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A GPT-5 review + The Great Gatsby on its 100th anniversary (Issue #390)
In his essay on building a life you love, poet and illustrator Jason McBride stresses that fulfillment starts with what he calls “radical responsibility.” That means owning every part of your life, even the circumstances you didn’t create. Most of what happens will be outside your control, but you can decide how you respond, focus on what you can shape, and refuse to live as a permanent victim of circumstance. When three of his freelance writing clients dropped him in the same week — two replaced by cheaper AI — he didn’t dwell on fairness or bad luck. Instead, he retooled his business to make his work irreplaceable, and ended up more profitable than before. For McBride, that’s the essence of radical responsibility: Stop assigning blame, set clear values, and make choices that align with them. “Happiness doesn’t come from vision boards or birthday wishes,” he writes. “Happiness comes from intentionally creating a life you love. It comes from taking responsibility for your life.”
Where McBride focuses on responsibility as the engine of change, digital communication expert Gabriele Geza Gobbo frames intentional living as reclaiming real-world presence. Raised in northern Italy before smartphones, Gobbo grew up with connection as something physical, not digital. Decades later, he found himself slipping into what he calls “Digital Sleepwalking,” or moving through life on autopilot with a phone in hand. But then when visiting friends in a small mountain town, they had a Sunday dinner where no one brought phones to the table. In those hours of uninterrupted conversation, he felt a muscle relax that had been tense for years. Since then, he’s made a practice of building small, deliberate breaks from technology into his daily life, as a reminder that “a meal is a meal, a walk is a walk, a conversation is a conversation.” His advice is simple: you don’t have to delete every app or take a month offline, but start by letting your phone miss you for a couple of hours. He says the practice makes space for presence to become the default instead of the exception.
— Anna Dorn
Recommended reading:
- Public health expert Dr. Jay K. Varma worked at the CDC for 20 years. Writing about the gunman opening fire on CDC buildings last week, he connects the attack to escalating threats and political hostility toward public health workers in the years since Covid. Some have left the field or concealed their work; others are choosing to fight back, organizing to defend the profession and the communities it serves.
- Tech analyst Alberto Romero reviews GPT-5’s release and singles out one improvement above all: a sharp drop in hallucination and deception rates. In some fact-seeking prompts, GPT-5’s error rate falls below 1% — a level of reliability Romero says could make AI far more useful in everyday decisions and institutional workflows.
- Photography enthusiast Dori Kasa shares 10 simple tricks for taking striking travel photos with nothing but your phone. Her advice ranges from cleaning your lens before every shot to looking up for overlooked details, using shadows as well as light, and leaving background in the frame instead of overcropping. Even scaffolding or construction, she notes, can make a landmark photo feel authentic to the moment you saw it.
- Journalist Jasmin James revisits The Great Gatsby on its 100th anniversary, exploring how its themes of ambition, reinvention, and illusion still resonate a century later. She argues that the novel’s staying power comes from its ability to shift meaning as we age — from a love story, to a critique of privilege, to a meditation on the hope and heartbreak of chasing the American dream.
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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How to stop “digital sleepwalking” and build a life you love was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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