Just a short newsletter this week, full of links to others' writing – apologies. Ideologies: Fred Turner argues in The Baffler that the California Ideology, as articulated by Richard Barbrook and Andrew Cameron in their famous 1995 essay, is no longer central to Silicon Valley hegemony. Instead, Turner contends, it’
Despite a last minute call from Senator Elizabeth Warren to delay the IPO, SpaceX is set to go public today, making Elon Musk, already the world’s richest man and surely one of its most unsavory, into the world's first trillionaire. In a letter to the SEC, Warren
I’m a couple of weeks behind on sharing links, so apologies for the length of this email and for the outdatedness of some of the news therein. But I devoted much of last week, as I noted in Saturday’s missive, to reading the Pope’s encyclical letter, and
It's become quite commonplace to charge those of us who challenge technology – specifically children's use of technology -- with fomenting some sort of "moral panic." To do so invokes a long history of opposition to television and rock-n-roll and video games and comic
Every spring, we get a flood of stories about college graduation ceremonies -- typically full of tut-tutting about inappropriate behavior or inappropriate speech -- always presented as synecdochical of all of higher ed. Oh sure sure, there’s often the odd tale of triumph: someone’s service dog gets a diploma;
“The only thing that matters is the future,” he told me after the civil trial was settled. “I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess -- the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t
For the second time in less than a year, a major disruption to the learning management system Canvas has prompted cries (and headlines) that “we can’t do school!” In the fall of 2025, an Amazon Web Services outage rendered the LMS inaccessible. At the time, Wired spoke to dozens
I often feel like I’m repeating myself here, because in fact I am. I am, in part, because ed-tech entrepreneurs and evangelists keep repackaging the same ideas, desperate to sound innovative instead of stuck in some Cold War science fiction fantasy. “Intelligent tutoring systems” become “adaptive learning” then
Kin and I have a nice little collection of vinyl -- mostly jazz, but music from other genres too, including a few beloved albums from our teens and twenties. He had just set the needle down on one of these when I walked in the door, home from my morning run.
"It's still early days," some guy splutters in anger, peeved that people like myself are cackling loudly at Sal Khan's admission that Khanmigo has been a big flop. "It's simply too soon to say" anything about "AI" in
I was supposed to give a 20-minute presentation this morning, but alas, it is 2026 and our household, once again, has COVID. So I’m skipping the part where I read this piece of writing aloud to a Zoom audience, even though there’d be no chance of infecting
I realize that you just received an email from me yesterday, and that it's far too soon for more Audrey in your inbox, but I'd feel a bit negligent if I didn't send out my weekly round-up of ed-tech (sigh, "AI&
Software engineer and educator Greg Wilson recently invoked Steve Jobs’ famous quotation, expanding the metaphor to argue that, “if a computer is a bicycle for the mind, then LLMs are like e-bikes.” They let a lot of people go distances and tackle hills that they couldn’t before, and
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?" Arguably and more than a little ironically, this may be one of the most frequently invoked lines of poetry on social media – I won't add "for better or worse,
Way back in 2016, Mark Zuckerberg made a surprise appearance at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, memorialized in a photograph of him striding to the stage past rows of men with the Oculus Rift VR headsets strapped to their faces: Fast forward a decade and now the founder of