by Tobias Wahlqvist | Sep 1, 2026
True crime did not begin with the podcast Serial in 2014. It began with the pamphlets sold to the crowd on the way to a public execution. The appetite has not changed in two hundred years. The only real difference is that we now call some of it journalism....
by Tobias Wahlqvist | Aug 18, 2026
Most of what looks like curiosity about the news is not curiosity at all. It is procrastination wearing curiosity’s coat. Here is the anatomy of that habit, and a way out that takes about five minutes. The first woman was named Pandora, at least according to...
by Tobias Wahlqvist | Aug 4, 2026
Last summer I took a course in AI, where part of the work was training models on data so they could learn patterns and make predictions. I did not expect it to explain what the news has been doing to everyone I know. The goal when you train a model is that it learns...
by Tobias Wahlqvist | Jun 28, 2026
Have you ever felt like you’re drowning in headlines? Every alert buzzing, every banner shouting, all of it certain that this is the thing you finally need to know. You tell yourself you’ll just check once. Forty minutes later you surface, vaguely worse,...
by Tobias Wahlqvist | May 13, 2025
The way we understand the world is shaped not just by what we see—but by what we’re shown. News media follow a specific logic for deciding what gets reported and what doesn’t. And what’s left out might be just as important as what makes the headlines. Imagine the...
by Tobias Wahlqvist | May 8, 2025
I was sitting in the sauna after a swim, chatting with a friendly man from Nashville. After a while I dared to ask him if the United States is really as polarized as it seems. He sighed deeply and said, “You know what, it is probably worse than it looks.” He told me...