Human Intelligence® News Update July 23, 2026

Jul 23, 2026

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Patrick McDonald is the creator of QueryTracker and Query Manager — the industry’s leading platform used by over 500,000 authors. His new book is The Modern Guide to Querying Literary Agents. Listen to our conversation here »

When artist Rachael Harms Mahlandt moved to Portland, Oregon in 2017, she wanted a way to build community and connect. She started by building a dinosaur exchange for her front yard. She followed this up with a tiny book swap (and another), a bee stop, and a mug exchange. Then she made a map of all Portland’s Sidewalk Joy locations—and now she’s gone global. READ SHAY MIRK’S STORY ABOUT RACHAEL and then FIND YOUR LOCAL SIDEWALK JOY » [2 min]

In 2019, Writer and Professor Robert Macfarlane released Underland, in which he guides readers through subterranean landscapes. A month before its release, he took us on a tour through a few of the more than 20 notebooks he used in the process of creating Underland. “The notebooks vary from a tiny lilac-colored Moleskine just seven or eight centimeters high, to robust hardback journals, tough enough to withstand being dragged through limestone tunnel systems and soaked in slate mines.” Together, they serve as evidence of one incredible artist’s process. EXPLORE THE NOTEBOOKS » [4 min]

For those of us who cannot bring ourselves to understand how AI companies make their money, Writer Andrew Singleton can explain. It’s complicated how one $2B grape becomes an accounting rate of return of $120B, or how replacing 99 farm workers with 99 mules devolves into “Blood Sacrifice Friday.” “All you really need to know is that everything is totally working and everyone is making a lot of money.” GET YOUR PHD IN AI ECONOMICS » [3 min]

We’ve all been there: A chatbot tells you there are three Bs in “blueberry,” that Toronto is a city in the United States, or that you should put glue on your pizza. And, until recently, there wasn’t much you could do about it other than scream into the ether. Flaw Reporting for AI (FLARE-AI), a tool created by Computer Scientist Elaine Zhu, Anthropic Researcher Shayne Longpre, and HuggingFace AI Policy Researcher Avijit Ghosh, offers an alternative: “Report a flaw or incident for any general-purpose AI system, and route a single report to everyone who needs to see it.” READ ABOUT THE TOOL and GET REPORTING » [4 min]

The New Yorker’s Infinite Scroll Writer Kyle Chayka looks into a recent design trend: imperfection. At a time when generative AI-produced images drip with controlled exactness, Chayka writes, “It’s no wonder that the artists and designers whose livelihoods are threatened by it have begun moving aggressively in the opposite direction, toward the scrawled, the sloppy, the seemingly mistake-riddled.” As Cloud Report Artist Christine Tyler Hill puts it, “We are moving into an age where people relish any little detail that signals there was room for error.” READ CHAYKA’S PERFECTLY IMPERFECT PIECE » [5 min]

A reader recently asked Philosopher and New York Times Ethicist Columnist Kwame Anthony Appiah, “How do I go about telling my partner his reliance on AI is damaging our relationship?” In a measured, thoughtful response, Appiah reminds us that dependence on AI does more than erode the user’s long term ability to reason and judge: “By letting his conversations with the bot supplant actual conversations, your partner is degrading his relationships with real people.” READ HIS ADVICE » [3 min]

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