This is a very weird time to have a family and a white collar job. Your employer – probably some tech titan with Mar-a-Lago face – blithely wipes away pillars of society and replaces it all with bots.

Your retirement soars, plumped by AI, the very technology that will soon put you of work. You find yourself secretly playing this game: How fast will I be replaced with a bot, and can my 401k grow just faster than that?

It's an even weirder time to earn your living as a writer, or keep a just-for-fun writing blog. The angst I find myself returning to and hiding from is whether we are near the end of reading. What is even the point of being a human writer?

I've used AI in my work. I'd be crazy not to. Not that I have ChatGPT write my assignments for me. But it's gotten me started, gotten me over the hump, suggested headlines, helped pull notes together, recommended cuts to hit the word count.

It is – perhaps paradoxically and perhaps obviously – very bad writing and very helpful. But we're just trying to get past the algorithm. It's like the early days of SEO. I have to balance how much human artistry or elbow grease I pour into a piece that may not reach many human eyeballs.

It's painful to see print news die, then online news, to think of magazines as fossils from the Ice Age, of blogging as a lost art.

But as I said last time, I want Fog City to be a place for hope as much as grief. And there are still many, many luminous writers working today. I want you to read their words. To feel the rhapsody I do when I discover a piece of writing that is unmistakably, startlingly human.

This week, that piece is a not-a-restaurant-review of the French Laundry from the San Francisco Chronicle's newish restaurant critic, MacKenzie Chung Fegan.

It has twists, tears, disguises, historical context, a 1am drive home. I found it to be a delicate and steely meditation on what older and younger generations want from each other.

I'm not the first to praise her writing. She's won awards, and this piece went slightly viral last year. It just popped up in my feed this week (thanks, algorithm), and I happened to have finally paid for a Chronicle subscription.

What I love about the writing is how she's never pushing. There's all this weight hung on this story, all this suspense she could juice, and she just kind of lets it unfold. She has this one metaphor that unlocks it in a sad, beautiful way, but she never taps her finger on in – she tries to almost sneak it past you.

I hope this gift article link works. It's fun, it's pretty quick, and more than anything, it's very human.

Thomas Keller asked me to leave the French Laundry. It turned into my most extraordinary night as a critic