Welcome back to One Offs: a mini segment on Day One FM, where we ask our guests to give their latest takes, gripes and recommendations.

This week, we welcomed back "New Yorker" columnist and "Filterworld" author Kyle Chayka to discuss the post-election, post-TikTok ban-unban internet landscape. We discussed, among much, much more:

• The rise of decentralized social

• Audience ownership and cross-platform portability

• “Titanium Daydream”

• Why a more "artisanal” internet could be on the horizon

Check out the full episode below and scroll for Kyle’s one-offs.

Social niche or account we should all tap into?

Titanium Daydream is a good one. There's also this woman named Celine [Nguyen] who writes a Substack called Personal Canon. Once a month she does these retrospectives of her cultural consumption: what I've read, what I've watched, the thoughts that I have. I find them super fascinating and inspiring. It's just this deep engagement with culture that's outside of the discourse, outside of what's new or cool. It's just her following her own personal philosophy, essentially cultivating her own perspective on literature and culture. I think that is super cool and everyone should do it. But it clearly takes a lot of time and effort.

Offline-ish recommendation?

I have been reading the diaries of Anne Truitt, who's a famous sculptor. Amazing minimalist artist. Her first diary "Daybook" is a pretty famous creative text. I read that, and it was incredibly inspiring and really cool to get a glimpse into this deeply philosophical artistic practice.

I've been reading right now the one ["Yield"] that she wrote just a year or two before she died. And this line really stuck out to me. She was like as I got older, I thought at some point the impulse to make art would go away. I thought these ideas would stop coming to me. But she writes, the art never stops coming. I have just as much inspiration and desire to create these new colors and shapes and sculptures, even as my body can't obey the creative impulse. And I just thought that was the deepest thing that I've read in a long time.

What’s your screen time like?

I never turned on the screen time thing on my phone, because I don’t want to know. I think I've been slightly better since late December. The holidays were a good reset, and I think I have tuned out a little bit more. A thing happens with writing a book and publishing a book: you get sick of books. I've been very happy that in the past three or four months, I've gotten back into reading books.

And actually, this is another offline recommendation. I've cut my screen time down by reading the hit memoirs of the late ’90s and 2000s. So I read "Eat, Pray, Love." I read "Under the Tuscan Sun." I read like Bill Buford's books about cooking. They're just fun, pop-y, entertaining books of a genre that doesn't totally exist anymore. I was on a reporting trip recently, and I had put a bunch of Ruth Reichl memoirs on my phone, and she was the dining critic for the "Times" in the ’90s and for the "LA Times" in the ’80s, I think. And I didn't even want to look at TikTok. I was just reading these amazing memoirs about being a dining critic and waiting at restaurant stands in 1991.

Unpopular opinion?

I think delivery food is morally reprehensible. If you don't want to cook, just go out in your neighborhood, go patronize a restaurant, go see some human beings, go be outside. Also hot coffee. Everyone should drink hot coffee year round. Iced coffee is bullshit.

Internet gripes/crimes you’d prosecute?

I did write a column on how I hated everyone's Instagram dumps. I think it hit its peak in late 2024. More and more people started doing the big slideshows at the end of the month like “summer vibes” or “me recently.” I just got sick of them. Please, please stop this. Don't put the month name and a sparkle emoji and then ten random images from your life. I hate it.