senior reporter, Bloomberg Businessweek. i write Buying Power, a column on consumer culture. ex @theatlantic. Georgia native, Georgia Bulldog. Opinions mine.
Brooklyn, NY
Joined March 2009
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it's sorta funny to watch companies reason this from first principles over many years when it's like...a very well-established fact of basic consumer psychology that people don't like to see new fees introduced at the end of a transaction. the Free Shipping Principle or whatever.
I think a lot of you are misunderstanding the frustration. what's annoying is paying a cleaning fee and then being asked to clean. it feels like double dipping. it may be illogical, but you'd get less complaints about "$100 fee but you don't have to do anything" versus "$50 fee + load the dishwasher"
Amanda Mull retweeted
As @tracyalloway writes in today's Odd Lots newsletter... The logical endpoint is my agent battles some company’s algorithm until they reach the same equilibrium we would reached before AI, except we both spent a lot on tokens and the whole thing is value destroying.
you will never achieve nirvana if you do not first internalize the fact that you can just do stuff
Amanda Mull retweeted
Lmfao. The more you increase, the more you drive people away.
The costs of cleaning are suppose to be cover my the nightly rate you charge.
Airbnb owners seem to think the nightly rate is suppose to be pure profit & they shouldn’t have any operating costs.
Amanda Mull retweeted
seeing a lot of 'we live in a new wild world' in response to this stuff. ok, sure! but uh who is on the hook for the breaches? a lot of the chatter on here is really interested in the frontier feeling of it all but there are, it seems, massive accountability questions!
affordability is important in many things but i'm not convinced it's a factor in this. hanging out is not a high-cost activity—never did i spend more time at friends' houses than when i was making $8/hour and up to my eyeballs in credit card debt. it's all we could afford to do!
Amanda Mull retweeted
Huge influx of accounts on here that AI-summarize Reddit posts for engagement. Most of them are running dropshipping scams in places like Vietnam and Rwanda. Users on here are stupider than they used to be and spend a lot of time fighting with them as if the stories are real.
Amanda Mull retweeted
Today in @thenation: a jaw-dropping investigation from Emmet Frazier (@moresycamore) on the damage that corporate and political interference caused to Scientific American. The stuff that Emmet uncovered from inside the magazine is NUTS. A must-read. thenation.com/article/societ…
Amanda Mull retweeted
"Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents operating inside customer accounts, with some agents attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources tell Axios." axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…
Amanda Mull retweeted
I think it's a good idea for us to demystify journalism and show our work/behind the scenes as much as possible. So much of the public doesn't understand how journalism is done and that's on us, tbh.
We're trying something new at @nytimes: "The Backstory," a newsletter digging into Times journalism and decision-making. We also talk to critics and skeptics of The Times in a segment called "Sound Off." You can read our first edition here: nytimes.com/2026/10/15/insid…
this is, like, exactly what the most expensive and sought-after residential neighborhood in most card-dependent american cities looks like
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truly the best life tip i have is to make friday night plans. it makes the weekend feel so much longer if you wake up on saturday morning and are already half a day into it! even if i'm tired, i never regret hauling myself out on friday night.
Amanda Mull retweeted
Horrified to learn documentary films do not provide unfiltered access to objective truth. Have any documentary makers wrestled with this question
"revealed preference" tends to be used as a thought-terminating cliche—there are lots of explanations for why people might be doing more or less of something other than that they are expressing their truest desires!
Americans have a "revealed preference" for doing less of basically everything except going online and I have serious doubts that this is making us happier.
slowboring.com/p/americans-n…
NY sports bars compete to sign state school alumni associations to contracts for game parties because those are the people who show up, spend money and tip. UGA's paid to send our Saturday bartenders to a game in Athens! If you don't like this, go take up that bar stool.
You know who else is in your local sports bar at noon on a fall Saturday? Nobody. So if you want football fans turned away, you and your friends better get there and get started drinking.