The Top 5: From fact-checking trust to protein-maxxing
Welcome to the latest 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 speak to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy these articles, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation!
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The Top 5 articles for your week:
“The Anti-Social Century” (The Atlantic)
Because we are starting off The Top 5 in 2025 strong with a widely popular essay from Derek Thompson on the effects of solitude in American culture.
But solitude and loneliness are not one and the same. “It is actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness,” the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg told me. “That cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.” The real problem here, the nature of America’s social crisis, is that most Americans don’t seem to be reacting to the biological cue to spend more time with other people. Their solitude levels are surging while many measures of loneliness are actually flat or dropping.
“She Is In Love With ChatGPT” (NYT)
Because Kashmir Hill with a “canary in the coal mine” article profiling a woman who claims she’s fallen in love with an AI chatbot.
Julie Carpenter, an expert on human attachment to technology, described coupling with A.I. as a new category of relationship that we do not yet have a definition for. Services that explicitly offer A.I. companionship, such as Replika, have millions of users. Even people who work in the field of artificial intelligence, and know firsthand that generative A.I. chatbots are just highly advanced mathematics, are bonding with them.
“What’s A Fact Anyway?” (New Yorker)
Because Fergus McIntosh reveals the inner-workings of the large fact-checking department at the New Yorker and also ruminates on how journalism (and institutions in general) builds trust. Does fact-checking contribute to any kind of trust-making?
…it becomes difficult to know what is true, and, consequently, to make decisions. Good journalism offers a way through, but only if readers are willing to follow: trust and naïveté can feel uncomfortably close. Gaining and holding that trust is hard. But failure—the end point of the story of generational decay, of gold exchanged for dross—is not inevitable…any solution must acknowledge the messiness of truth, the requirements of attention, the way we squint to see more clearly. It must tell you to say what you mean, and know that you mean it.
“Smells Like Protein Spirit” (Taste)
Because Jordan Michelman looks at the current nutrition trends around “protein-maxxing.”
This raises a major question I’ve been noodling on for some time—what with the powdered protein doughnut of it all—as to whether or not this stuff should even taste good in the first place. Are we gorging ourselves to hit the golden 200 grams of protein pop-up notification for the flavor? Or is it to satisfy something else, to chase a numbers matrix in our own private gamified version of modern life, half-cyborgically obsessed with the glowing readout on our soon-to-be surgically attached devices?
“Jazz Off the Record” (The Nation)
Because Ethan Iverson writes about Slugs, an often forgotten Lower East Side jazz club in New York, and it is for our readers who love the genre like Michael does.
The idioms of free jazz and fusion are perpetually controversial. The Ken Burns PBS documentary Jazz, which codified a certain narrative of jazz history in the public imagination, did what it could to ignore both. The story Burns tells suggests that jazz was in hibernation between the death of Coltrane and the eventual emergence of new traditionalists like Wynton Marsalis. The music played at Slugs’ and clubs like it goes all but unmentioned.