It’s confession time: Because of another commitment this week, I did not have the time to follow the news as diligently as usual. Which was a problem, because as the only retiree in our little trio, I’m usually the only one with the space to put together our weekly show notes.
In the Before Times, I could rely on the editors of newspapers like the Washington Post and LA Times to efficiently curate my news diet. Unlike now, when it takes me hours to sift through a couple of dozen newsletters and online sources daily.
Sometimes I feel like I am drowning in information - and that it’s not making me all that better-informed.
So this week, I decided to act like a tech bro: I delegated the job of creating the show notes to Claude.
I tasked the AI agent with creating a daily summary of all the Substack messages in my Inbox. (I originally asked it to look at the ones emanating from Ghost and beehiiv as well, but Claude had some trouble with that part of it - and the bulk of my subscriptions are from Substack).
Here was the agent’s first response:
Heavy Substack diet! Most of your newsletters are politically focused, skewing progressive. Want me to go deeper on any of these?
Claude got that right. And my answer to the question was yes.
The results were…
…not terrible.
So all I had to do before the podcast yesterday was organize all those daily newsletter summaries into one big compendium of what happened over the last seven days. I probably could have had Claude do that too, but I wanted - actually, I needed - to put something of myself into it.
This week, we talked about:
Trump’s bonkers decision to hold the bipartisan bill hostage in order to get his voter-restriction SAVE Act passed
The fact that the SAVE Act will never be passed
“Algaegate“
The US Postal Service’s willingness to help Trump restrict voting (a Federal judge has weighed in on that today)
Tuesday’s primaries
ABC’s campaign to enlist its viewers to help fight the FCC
Bill Pulte as acting DNI and revelations about Tulsi Gabbard
The AI-generated notes included the main points - but in the end, I did not feel as vested in it as I do when I’ve done all that reading. And I really did miss the reading. Just not the hours and hours it takes to do it.
I have not decided if I will continue to use Claude to help me summarize the news. At any rate, it made for an interesting experiment.
Watch the podcast above, or listen below. And let us know what you think!
