The Top 5: BuzzFeed, 8 billion people, & screen time

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A new Banksy piece outside of Kyiv. Image credit: Genya Savilov / AFP / Getty

Welcome to your weekly edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speaks to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy our list, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation! Please also consider becoming a paid subscriber if this is one of those newsletters you open up all the time or look forward to each week.

The Top 5 articles for your week:

1. “How the World Sped Up” (The Garden of Forking Paths)

   Because “In modernity, our lives unfold quicker. Stasis is shorter. The accelerated pace of change has embedded catastrophic risk into our precarious world, as most systems are designed for gradualism, evolution by creeps, not evolution by jerks. The world can change in a second, but it can also break in a second.”

2. “The Unbearable Lightness of BuzzFeed” (The Verge)

   Because “BuzzFeed’s ability to reflect, amplify, and create massive cultural moments by giving a staff of hundreds free rein to invent new formats led to a $1.7 billion valuation in 2016. It built a Pulitzer-winning newsroom with BuzzFeed News, popularized a genre of simple and stylized cooking content with Tasty, and launched a slate of beloved shows like BuzzFeed Unsolved and Another Round. Today, BuzzFeed’s high-profile hosts have moved on, its news division has been gutted, and its core website pays contractors around $100 per post to chase trending topics.”

3. “The world’s population is 8 billion and rising. That’s probably a good thing.” (Washington Post)

   Because “Too often in the past, conventional wisdom about population growth has tended to be pessimistic — even apocalyptic. In 1798, British economist Thomas Malthus forecast that an increasing population would soon outstrip, disastrously, nature’s capacity to feed so many people…For most of human history, the world’s population remained essentially stagnant for the unhappy reason that high death rates offset high birthrates…It turned out that a scramble for resources among increasing numbers of people would create not only scarcities and conflicts — but also incentives to overcome them through innovation.”

4. “Is Effective Altruism Now Defective?” (New York Magazine)

   Because “While most of the internet has experienced FTX’s meltdown with Schadenfreude, the effective altruists are grieving. Per origin myth, Sam Bankman-Fried forged his career according to a core principle of this belief system: Get as rich as possible in order to give away as much money as possible. Now, untold millions in promised EA-driven grants have been vaporized, and true believers are wondering how much responsibility they bear. What began about a decade ago as an ascetic movement of kidney-donating mosquito-net evangelists had lately morphed into something more sci-fi, backed by a token-minting benefactor and absorbed with doomsday-prevention schemes.”

5. “Bed Habits” (Vulture)

   Because this is a hilariously written article of one writer’s experiences while testing the idea that screens are all bad for our sleep habits.