Sunday Reading: May 24, 2026

Happy Sunday. Below you’ll find a handful of pieces I’ve enjoyed reading this week:

–A Guardian profile of the comedian Charlie Berens, who’s become a face of the campaign against data center construction in Wisconsin; 

–a fascinating interview with Wallace Shawn; 

–an interactive look at the making of SNL digital shorts; 

–a long and thoughtful essay about the new Ben Lerner novel;

–Critic BD McClay’s commentary on the Granta/Commonwealth Short Story prize controversy; 

–and more.

Another reminder while we’re here: I'm assembling a big fun roundup of your favorite funny internet videos. Send me your favorite sketches, short films, viral clips, or internet ephemera, with a few sentences or more about what they mean to you, and I'll include them in the piece. Thank you to everyone who's contributed so far.

And one more bump for this week's podcast:

Humorism Evening Podcast No. 002

Concerning “Nateland.”

HumorismSeth Simons

Hope you’re having a great long weekend.

‘Nobody’s negotiating for the people here’: comedian Charlie Berens takes on AI datacenters

Berens was not always an AI pessimist.Berens was not always an AI pessimist.

A few years ago, he believed the utopian vision laid out by AI luminaries like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who spoke of how the technology could be used to cure social ills, even to treat intractable diseases. Berens thought maybe it could also help Wisconsin deal with its PFAS contamination issue. “My interest in AI started with a lot of hope and optimism actually,” he said.

That sentiment eventually turned to cynicism as, he claims, the industry’s billionaire CEOs dispelled any virtuous use of the technology for the social good in favor of enriching themselves and their investors. He cited Altman’s recent efforts to create an Erotica feature in OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, despite concerns even from the company’s advisers that such a tool could create a “sexy suicide coach”, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

“I thought this thing was supposed to cure cancer,” Berens said, referencing Altman’s past statements. “Is this what we’re giving our land for? Is that what we’re giving our water for? Is this what you’re asking to change our communities for?”

The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon

The real, unsettling mechanism of Fallon’s banal horror is its insistence on a radical non-engagement with reality: a position that, in our current political climate, is itself an aggressively political act. Fallon doesn’t do politics, or if he does, he wants to “keep his head down” because “we hit both sides equally.” Tellingly, Donald Trump has called for the firing of almost all of the other late night hosts—Colbert, Kimmel, even Seth Meyers—but excluded Fallon from his hit-list, because Trump recognizes that there’s nothing about Fallon’s empty banality that could be anything close to a threat.

Contrast Fallon’s “head empty, no thoughts” presentation with someone like Dick Cavett. Back in 1969, on what was, at the time, the most popular show in the country, there’s a 17-minute segment with James Baldwin on the possibility of Black liberation in America. There’s a moment where Baldwin talks of the American system wanting him, as a Black man, to be an accomplice to his own murder. The camera cuts back to Cavett, who has been listening intently. “I don’t understand that last sentence,” says Cavett, which leads into a discussion of the work and activism of Stokely Carmichael. What’s shocking is not just the content but the space and time given to ideas—to the intellectual and cultural problems of the world outside the studio walls.

In contrast, Fallon is desperate to keep the real world out. In his interviews, he barely seems to be listening to his guests, waiting for them to finish speaking so his rituals can begin anew. The constant, forced joviality can’t completely conceal an encroaching terror—the horror of the political world that keeps threatening to break down the walls around his studio-castle.

The Meanest Tradition in Entertainment

Early on in the special, Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-CEO, could be seen grinning in the audience. His presence was a clear symbol of brand support for Hart, who has been in the streamer’s fold for years, and most recently hosted the Netflix comedy-competition series Funny AF. “I did say that Kevin was a Hollywood puppet,” Katt Williams, a longtime critic of Hart’s, remarked onstage. “I meant that the head of Netflix literally has his whole hand up Kevin’s ass and can make him do anything.”

Of course, Netflix has also produced four of Williams’s stand-up specials since 2018, and many of the other guests also regularly feature on the streamer’s programming. Following Williams’s logic, Sarandos could make most everyone on the dais do just about anything. The overwhelming Netflix presence at The Roast of Kevin Hart, combined with a grin-and-bear-it vibe from the participants, made it feel less like a comedy show and more like a branding event.

Inside a Year of Chaos and Conflict at Kevin Hart’s Media Company

While Hartbeat expanded, Hollywood entered a recession. Economic uncertainty, rising interest rates and growing skepticism about the profitability of streaming caused major media companies to fire staff and pull back on buying new projects. Hartbeat was a little more insulated than most because talent like Hart could usually still get a project made. Still, producing projects without Hart in a starring role became more difficult.

Randolph left the company in late 2023 and was replaced by Jay Levine, who had spent much of his career at Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. Levine brought in a couple of other senior leaders with experience at major media companies.

A contingent of executives pushed Hart to scale back some ambitions, the people said. The company couldn’t afford to be working in so many different businesses at the same time, especially as areas like free, advertising-supported online video, and podcasts got more competitive. Hart was one of the most prolific and productive creative people in the world, starring in and producing movies, TV shows, comedy, short-form videos and advertisements. The point of the company was to relieve the stress on him, not add to it.

Wallace Shawn Isn’t Ready to Die

SHAWN: I don’t understand what happened to me, but I somehow became politically conscious over that rather short period of time. I went from being a liberal with basically the same views as my mother to being a leftist with quite different views.

RAINBOW: How did it change your work?

SHAWN: I was thinking about the world, and so the world came into my writing. I mean, it had a certain presence before that. I would have said that there was something disturbed about our society, or diseased, and that my early plays in some ways reflected that. But I didn’t take on the idea that I was a member of a class that had derived its privilege from criminal behavior, and that I was a product of evil actions. All of a sudden it dawned on me. I didn’t quite get it before that the government of the United States was not an entity that was independent of me. It may be that by simply paying taxes and having a little bit of personal prosperity, a little bit of success, made me more conscious of the fact that the government is not just this separate animal that I either like or dislike. I knew the Vietnam War was bad, but I didn’t get that it was being waged on my behalf or that I was supposed to derive some personal benefit from it. I didn’t get any of that.

36 Hours to Air: Inside the Scramble to Film ‘S.N.L.’ Shorts

Sherman, who co-wrote the segment, had pitched the idea unsuccessfully before. “Sometimes Lorne doesn’t love farts,” she said. Michaels: “Normally, no, it’s not my favorite kind of comedy, but it has its place.”

Why Is It So Hard to Be Ordinary?

“I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me,” Stuart Smalley, the self-help guru played by Al Franken on “Saturday Night Live,” used to say. Smalley stood in for those writers who suggest embracing good-enoughness on a purely personal level, as a strategy for happiness and success. Yet those kinds of changes—adopting, say, “the subtle art of not giving a fuck,” as advised by the writer Mark Manson—are of limited value, Alpert thinks, both because they are often greatness thinking in disguise (they are secretly designed to get us to the top) and because they are “too incompatible with social pressures.” The ideology of greatness is deeply ingrained, he suggests, and hard to set aside. Contemplating global poverty, for instance, many people find it natural to worry about the problem of “lost Einsteins”—the many geniuses who never get to develop their talents. In doing so, Alpert writes, they embrace a theory of trickle-down greatness, according to which everyone benefits when the very best people are empowered. Alpert doesn’t want to diminish the value of genius, but the broader reality, he argues, is that “there are almost always many more talented and qualified people for a job than the number of available positions.” The systems we have in place fail at “harnessing the abilities of 7.7 billion good-enough human beings.” Why not turn the whole arrangement on its head?

Beautiful Rules

It is late, finally, in the sense that literature is always late: a form of reflection that comes after what it reflects on. The ‘experiment’ is technology’s pervasion of society, our approach to which resembles Max’s scheme to help his daughter: ‘We’re going to conduct an experiment where we just eat what we want without rules for a while and see how that feels for all of us. So anything that looks good, just put it in the cart.’ We collectively adopt technologies whose power no one seems to have a stable understanding of. We unreflectively feed LLMs our sensitive data, our banal secrets, our finest poetry, outsourcing our reading, our thinking, our writing. It is the dynamics driving this seemingly inexorable process – what Jameson called ‘that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions’ – not the gadgets themselves, which seem the true poem behind Transcription’s glassy surface: the movement of history which ‘remains forever out of reach’, as Jameson writes. Technology is ‘a figure for something else’: a ‘representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp – namely the whole new decentred global network of the third stage of capital itself.’

notes on metaphor

Awkwardness is a tool that is fine to use as long as you’re using it on purpose. In general, what matters more than any particular rule is that you’re doing what you’re doing on purpose. If you’re doing it on purpose it can be good or bad. When it’s not on purpose, it can only be bad.

The 100 Greatest Bird Names of All Time

#47: Quailfinch Indigobird. This name is just four nouns mashed together and needs some unpacking. It’s a poorly-known type of Indigobird, and lays its eggs in the nests of the African Quailfinch. It’s only been logged 4 times on eBird and doesn’t have any photos, but looks basically like the Dusky Indigobird.

"A kind of abdication”: Revisiting Zohran Mamdani and the NYPD with Katie Way

It feels pretty safe to say that, when it comes to their specific dynamic, Tisch is running the show. At City & State’s New York City Power 100 event on April 28, she made a quip about the mayor’s “core principle to ensure the strength of our city: Support, Reinforce, and Grow, or, for short, SRG.” It was a joke, but one that is ultimately about asserting her dominance: Mamdani vowed to disband the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group (SRG), which responds to protests, but Tisch hasn’t agreed to it. She doesn’t seem to be worried about political blowback.

One of the times that the mayor stood his ground against the NYPD outrage machine — because it really is an outrage machine — was when police showed up at a snowball fight that had been set up by streamers and got hit with snowballs. Mamdani was clear that he didn’t think we should arrest anyone over it. I just wish he brought a bit more of that energy to his other dealings with both Tisch and the department as a whole.