Nilay Patel

That’s a real quote from our group publisher Chris Grant, who founded Polygon. Enjoy!

Help. Help help help.

But for those of us doomed to remember what the Obama years were like the first time around — the turbo-pop, the undercuts, the novelty Twitter accounts, the Internet Boyfriends, the girlbosses, the hashtags, the precise shades of pink — there is one last bracing thought. For better or worse, these were our ’60s, and we’re all just going to have to come to terms with that.

This post by Obsolete Sony is my favorite thing on the internet right now.

New York has a dive into New York governor Kathy Hochul’s push to ban phones in schools — and this very funny anecdote about how distracted they make kids:

At the time, Bethlehem Central was about four months into a near-total ban on electronics in schools. iPhones, earbuds, smart watches, and the rest — gone. During the prior few years, when a class period would end, students would walk in near-total silence through the halls, heads down, engrossed in their phones. Surveillance cameras would sometimes capture distracted teenagers walking into a wall or even, according to Rounds, falling down stairs.

No bill yet, but Hochul says she wants “to go big on this one.”

Autoblog was once an institution, but nothing good can survive the private equity disaster pipeline. (In this case, Autoblog’s new owner is Arena Group, the company which took over Sports Illustrated and immediately caused various scandals, including an AI content scandal, that led to their SI contract being terminated.)

The staff has been told the last day will be September 13th, according to a LinkedIn post from former Autoblog editor Sam Abuelsamid. Car media is messy and getting messier every day.

A big Wired piece with the Google team behind the Pixel cameras just hit. Let’s gaze upon the philosophical justification for the ongoing AI-powered what-is-a-photo apocalypse:

To Reynolds and the broader Pixel Camera team, it’s not necessarily the photo that’s important, but your memory. [...]

“What some of these edits do is help you create the moment that is the way you remember it, that’s authentic to your memory and to the greater context, but maybe isn’t authentic to a particular millisecond.”

No huge problems teaching people they can’t trust any photos at all worth thinking about there!