Hi {{first_name|friend}},
We’re all grappling for the right vices to compare technology to. Online sports betting platforms DraftKings and FanDuel are “digital heroin.” Buy now, pay later service Klarna’s business model resembles the “subprime mortgage strategy.” Smartphones are “attention alcohol.” Meta and YouTube are like slot machines, big tobacco companies, an endless supply of “free tortilla chips” at a restaurant, or a lion stalking the weakest member of the herd. And then there’s “slop,” the go-to term for the AI-generated content flooding the web, including on YouTube Kids.
The size of these businesses makes it hard to wrap your head around the harm. Here’s how the Financial Times puts it:
“These companies are almost unbelievably enormous. Meta is a 1.36 trillion dollar company, and Google (Alphabet) is 3.3 trillion dollars worth of market capitalization…Think about how much internet advertising you see every day, week, month, year of your life. These two companies, along with Amazon — which has a huge ad business — those three companies get half the internet advertising dollars that get spent anywhere. They absolutely dominate in this form of advertising that really colors the texture of our whole existence. If this changes the way they do business, it’s going to be big news for everybody…”
The building anger at the tech industry is less of a moral panic and more of a sign of an economic crisis. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter why kids love social media. It’s making trillions — trillions! — of dollars off our time and attention. It’s incentivizing gross behavior, too, from looksmaxxing manosphere creators to exploitative family vloggers (the subject of upcoming book Like, Follow, Subscribe). While these technology companies bloom, others wither. Is this the economy that we all want?
Bye,
Your friends at Gloria
Ovarian cancer is the deadliest gynecological cancer and the fifth leading cause of cancer death in women — with around 22,000 new diagnoses in the United States a year, most of them in women over 50. Unlike cervical cancer, which has the pap smear, or breast cancer, which has mammography, ovarian cancer has no reliable, widely available screening test.
The core challenge with this deadly cancer is early detection. Only 20 percent of ovarian cancers are found at an early stage — but when it’s found early, about 92 percent of patients live longer than five years. For those diagnosed at a later stage, the picture is grimmer; five-year survival rates drop to around 20 percent for stage 4.
“The only available test, the CA-125 blood test, developed decades ago, is considered a poor screening tool because it often delivers false positive and false negative results and has a highly flawed detection rate,” says Elena Ratner, M.D, M.B.A., who heads the Gynecologic Oncology department at Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Ratner also runs the Peter E. Schwartz Discovery to a Cure Program, which was launched in 2003 to provide women with new methods in prevention, detection, and treatment of gynecological cancers. Dr. Ratner and her team run clinical trials and study cancer mutations in the lab and apply that knowledge in real time to the patients they treat.
The message must get out that women are not being heard.
The good news, according to Dr. Ratner, is that more reliable and advanced blood, urine, and specialized pap smear-based tests are in the works. “We are currently developing these tests and using them in early clinical trials. I am hopeful they will be available in the near future.”
We’re prepping for a much-needed trip and, instead of buying a whole new wardrobe, we’re using the rental service Armoire. We were able to rent vacation-ready dresses and sets from brands like Farm Rio, Milly, and Trina Turk (the spring break edit makes it easy). Shipping, cleaning, and styling are all included, sizes run 0–3X, and we can pause or cancel anytime.
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The Drama. Image via A24.
TO WATCH Despite squirming with discomfort during all the home-robbery scenes, we will be tuning in to watch Jon Hamm as a disgraced hedge funder going through a crime-fueled midlife crisis in the second season of Your Friends & Neighbors (on Apple TV today). There’s also the Zendaya-Robert Pattinson A24 film The Drama, which has gotten a ton of buzz thanks to the casting but seems to just be kind of a weird bummer, per early reviews.
TO SIP We’re celebrating warmer weather with Cann’s low-dose THC beverages. They’re an easy, enjoyable party beverage that helps you stay mellow without overdoing it. Spend $185+ and get a free Hi Boy four-pack. Shop it all here. #partner
TO LISTEN Indie folk band Bon Iver’s last album Sable, Fable was one of the best releases of 2025, so we’re excited for Volumes: One. Out today, it’s a compilation of live recordings as well as other unreleased/unheard music. Here’s a sample.
Someone please (please!) fix the school calendar. • “I read my boyfriend’s ChatGPT and it ended our relationship.” • Recasting ADHD as “hypercuriosity." • A nuanced look at why some women with complex health issues are turning to AI for help.
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