Friday: Three Morning Takes
a neo for your troubles / “a” for (little) effort / get off my overly graphic lawn
PW Daily
Oct 31, 2025
A Neo for your troubles
This week, a Norwegian-American tech company launched Neo, the first chores-focused robot you can actually buy. Other than the obvious caveats — you’re paying $20k for the privilege of training the company’s AI while your “autonomous” robot is mostly operated remotely by humans with controls (lol) — uh, we’re tepidly interested? We all need more help to keep our households even remotely functioning… but Neo also gives me the creeps. These meme-able robots with their cute, anime-looking faces represent another chunk of our most intimate needs being outsourced to a literally soulless gig economy. Where we once survived in a durable system of giving and receiving help, now we buy Neos to get more time to send emails to keep our desk jobs (so we can afford our Neos), and round and round it goes until the sun consumes this particular space rock. But yeah, help with the laundry would be sick.
“A” for (Little) Effort
After Harvard’s Office of Undergraduate Education published a damning report suggesting widespread grade inflation at the university — with undergrads receiving A’s at a rate of 60% compared to 25% just two decades ago — students are now reportedly distraught at the prospect of actually working for higher marks. One even confessed she “skipped classes” and was “sobbing in bed” upon discovering that A’s may no longer be handed on a silver platter. And while “skipping class and crying” is certainly a… bold strategy for adjusting to a potentially stricter grading curve, I do feel for these students, and furthermore demand this report be retracted immediately. The time-honored tradition of pretending to be Native American for Ivy admission, coasting for 4 years while plagiarizing papers about colonization, and walking right into a six-figure McKinsey gig is the backbone of our economy, people. A little grade inflation? That’s a small price to pay for ‘credentialed elites’ (*cough* overpaid consultants).
Get off my overly graphic lawn
Slopfarms are starved of controversy, so the NYT’s stepped up to revisit an age-old question: have Halloween decorations become too scary? For some, graphic decor like an “inflatable four-foot-long demo zombie baby” is terrifying, and parents want HOA enforcement. Others believe conservative influencers just want to criticize their sworn enemy: childless millennial Halloween lovers with an envious amount of disposable income. And for me, while I think deploying a multi-4-figure budget on a motion-activated minefield of dead kids is a tasteless and exceptionally Reddit move that probably warrants an FBI hard drive investigation, I don’t think we need HOAs stepping in to regulate. Return to tradition: is your tasteless decor traumatizing my toddler? At minimum I expect an XL chocolate bar for my kid to calm them down. And if not? Prepare for the “trick” part of trick-or-treat (my dog poo trebuchet bombarding your creepy house).
