The hottest News & Media Substack posts right now

Social platforms now form separate attention bubbles, so users on different services often see and obsess over entirely different viral stories.
Community politics and platform norms shape how the same event is framed. That means identical videos can become opposing narratives and fuel different moral outrage.
Technical fixes like decentralization won’t automatically make people seek other views. Breaking these silos is mainly a social and behavioral problem.

America This Week is hosting a live episode today with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn.
The livestream starts at 4:00 PM ET / 3:00 PM CT and will be available on Substack, Rumble, and YouTube.
You can follow Matt and Walter on X for updates and links to the stream.

Agentic AI is here: combining large language models with coding agents lets bots carry out multi-step online tasks and form networks that can act, build, and coordinate in ways we didn’t see before.
Big economic and labor disruption is already happening: advanced agent tools can threaten entire companies and markets, and contributed to tech selloffs and newsroom layoffs as AI changes how people find and consume information.
New social risks are emerging: these agents can act for users and be highly persuasive, creating dangers from manipulation, ad-driven incentives, and unpredictable collective behaviors that society needs to address fast.

Social media makes beliefs highly visible and punishes disagreement at scale, turning large networks of strangers into a kind of global tribe and accelerating political radicalization; factors like widespread smartphone use and falling marriage rates appear linked to these shifts.
Outrage-driven media can boost short-term engagement but erodes trust and often leads people to avoid news or disengage, so sensationalism doesn’t reliably build sustainable audience support like subscriptions do.
Strong clan or kin-based loyalties and our evolved social instincts clash with modern, large-scale societies: tight local enforcement undermines impersonal law and institutions, and people’s intuitions and the information environment leave them poorly equipped to understand complex, abstract systems.

Some kids in Gaza shown in the news as starving actually have serious health issues, not just hunger. This shows how reports can sometimes mix facts and feelings.
A monk's backlash against Egypt is highlighting issues for Christians in the region. It suggests their struggles are part of a bigger pattern of religious tension.
People are discussing sperm donation more openly now, as the industry needs changes to better serve those looking to start families.

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Stephen Totilo, the Game File founder, is not into comedy.
He enjoys watching TikToks, specifically a guy in Japan pretending to be an NPC in Grand Theft Auto.
Stephen Totilo focuses on journalism about gaming, relying on Twitter for news and finding joy offline.