The Abba insurgency: art and science by Fraser Nelson

For his own Substack, Fraser Nelson writes about the incredible popularity enjoyed by ABBA after winning the Eurovision Song Contest more than fifty years ago with “Waterloo.” Nelson has lots of insight about why ABBA’s approach to pop music held such appeal, but I mainly found this piece engaging because of all the incredible details he shares that show the cultural ripple effects of different social structures. ABBA’s bold fashion sense, for example, was driven less by aesthetic adventurism than the threshold of garishness that needed to be met to qualify for a Swedish tax break on costumes.

A New Headache for Honest Students: Proving They Didn’t Use A.I. by Callie Holtermann

Reporting for The New York Times, Callie Holtermann details incidents of college students who diligently do their schoolwork only to be hit with accusations that they outsourced their assignments to A.I. tools. The burden of proof is not on the professors who level the charges, of course. The students are forced to deliver evidence of their innocence, which leads to exhaustive excavation or documentation of their processes, a ludicrous added burden on top of the scholarship itself. This strikes me as little more than the latest iteration of a longstanding trend I’ve noticed in higher education: a shocking number of professors and administrators seem to genuinely despise the students they are meant to serve.

This is why I refuse to run student submissions through "AI detectors."

— Eladio Bobadilla (@eladiobobadilla.com) 2025-05-20T22:41:30.805Z

Why Did ESPN Have to Cancel ‘Around the Horn’? by Jake Nevins

I have an odd affection for the now-gone ESPN series Around the Horn. Although I’ve never been a huge sports fans (outside of baseball, and that interest has faded dramatically in recent years), I did have a stretch where I was fascinated by media based around sports talk. Around the Horn was one of the programs I watched frequently despite not consuming a moment of most of the sports they discussed. In this consideration of the end of the program’s long run, mandated by the network rather than chosen by the creators, Jake Nevins effectively gets at a general curdling of the broader culture and the retrograde animosities of simian-brained dudes who can’t stand it when even one iota of the public discourse doesn’t abjectly serve their simplistic needs and interests. This piece is published by Intelligencer, an offshoot of New York magazine.