iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 29/09/2026

Some people desperate to let you know they've never met a brown person before

Someone suggesting my name is a "nom de plume of a Georgetown alumna. School motto is Hoya Saxa"

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 18/09/2026

Really curious when the tipping point on this lettering style is gonna be

Three examples of a seemingly hand drawn, kinda scratchy looking lettering on AI posters

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 11/09/2026

25 years ago I was in high school in Manhattan. I don’t remember taking any photos but in the days after I clipped photos and headlines from the papers because (“woman bakes American flag cake” voice) I didn’t know what else to do

A strawberry printed bag with a piece of masking tape that reads September 11th

Clip outs of headlines and photos on 9/11

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 09/09/2026

Sure but I don't think a bank, specifically JP Morgan Chase, who is building the "AI powered bank of the future," is actually doing that

forbes: how jp morgan chase is building the ai powered bank of the future

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 06/09/2026

I need every other newsletter to get on the level of the newsletter from the moss garden in Kyoto I went to two years ago

September has arrived, yet the hot weather still continues in Kyoto. The moss in the garden has patiently weathered the harsh summer temperatures, but when blessed with an occasional rain shower, it eagerly absorbs the moisture and seems to come alive again.

The mossy landscape we see today began to evolve about 300 years ago, and has been nurtured through the steady passage of time. With that in mind, we are reminded that each day we live is also an irreplaceable part of history in the making.

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 02/09/2026

these fucking corporate sponsors

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 23/08/2026

Having a mentor is so important in this industry

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 07/08/2026

Huh, I'm a lifelong New Yorker who has lived in Astoria for 17 years, and felt like these politicians have always done a good faith job of trying to represent everyone. Who exactly is against this?

Ketcham, a longtime Astoria resident, is also director of cities at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that has been critical of socialist policies.

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 03/08/2026

www.weareravenous.com/ai-freelance...

On the precipice of soliciting freelance work, I asked some colleagues about what they were doing to protect their publications from getting got by AI, and the responses were depressing. Some reported spending more time poring over a writer’s or photographer’s clips, or requiring video interviews to make sure freelancers were actually real, which cuts into other work they could be doing. And multiple publications said they had just decided to close open freelance calls altogether, instead only accepting pitches from people they already knew, or from friends-of-friends who could be personally vouched for. It makes perfect sense when the other option is wading through AI-generated emails and potentially publishing a completely fabricated story from a person that doesn’t exist. But operating on a who-you-know basis recreates the environment of gatekeeping, privilege and closed ranks that so many of us in worker-owned media are trying to fight.

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 24/07/2026

I just got one of those AI generated "as a fellow author..." emails from "Colleen Hoover" the internet is toast

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 30/06/2026

I love this sort of response. Like sure, but why and how were hot dogs produced in such numbers that cooking them outside became quick and easy? Why them rather than any number of things that can be cooked outside quick and easily? Imagine having not a lick of curiosity!

Response to article about why we eat hot dogs in summer: "Because you can cook it outside quickly and easily. Next question."

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 30/06/2026

Happy pride from all the horseshoe crabs fucking

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 24/06/2026

I highly suggest naming your cat Frog for all the correspondence

Fireworks season is coming. Is Frog prepared? [inbox]

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 17/06/2026

This past weekend @weareravenous.com went to the James Beard Foundation awards in Chicago, and thrilled that the first photo we got was me and @aemccarthy.bsky.social belting to karaoke at the AAPI event

A crowd, including me and Amy, singing along to "I'll make a man out of you" by Mulan

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 10/06/2026

Ok I think we know who we have to call to get the Knicks to turn it around

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 31/05/2026

Been married to @mattielubchansky.com for 12 years today and she remains the best thing that’s ever happened to me!!!

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 27/05/2026

Actually wait this was the worst one. Got sent this for work and people didn't even want me to pour it down their drain.

Bottle of "Pickle Juice Chaser," a neon piss colored liquid in a bottle covered with green lightning

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 04/05/2026

This weekend we had a memorial for my aunt Katherine, who I love and will miss so much, and now I get to remember by this amazing mug I found in her house

A Minnesota zoo mug with an illustration of a koala that says “1989 koalas”

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 29/04/2026

Been spending a lot of time thinking about this graph and the expansion of the NYTimes food section and what that means for food writing in general 🙃 (I know the graph is "employees" and not specifically editorial but you know what's up)

A graph from the NYTimes showing that about 7% of all newspaper employees in the US work at the Times

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 28/04/2026

I am going to need England to be serious

A bag of “bebeto fizzy whizzy weenie worms”

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 20/04/2026

I particularly love this insight from Amiel at @gourmetlives.bsky.social about how food media has spent so much time trying to capture people who are not actually very interested in food

For Stanek, Gourmet’s call to cook was about countering the narratives he has seen over his long career in food media. “Food media writ large has this fundamentally aversive relationship with cooking,” he says. This, he argues, is because of how media in general has worked, with magazines and websites—often at the behest of investors and venture capitalists interested only in infinite growth—attempting to cater to as many readers as possible for profit. In food, this means not just talking to people who already enjoy cooking but capturing those who really have no interest in it, or actively hate it, at least for the purposes of page views. “I’ve spent a lot of my career feeling like I’m trying to convince people to do something that they don’t want to do, trying to convince people that something that they think is hard is actually easy or that something that is inconvenient is actually worth doing,” says Stanek. This leads to recipes that promise they’re “quick and easy” or “one-pot” before you even get to what’s in them.

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 16/04/2026

It really is laid off if you do, laid off if you don't with corporate media www.nytimes.com/2026/04/16/b...

Re: shuttering Self Magazine: "Condé Nast’s overall business was profitable and ended 2025 with revenue growth, Mr. Lynch said. The new changes, he said, were aimed at positioning “the company for continued growth.”"

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 09/04/2026

A fascinating look into this mentality. Why do you need to compete with a Fortune 500 company? You are a diner! The number one thing I want to see is photos of YOUR food, not a generic AI burger or your mac and cheese animated beyond recognition

AI, he said, is a way to compete with “some of the Fortune 500 companies that have 40-people marketing teams and their own photography department.”

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 07/04/2026

I was in Feed Me today talking about @weareravenous.com, food media, and why we are making it clear we are gen AI free

1. A handful of new food media businesses (Caper, Cake Zine the new Gourmet) have launched recently. I noticed the line on your site that says, "For too long, food media has felt toothless." What did you think was missing from the food media landscape that Ravenous aims to fix?

1. First off we just want to be clear we are so excited to be part of a larger cohort of new food media, and we are very much in solidarity with our fellow worker-owned food sites. But one of the things we focused on when we started to plan Ravenous back in August was we were seeing larger food media companies pull away from the deeper culture writing and reporting that the five of us love to do. About 10% of the US workforce works in the restaurant industry, and that doesn't even include food production, and yet so much of food media is reduced to uncritical praise or recommendations with no context. The founders live across the country (I'm the only one in New York), so we hope to be able to talk about food and restaurant culture and labor through a national lens. That's really the core of what we hope Ravenous becomes.

2. I appreciated all the language around Ravenous's stance on AI writing. That used to be a given -- why did you decide to add this to the site?

2. You're right, it's kind of wild that we even have to make that clear. We have our ethical and moral objections to AI--personally, as a writer, I do not understand why I should outsource my process to an entity that cannot eat, cannot have a conversation with a source, and cannot derive meaning from the words it generates. But I also see promising not to use generative AI in any of our creative output as a business promise. We are in the middle of a subscription drive, and if we are asking our readers to pay us money directly for our work, that should mean our work. Unfortunately, especially in food media, we are seeing what appears to be AI-generated content a lot more, so we felt it was important to make it abundantly clear that's not what you'll find at Ravenous.

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 07/04/2026

I'm already crying about space so a reminder that @jonbois.bsky.social maybe made the best piece of art of the 21st century so far here www.sbnation.com/a/17776-foot...

People defeated scarcity. Everyone had what they needed, and nobody got sick, but they found that they needed things to be just a little bit difficult once in a while. They needed to stub their toe and wait in line and see that check engine light. They decided to leave their existence just a little short of perfect, because they wanted to want.

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 05/04/2026

I made a lamb cake and named her Grizzabella and I have never been so proud

A lamb cake with its face kinda melting off but it’s ok

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Jaya Saxena @jayasaxena.com · 03/04/2026

Also this is not the point but literally a block away from the $34 burger place is a diner selling them for $14, a spread you can find in basically any Manhattan neighborhood but especially here cause we are down the street from Hunter College, so please shut up