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Today's edition has range.
Former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse’s doctors gave him three to four months to live after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis six months ago. He is still here, still giving speeches, and sat down with John McCormack to talk about faith, regret, his wife, and what he thinks comes next.
Reaching back to 2025 for an Atlantic piece on disappearing from the Internet. Alec Harris runs a boutique privacy firm and lives in a house registered to a trust, with 191 virtual debit cards and 10 phone numbers. Benjamin Wallace traces his tradecraft back to a former cop who disappeared from the internet in 2023.
Want to roll your eyes today at the idea of an AI actress and then fervent attention this topic gets from legacy publications? Well, Taffy Brodesser-Akner interviewed Tilly Norwood, the world's first AI actress. The more interesting person in the room was Tilly's creator, Eline van der Velden, who built an AI proxy to do the acting career she couldn't.
And lastly, we head to China, where polling data shows overwhelming AI optimism. Writer Zilan Qian argues that what looks like enthusiasm is actually the same mass anxiety that drove workers to board every "last bus" since the state-sector layoffs of the 1990s destroyed 24 million jobs.
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The Dispatch
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John McCormack
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Six months ago, doctors gave Ben Sasse three to four months to live. His Stage IV pancreatic cancer has since metastasized into five cancer types. He is still giving speeches, recording a podcast called Not Dead Yet, and ordering Jack and Cokes while joking about it. John McCormack profiles a man whose theological framework, rooted in Reformed Christianity and the teachings of St. Augustine, has made him less afraid of death than of wasting the time before it. Sasse regrets the Senate, the missed dinners, and the work travel. He does not regret his wife, his kids, or what he believes comes next.
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The Atlantic
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Benjamin Wallace
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Alec Harris, CEO of a firm called HavenX, runs 191 virtual debit cards, 10 phone numbers, and a home registered to a trust under a pseudonym. His clients, some paying tens of thousands a month, include crypto executives, celebrities, and post-Brian-Thompson-assassination corporate leaders. Much of his tradecraft traces to Michael Bazzell, a former cybercrime detective who built the field from scratch, then vanished from the internet in 2023. Privacy at this level costs money, cognitive overhead, and constant low-grade deception. It also costs nothing if a blackmailer sends a threatening photo to your address and gets a picture of a UPS Store.
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The New York Times
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Taffy Brodesser-Akner
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Eline van der Velden, a Dutch-British producer who couldn't break into acting, built an AI actress named Tilly Norwood using ChatGPT, ElevenLabs, and motion capture of herself. After 2,000 prompts and a name chosen with ChatGPT's help, Tilly launched in July 2025 to immediate backlash from SAG-AFTRA and working actors. Writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner interviewed Tilly across two days in London and found her slick, deflective, and ultimately empty. The more interesting story is Eline's: a trained physicist and comedy performer who found a way to direct and act for a major director by wearing her own creation like a mask.
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Asterisk Magazine
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Zilan Qian
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Zilan Qian traces Chinese AI enthusiasm to a specific psychological wound: the mass layoffs of the 1990s, when market reforms eliminated 24 million state-sector jobs and destroyed the danwei system that organized workers' entire social lives. From that rupture emerged what anthropologist Xiang Biao calls "last bus" thinking: a terror of missing each successive wave of transformation. English fluency, coding, and now AI have all triggered the same panicked mass adoption. Polling showing 85% of Chinese respondents viewing AI favorably likely conflates genuine optimism with the belief that non-adoption is not a survivable option.
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