She bites her pets, dumped Hannibal Lecter and claims she was the original tradwife. For anxious, people-pleasing women like me, channelling some of her DGAF energy could do us some good

With every year that passes, my decorative and culinary standards slip further, while, paradoxically, I become more obsessed with the former billionaire, felon, fancy fowl enthusiast and Snoop Dogg best buddy Martha Stewart. Stewart is, of course, the original domestic goddess, but also, she’s now claiming, the template tradwife. “I really was that woman. I was the original fucking tradwife,” she told the Lipstick on the Rim podcast, embellishing later, in an interview for the New York Times (marking the reissue of her 1982 cookbook, Entertaining): “And I was just as pretty as those girls, and more organised.”

I suppose she’s not wrong – she was already combining the homemaking, empire-building and self-promotional elements that characterise tradwifery 40 years ago – but it’s not the most tactful or self-effacing way to put it, which is very on-brand.

While it might be soothing to think you could replace social interactions like book clubs with ChatGPT, subcontracting human thought out to a bot will never bring happiness

This is depressing: according to the Cut, people are using AI to solve escape room puzzles and cheat at trivia nights. Surely, that is the definition of spoiling your own fun? “Like going into a corn maze and just wanting a straight line to the end,” says one TikToker quoted in the article. There’s also an interview with a keen reader who uses ChatGPT as a book club replacement, scraping the internet and aggregating “stimulating opinions and perspectives”. All well and good (actually, no, it sounds bleak as hell) until he had a character’s death spoilered in the fantasy epic he had been enjoying.

Meanwhile, Substack seems to be clogging up with AI-generated essays. The nu-blogging platform is an earnestly artisanal space where writers craft their stuff; subcontracting that to a bot seems like the acme of pointlessness. Will Storr, who writes about storytelling, examines this boggling trend and the tells that give it away on his own Substack, including a penchant for what he calls “the impersonal universal”: sweeping statements that sound deep but aren’t. There is, he says, “A white-noise generality to its insights, an uncanny vagueness that makes the mind glaze over.”