Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

The internet's most-discussed pollutant of 2025 turned out to be more boring, and more profitable, than the panic suggested. AI-generated articles now make up over half of long-form English content online, and "slop" was named Word of the Year by both Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society. The real story is not aesthetic but economic: cheap content has become infrastructure, paid for by ad networks that keep funding it. What is becoming scarce, and therefore valuable, is taste. The brands that will stand out are the ones that treat editorial judgement as an asset rather than a cost.

A new study from UCSB, soon to be published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, split nearly 500 participants between viral YouTube clips and challenging animated shorts. Even seven minutes of ambiguous, slow-paced film raised measurable scores in creativity and openness, while the viral feed barely moved the needle. People preferred the easy content, and got less from it. In an environment shaped by algorithmic ease, friction is what builds the kind of attention that lasts.

In an excerpt from Tao Ruspoli's documentary Being in the World, Heidegger's old warning returns with new weight. When efficiency becomes the lens through which we see everything, an undeveloped beach turns into a building site, a conversation turns into data, a brand turns into a metric. Heidegger pointed to artists as a counterforce, those who deepen the world rather than flatten it. The point is not to optimise meaning, but to make space for it.

Kathy Pham argues that design education has drifted into trade school territory: students trained for the job market, with art history and the liberal arts cut to make room. The result is a profession fluent in software and increasingly mute on culture. Quoting Michael Beirut from 1989, she points out that clients are not other designers, and the audiences for design work live in a wider world that designers are no longer taught to read. It is a quiet but sharp diagnosis of why so much current work feels technically clean and culturally thin.

Creative director Gail Bichler walks through The New York Times Magazine's first major redesign in nearly a decade. Custom typefaces by Henrik Kubel, a tighter relationship with the broader Times identity, and a new back-of-book section, the Culture Digest, built only for the print reader. The most interesting move is conceptual: the team began by asking what makes something feel like magazine journalism when the same story now travels across print, web, audio and video. Their answer puts tone, voice and editorial process at the centre, with format as a consequence rather than a constraint.