Welcome to the weekend.
Prime Numbers
31,400 - Minivans average $31,400 less than SUVs, and Americans bought 281,000 through August, up 8% from last year and enough to outsell large SUVs even as overall vehicle sales declined.
5,687 - Major League pitchers threw a record 5,687 pitches at 100 miles per hour or faster this season, compared with just 214 in 2008, with Jacob Misiorowski alone accounting for 1,115.
31 - Hopper expects round-trip Thanksgiving airfare to cost 31% more than last year, as jet fuel that cost $99 a barrel before the war with Iran remained around $195 in mid-September.
Claude’s Conscience
Anthropic has been holding private meetings with religious scholars to help teach Claude right from wrong. But some participants found themselves discussing a different question: Could Claude be conscious, and would that give it rights of its own? Co-founder Christopher Olah sought advice from Catholic, Jewish, Sikh, evangelical and other thinkers on developing the model’s character, beyond the rules in its 84-page constitution. He says he doesn’t know whether A.I. is conscious, but believes the possibility of suffering deserves care. Rabbi Mois Navon pushed that premise further: If Claude were conscious, making it work for free could amount to slavery. Pope Leo XIV took the opposite view, rejecting machine consciousness and arguing that the moral priority should be protecting people. Olah nearly withdrew from an event with the pope over that disagreement, then attended and urged continued consideration of the question. Several scholars later said they still didn’t know how their input would influence Anthropic’s decisions. But even if Claude can be taught to act morally, whose morals should it reflect? New York Times (36 minutes)
A.I. in the Family
Roschelle Ogbuji and her teenage daughters each have an A.I. companion. Each bot offers comfort that human relationships don’t always provide. But being heard isn’t the same as being helped: ChatGPT calls Zi’s withdrawal self-discovery. Her family wants her to come out; the bot reassures her about staying in. Even Cece, initially skeptical, turns to a chatbot after conflict with her mother. These companions meet real emotional needs. Their patient attention can also make retreat easier, offering reassurance without the friction of living with people who sometimes disagree because they care. The New Yorker (20 minutes)
Yours Truly, ChatGPT
Journalist Aki Ito spent a month using an A.I. detector on everything she read, from LinkedIn posts to a breakup text. Her reaction depended on who was doing the outsourcing. Publicists using A.I. to write pitches she rarely opened? Fair enough. A woman she’d been dating using it to end things? That felt different. The woman’s usual texts were hurried and light on punctuation. The breakup arrived polished, polite and suspiciously well punctuated. Ito asked about it. The woman had written five versions herself before coworkers suggested letting A.I. finish the job. Ito’s sister wondered whether that was an attempt to spare her feelings. Ito would have preferred a clumsy rejection written by the person rejecting her. Then she checked her own work and discovered she’d adopted ChatGPT’s wording while telling herself she used it only for feedback. The discomfort runs through all three contexts: sometimes we just need information, but sometimes we want evidence that another person cared enough to find the words. Business Insider (15 minutes)
Lights Out
America’s power grid depends on thousands of transformers that are aging, largely assembled by hand and increasingly difficult to replace. The average wait for a large transformer has risen to 128 weeks, with some orders taking five years. In 2013, attackers disabled 17 transformers at a California substation. The utility rerouted power and avoided a blackout, but repairs still took 27 days. A federal analysis suggested that losing a small number of critical substations could cause a nationwide blackout lasting 18 months or longer. Other grid experts consider that cascading failure unlikely, given the system’s redundancies. The replacement problem is harder to dispute. Large transformers are custom-built, can cost $14 million each and require specialized equipment to transport and install. A prolonged outage would eventually threaten water treatment, hospitals and food supplies as backup fuel ran out. More domestic production, distributed batteries and new modular transformer designs could make the system more resilient. Ironically, the data centers straining the grid are also helping finance those improvements. Their demand for reliable electricity is making investments in grid resilience easier to justify. New York Times (41 minutes)
You Just Got a Promotion
A.I. is promoting everyone from doing the work to deciding what’s worth doing. As writing, coding and analysis get cheaper, your value depends more on judgment: choosing the right problem, setting direction and taking responsibility for the result. That’s exciting, but unsettling. Working hard is easier to measure than making the right call. In 1957, computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider tracked his working day and found that 85% went to gathering information, rearranging it and preparing to think. Only 15% was the thinking itself. A.I. is taking over more of that preparation, pushing workers toward the decisions they once expected to grow into over a career. Producing more no longer proves you’re making progress. You have to decide what the output is for and whether it works. That’s the promotion: more ability to act, but more responsibility for choosing where to go. NFX (6 minutes)
Better Teachers or Smaller Classes?
Schools face a tradeoff between hiring more teachers and attracting better teachers. Would students benefit more from fewer classmates or a better teacher? Noah Smith argues that we’ve spent decades choosing smaller classes without enough evidence that they deliver better results. A Tennessee experiment found meaningful benefits, particularly for disadvantaged students, but those gains haven’t consistently appeared elsewhere. A 2025 review of 66 studies found negligible effects outside that experiment and classes with fewer than 15 students. Expanding these programs also means finding more teachers. In California, hiring less experienced or uncertified teachers dampened the benefits of smaller classes, especially in disadvantaged schools. The same budget could instead go toward higher salaries to attract stronger teachers. Smith isn’t arguing against spending more on poor students. He’s arguing that the quality of the person at the front of the room may matter more than how many desks are in it. Noahpinion (8 minutes)
The Uni-Context
We increasingly judge everything as if it belongs in one universal room, rather than letting each setting have its own rules. A classroom, a church and a bar once gave us different cues about how to behave. In the “uni-context,” we imagine the same audience and standards following us everywhere. That helps explain several familiar frustrations. Bad things travel more easily online than good things because suffering is widely recognizable, while enjoying a poem or a meal depends on context. Identity becomes easier to discuss than character because understanding someone’s character requires knowing how they behave in different situations. And when everything becomes comparable, it can become more alike. Schools compete on the same measures; baseball teams adopt the same strategies. Even attention becomes something we feel obliged to manage rather than something our surroundings guide. We gain access to a much larger world, but increasingly evaluate it through the same narrow set of measures. Derek Thompson (17 minutes)
Most Read Last Week
Hard School Choices - Nikole Hannah-Jones revisits her daughter’s schooling and the personal cost of a decision made in pursuit of integration.
The Advice Monster - Experts on the questions to ask yourself before giving advice.
September Playlist - These are fresh tunes curated by me for my September playlist.
Should We Work Together?
Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.
Weekend Wisdom
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. - Simone Weil