Hello, and for the final time from me this year, happy Friday! This correspondence is coming to you all the way from sunny San Diego, hence the slight delay. As a holiday gift to both you and I, I’ll be keeping this final newsletter of the year short.
And what a year it’s been! On my end, 2022 was marked by some major milestones: I ended my time at The Atlantic after six wonderful years and started an exciting new role at TIME. I marked five years of living in London by memorizing some fun facts about Henry VIII and achieving indefinite leave to remain in the U.K.
And finally, I kept up this correspondence with all of you. Over the past year, we’ve had two dozen emails covering everything from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the death of Queen Elizabeth II. We’ve chronicled three British premierships (and one very popular lettuce). We’ve discussed major elections as far afield as Hungary, France, Italy, Brazil, Israel, and the U.S.
Thank you for sticking around for it all. If you have any feedback for how this correspondence can be improved in the New Year, hit ‘reply’ and let me know!
What I’ve written
For TIME’s 2022 Person of the Year, I helped profile the Spirit of Ukraine—the scores of ordinary people in Ukraine and around the world, including doctors, engineers, chefs, and entrepreneurs, who rallied behind the country when the war broke out.
But the most stirring answers to Zelensky’s imperative came from individuals. Governments and blocs, like companies, have their own interests, to which Putin’s aggression was not only morally offensive but also threatening. And true selflessness, after all, requires a self. Keep reading here
New legislation going through the British Parliament could impose unprecedented restrictions on the right to protest in England and Wales. I wrote about what it means for British democracy:
“It’s the kind of legislation you would expect in Russia or Iran or Egypt or China,” says George Monbiot, a British writer and environmental activist. “It’s not the kind of legislation you would expect to see in a nominal democracy.” Keep reading here
And for my final piece of the year, I wrote about how democracy fared in 2022 and what to expect in 2023:
Democracy in 2022 has been under siege, marked by attempted coups in Peru, contested elections in Brazil, and authoritarian crackdowns on peaceful protesters in Iran, China, and elsewhere. According to an annual report on the state of global democracy by the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or International IDEA, half of the world’s democratic nations are in retreat. The most concerning cases can be found among the world’s biggest and most influential democracies, such as India, Brazil, and the United States. Keep reading here
What I’ve read
This piece on the inherent biases of the viral AI avatar app Lensa (MIT Technology Review)
But while Lensa generated realistic yet flattering avatars for them—think astronauts, fierce warriors, and cool cover photos for electronic music albums— I got tons of nudes. Out of 100 avatars I generated, 16 were topless, and in another 14 it had put me in extremely skimpy clothes and overtly sexualized poses.
This elegy for the Iowa Caucus (The Atlantic)
That’s how many Iowans see the caucus: a messy, intimate project that represents politics in its most sublime form—a dose of pure democracy smack-dab in the middle of Iowa’s fields and farms. I’m not sure about all that. But the caucuses are intimate. You discuss electability with your legs wedged beneath a lunch table designed for children. You look your neighbor in the eye and tell him why he’s wrong. On a school night! During one of his first-ever caucuses, my father, sitting at Senator Bernie Sanders’s table, was approached by a neighbor from Hillary Clinton’s. “Didn’t you hear that Sanders was a conscientious objector?” the man asked. Dad replied that he didn’t realize it was a liability for a presidential candidate to have a conscience. I remember thinking that this was a good comeback.
This Q&A on the limits of ChatGPT … with ChatGPT (TIME)
There are still those who say OpenAI was irresponsible to release these technologies to the public, but one thing seems clear at the end of 2022: large language models are here to stay. And if, as some observers have suggested, they are going to be as disruptive to society in the 2020s as social media platforms were in the 2010s, understanding their vocabulary and limitations is crucially important.
What I’m thinking about
That incredible World Cup final (and whether, as this essay suggests, Qatar ultimately won).
Until 2023,
Yasmeen