DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: June 7, 2026

A Playlist For Your Dog?  I’m not buying it.  However:

Dog ownership has gotten increasingly elaborate, and nobody seems embarrassed about it. The fresh food delivery services, the orthopedic beds, the Halloween costumes with coordinating owner outfits—and now, according to new research, the personalized Spotify playlist.

MetLife Pet Insurance analyzed more than 500 public Spotify playlists made specifically for dogs and surveyed over 1,000 dog owners about their music habits. Nine in 10 play music for or around their dog, though 87% are just playing whatever they’d normally listen to. Only 13% choose music based on their dog’s mood or personality, and just 14% have ever made a dedicated playlist. Most people just have Spotify on, the dog is ambient.

The playlists that do exist have mainstream similarities. “Yellow” by Coldplay is the most popular song across American dog playlists, followed by “Creep” by Radiohead and “Linger” by The Cranberries. (They’re, uh, programming this for their dogs, right?)  Taylor Swift is the top artist overall (surprise, surprise), appearing on 1 in 6 playlists, though no single Swift track cracks the top five in any category. Dog-themed songs skew predictable: “Dog Days Are Over” by Florence + The Machine, “Hound Dog” by Elvis, “Me & My Dog” by Boygenius.

Genre choices are somewhat situational. Rock leads walking playlists at 33%, classical tops calming and anxiety playlists at 34%, and home-alone playlists—which you’d expect to be soft and soothing—somehow include “Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen and “I Was Made For Lovin’ You” by KISS. Not sure how the dog is feeling about those.

What do the dogs think about this?:

Does your dog howl to songs or fall asleep when classical music is playing? You might be wondering if it’s all in your head or if dogs, like people, really do respond to certain melodies. You’re not the only one who’s curious—multiple studies have been done on dogs and music. The results? Mixed.

So we talked to Lisa Radosta, DVM, DACVB, a board-certified veterinary behaviorist at Florida Veterinary Behavior Service and a host for Top Vets Talk Pets, to get her take on whether your pooch should have her own playlist.

The answer to whether dogs like music is: It depends, Radosta says. Research indicates that when dogs are stressed, music may help.

A landmark study in 2002 compared how shelter dogs responded to classical, pop, and heavy-metal music as well as conversation and silence. Researchers found that classical music had a calming effect on dogs. The pups went from standing and barking to laying down and resting. Another study showed that harp music could help hospitalized dogs with better breathing and heart rates compared to dogs that didn’t listen to it.

But recent research found that shelter dogs were most soothed by the sounds of an audio book, not classical music. What gives? Radosta says what’s probably making the biggest impact is having a rhythmic sound to drown out scary noises like hospital machines or other dogs barking.

‘Unsupervised Art’, Or–‘A Massive Techno Lava Lamp’?  Yep, it’s here, and it’s not going away:

Nearly every flower in the Amazon rainforest living in synchronicity in the opening gallery at Dataland.

We were in downtown Los Angeles at Dataland, the soon-to-open museum dedicated to art generated by artificial intelligence, and yeah, it was pretty crazy. The students, from an A.I. class at the University of California, Los Angeles, were getting an advance look at the invitation of their professor, the digital art star Refik Anadol.

Founded by Anadol and his wife, the painter Efsun Erkiliç, Dataland is a highly anticipated addition to the city’s burgeoning art/tech scene — and arguably the most ambitious museum for A.I. art to date. But for now Anadol’s 20-odd students and I were the only visitors in a vast, black-walled, 22-foot-high gallery awash in light, color and sound.

One moment, brightly colored photographs of flora and fauna from Brazil’s Amazon were sliding down the wall and across the floor; then, similar photos drifted toward us in 3-D before abruptly speeding up and slowing back down; strips and circles of white light appeared in intricate patterns; abstract streaks of green and yellow, red and yellow splashed across the room.

“Beautiful patterns from butterfly wings,” Anadol explained.

Butterfly wings? Well, yes. The A.I. that he and his studio have built for the new museum is transforming data about rainforest butterflies into the constantly moving imagery his students call “crazy.”

“Data is not just a number,” Anadol pointed out. It used to be, but with the information explosion that began in the 1960s, almost anything can be considered data — photographs, video, audio, even butterfly wings. Anadol’s data on butterflies — their origins, their life spans, their color patterns, their behavior — comes mainly from The Encyclopedia of Life, an online repository compiled by the American Museum of Natural History.

Using this information, Anadol said, “We were able to model algorithmically how butterflies move.” By feeding this into the extraordinarily sophisticated software that powers Dataland itself, and the artificial intelligence that makes it work — software that Anadol said is made up of more 10 million lines of code — he ends up with a hyperkinetic work of art.

The vision behind this is human.  So, I, for one, give it a thumbs-up.

Nothing Says ‘Humanity’ Quite Like Serif Fonts.  Which is what A I (not Al) wants you to think.  Call it ‘tasteslop’:

As public backlash to the seeming omnipresence of artificial intelligence intensifies, the collective quest to weed out—and reject—telltale signs of its use continues.

One of the first casualties, to my dismay, was em dashes—which are a great, and very human form of punctuation, by the way! There’s also the “rule of threes,” which is meant to scan as rhythmic, but often comes across predictable, hackish, and stale. And, of course, there are the clunky grammatical constructions of the “not X, but Y” variety.

The shift away from slicker, more conspicuously computerized typefaces is something the San Francisco Bay Area writer, designer, and type practitioner Keya Vadgama has termed “the serif renaissance.” In a recent newsletter, published on her Substack, Vadgama suggests the move is a bid for companies to project more “personality and warmth.”

“It’s not that difficult to discern why AI-native companies in particular are being drawn to serif fonts: AI is inherently cold and without opinion,” she writes. “[Using serifs] signals ‘We’re AI! But real humans use (and made) our product! We swear!’”

“Serifs have an origin in calligraphy,” Vadgama tells WIRED. “It connotes a very human, fluid way of making letterforms.” Vadgama has noticed that Anthropic’s Claude was defaulting to serifs. Other AI companies—Runway, Perplexity, Manus—had also adopted similar typefaces in their UX and branding.

Both Qadeer and Vadgama see the trend toward serifs as a rejoinder to AI’s perceived (and, indeed, literal) lack of soul, and the wider public suspicion of the technology. They’re not the only ones. Alongside the “tasteslop” discourse, people online have criticized the serification of AI aesthetics as “generic” and “very ugly.”Not everyone is so despairing. While designer and founder Yitong Zhang described the transition to serifs as “cursed” on X, he doesn’t think it portends anything especially sneaky or sinister. “Somebody at these labs is trying to get these models to be good at design,” he says.“It’s pretty pragmatic.”He likens this emergent style to “premium mediocre,” an idea coined by the blogger Venkatesh Rao, to describe a kind of popular, faux luxury. (“Premium mediocre,” Rao writes, “is the finest bottle of wine at Olive Garden.”)

The quote of the week.  Which begets this lyric:

“The serifs are the heralds of the New Fontier.”