The Alpha Bet
Sometimes you have to repeat yourself. Sometimes you didn't say things clearly the first time. Sometimes your intended audience didn't hear you or they didn't listen. Sometimes there were louder voices, different messages that drowned yours out. Sometimes you need a do-over. Sometimes you
Little Stories Everywhere
Push-Button Promises and (Not) Doing Hard Things
Although I linked to it in Friday's newsletter and even embedded the Instagram clip, I have not been able to stop thinking about Ocean Vuong's remarks on how social media has shaping students' thoughts about "effort." Vuong says that, Our students… are more
The Prime Directive
Over a decade ago, at the height of the MOOC madness, many people crowed excitedly about "the end of college" – not because the various technologies they believed would enable this were any good (by "good" I mean either "pedagogically sound" or "at all
Duped and Doped
How Does It Feel?
Abetted by technological and military might, finance capital has achieved its hegemony over the Earth by annexing the core of human desires – Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics Last week, METR released the results of a study into how "AI" affects the productivity of open-source software developers – results that certainly run
The Agents of Unproductivity
"Could AI slow science?" Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan ask, and proceed to poke a sizable hole in one of the major claims about "AI" – about its application in healthcare, in education, and beyond: that "AI" will "enable dramatic scientific progress: curing cancer,
The Ball Drop
Bad Company
For decades, Johnson & Johnson was one of the most trusted brands in the world. The maker of bandaids and baby shampoo, its name was associated with care for our health and our bodies and, more importantly, for our children. Even when in 1982, one of the company's
Into the Breach
There's been plenty of ink spilled in the last week in response to The New York Times's story on NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and his college application to Columbia University, in which he ticked both the boxes for "Asian" and "Black or
