If “[e]very media era gets the fabulists it deserves,” as Nicholas Hune-Brown writes, then such fabulists, if they’re lucky, get the profiles they merit. Nick’s feature about the strange, sad case of “Victoria Goldiee”—a phantom writer whose spree of bylines, in publications ranging from the Guardian to Architectural Digest, have all the watermarks of chatbot prose—is the must-read piece of this closing year. With 2025 bringing flirty AI companions and lawsuits against AI giants and a looming AI bubble, his tale about the ease with which synthetic voices can now pass for human hits with...