"Well, at least Mussolini made the trains run on time." Except he didn't, of course. Mussolini sought to convince the world that fascism delivered Italy into a technologically efficient order; and the story was part of the dictator's careful (and successful, even) crafting of
I'm not really sure what to say. But phew, I sure as hell won't turn to ChatGPT to compensate, because my god, I'm grieving – "election grief is real" – and some advanced text predictor that promises to compensate for my "loss for
I send The Extra Mile to paid subscribers of Second Breakfast every Monday. But I wanted to talk about yesterday, and I wanted to talk about tomorrow, and I thought that maybe everyone should receive this one, that maybe everyone could use a little cheering on and cheering up, a
In 1902, Rudyard Kipling published Just So Stories for Children, a collection of short, origin stories of how various animals acquired their best known features: "How the Leopard Got His Spots" and so on. Kipling had first told these tales to put his daughter to sleep, and “you
There's been quite a bit of mumbling and grumbling in the last few days (weeks? months?) that this whole AI thing might be a bubble and that the bubble might be about to burst. "The AI bubble is looking worse than the dot-com bubble," MarketWatch cautioned
Tressie McMillan Cottom delivered an excellent "mini lecture" on TikTok this week about AI, politics, and inequality. In it, she draws on Daniel Greene's book The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope: his idea of the "access doctrine" that
Happy Friday! What's good? I've picked up many, many new subscribers to Second Breakfast this week. Welcome. And thank you all for making me feel like my decision to re-enter the ed-tech fray and write another book is a good one. I started Second Breakfast because
It's really happening! I mean, I even updated Hack Education with the news. Here'a little bit of what my book-writing process looks like: I read. A lot. I read stuff online, sure, sure. I already lament not having access to academic journal articles. So for now,
Noam Chomsky's savage review of B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity, published in The New York Review of Books in 1971, is sometimes credited as the coup de grâce to behaviorism – its widely-read condemnation of that particular strand of psychology (alongside what Chomsky argued were