Another Debate And Another iPhone

ICYMI

• Here’s what you need to know about Kamala vs Trump:

  • Trump hammered the Vice President on the border and inflation, attempting to paint her as Biden 2.0, a viable strategy given his historically unpopular administration.

  • Kamala attacked Trump by playing all the old hits: abortion, his convictions, his temperament, his fitness to lead, etc. A new line of attack: she called his rallies “boring.” He did not like that.

  • The NYT, the WSJ, The Atlantic and even National Review believed that Kamala got the better of Trump. But notably, undecided voters weren’t so sure.

Recommendations

• The Center for Faith and Work offers book recommendations for Christians in every industry of human work. We’re jealous we didn’t compile the list first, to be honest. Go check it out.

Articles

• The world is getting weirder each day. Melissa Kruger explains why parents can still trust God in our crazy cultural moment.

• How to build trust on your team in a short period of time.

• What qualities should you look for when you’re hiring a manager? Harvard has some ideas.

• Neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff has suggestions for those who want to be more creative.

• Is our dopamine-heavy culture — the scrolling through too many videos and eating too many cheeseburgers — eroding our capacity “to handle Normal Mental Anguish?”

  • A line: “Self-sacrificial love knows depths that dopamine could never fathom.”

• Evergreen content: 7 ways to strengthen your prayer life

• JP Morgan adds an 80-hour weekly work cap, answering the cries of their younger employees.

Paywalled

• Apple announced the release of the iPhone 16, eliciting the article title of the week: “Yet Another iPhone, Dear God” (The Atlantic)

  • “What do you mean, you don’t need four studio-quality microphones?”

• David Brooks on the “Junkification of American Life”

  • A highlight: “Even journalism has found ways to trigger dopamine for profit…Minute after minute they’re rubbing their audience’s pleasure centers, which feels like a somewhat older profession.” (Emphasis mine)

• High schoolers are over-worked, over-scheduled, and over-optimized. Let them do less, so they can do better. (NYT)

• “Raising kids in the shadow of doom” (NYT)

  • “He has grown up in an age in which Covid closed schools, forest fires darkened the skies, hurricanes intensified and rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol. My instinct to minimize all of this was wrong. On some level, I just didn’t want to admit to my kids — or to myself — that I was powerless to protect them. This was, at heart, a lie that would only undermine their trust in me.”

Deep Dive

• AI & Entertainment (from Ted Gioia’s fantastic newsletter)

  • The movie trailer for Francis For Coppola’s new film got pulled from theaters because “the studio had been duped by an AI bot.”

  • Just one person in North Carolina was able to steal $10 million in royalties from human musicians with AI-generated songs. They got billions of streams.

  • The promoters of National Novel Writing Month angrily declared that opposition to AI books is classist and ableist.

  • Children are now routinely using AI to make nude photos of other youngsters.

  • Nearly half of the safety team at OpenAI left their jobs—and almost nobody seems to care or notice.

  • AI tech titan Nvidia lost a half trillion in market capitalization over the course of just a few days—including the largest daily decline in the history of capitalism.

  • By pure coincidence, Nvidia’s CEO sold $633 million worth of stock in the weeks leading up to the current decline.

One Last Thing

• You should read Ben Dockery’s latest Screwtape letter on politics. Someday, we will say we knew him before he was famous.