Friday Recap: Aggregation and Conspiracies

This week, I wrote about AI, aggregated some data and podcasted about player conspiracies

Every week, I intend to go over the work I’ve done throughout the week across various platforms, whether that’s written content or otherwise — like podcast or radio appearances.

I’ll also shout out some other work I’ve enjoyed throughout the week. Articles behind a paywall of some sort are marked with a ($).

Enjoy.

My work:

• For anybody that missed my work this week on the Substack, my work this week included a piece on “Artificial Intelligence” in sportswriting ($), using other media guesses at the 53-man roster ($) to build a dataset and quick thoughts on the Vikings preseason game against the Titans

• I’ve also appeared in a few podcasts this week.

  • On Norse Code, we reviewed the Titans game with a bit more detail and talk about both Lewis Cine and the wide receivers.

  • On The Minnesota Football Party we first discussed preseason winners and losers, going over our June 53-man roster predictions and then discussed the Cardinals joint practices to come.

  • On the other episode this week, we discussed the conspiracy theories surrounding T.J. Hockenson and the trade rumors around Trey Lance.

  • I was also on Climbing the Pocket with Matthew Anderson and Ryan Ortega to discuss Trey Lance and Hockenson.

• I went over the UDFA rookies who shined in Preseason Week 2 on TWSN.

Work I enjoyed (football):

• Alec Lewis on Ryan Grigson ($)

• More of the ongoing Dorktown documentary on the history of the Minnesota Vikings

• Given all the Trey Lance rumors, it’s worth shouting out the QB School, run by former NFL quarterback JT O’Sullivan. His video on Trey Lance’s Week 2 of the preseason was very enlightening.

• Joseph Acosta expresses his disappointment in the Netflix documentary on the 2006-2010 Florida Gators.

• Check out Brandon Thorn’s ranking of the top 40 defensive linemen ($) which includes the edge plus the interior.

Work I enjoyed (non-football):

• Rebecca Watson runs down an incredibly undercovered story on the disappearance of Naomi Wu, a trailblazing queer maker from China.

• Filmmaker and video essayist Patrick Willems goes over his gripe with the word “content” and how it’s used to describe every element of creation and art.

• ShotSpotter, the “acoustic surveillance technology” contracted to police departments to monitor gunshots and extrapolate their location, is exclusively installed in poor and minority neighborhoods, a massive waste of police funding and extraordinarily inaccurate. In any other governmental context, this would be an incredible scandal about grift and wasteful spending. Instead, it’s mostly nothing.

• Erin Reed’s incredibly moving and to-the-point piece on the danger facing trans people, titled “This is What Transgender Eradication Looks Like”

• GOP Debate Coverage

  • Historian Kevin M. Kruse goes over the historical oddity of Trump avoiding the debate

  • Writer Noah Berlatsky goes over how the debate, paradoxically, helped secure Trump’s standing in the nomination race

  • Aaron Rupar covered the insanity of the debate ($) and the positions politicians have to hold to be considered viable GOP candidates.

• Elon Musk’s Twitter/X account is one of the most followed accounts on the platform. His following is populated by millions of new and inactive bot accounts.

• Elon Musk’s level of power and control over certain sectors of governance, including foreign policy, is near despotic. Changes in his whims can move mountains, and win or lose wars. It’s wild. And on top of it, he’s unhinged and unlearned about his most important influences.

  But some of Musk’s touchstones present ironies. He has said that his hero is Douglas Adams, the writer who skewered both the hyper-rich and the progress-at-any-cost ethos that Musk has come to embody. In the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” novels and radio plays, the latter of which were broadcast in South Africa during Musk’s childhood, a narcissistic playboy becomes the president of the galaxy, and Earth is demolished to make way for a space transit route. Musk is also an avowed fan of Deus Ex, a role-playing first-person-shooter video game that he has brought up when discussing his company Neuralink, which aspires to invent ability-enhancing body modifications like those featured in the game. During the pandemic, Musk seemed to embrace covid denialism, and for a while he changed his Twitter profile picture to an image of the protagonist of the game, which turns on a manufactured plague designed to control the masses. But Deus Ex, like “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a fundamentally anti-capitalist text, in which the plague is the culmination of unrestrained corporate power, and the villain is the world’s richest man, a media-darling tech entrepreneur with global aspirations and political leaders under his control.