and have it generate the outline of your piece? Want to dump your entire career archives into a chatbot and then order it to replicate your own voice so you don’t have to?

Do you, a grown man, a successful professional writer who has received a book deal paying you real US currency, want to use AI for the purpose of “making sure the book matches [your own] writing style”[???]? Guess what, brother: I support you. I affirm you. I am right here offering you a classic thumbs-up gesture of affirmation.

“Whoa, a writer who I have never regarded as particularly inventive is using AI? I am surprised and disappointed.” There’s a sentence I would never utter. Instead, I would accept the news of your AI use with total equanimity, nodding almost imperceptibly to indicate that this is not something worth raising my eyebrows over.

No, I will not be joining in the chorus of condemnation. On the contrary. If you are a professional writer, I want you to use AI. Because this industry is competitive. I’ll take any advantage I can get. And if you want to make your writing suck, that’s all the better for me. One less person outshining me.

The tepid, conformist nature of your AI-assisted prose will only make my unexpected bons mot stand out more sharply. While you lean on a technological crutch of grammatical mediocrity to drag your essays over the finish line, I’ll be metaphorically zipping past you on my “magic carpet” of words emerging directly from my own declining and unpredictable brain. Over time, the intellectual box into which AI has seduced your creative process will suffocate you, leaving your bereft readers little choice but to drift into my subscription base.

Donate to our reporting fund

You’ll be all, “Politics in America is divided—but it doesn’t have to be. Let’s discuss how to bridge the partisan divide.” Your sense of joy at the possibilities of the English language will have been so eroded that you won’t even understand why that sucks shit. Meanwhile I’ll be dropping some wild similes you could never even imagine. “Politics is like a sea slug.” What?? How?? Readers will flock to me to find out. Too bad your AI editor struck that line from your piece as “indecipherable.”

You and your friend “Claude” wouldn’t last two seconds in my cipher.

Maybe you read the studies about how AI use causes “cognitive surrender” that slowly destroys your ability to think critically about the linguistic cud that the machine is serving you. Or about how it causes “cognitive foreclosure” that prevents you from ever developing the skills to critique AI output even if you wanted to. Maybe these studies give you pause, when you think about introducing these inscrutable tools of mental paralysis into your own creative process.

Don’t worry about it!

Life is hard enough already. You’re busy. You have lots of things to do—laundry, making lunch, and more. The last thing you need is a bunch of jealous (Brooklyn hipster) writers lecturing you about how this magical productivity booster is somehow “bad” for you. Those are probably the same haters who told you to stop doing so much crystal meth. Some people can’t stand to see you succeed!

I just checked a calendar—it’s 2026. AI is here to stay and you might as well beat the rush by using it more and more, right? Right. In the name of efficiency, it just makes sense for you to turn over ever greater portions of your thought process to this seductive helper, never stopping to ask yourself what it is costing you. You are a nice person and your job (writing) deserves to be easy. There, there. Allow yourself to sink into the warm opiate of cerebral ease. This is better. Yes. This is much better.

By all means—proceed.

And then, when you have settled into this comfortable pattern, sit back and watch me unsheath my massive, work-hardened intellect, built to staggering strength through a daily regimen of thinking about stuff. I think you’ll find that your panicked efforts to resist my onslaught will prove unsuccessful, hampered as you are by atrophied muscles of the mind. Ask your AI companion for some final words of comfort. The hour of your doom draws near.

I will crush you with ease.

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