Welcome back! And welcome to the new subscribers. I hope you're all enjoying the links I share with you each week. If you are, feel free to share the letter with your friends, family, and co-workers. If you're not, then why not share it with your enemies? If only to annoy them ...

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

Is a memory palace actually useful? It helped me memorize the first 20 digits of pi — A short explanation of the popular, though oft misunderstood, technique for remembering various bits of stuff. A technique that I find a bit convoluted but one which seems to work for more than a few people.

From the article:

The method of loci is uniquely suited to capitalize on how the brain works. One of the primary areas of the brain responsible for memory is the hippocampus, says Long. “The two things the hippocampus loves to do above everything else is spatial navigation and associations,” she says. So by using spatial navigation to associate a place and an item, we are letting the hippocampus do what it does best.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Alt-Weeklies — A loving paen to publications, outside of the mainstream, that can be challenging, that can be incisive, that can be pretentious and edgy (in the worst sense of the word), but which also can do a lot of good that the mainstream media can't or won't do.

From the article:

Weeklies thrived across the country well into the ‘90s and early aughts, with mastheads of several dozen people and papers that regularly topped 130 pages. Those papers broke news, took down corrupt politicians, and helped launch countless writers’ and artists’ careers. They were the class clowns of local media — sometimes bratty, but smarter than they looked.

Why your attention keeps slipping away (and how to get it back) — Yet another in the long list of articles about attention and focus, about losing and regaining them. This one, at least, looks at a slightly different approach to the subject.

From the article:

The same thing happens with goals. We trick ourselves into thinking that throwing time at a task means we’re focusing on it, even though a crucial chunk of our attention is scattered elsewhere. By the end of the day, you’ve been “busy” for eight hours but made no meaningful progress on what matters most. You may feel exhausted instead of energized.

ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners — When I first read this article, my reaction was what the you-know-what??? A second reading left me with the same impression. Yeah, it's messed up.

From the article:

“But that is not what’s happening with AI, because AI isn’t really designed to be therapeutic,” the Stanford professor continued. “It’s really designed to make people feel better in the short term, which also ultimately promotes continued engagement — which is the real agenda for these companies that are making and creating and profiting from these products… they’re not optimized for well-being.”