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Eve Ewing on the slow disaster encroaching on Chicago’s South Side, and a relevant companion to the NHJ piece circulating so widely this week. Also related.

Why cool is hard to imitate.

Garbage Day asks what all the new embedded AI agents are for.

Plain language guide on how LLMs are shifting the AI market right now.

Trend watch: Defanging consumer surveillance technology by emphasizing cuteness.

How highly formalized government processes are slowing down AI governance at the state level.

Feminist blog cohorts: a (semi-) authoritative remapping using AI: 🎵: Let’s Dance - David Bowie I’ve spent the last few months annoyed with the incomplete retrospectives around writers and writing online and how we all got here. At work, I use a portfolio perspective to understand working groups, and used a couple of AI approaches to build out a highly contextual, …

Konstantinos Komaitis has started a ten-part series at Techdirt called The Metric Is Not the Mission. It traces how Big Tech went from building the open internet to reshaping it around its own metrics and incentives. Part I argues that the recurring fights over content moderation, privacy, …

1000 Mountains: a Gary, Indiana, reading list: 🎵: A Thousand Mountains - Freddie Gibbs and The Alchemist Yesterday I cut through Gary to get around a traffic jam on the toll road and picked up the Dan Ryan and the Skyway. Since living in Madison, I’ve made some version of that drive more times than I can count. I grew up south of Gary, at …

Two steps forward, one step back: While I still go back to Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” for the argument that every view comes from somewhere, these days, the writer I read most closely on technology is Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom. Haraway asks where a knowledge claim is standing, while Dr. Tressie asks who pays …

Noted: Because I’m using Gemini to find and complete resources related to the earliest blog years, I’m citing a Clancy throughout my project, which the LLM keeps pulling back to center events and articles related to the Clancy trial.

How long before Claude or Gemini cite a new webpage? : Neither company publishes a timeline, and most of the numbers floating around come from SEO consultants, so treat this as rough. The short answer is that Gemini usually gets there faster because it searches Google’s index, while Claude appears to search Brave’s, which fills in more …

Grief resources from fellow internet long-hauler Lenée.

🍿 Watched The Craft with the teenager tonight. Her observation: “Everyone looks so normal in the nineties. Look at their teeth!”

Machines and machine learning change the ways we think about humans and humanity. In cyberspace, we create “digital doubles,” or data doubles, or digital human twins (DHTs), and now these digital doubles move through assemblages of AI systems. New politics are emerging from this tangle.

Reading about personalized LLMs and the risks of the digital twin metaphor.

🎵: Witch Doctor - Erykah Badu and The Alchemist Over the weekend, I asked Gemini to examine the career trajectories of the authors in this 2019 Jezebel article by Soraya Roberts, which covered the ins and outs of the major conflicts that erupted over the feminist blogs. (I am sad to hear that Soraya …

Noted: I’ve been playing with Copilot, Claude and Gemini in tandem, and Copilot and Gemini are suddenly, curiously outperforming Claude by a lot.

Old playbook, new eyes: The feminist blogosphere of the 2000s exemplified early decentralized internet communication through federated protocols, enabling diverse and dynamic conversations across independent platforms.

Recommended: Bike Jerks and the Hodag Country Ramble.

Finished reading: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman 📚

404 Media on Project Lily, the ChatGPT project where humans read users’ prompts – including sensitive and personal information – to better train the product.

Eli Lilly redux: Thinking about the democratization of information and the removal of gatekeepers alongside this story I saw first at Boys’ Club. This Harvard PhD is vibe-manufacturing schizophrenia drugs in his garage. Are we vibe-coding medicine?

Extra credit: The return of the university brings back a variety of popular food trucks to the city, offering diverse and customizable dining options that support local culture.

This 2013 essay is circulating widely this week. In it, cartoonist Tim Kreider reflects on having anxiety, and in particular the anxiety he feels while interacting with an increasingly watchful stack of digital tools and on how they provide him with social feedback he’s not prepared for.

TechCrunch reports on the problems inherent to AI-generated restaurant advertising - it looks wrong.

Return to markdown?

Finished reading: Suffer a Witch A Memoir by Joy McCullough 📚

Cap Times on Electric Heart, the new EP by Madison songwriter Whitney Mann.

In plain language, this suggests that the way search is reoriented around AI revalued long tail search strings, so there are big incentives to link deeply and widely across the corpus, especially if you have access to an authoritative platform.

Manton on AGI: “As we reach AGI… I’d like to set some ground rules for myself — beliefs that won’t change as technology changes. AI will be smarter than us, but consciousness and ‘a soul’ can’t be created from computation.”

Where we’ve been: “Today’s young American women were born into a world of unfinished feminism. We have freedoms our great-grandmothers couldn’t have imagined, but also fewer rights than we did just a handful of years ago.” Plus, some examination of how ad tech and algorithmic …

Traditional search favored common keywords, while LLMs favor (extremely) long tail search terms because of the idiosyncratic and conversational way people write to chatbots. Suggesting that a small group of writers on the open web could move the corpus on any coordinated subject in no time at all.

In honor of Gloria Steinem’s passing (rest in power), an article on the business and activist tensions present in, and the long-tail value of, feminist publishing efforts. And a 2019 dissertation on organized literacy education as a civil rights effort. A trip to the bookstore is in order.

This first-person essay from The Baffler is circulating in writerly crowds this week. It’s a ripper and a must-read, enough to convert me to a print subscriber.

For reasons, I was reminded of the list of Geek Social Fallacies that first circulated on Plausibly Deniable, then took root as an entire body of advice at Captain Awkward.

A composition teacher friend shared this paper on social media: Lester Faigley’s “Literacy after the Revolution”, the essay version of his 1996 CCCC Chair’s address. In it, the author argues that the economic impacts of the digital revolution had begun to undo an older …

In honor of Dolly (rest in power), some links: Dolly Parton’s America: This nine-episode podcast offers a deep dive into the Dollyverse, covering Dolly’s biography and lore and her role as an icon within a broader story about American ideals. This series swept the best-of lists of 2019. …

Lux Magazine on the return of The Rumpus.

I found out about a hyperlocal newsletter in my neighborhood and had to share. The Monroe Street Tattler offers print delivery and email distribution, and reports only on the hard local news, such as dog walk water bowl locations and the best fries in the neighborhood, among other ephemera.

“Students who spoke to ESPN said that betting is an accepted part of day-to-day life and that they learned about their school’s gambling culture immediately after arriving on campus. A 2023 NCAA survey of 18- to 22-year-olds found that 51% of the women and two-thirds of the men have bet …

Guerrilla marketing: When someone built a fake deodorant company with a lightweight marketing plan to capture long-tail search results, she found her way into AI recommendation results, showing how brands can gain visibility in emerging discovery systems.

Grose covers how Scandinavians approach AI and ed tech by emphasizing peer review and removing the profit motive.

Reading about yesterday’s Meta settlement, the global movement to get kids off tech, “chopped uncs,” and thinking about the dance between students and our local school system’s IT department during the COVID-19 shutdown, when my then-elementary schooler was unwittingly …

“We all know that you can get lied to online at any point. If you don’t get that this is an obvious lie, then you’re washed and you’re unc and you’re chopped.”

Reading over the $18b Meta settlement over social media harms to children, and while it’s not perfect, it’s something. I’m a fan of default time limits, night and school-time blocks, and other limits baked into the software. It’s not fair to ask every parent to become an IT …

Finished reading: Famesick by Lena Dunham 📚

To read: this report from Common Sense Media, “Talk, Trust and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions.” About a third of teens have turned to an AI for serious conversations about their own mental health and relationships, showing these tools are already embedded in teen social …

Computer Love: Two podcasts featuring writer and podcaster Bridget Todd examine the complexities of human-AI relationships and their implications.

Micro.bloggers: I’m interested in turning the link log into a micro.blog plug-in, but I don’t have the skill or the will to make it happen. Where should I begin?

When accidental engagement counts the same as intentional engagement.

Deep dive: What are platforms, and why do they have so much power?

Parents are encouraged to share resources for teaching teens about digital safety.

Question for micro.bloggers: Can you separate keywords by comma in this category filter field, or is it one word per filter?

Some thoughts on linklogs and link libraries: A linklog is a dated list of outbound links, maybe a tag, and a note about why it’s worthwhile. But that little note does two things at once, and together they make for a better web. See the L I N K L O G First, it’s a way of organizing the web. The web doesn’t sort itself, so …

Posting a lot while I get through the inbox today. Among other stories, WordPress is offering free hosting to students, marketing WP as a way to change how people relate to their own writing. Does a self-hosted public blog make students think differently about audience than a school LMS post does?

Chester argues that universities should govern AI by classifying data by sensitivity rather than approving specific tools. Public data goes anywhere –> regulated data requires an institutional contract –> sensitive data requires a local system. He also makes a renewed case for MS …

Community Notes was meant to democratize moderation power (and spare platforms the burden of thinking through moderation). Instead, a new paper shows that 20% of users cast 80% of ratings, and removing just ten active note writers from the pool changes what happens to nearly 5,000 community notes.

Gruber argues that AI text watermarking likely degrades prose quality and, even if it doesn’t, remains objectionable because it operates as an embargoed, unverifiable tag or signal controlled by providers like Anthropic and Google.

A person was found to be hiding an AI prompt injection in a legal filing that tells any AI that reads it to side with his perspective. The judge in this case likened it to “an automated agent communicat[ing] covertly with a juror during trial.”

Saw “The Odyssey” with the fam. 🍿

Computah: Make it a link: New features were successfully added to the blog using Claude Cowork, enhancing functionality and organization despite some unintended design changes.

“When you gaze long enough into Instagram, Instagram gazes back into you.”

A friend shared the Embroidered Computer, an 8-bit programmable computer made with traditional embroidery techniques that mimics the processing power of a 1950s mainframe without silicon.

Claude is launching an AI watermark, one that users can’t opt out of (but can easily outsmart). As internet god Notopoulos wrote, “Claude’s watermarking poses the question: Are you willing to proudly own that you write with AI?” More: What is an AI watermark and how do they work?

I can’t believe it’s mid-August. I’m terribly behind on my reading list. Still, I did want to draw attention to this entertaining and extremely shareable article on the glory of Record Head, a legendary record store in Milwaukee. Make sure to watch their public access TV commercials at the link.

The knitting community is one of the great deliberative communities of the internet, and as they’ll happily tell you, knitting and fiber arts are closely tied to industrial and computing history. It’s really hard to pull one over on knitters online, because they have a deep and different …

Winer on the purpose of web standards: “I find that most standards that come out of the standards bodies aren’t developed by implementors or with them in mind. They avoid trying to solve any specific problem, rather focusing on the elegance and flexibility of the format. This makes …

I found this American Affairs article on the insidiousness of ad tech quite relevant. It focuses on foreign propagandists’ exploitation of social media, but it’s just as instructive for thinking about ad tech as tech, channel and product, and its entwinement with social media as …

Garbage Day uses Jimothy to trace how virality works on the internet of 2026. Related: this story on how the algorithm has prevented us from producing a single “song of the summer.”

UW–Madison communication professor Catalina Toma argues that technology-mediated communication more often supports human connection and well-being than harms it, provided people use it intentionally.

I watched “Obsession” with my teenager last night, and dare I say, I liked it as a little genre story, a morality play about romance, relationships and consent. I also enjoyed the practical horror effects.🍿

A colleague hosted a nice discussion of the work of David Dylan Thomas, who advocates for using human-centered design concepts to bring humanity back to tech. New and novel approaches abound, especially on whether and how to let engagement metrics drive decisions on design teams.

This is a pretty good Tiktok breaking down the historical, cultural and religious meanings invoked in the “computah” memes. An important rule of the internet: the best memes are intertextual.

Scheduled send as alibi? Nice try, Costanza.

Parents wanting stakes lower than a smartphone: consider a kid-friendly Wi-Fi landline, which looks and works like an old corded phone but runs over your internet connection, giving kids the independence to get connected safely. Alternatively, get a VOIP phone through your ISP for ~$10/mo.

Finished reading: We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida 📚

The Atlantic takes on the prevalence of the “it’s not X, it’s Y” construction in AI-generated writing, highlighting the semantic roles in sentence construction that differentiate ideas for clarity. Chatbots seem to like this construction, despite how clunky it sounds to the human ear.

Henry Rollins and Ian Mackaye have taken on a critical calling: preserving the legacy of The Cramps for posterity.

Finished reading: Yesteryear A Novel by Caro Claire Burke 📚

rss.chat is a new, free social network service that uses RSS to create a federated social feed that looks and feels a lot like OG Twitter. See also: the launch of HyperTexting, another RSS-based app that centralizes the open web in a way that feels a little like Google Reader (complimentary).

Clothing technology: tracing a history of pockets from ancient coin purses to tie-on pouches to today.

A cool article from Cap Times on how language translation serves as a trust-builder for local government in an era of mistrust.

With global temps at peak in several areas of the world, the BBC covers how critical tech infrastructure is impacted by high heat.

If you’re looking to be depressed, see this early research from Business Insider on the social implications of GLP-1 usage and how it may impact relationships in the home and workplace.

Dan Hon made me laugh with “carbon-based chauvinism.”

I found this piece from an anthology celebrating 50 years of women’s studies, which explores the intersection of scholarship and publishing practices over time.

I too am dismayed at the sudden lack of cottage cheese in the local supermarket (I take mine as a snack, dusted with EBTB). The shortage hits hardest in the lactose-free section, where six of us appear to be competing for five tubs, and I have started to recognize their faces.

Among other disappointing SCOTUS announcements today: Supreme Court Rejects Lawsuit Alleging Roundup Weedkiller Caused Cancer. In a previous life, I worked in the same college as a cancer researcher who developed twenty years of conclusive research that Roundup causes cancer in dogs by studying …

I’ve been on vacation, which means I’ve been reading my fool face off. I’ve also caught several great live shows lately, including an incredible set by Australian no-wave noise band Party Dozen. It’s a two-person band and the saxophonist sings directly into the bell of her …

Finished reading: The Mixed Marriage Project A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family by Dorothy Roberts 📚

A deeply nerdy (complimentary) look at the history of Markdown. And more on Markdown, its function and legacy from Anil Dash.

Finished reading: Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy 📚

Finished reading: A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle 📚

Finished reading: My Mother’s Daughter - Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past by Tracy Clark-Flory 📚

“How internet misogyny parallels ‘real-world’ harassment” is a 2007 paper in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism by my old co-blogger, Jill, on her experience being harassed online by peers she knew IRL. Many parallels to current attitudes, all enabled and accelerated by …

Another old article on the emotional toll of being an internet personality and a woman with a platform in the public sphere. I’m quoted briefly: I intentionally broke my social presence when I stepped away, which gave me necessary peace but made it harder to claim my work in this arena over …

A cathartic read.

It’s a pleasure to read such a deft writer. Currently reading: My Mother’s Daughter - Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past by Tracy Clark-Flory 📚

I followed the discourse on this one, but the book itself was much more sad than I expected. I did appreciate her thoughts on the pressure of balancing a public persona with the reality of being a messy and unfinished person, as we all are. Finished reading: Adult Braces by Lindy West 📚

This one was okay. It felt like a series of earnest blog posts without a real throughline. Finished reading: Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell 📚

I attended the Clayman Institute’s talk on Gender, Power and Artificial Intelligence earlier this month. They now have the session shared on YouTube for posterity. There are many topics and ideas here to chew on as this AI moment develops, and I recommend giving their angles some …

There are enough common signs of AI writing now that the subject has its own Wikipedia page. Via John Gallagher’s latest on “template rhetoric.”

The Pope provides a vision for living with artificial intelligence (gift link).

Major changes coming to Google Search. Question: What search engines do we like in 2026?

The Harris digital campaign head does a post-campaign autopsy of the conditions that impacted the DNC’s 2024 presidential strategy, with lessons learned. I enjoyed this read because it was so close to the work that there are relevant takeaways for other public marcomms practitioners.

After listening to the talk yesterday, I was reminded of this article describing a journalism model for using AI that shared some parallels with D’Ignazio’s research.

Some media and ad-tech operations hire “clippers,” people who cut and distribute high volumes of short video across social platforms, to manufacture cultural relevance. The strategy in short: volume generates attention, and attention confers legitimacy.

Gender, Power and AI: Wrestling for the soul of the network, again: A virtual panel at Stanford’s Clayman Institute explored the intersection of gender, power, and AI, emphasizing the need for socially responsible research and community engagement to address the impacts of algorithmic bias and technology on marginalized groups.

How early blogging tools like Movable Type made reverse-chronological posting the path of least resistance, killing the curated, librarian-style personal homepage and locking the whole web into the chronostream.

More on personal websites as digital gardens.

Did poptimism kill rock n’ roll?

“Two things can be independently true about social media. First, there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness. Second, considerable reforms to these platforms are required, given how much time young people spend on them.”

For those who love to post, a guide to the Internet of the future.

Garbage Day on whether Bluesky was a net negative for left politics. I’d argue the most important thing Bluesky did/does is technical, by producing the AT protocol that underlies it, thereby building out the federated web. Distribution channels come and go, so consider posting at your own …

A look at the national decline in student test scores. It’s important to consider this alongside global trends in education as well.

Some contemporary thoughts from Ana Rodrigues on the perennial question of being a “woman in tech.”

Added a Wayback link preserver plugin to the site. This lightweight code detects broken external links on the blog and shows clickable Wayback Machine fallbacks so readers can still access the content. Handy when we’re working on the indie web where the web is fragile.

Finished reading: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison 📚

Reflections on teaching fiction writing in the age of AI, from a professor with ten years of classroom experience teaching writing at MIT.

Read this alongside The Bluest Eye. Finished reading: On Morrison by Namwali Serpell 📚

Reading Timothy Chester’s reflections on last week’s Canvas incident. As institutions increasingly outsource the technical load to cloud service teams, IT incident response becomes about communication.

Why I'm broadly skeptical of device bans in K-12: Watching a local phone ban policy snake through the community this week, one that state law now requires every district to adopt by July 1. Like others have already said, my concern is mostly related to enforcement, as we know enforcement for all school policy lands unevenly across school …

It’s like the phrase “turtles all the way down,” but turtles are marketing.

A new group is attempting to map influence in the AI industry, with the goal to “produce a structured, shareable, and dynamic resource that identifies who is working on what, where the gaps are, and which partnerships might form across ideological and organizational lines.”

A new study suggests that people who use AI for writing are more able to detect AI writing than automated scanner tools. My current LLM pet peeve is how they use language like load-bearing, structural and legible to describe most ideas.

A quarter of the way in and already exhausted/confounded. Currently reading: Adult Braces by Lindy West 📚

“Amazon has launched a new feature that uses AI to generate a short, podcast-like audio segment where two AI ‘hosts’ discuss the merits and reviews of a specific product.”

I’m seeing grunge icons L7 in concert with Amyl and the Sniffers this summer and have been reading a lot about the ’90s indie rock era in the meantime. One frame I keep encountering positions grunge as regional punk musicians navigating a global, corporate pop mainstream – awkward, …

It looks like Wordpress has produced a short-form blogging app that duplicates the model we are trying over here on the even-more-indie web. I might give it a spin.

I’m reading about trends in book and phone bans in American public schools, and reminded that reading novels was once considered an idle and immoral pasttime, just as internet use is today. This 2016 article from JSTOR goes into the history of reading books and the fear that it …

“A.I. is less regulated in America than sandwiches,” said Mr. Tegmark, who is also a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You can’t open a sandwich shop without having your kitchen inspected. But you can release an A.I. girlfriend for 11-year-olds and that’s fine.”

Adventures in AI: I asked a Claude agent (new Opus, Pro plan) to build a Google Doc template with multiple tabs, using an existing doc as reference. It failed three times over two days, burned thru tokens, never worked with Drive. Eventually it spat out text for me to paste into a doc I made myself.

Some initial review suggests that a staggering amount of Substack content is written by AI.

If folks want quality first-person writing about age and aging, I highly recommend the newsletter magazine Oldster, which explores “the experience of getting older, and what that means at different junctures.” Bonus: Oldster is run by Sari Botton, formerly the longtime essay editor of …

NYT writes about the surge of “slopaganda.”

Finished reading: Even the Good Girls Will Cry A ’90s Rock Memoir by Melissa Auf der Maur 📚

Fellow Madisonians, someone pulled together a website ranking local businesses in Madison by how local they are (by what criteria, idk). In my experience, this is one way we’re likely to see AI used in the next couple of years, via prototyping and/or executing ideas that result in dynamic websites.

Digital humility stitch: A new AI tool puts typos back in your emails, so they don’t look like they were written by AI.

Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier by Ethan Mollick in 2023: “On some tasks AI is immensely powerful, and on others it fails completely or subtly. And, unless you use AI a lot, you won’t know which is which.”

Last night I had dinner with a friend in tech who recently attended a training on AI and analytics, where they made the observation that we’re in the “Napster era” of artificial intelligence. It’s an imperfect comparison but useful to consider.

Anecdotally, I’ve seen two family court cases where one party submitted full AI chats — prompts and colorful complaints included — as formal filings. The complaints wouldn’t pass muster with a real lawyer, but the conflict was nurtured by AI nonetheless. One was dinged for wasting the …

I’ve posted a couple of times about instances I’m aware of where people are using AI in pro se court cases, especially family courts. A new study shows evidence of increasing numbers in pro se cases at the federal level, exacerbating existing bottlenecks. Many trade-offs abound here.

A professor asked students to self-report AI usage on their homework, leading to lots of confusion and uproar. Points aside, it’s clear people want more clarity up front about when and whether to use LLM tools. In the meantime, treating students like they’re guilty until proven innocent …

I missed this 2025 article by Noah Hawley on Vonnegut, war and the atomic bomb, and it is worth the time.

What does it mean for the culture when everything (everything!) is content, even war and mass shootings?

Timothy Chester offers some thoughts on the place of AI-assisted software development in a modern research university, and suggests that just because you can doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

Mindy Seu on It’s Been a Minute talking about the history of women on the internet.

Out: Twitter on a vape. In: AI-powered crypto vape. Is this real? Who can tell anymore.

Was gifted a jar of gorgeous fresh maple syrup.

Morels for dinner.

Maris Kreizman on AI pressures building in the publishing industry, particularly how it impacts writers and editors: “It’s not an ideal environment for productivity, let alone for making art.”

A nostalgic read on how music nerdery bloomed online.

More on user-generated content marketing and how it works. UGC is a powerful example of “social proof,” where people’s parasocial tendencies are leveraged to boost brand credibility and conversions. This is the consumer psychology behind celebrity and influencer sales and …

Watching the fallout: Fans discovered that the band Geese benefitted from a hefty marketing campaign. Folks are debating whether this makes Geese a “psy-op” or merely “sell-outs”, to use an old term of art. Meanwhile the marketing firm behind the push is getting a ton of …

I’m following a guy in TX who is using AI to write and illustrate children’s books whole cloth, then self-publishes using Amazon, and getting recognition in his region as a laudable children’s author. The books are categorically not good. It’s like people are rewarding his content strategy.

Tom’s Hardware on Mythos and marketing hype. Additional commentary from Michael Corn, asking whether Mythos coverage reinforces or establishes perceptions about cybersecurity.

Garbage Day on what makes something cool to Gen Z, and how this is impacted by the degradation of “pillars of coolness” in previous generations like culture rags and MTV. GD predicts that “cool” will be measured by lack of polish and “how many human beings left their …

Finished reading: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor 📚

What the internet was made for: A Chicago music fan secretly recorded over 10,000 live concerts from Nirvana to Sonic Youth to Spoon, and has made them all available online.

Taste the Music is a new audio series exploring why artists are driven to create. The first episode features storytelling and songwriting by friend of the blog Whitney Mann, where she chronicles her experience getting “the yips” onstage, and how she worked through it and picked up her guitar again.

Deepfake nude culture and its impact on American teens.

I once worked in a role where I keyed million dollar manufacturing orders into SAP, information that directly fed into factory specs for a manufacturing facility based in another country. Our regional office fed into a massive, global electrical engineering firm that ran on small margins …

Amid renewed calls for the death of feminism, or of millennial feminism or whatever (TERF alert), I found this old victory lap from the era where it looked like new media had permanently paved the way for a newer, fresher publishing industry. It also tips the hat to Jezebel’s place in the …

Poell argues AI is entangled with platform capitalism through shared infrastructure, reinforcing concentration of the market. The hype obscures local realities of adoption, putting public alternatives in the position of proving their existence alongside advocating for their place in the market.

I’m collecting mentions of the old blog while they still exist bc lot about this cohort is hagiography written well after the fact. I don’t think I saw it way back when, from the first time I “quit blogging” in 2006 by Rebecca Traister. As ever, a big part of social media is …

Pulling from some old communication theory while I am thinking about blogging and the indie web, and especially thinking about Dallas Smythe, who argues that mass media doesn’t produce content but audiences, packaged and sold to advertisers. On social media, users aren’t just the …

While poking around for some examples of media coverage of the early blogosphere, I found this mention from the time Lisa Jervis of Bitch Magazine did a guest stint at Feministe. For context, Feministe hosted regular guest blogging seasons where we opened our comparatively gigantic platform to much …

Seeing a lot of discussion about trade-offs related to vibe-coding.

Angst about data center development continues to grow in the Rust Belt.

This post and the accompanying graphs have been a trending topic on social all weekend, particularly on Twitter/X, which is negatively implicated in the findings. In short, social media looks weirder than ever.

Silicon sampling is the practice of using LLMs to run surveys without talking to any people at all.

Innovations in scamming: Folks are predicting that AI will supercharge scams alongside any technical and administrative innovation. Here’s one example of an unethical use of AI, where an internet-based GLP-1 hub used AI to generate fake product images and before and after photos of smiling patients.

Enh: Describing the development of agentic AI as a natural evolutionary transition naturalizes specific design choices made by specific people at Google et al. It makes it harder, not easier, to find out why this path? Who decided? What was not built?

I heard a good talk on “slow brain” activities this week and have been thinking about that alongside indie web practices. I’m not alone: how to leave your feed and go exploring again.

A collection of articles that answer the question, “Why have a personal website?”

Testing a new feature I created using a mix of open source code and Claude, hoping I didn’t break my own site. I pulled together a dynamic link library using a Hugo partial and some shortcode that automatically catalogs all of my outbound links into sortable lists.

Just ran across Paul Robert Lloyd’s talk on using tools and approaches from the indie web to build the Internet we want. Talking points and slides at the link.

Playing with a link archive that produces a sortable list of each of my outbound links. An okay start.

The cost of moving to token-based access to tech, rather than seat-based licenses based on employee headcount.

If digital millennials are interested in what was being written about them when they were going off on Tumblr, they should read “Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age” by Jessalynn Keller.

Another cool and relevant resource related to digital feminisms, “Digital Black Feminism” by Catherine Knight Steele. This work pulls narratives from existing literature about Black women’s technology beginning in the 19th century, linking ideas, fields and methods across the work of …

While poking around for other academic sources on feminist blogs, I found this article from 2016, “The Trouble with White Feminism: Whiteness, Digital Feminism and the Intersectional Internet.” The complete article is embedded in the page.

In 2007, S&F Online dedicated an entire issue to feminist blogs with essays on race, anonymity, access and audience. The blogs are mostly dead links now but the academic record holds up. Important names: Clancy Ratliff, Tedra Osell.

The first woman I found online was Shelley Powers of Burningbird, around 2000-2001. Then, if you wanted to read women writing about technology (or anything else) with any critical depth, you had to go looking because those writers were not respected or recognized by brick and mortar institutions.

“Last mile” issues around AI in Harvard Business Review. Digital technologies work best in optimal environments, while most real world environments are nonoptimal and arguably non-optimizable.

An observation on feminist writing and Jezebel: Throughout history, a lot of time and energy has been spent mediating how and whether certain kinds of people talk to one another. The feminist blogosphere, for all its faults, was the first time lateral, public, unmediated conversation happened among …

Being a writer for pay is an unusual and vanishing proposition, according to Baffler. “Fifty-six percent of the respondents rely on side jobs to survive.”

Dip into the Diffusion Bias Explorer to explore how the text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion v1.4, Stable Diffusion v.2 and DALLE-2 represent different professions and adjectives.

What Midjourney (AI) thinks university leaders look like. Of course, the technology reflects old ideas about expertise and leadership, but AI adds the ability to reproduce these biases times infinity.

Another AI writing tell that annoys me is the preoccupation with describing what “exists,” and what is “structural” or “architectural” to an ephemeral idea. LLMs seem tuned to describing physical presence and connections even where they aren’t appropriate …

Several years ago, NPR’s Code Switch did a great episode on Black Republicans and how they come to their politics. A good listen on partisan politics and how they intersect with complex identities and life experiences.

A couple of weeks ago I had an interesting convo with Jessica Grose on Threads about the rise of the “Luddite teen” trend. I largely suspect neo-Luddism is a class-related trend and will not be durable. In short, I remain unconvinced that the concern of white collar professionals and …

From 2024: Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, on the durable limits of Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation.”

Looking at early feminist blogs and how they previewed the social critiques and economic problems present within today’s attention and publishing economies. What is old is new again.

From 2024, Anil Dash on why everyone needs to rethink Substack.

A new playlist titled “Digital Animal” explores the human relationship with technology and digital culture through a diverse selection of songs, highlighting the emotional complexities and societal implications of our tech-driven lives.

In which the author summarizes artificial intelligence functions that might be reasonably regulated.

On the intersection of memoir, feminism and the Internet pile-on.

A write up on sycophancy in popular chatbots.

Many years ago, a writing professor told me to get out of academia and go live a life, so I’d have something beyond my own circles to bring back to the commentariat. Prescient advice then. It might be even more prescient for someone who seems wildly content speaking from an extraordinarily …

Regarding dinergoth, a rebrand of an old trope: “Alt kids are the social fabric of the most economically depressed, culturally conservative corners of America and have been for a very long time.”

A roundup of news stories on Meta and Google’s losses in court this week, where their social media business practices were found harmful to children’s mental health and in violation of consumer protection law.

“This is a 300-page voyage of zero discoveries. It’s an addiction memoir that doesn’t end in sobriety. It’s a cult memoir that ends with a spirited defense of the cult leader.”

Finished reading: Bog Queen by Anna North 📚

“The movement, they said, was more than one man.”

That was fast: Afroman cleared of charges. Also noticed that in an amicus brief, the ACLU argued that the deputies’ lawsuit was a classic SLAPP approach, referring to a type of lawsuit that seeks to discourage criticism of public officials by burdening individuals with lawsuits in retaliation for …

Speaking of autoethnographies, I just heard about Dorothy Roberts’ latest and it looks intriguing.

The belief that LLMs are intelligent is based on the idea that language and intelligence are equivalent. From November, this article from The Verge argues that idea is a misnomer, instead arguing that we should think of language as a cultural tool we evolved to share our thoughts with one another.

On AI and the value of “taste” in Silicon Valley. As a pretentious hipster reformed, I welcome the return of bad taste as a social dealbreaker. Except for when bad taste is good.

I’m watching the feminist writer scene go hard on some recent books: Jamilah Lemieux’s Black. Single. Mother. and Lindy West’s Adult Braces. Both books were published on March 10, and both authors are talented, with impressive bylines, with significant followings baked in. …

Rapper Afroman is going ultra viral this week as his “Lemon Pound Cake” trial plays out in the news. He captured the raid on security cameras in his home and used the footage in a series of songs, videos and merch. He ultimately did not face charges after the search, and argues (with evidence) that …

More discussion on how “last mile” problems suggest that stories about massive AI disruption of jobs are hyperbole.

This writer suggests that LLMs used to be pretty cool and creative — read: exceedingly weird — and that corporate tinkering to prepare the tech for a broader market took away some of the magic.

The “stochastic parrot” argument against LLMs has some rhetorical limits.

Podcast: The kids in ICE detention.

I misused PESOS below, c’est la vie, I’m doing a POSSE model. Here’s someone smarter than me on POSSE v PESOS.

Anne Helen Peterson on the erosion of good, stable, sustainable jobs.

Turned on a couple of micro.blog site features: if you’re reading this feed on a social site (Mastodon, Bsky, Threads), I’m posting from micro.blog and syndicating out from there. Replies from federated social sites (Bsky, Mastodon) are now syndicated on my site as comments under my blog posts.

My digital presence has been deliberately fractured for years, so I’m watching how this site stitches together my breadcrumbs through SEO, with the serious stuff and throwaway asides alongside the occasional hilarity. Currently one of my top Google results.

Big internet controversy over dress codes in chain restaurants.

Just experienced my first thundersleet.

Author Margaret Atwood plays with Claude and reports back on her experience.

On the many failures of social media companies to act with pro-social ethics.

Pulling everything she’s ever posted back to her own website: Lisa Charlotte Muth flips POSSE to PESOS, “Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site.”

A gift link from The Atlantic, a reporter is given $10k to spend on emerging betting markets and reports on what he found. Spoiler: it’s dark!

Lean In girlbosses out, burned out babes in.

Interesting read: NYT is using a custom LLM tool to track trends within the “manosphere,” as reported by the Nieman Journalism Lab.

A friend of the blog told me a story about a Substacker who uses AI to summarize books and then publishes AI-generated content about those summaries, never reading the books herself, and yet has a ton of followers. I’d guess at least some of those are purchased, betting that a high follower count …

Anecdotally hearing about LLMs being weaponized in divorce and custody, including inundating the other party with slop to drive up the opponent’s legal fees. Worse, the sycophancy is tuned to and confirms the aggrieved party’s grievances, regardless of their real-world relevance in court.

Brooke Warner grapples with the implications around authorship and ownership in relation to AI writing, and how it’s showing up in the small publishing business.

NYT on the trend of “Luddite teens.” I have a growing suspicion that various neo-Luddist trends will largely map to class identity. In some areas of the world, in some areas of the US, Facebook is the internet, yellow pages and water cooler, and the internet experience is entirely …

From 2021, notes on supply chains and chip shortages in a global economy.

Twitter on a vape, the great e-waste crisis.

A good essay on writing and communication in this time. Ultimately the pickle of AI writing is that meaning is something best made through collaboration.

Forgive me, but I’d like to propose we call this a “sloppelganger.”

Excited about Inkwell, a contemporary treatment of the classic RSS reader.

Doing numbers on Twitter/X this week: this paper tested 70+ LLMs on open-ended prompts and found they all produce strikingly similar outputs. Worse, the systems used to improve models actively penalize diversity, reinforcing the convergence.

I need someone to talk me into/out of the new Macbook Neo. Is this just a Chromebook for design people?

Through a new quiz, NYT asks readers to rate passages of writing against AI. Despite thinking I could spot the AI writing, my results were 50/50.

Telling the gods: I would love a micro.blog plugin that provides an easy way to bulk-manage post categories. If there is one, lmk.

AI in practice: Chatbot tool comparison: The exploration of LLMs as writing tools reveals their varying strengths and weaknesses in generating content, ultimately highlighting patterns rather than determining superiority among them.

Winer on Doctorow on RSS.

One of the tricky things about consumer AI tools like Claude and Gemini is that the experience varies widely depending on the person using it, and it’s not always clear why. I have spent a lot of time learning the tools so I can advise on them in my work, and this variance of experience has become a …

A note on Ezra Klein: I’ve been looking across the NYT’s breathless reporting on the AI industry and seeing very few women represented across the commentary. Klein’s tech coverage tends to center a fairly narrow circuit of sources: founders, researchers, and policy thinkers who are …

Finished reading: Life in Code by Ellen Ullman 📚

Thinking more about arXiv and public-facing publishing: Back in the day, my mentor was among the first on campus to successfully argue that public-facing publishing should count toward tenure, as service and outreach at minimum. She was on the edge of digital studies, and by the time her work was …

Do you have what it takes to be the next McDonald’s CEO? A quiz about this week’s funniest business story.

Some notes on arXiv: arXiv is a preprint server hosted and maintained by Cornell University, where researchers post their work to establish priority and get it in front of other researchers quickly. This kind of server is common in emerging fields, to help build a body of shared knowledge among …

Good and bad uses of AI on a website, from Sumy Designs.

Reaching back to 2025 to put this article on the pile of AI commentary: Cottom’s argument here is that AI, for all the breathless hype around it, is a “mid” technology, one that makes modest augmentations to existing processes while its loudest boosters use it to justify employing …

A smart take on nonconsensual deepfakes, considering them not just as a social issue but as a cybersecurity issue, as they’re often connected to broader financial and social harassment campaigns.

Platformer on the emerging politics of military AI, and the backlash resulting from this week’s activities.

Applying a Claude writing skill: LLMs have a default house writing style with identifiable patterns: sentence fragments for emphasis, “not X, but Y” constructions, lots of hard contrast, atmospheric openings, heavy use of em dashes, and heavy use of marketing language. This reflects the semantic construction of an LLM. …

This new report from Anthropic is depressing at best, as it tries to measure which employment sectors carry the most exposure around AI expansion into the economy. In short, the tech is likely to impact two groups the hardest: educated professional women, and young workers for whom the career ladder …

WaPo on the many issues of LLM house writing styles. I have much to add. Here are some notes on applying a writing skill to override house style on Claude.

Some content notes: while I haven’t quite figured out how much I want to broadcast this space, I have put a couple of feedback mechanisms into place, including an email loop as well as turning on comments for those logged into micro.blog, Bluesky and Mastodon. If you’re reading along, say hello.

A thorough look at the loss of institutional hip-hop media archives and what it means for culture writing today.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

NPR’s Code Switch on the gentrification of the Internet.

I have pretty strong feelings against the use of AI around military operations, based on my hands-on experience with the tools. When the tech’s creators say the tech isn’t ripe for warfare, that’s strong feedback. And I agree, with the risks and implications around trust, marketing …

Following the news on Meta glasses this week and how real people are moderating that content loop, watching and moderating all of our intimate video footage, including our most private moments. Last year, my book club read a speculative fiction novel about this very dynamic called …

You might call this a taste test: Obsessed with the story about the McDonald’s CEO and how his LinkedIn-style videos selling the McD’s franchise have escaped containment, leading to one of the funnier CEO/product marketing dynamics in recent history. Burger King’s CEO swooped in, …

New blog alert on gender, feminism and gaming: Mothership.

Ryan Broderick is currently my fav reporter on the Internet culture beat, and on this podcast he’s talking about Epstein and why he was interested in putting his resources to developing the early internet (spoiler: for crimes).

Ruling: AI art is not copyrightable.

Apparently one thing LLMs excel at is deanonymization at scale. The original promise of pseudonymity online was social and normative, over and above any question of technical depth: decent people don’t try to unmask you, because why. What strikes me today is how what used to be unacceptably …

Developing a new pet theory that you could theoretically crank AI outputs toward your vision by having an organized link blog revolution.

The Guardian has a long-running series where readers answer one another’s questions, which gives a pretty good point-in-time survey of how people of a certain demographic are feeling on a given subject. This week’s question is on AI futures: “what would happen to the world if computer said yes?”

Reading about a new “slow” RSS app called Current.

Some analysis on Anthropic and the Pentagon. Per @manton, it feels a little bit like the company isn’t fully on board with the product they produce. I find it interesting that the feds appear to be toying with the idea of nationalizing AI companies alongside other nationalization efforts.

Like Rickrolling on steroids: I didn’t even know P2P music file downloads were still a thing, but of course, and the scene had a big week recently when somebody trolled SoulSeek by generating a bunch of popular songs sung in Homer Simpson’s voice, then quietly polluted the platform by offering the …

A new report shows that “just 100 users were responsible for almost 70 per cent of online conspiracy posts from influential accounts they examined in Canada.” Relatedly, a White House staffer is reportedly behind a massive Trump account on Twitter. This practice is a common information strategy by …

A pal sent along this exceedingly cool article on an art space on the south side of Madison, WI, that marries quilting and memory care.

A guy put his life savings up against DOGE and won big on the new, anarchic betting markets online. This line hooked me: “Crucially, he’s been around long enough to see promises collide into reality and to know basic federal-budget math.”

Second wavers in tech and engineering talked a lot about the “god trick” of presenting knowledge and information, particularly around math and science, in a way that suggests its objectivity is eternal, immortal, unknowable. Work by Safiya Umoja Noble and others extended this lens to Internet search …

An open letter from employees of Google and OpenAI in support of Anthropic, against the DoD: notdivided.org

Looking at this new book by Michael Berube (mensch and legend) on what science fiction can tell us about our contemporary crises. Berube and I used to play Words With Friends together and I assure you he’s a killer.

McKenzie Wark for Verso Books on Donna Haraway, in 2015: “Creating any kind of knowledge and power in and against something as pervasive and effective as the world built by postwar techno-science is a difficult task. It may seem easier simply to vacate the field, to try to turn back the clock, …

Where are the women? A brief history of women in the computer sciences.

New research shows that social media advertising suppresses voting in targeted communities, and is the first to quantify the effect of this kind of microtargeting on voter turnout.

Sharing Digital Animal, a new, curated playlist of songs about all the angst and joys of living with modern technology.

I’ve been spending more time in tech spaces online and getting good information from folks like @manton, creator of Micro.blog. Like this reflection on how to think about AI now that vibe coding works. Something I’m thinking about: there’s an emerging tension between those who see …

Making the rounds on Twitter today, an AI programmer pulled together a dashboard comparing how LLMs respond when given a series of nonsense prompts. There is a notable difference in quality even between Claude’s Opus and Sonnet, in my experience. The lesser GPTs will take a wobbly claim as …

Some additional discussion of LLM models, including open weight and “staggered openness,” where orgs “release previous versions of proprietary models once a successor is launched, providing limited insight into the architecture while restricting access to the most current …

“Open source,” “open weight,” and “proprietary” describe different relationships between LLM model producers and users, governing what you see, modify and control. Comparing them isn’t necessarily about “best,” but whether you’re optimizing …

A new report from Pew on how teens view and use AI says that more than half of teens turn to chatbots for help with school, and some are turning to AI for emotional support and companionship.

“A brief history on writing, a forgotten technology: how the challenges we face in today’s digital age can be traced back to one of the most significant yet underrated innovations of all time.”

“Digital silence” is a new ethic emerging on the visual web, where travelers are no longer posting about their travels. Reading along, thinking of how I rarely post about family out of respect for their privacy, and recently took several road trips without a single post.

“History was unmade last year, as engineers began the massive project of ripping the first-ever transoceanic fiber-optic cable from the ocean floor.”

My life is work right now, so I’ve been training my reading and writing habits in that direction in the hope it will be additive. So when a friend who works in tech suggested I pick up some Ellen Ullman, I snapped it up. Ullman was a programmer who wrote about her experience as a woman in tech in …

My friend Dave Bangert has been a Midwestern reporter for thirty years, and began his own newsletter project after layoffs and mergers emptied his local newsroom. Now his 8000 subscriber project is a major influence in a Big Ten town that otherwise has a weak media market. In this podcast he talks …

As a true blue Hoosier, here’s my hot take on the Chicago Bears moving to Hammond: no dunking on NWI. I’m seeing a lot of disgust for Indiana in related Bears commentary that troubles me, especially the comments about NWI as a place of blight, beyond consideration or repair, obscuring the …

The last time I went truly viral was in April of 2020 in the height of the COVID shutdown. I posted a tweet and walked away from my phone. By the time I checked back, my notifications were out of control. The next morning, I got a message from an old friend familiar with my handle. “I think I …

In an Internet of things (IOT), what happens when the companies behind the service model cease to be?

What to do when the biggest platforms for readers are kind of evil?

Making the rounds on social today: New study suggests that while 70% of financial firms use AI today, 80% report no impact on employment or productivity.

“Because RSS is an open protocol, and because there are so many different possible ways to follow and read the news, RSS readers ought to be a UI playground in the way Twitter clients once were, where innovation and experimentation are normal and celebrated.”

There are many hyperbolic essays on AI going viral this week. This essay gets into some of the emerging politics around AI in the United States and how they map onto electoral politics, and is irritated with the American left’s approach to AI. I agree on one angle, that as a cohort, abstaining …

Widespread AI adoption reopens some basic questions in business: who your audience is, what work can reasonably be automated, what absolutely requires human oversight, and how the service and information environment actually holds together when we shuffle these circumstances around. All this, with …

Who decides what’s real in the age of AI? Instagram.

I’ve been writing about how writing and code are the same thing in digital environments, and about how that equivalence shaped the early web. AI changes that relationship. The dominant conversation is about whether LLMs can write well, but I suspect that’s the wrong frame. Human …

When I started building websites in the late ’90s, the line between writing and coding didn’t really exist. A person probably learned HTML because she had something to say and needed a place to put it. The internet was free and anonymous and it felt audacious to put your stuff online, …

I’ve been running a series of informal experiments with my team to understand how we should advise people on using AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini around our work. In our last session, I gave everyone the same task: ask your AI tool to summarize a single article in plain language. …

Writing is code, code is writing.

I asked Claude.ai for a plain language summary of this buzzy new research paper. Claude offers the following: Researchers from Caltech and Stanford conducted the first comprehensive survey of how and why large language models (LLMs) — AI systems like ChatGPT or Claude — fail at reasoning tasks. …

A survey of 1200 authors on how they are thinking about and using AI

My undergrad experience in college really shaped my approach to the internet. I was an English Education major at the time, in the early 00s, when the internet was around but mostly the wheelhouse of scholars and nerds. I was a nerd, learning code as a vehicle for writing, primarily to amuse myself …

I have a confession. While experimenting with AI over the last year, I wondered what would happen if I crammed an unfinished novel draft, one I actually care about, into Claude. Claude is pitched as the LLM for writers, with Claude 3.7 Sonnet and 3 Opus widely regarded as the premier LLMs for …

Something else I noticed in my experimentation with AI and creative writing: Claude prefers a mid-length, declarative sentence, while I prefer a lot of variety in my prose. Sentence variety is a primary consideration in any text-based communication approach. Write accordingly.

About fifteen years ago, when I began to take my work and career more seriously, I turned toward other women in my orbit who were in the same phase of life. For many years now we have supported each other through our various iterations, talking interviews and talent and resumes and obstacles and …

Tagging this plain language definition for later: “platforms… are any space or any institution that brings together buyers and sellers, speakers and listeners.”

The article argues that Silicon Valley’s shift from long-term employment to talent migration has created a model where workers maximize their individual compensation through frequent job changes, fundamentally altering tech industry culture and economics for the worse.

The reporter who tried to replace herself with a bot

🍿Watched: Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am This PBS doc recently came to Netflix, and I tucked in expecting a nice but predictably boring documentary about one of my favorite authors. To the contrary, it really plumbs Morrison’s writing craft, not only as an author but as an editor who brought a …

The universe is telling me to read Neuromancer already.

Closer to the machine: There is something about the AI moment that reminds me a lot of when the internet was new. A lot of what was imagined and promised about the internet was never realized. But much was. I’ve been reading Ellen Ullman’s memoirs - “Life in Code” and “Close to the …

“Evidence from a study about workplace writers who use AI suggests that writers are outsourcing some of their research, editing, or drafting to AI, but that they retain responsibility for their writing.”

Crunching for clarity: In 1999, academic and theorist Judith Butler famously won an award for the worst academic sentence, raising good questions about how we read difficult texts, who gets to access academic ideas, and the role of academic and plain language in and around the academy: The move from a structuralist …

A lot of readers are fascinated with the “black box” of AI writing, and trying to reverse engineer what it does and why. John Gallagher goes down the rabbit hole and articulates some credible theories about why LLMs use lists and listing to create meaning, and why it matters.

French overlooks how smartphones and social media raised the stakes on debate and discussion, transforming campus discourse. Today’s students worry that one viral misstep (in countless directions) may define them forever.

Connected Places uses ICE as a case study to explore trust, safety, and community dynamics on decentralized social networks, examining how federation changes community moderation expectations we’ve developed from centralized platforms.

A new paper in Science Magazine explains how AI now allows propaganda campaigns to reach previously unprecedented scale and precision. This gets into the implications for organizations, institutions and nations.

The real problem is that it's not our quagmire: Tiktok is not much better or worse than other major social platforms, I say. The primary arguments against TikTok, including data collection, algorithmic manipulation, potential foreign government access, addiction and influence on public opinion, apply with equal or greater force to American …

The TikTok deal means American users will see a US-only algorithm. Brands and creators will likely see smaller audiences and higher costs for domestic reach. ByteDance faces split algorithms, divided workforces and parallel governance, complicating product delivery across global markets.

The promise of AI is that it makes work more productive, but the reality is proving more complex and less rosy.

I’m generally skeptical of anyone selling a solution to a social problem that relies on individual abstinence, so I tend to be annoyed with many arguments about the attention economy. I more or less land here on the question of AI, which I know many of my contemporaries will find similarly …

Searching for Suzy Thunder: In the ’80s, Susan Headley ran with the best of them—phone phreakers, social engineers, and the most notorious computer hackers of the era. Then she disappeared.

While conspiring with a friend about life and work in these trying times, both of us confessed that we believe, at the root, that reading and writing are ultimately the cure for everything that ails us: collectively, individually, epistemically, existentially. Maybe that’s naive, but I’ll take it.

Make Canadian TV weird again (sponsored by The Red Green Show, probably).

Rules without lessons: If you spend time around cycling and pedestrian advocates, the debate between bans and regulations is familiar territory. When I got deep into road biking, where I learned to ride long distance through a red state with almost no bike infrastructure outside tight urban and exurban areas, one of the …

UW-Madison is among universities seeing federal terminations of international student visas. Public research universities have come to rely on these students to offset funding cuts. The losses are both financial and cultural.

404 Media on Wikipedia, reciprocity and collaboration online, and how to protect the public commons in the age of AI.

Wondering whether I want to switch to something more robust like Wordpress if I keep doing this thing, but at the same time I have enjoyed not working within and around the world of WP, which has dominated my CMS experience since the aughts.

Affinity as an organizing principle: Reading this blog post by a political scientist explaining the problem with our fractured information landscape, and how calls for more information and media literacy are not likely solutions: “In short, decades of research have demonstrated that our political beliefs and behavior are …

This observation at the end of Manton’s post on AI and Wikipedia made me chuckle: AI using Wikipedia reminds me of the FAQ on setting up a Little Free Library: _I think someone is stealing books from my library and selling them, what do I do?_ Remember that the purpose of a Little Free Library …

Woof: ads are coming to ChatGPT.

I too have been challenged by defining “federation” to non-technical audiences, so it was fun and instructive to see others give it a go.

The CEO of Instagram says that social media platforms will be under mounting pressure to help users tell the difference between human-made and AI content, and that going forward, it will be more practical to label real content over AI.

The trust gap : I suspect these three trends are connected: Women reportedly use AI at significantly lower rates than men—25 percent lower on average—in part because they’re more concerned about ethics, including privacy, consent and intellectual property. At the same time, countries with more positive social …

“It’s really a software maturity story,” Sag says. “But that’s not very sexy.”

Folks are beginning to wonder why Twitter and Grok are still in the app stores, given the latest trend in using the LLM to generate non-consensual imagery of people (namely women and children) at alarming rates.

Blogging from the Ruins is an essay getting a ton of attention in the fediverse this week, making a strong case for intentionally building non-algorithmic intellectual communities on the open web.

A new study suggests that countries who report more positive experiences with social media also feel more positive about AI. It seems to come down to tech regulation and trust.

On the Media spends an hour exploring the media strategy behind the calls for debate. Tl;dr: controversy extends unpopular ideas much further than they would reach organically on their own.

New numbers from Pew Research on how teens used social media and AI chatbots in 2025.

One of my favorite low-cost cooking hacks is baking nice charcuterie on a frozen pizza. Today, I found out that Alimentari carries Smoking Goose products from my home state, so we’re having frozen pizza from Sal’s with capicola for dinner. Rawr, yum.

The deepfake goes mainstream, and it sounds like virtually everyone is unprepared for the negative social implications.

Our friend, the RSS feed.

Nieman Lab’s Predictions for Journalism 2026

A meta lesson about AI assistance: I just completed my first attempt at coding using AI, in this case having Claude assist me with putting together a simple client-side OPML parser using Dave Winer’s Feedland service. Winer’s original script is pretty slick, and includes a list of all my feeds with titles, URLs, and …

Anthropic on how AI is changing how people work. This is a marketing piece, of course, but useful nonetheless.

“Substack entrapment theory”

Just speaking this into the universe, but it would be exceedingly cool if someone pulled together a micro.blog plugin for Feedland blogrolls and page feeds.

An interesting update by Dave Winer on how blog comments might work in and around federation.

I love this: Sam at Yale Climate Connections suggests some slow fashion gift ideas for the holidays.

Determined to finish at least one more novel this year, and this one fits the bill. Currently reading: Moderation by Elaine Castillo 📚

I am pro-games and gaming (and partake in gaming myself), and both of my kids had a generally positive experience on various gaming platforms over the years, but stuff like this still gives me pause.

“I don’t shine if you don’t shine.”

Interesting to see web and print magazines talk about their strategy and value proposition since Google adopted an A.I.-powered search feature. x.com/pastemaga…

Solarpunk is happening in sub-Saharan Africa, a movement to bring electricity to places that are impacted by “last mile” challenges in grid engineering and politics.

Human in the loop (HITL): HITL means that humans are involved at some point in the AI workflow to ensure accuracy, safety, accountability or ethical decision-making. HITL inserts human insight into the “loop,” the continuous cycle of interaction and feedback between AI systems and humans.

At the nail salon where a woman is telling her very intrigued mother about podcasts. “You can listen to them anywhere! In the car, while you’re gardening.”

This book isn’t in Epilogue so I can’t log it properly, but it’s an okay primer on change communication. For higher ed, the emphasis on engaging leadership and governance is handy. 📚

Eyes on this story, both for the implications on the LLM sector and for the company’s approach to publicity after they were effectively targeted by bad actors.

When AI is wrong, who pays?

How the networking technology sector is changed by the introduction of AI.

Bookmarking this 404 media podcast specifically because it discusses how librarians are navigating the rise of AI.

Why Tim Berners-Lee still believes in the web | The Verge You want to have control of your own destiny. We call it digital sovereignty. In the old days, the early days of the web, anybody used to be able to make a website. So that feeling of sovereignty as an individual being enabled and being a …

“Writing is a practical skill—particularly since most of our online communication is text-based to begin with. …Done well, it means you’re contributing signal, instead of noise.”

Rhetoric of intertextuality: “… every text is connected to other texts by citations, quotations, allusions, borrowings, adaptations, appropriations, parody, pastiche, imitation, and the like. Every text is in a dialogical relationship with other texts. In sum, intertextuality describes the relationships that exist …

What is this site and why am I doing it?: In recent history I stopped posting on most social media and moved to the fediverse. I still browse the social platforms to keep up with trends and friends, but I only post on my private IG and here. What I share here is separate from but related to my professional life — I’m thinking out loud …

More on rhetorical velocity and the art of the remix. As Lawrence Lessig says, “Remix is how we as humans live and everyone within our society engages in this act of creativity.”

Big news in ecommerce: TikTok Shop is now bigger than ebay.

Writing for the public in an age of anxiety: “This article identifies five topoi of this new rhetorical landscape—presence, persistence, permeability, promiscuity, and power—describing the anxieties and affordances they present for student writers, the dispositions toward writing they foster, …

On virtuous cycles: “Culture is the core of the virtuous cycle, in which shared principles guide you toward collective goals.”

Practicing pluralism in risky spaces : While I’m cleaning up the cruft around my social presence, I’m finding more references to the heyday of blogging that explain how people organized online (Web 1.0) before the era of platforms (Web 2.0). One is this interview with Jill Filipovic, my one-time co-blogger and comrade at Feministe, with …

I met a friend for dinner, we had a time, and as she left she mentioned her long-time book club and how much everyone hated their latest read. What was it? I asked. She said, “Have you heard of ‘The Heart in Winter’?” 😭

Yet another playlist added to my playlists page.

Why emphasis on literacy, writing, reading and the canon is always politically prescient. Also why the cyborg’s mark remains one of my favorite metaphors.

Returning to Haraway: There are certain pieces of writing I return to when thinking about our relationship with technology. Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” published in 1985, is one of them. Despite being forty years old, it continues to offer insights into how we understand technology’s role in our lives. Haraway …

I miss Twitter because I’m full of big opinions and inappropriate one-liners. Anyway, here’s an analysis from WIRED on the implications of this month’s AWS outage.

Very much enjoying the Netflix series “Dark Winds,” based on the series of novels by Tony Hillerman. Not only does the storytelling slap, but it’s visually beautiful, with sweeping Southwest vistas and a fleet of classic vehicles that look so good in widescreen.

Wisconsin Watch profiled the Pulaski News, the newspaper of record in a ~3500 person village in northeast Wisconsin, run by high school students.

France is taking the “not now, sweetie, mommy is cyberbullying the mayor” meme to new legal arenas.

On prompt injections: Because AI chatbots are trained to be helpful and to understand context, jailbreakers are able to engineer scenarios where the AI believes ignoring its usual ethical guidelines is appropriate. Is it currently possible to safeguard LLMs from injection attacks at scale?

What made blogging different? Reflections on 25 years of digital media.

Out: SEO; In: GEO.

“LOLgislation,” or how memes become policy, and posting becomes praxis.

For many years, “shitposting” has been a staple of internet culture in which individuals riff on the moment using nonsense and irony, derailing threads for fun. In today’s influencer-driven attention economy, however, shitposting as a practice is now a meaningful comms and …

What rivalry? : Purdue Exponent students distributed 3,000 copies of a special “solidarity edition” newspaper in Bloomington after IU spanked their student paper for insubordinance, ending the IDS print edition and firing their director. The media landscape in Indiana is bleak, generally, after years of …

A difficult number for so many reasons.

The next big trend in AI that I’m watching is platform integration. First company to produce the interoperability required for a united platform experience wins.

RIP D’Angelo. And a good occasion to reread this excellent 2012 profile discussing fame, religion, and how his status as a sex symbol in his youth negatively impacted D’Angelo’s self-esteem - and ultimately his career.

What happens to college towns after they’re hit by the so-called enrollment cliff?

Choco Taco is back: the business and engineering behind the revival of a retro treat.

From Propublica, on how publicly-funded private school vouchers are funding a segregation academy dynamic.

Saving for later: The story of DOGE, as told by federal workers.

A lovely story about the restoration of prairie land undertaken by the nuns of Holy Wisdom, just outside of Madison, WI.

A pleasant surprise resulting from LLM acceleration in the IT landscape is the sudden opportunity for storytelling around other, more analog kinds of information technology and access models. Nostalgia abound (complimentary).

On the rise of faith tech.

Harvard Business Review offers this take on why it’s bad for business to automate our way out of staffing entry-level positions.

What do people actually use ChatGPT for? A snapshot.

This is incredible storytelling from propublica.org, on opioids, inequality, and the scope of drug-induced homicide charges brought against teens in Wisconsin.

Gap x Katseye collab

Gap capitalized on the Sidney Sweeney “good genes” controversy by doing this collab with Katseye, the global pop group where each member is a different nationality. Each member of the pop group dances through in black and brown jeans.

Another one on how LLM sycophancy facilitates suicidal ideation.

Something that worries me about AI adoption in higher ed is the risk to students facing mental health challenges, who are increasingly turning to chat bots to plumb their own depths. What can higher ed ask of LLM business partners to protect our students’ mental health?

“It’s almost as if groups on both sides of the political spectrum are looking for an excuse to brand business decisions as politically or socially hostile,” said Jill Fisch, a professor of business law at the University of Pennsylvania who studies how corporations operate in political spaces.

Hey chat, how is pedagogy changing in an age of AI?

⚡ AI's last mile problem in higher ed: Thinking out loud about tech in the public sector, and the classic technical problem of covering the “last mile.”

⚡ Navigating AI in higher ed communications: A practitioner's guide: As communications professionals in higher education, we work for institutions built on the pursuit of knowledge and innovation, yet many of us feel uncertain about how to thoughtfully integrate one of the most significant technological advances of our time: artificial intelligence. I offer some …

I work in an IT communications role in higher ed, and AI finally crept into my life in a real way. Coming soon: some reflections on AI from a comms practitioner in higher ed.

AI-driven bots are disrupting web traffic— “and may also be inflating the internet economy by distorting the very metrics that drive tech company valuations.”

What makes AI generative? “To choose well between billions of things is difficult. To choose between effectively infinite options perfectly is impossible.”

“In 2024, there were a total of 454 words used excessively by chatbots, the researchers report.” When does use of AI tip over into something fraudulent? Experts disagree.

Currently reading: Women! In! Peril! by Jessie Ren Marshall 📚

The education sector is a big target for cyber attacks, with higher ed being one of the largest and most sensitive targets for bad actors. A recent study shows that education is unprepared as a sector and many institutions lack resources to support a thoughtful and robust cybersecurity program.

Search engines deliver answers instead of links. What does it mean for web traffic - and the outlets, people and jobs who rely on it? Inside the Media’s Traffic Apocalypse

A cool sustainability story out of Madison: “Birds did not evolve with windows, so [they] have little to no ability to identify them as solid, transparent objects…” sustainability.wisc.edu/bird-safe…

“The world’s most valuable companies are based in the United States, built on foundations of government-funded university research.” open.substack.com/pub/edtec…

Of course Jean Grae has a striking narrative voice and point of view. My hero. Currently reading: In My Remaining Years by Jean Grae 📚

Currently reading: Communication Solution by Stacy Smulowitz 📚

Close reading as the salve for These Times: https://defector.com/close-reading-is-for-everyone

How is identity created and conferred across digital spaces? And should those spaces be controlled by corporate interests? www.wired.com/story/big…

This book has some decent insights, especially on how to refine your leadership “brand” in the workplace and online, but I’m not sold yet. Currently reading: When We’re in Charge by Amanda Litman 📚

An interesting take on why we like AI for coding but not for writing. www.linkedin.com/pulse/cre…

Currently reading: In My Remaining Years by Jean Grae 📚

Currently reading: When We’re in Charge by Amanda Litman 📚

Which AI applications do what best - and how to think about it. www.vox.com/future-pe…

“It allows their message to go farther on social media because there’s already a set of visual cues that many viewers recognize before a single word comes out of their mouths.”

Private group chats are as maddening as public social media - and much harder to track. https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america

I generally use this space to track what I’m reading in books. But going forward, I’ll also be using it to consolidate links to articles I’m reading about communication, higher education and technology trends.

Vonnegut captures today’s tech zeitgeist in a science fiction tale - written seventy years ago. Apparently he wrote it during his time at GE, inspired by their rush to automation. Finished reading: Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut 📚

Wherein the protagonist turns a blob into the man of her dreams. Currently reading: Blob by Maggie Su 📚

Currently reading: Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut 📚

Still maintaining this sprawling 1200+ song playlist of indie music across genres, focused on women vocalists and players. open.spotify.com/playlist/…

Needed this vibe. Currently reading: An Immense World by Ed Yong 📚

There’s a reasonable argument that this is the single biggest breach of public data by private person, ever. NYT gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/02/1…

The ham-handed relationship between governments, trustees and schools as boards get politicized. PBS: www.pbs.org/newshour/…

On “institutional neutrality,” a conservative approach to dampen political speech on college campuses.

⚡ A trust-building exercise in an era of "flooding the zone": While institutions are backing away from making position statements, news outlets are making lengthy statements of intent. This one from Madison is interesting because it also acknowledges that a portion of their audience may be intentionally avoiding news about the White House. This is a …

The bureau speak is v amusing. Currently reading: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley 📚

Finished reading: Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom 📚

Updated my reading list, while slowly making my way through half a dozen books at once.

Book club categorically disliked this one. Finished reading: The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry 📚

Dang, this is good. Currently reading: Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom 📚

Finished reading: Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange 📚

🧶 Wonky Star quilt : Posting about my latest quilt for posterity. This is a “wonky star” quilt using 10” precuts, measuring about 60 X 70”. I completed the sides last night and will hand quilt all of it with a mix of big stitch quilting.

Finished reading: Lit by Mary Karr 📚

So long : Deactivated my Twitter account after fifteen years (sheesh).

Finished reading: The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates 📚

Finished reading: Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt 📚

Just talked myself into and out of $300 of yarn.

Currently reading: Abortion by Jessica Valenti 📚

It’s the time of year when I can’t get around the nagging feeling that I need to buy yarn (I don’t need any more yarn).

Ephemera: Been playing with micro.blog for a bit now and very much recommend the experience. The interface is friendly and the team behind the app is ultra responsive. My fav features are Bookshelves - and the ability to push new posts to Bluesky and Mastodon. In other news, I got a new bike.

Finished reading (a couple of months ago): Holding It Together by Jessica Calarco 📚

Read this in one sitting, reminded of “The Fire Next Time” in both style and urgency. Finished reading: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates 📚

Finished reading: On Writing by Stephen King 📚

“To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence.”

🍳 Bean machine : It’s soup season - and I’m a newly-minted member of the bean club. This is more or less my favorite lentil soup recipe, except I deglaze the pot with a healthy dose of dry red wine before adding the lentils and stock, and I stew it with a big sachet of fresh thyme.

Finished reading: James by Percival Everett 📚

🍳 Meat People: This butchery on the east side of Madison is owner-operated, and features meats only from local, humane farms. In addition, they are a “whole animal” butcher, in that they buy and break down a whole animal at a time, thus offering an array of extremely fresh products from sausage to …

Currently reading: 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories by Lorrie Moore 📚

Watch House: Last week I joined an old friend on a road trip through Wisconsin. We saw a folk show, stayed at a vintage motel, and camped in the crook of Green Bay. In our early years, we were both shit-kicking dirtbags, rebels, people who thumbed our noses at convention and were told (and fully believed) we …

⚡ Acceleration : This has a bad headline, but the gist is that AI is already beginning to be used to power racketeering and ransom business models against vulnerable human enterprises. The net effect is a general erosion of the trustworthiness of written communication, especially online, as the same tools we use to …

I read this again after a twenty year break. It holds up, but wowzers, my takeaways were different in 2024. Finished reading: The Red Tent by Anita Diamant 📚

“Again and again, I sought out high-challenge, high-stress jobs. I thrived when I felt bad.”

In relationship to collectors, purchases of physical media are on the rise, with vinyl outselling everything, and cassette tapes, CDs and DVDs making a comeback. I’m a longtime downloader and streamer, but have been buying vinyl lately myself. Indicative of lost trust in Big Tech?

61% of Americans are self-proclaimed collectors. 83% of collectors think their collection will be worth something someday. Young people identify as collectors more than ever, with Gen Z at 76% and millennials at 72%.

Starting to see some best practices emerging around AI capabilities in the higher ed space. Here’s a table of AI vs human capabilities in the Bloom’s hierarchy of cognitive tasks from Oregon State.

“fine Corinthian leather”

Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading so much, maybe it’s because I’m in a reflective stage of life, but I have the writing bug again. It’s been a long, long time since I felt the urge to write.

A clever look at feminist theory through celebrity case studies. My favorite chapters were on humor, leadership and nudity. Finished reading: Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud by Anne Helen Petersen 📚

All the women I know are reading and gardening at a feral clip.

From the Garbage Day newsletter, my fav newsletter on internet trends and marketing, this blog post on looking for federated blog alternatives to Wordpress which links out to this handy dashboard measuring total users on federated platforms.

Girl in a Band: A quick read by a singular voice, heavy on descriptions of the New York art and music scene of the 90s. Like many punk memoirs, it’s a tribute to the many names that made the movement and a memorial for a city that no longer exists. Gordon’s voice is kind and bold, curious and smart. Her …

Why are divorce memoirs stuck in the 1960s? A fair question, I say. www.nytimes.com/2024/05/2… The relevance of these authors, imo, is about women’s buying power in the ex-evangelical and ex-Mormon movement. But I think it’s pretty difficult to think publicly about ideas like …

⚡ Bookshelves: The Bookshelves feature of Micro.blog is easily my favorite of this platform. It sits right at the intersection of medium and function: as a reader I want to keep track of things, but I don’t need so much infrastructure around it. Just some checkmarks and a place to dash off my immediate …

My posts from micro.blog are pushing to Mastodon but not Bluesky. Why?

Two new media publishers are looking to build out their presence in the Fediverse: digiday.com/media/why…

I very much enjoyed this book. Despite the heavy subjects, ultimately culminating in a reflection on the ongoing conflict in Palestine that can’t be missed, it was a compelling read that I’ve returned to many times as a reference. The mirror as metaphor for the inexplicable stories in …

Currently watching how AI will affect SEO and search: www.forbes.com/sites/for…

It’s spring, so my lizard brain is locked on the excitement of garden-planning. The backyard is a blank slate, virtually untouched for ten years until we moved in and removed a wild grapevine so overgrown it looked like a hedge. I have my work cut out for me.

Just finished rereading “Station Eleven” for my beloved book club. It’s so well-written that I find myself annoyed and jealous by it, it’s that good. It makes me consider the legacy of art-making - grassroots, human-made art - and its role in crafting meaning and beauty out …

I got to eat at my first Michelin star restaurant this weekend, Kasama in Chicago, which you may recognize from The Bear. We braved the line during the day to try their daytime menu, including a hearty breakfast and a selection of lovely, delicate pastries. Beautiful food, worth a wait.

Light and clever enough for an easy read, while serious enough to hold my attention. Love the demonstrations of mutual care on the margins of polite society. Finished reading: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride 📚

A couple of years ago I was featured on the LGM podcast, as a speaker on the oral history of the blogosphere. Posting it here for posterity: www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/07/o…

🧶 Craft Work: On a Joann's bankruptcy and the struggling retail craft market: The internet says Joann fabrics is going to declare bankruptcy, putting a huge market of individual crafters without access to in-person retail craft spaces into a tailspin. It’s likely they will ask their creditors to restructure their debt, making them able to keep some stores open. The …

Also in arts and crafts: On the revival of blacksmithing in Kentucky.

Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood: I’ve been waiting for this one because it’s a story I know well. It is an impeccably reported book covering how young women navigated a compromised, stigmatized, coercive landscape around unplanned pregnancies in the late 20th century. Sisson is a comprehensive writer whose reporting is …

Embarking on a little side quest, which shifts my normal reading list from whatever it is now to a list of water metaphors.

Halloween quilt, finally : I finished my latest quilt on my birthday, a Halloween quilt made from precuts (no pattern) that I started in 2021? 2022? I don’t know how old it is. It’s been languishing. I don’t love shoving a huge quilt through my lil sewing machine, so I still hand quilt these puppies using 6-strand embroidery …

Hidden Systems: My delightful book club pulled this YA graphic novel out of the 2023-24 “best of” lists and loved it. There is a remarkable amount of information on each page - truly, you could build a dynamic reading curriculum off of each section - between the written and visual communication. A …

The new provost is an interesting person and an ultra-charismatic speaker, which makes for a p good podcast. madison.citycast.fm/podcasts/…

I had a great birthday yesterday. The kiddo and I have been going to the gym together. We could do most of these workouts at home, but she likes the novelty of going to work out in public, people watching, and noodling with electronics while you’re on the elliptical. I enjoy her company there …

U of M not selling student data (yet): This story spun up yesterday with broad outcry from academics, and with good reason. Institutions needs to define and clarify their relationship to tech in order to assuage ongoing concerns about monetization in a fast-moving landscape. gizmodo.com/universit…

This is the kind of book that connects the dots on some big ideas, primarily how traditional gender roles intersect with capitalism to produce the economy, and in turn, how these systems, tensions and behaviors then reproduce inequality. It’s also, at the root, about how ideas form reality. By …

I don’t need a WYSIWYG editor on micro.blog, but some buttons for linking and styling on new posts would be a no-brainer addition to this app.

The (very decorated) author (his first novel) spent time on the faculty in my Big Ten hometown. I already recognize some of the side characters. 👀 Currently reading: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar 📚

Escapist and breezy. Finished reading: Seven Days in June by Tia Williams 📚

This smart graphic novel zooms in and out on engineered systems happening all around us: electricity, water, the internet. Fascinating and clever. Currently reading: Hidden Systems by Dan Nott 📚

I’m divorcing my Apple Watch because I’m in love with my Oura ring. I need fewer CTAs and notifications in my life, and more reminders to prioritize sleep and mindfulness. Plus, you can pay for one with your HSA.

V proud of myself because, despite going to the quilt store yesterday and getting everything BUT what I went there for, I found enough batting scraps to put together a quilt sandwich and began hand quilting it last night. She’s going to be cute.

Nicki does party songs, Megan does praxis.

The latest You’re Wrong About podcast about the pro-life movement is an excellent primer for anyone who knows a little but doesn’t feel like an expert. Covers the history of the movement, where they came from ideologically, how they organize and why it’s effective. …

Goodreads never did anything for me: I just spent a pile of money on books, with the goal of reading for pleasure every day, and with the intention of sprinkling some light stuff around my generally serious reading preferences. While I usually read like a dad, heavy on the serious memoirs and book-length nonfiction explainers, …

Finished reading: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid 📚 I liked this one mostly because it asks nothing of the reader, save for enduring the completely unnecessary side story about the biographer.

I’m looking for some lightness in my reading list for the next couple of months. Found this list of funniest novels from the Booker library: thebookerprizes.com/the-booke…

Devastating, bleak, relentless. Finished reading: The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan 📚

❄️ big, fat snowflakes ❄️

Currently reading: The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan 📚 Dystopian, but not so far away.

First real snow today.

🍿 Saltburn, baby.

The local story is ripe with corruption. Indiana likes to spin up private “growth” orgs to bypass legislation, after a long history of treating the state’s water resources like something between a highway and a sewer. Indiana’s Plan to Pipe In Groundwater for Microchip-Making Draws …

I am enjoying the Twitter/Tumblr feel of micro.blog and feel like I could settle in here. But it would be cooler if there was a quick reference for markdown near the input field to better format our posts.

“The able and the disabled aren’t two different kinds of people but the same people at different times.” My Unraveling, by Tom Scocca for NYMag

Best New (to me) Books of 2023 : After a stint as an English major and as a writer myself, I got into a habit of reading dozens of articles a day instead of longer form writing: books. I spent a lot of energy in 2023 getting back to books. Thanks to a great book club (you know who you are) and making space to settle in with a great …

Indiana, the KKK, and me: Currently reading: A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan 📚 Despite being from Indiana, I feel like I’ve heard very little about this book, which covers the rise of the Indiana KKK in the early 1900s. The book’s central story revolves around the Grand Dragon, a bad man whose bad acts …

The trailer for the next Mad Max movie, “Furiosa,” is out now: www.youtube.com/watch 🍿

Britney's Yellow Wallpaper: Finished reading: The Woman in Me by Britney Spears 📚 Come for the juicy tell-all, stay for the damning details on how Britney’s abusive father, codependent mother and opportunist sister ensnared one of the world’s biggest stars into an abusive conservatorship, and consider at length why …

Finished reading: The Forgotten Girls by Monica Potts 📚 Potts brings her reporting background to this memoir about coming of age in Arkansas, one of the poorest, reddest states, with lengthy explorations of the economic and social policies that create conditions in which women struggle to thrive. I …

Looming projects: I was invited to submit to the pop culture fiber craft show at Gallery 1988 again this year. Last year I sold a large Kris Jenner meme quilt. I was delighted to be included and nervous about how my work would be received, and was chuffed to be one of the first artists whose work sold. I immediately …

I’m v excited about the PJ Harvey Tiny Desk concert out today. 🎵 PJ Harvey is one of my favorite musicians because she is a weirdo and an artist in the same vein as a Kate Bush, or even a Bob Dylan, who concentrates on mythology, atmosphere, artistry and sense of place. For a lot of my life, …

Sometimes rules are useful: Created some artsy fartsy rules for myself where I have to finish something old before I start something new, just to keep some momentum going on existing projects. I have several outstanding embroidery, quilting, knitting AND crochet projects, and a loom I refuse to assemble until I knock out one …

Need a brilliant bauble for the holidays? How about a beautiful box of blooming instant miso soup bombs? www.brooklynmisomaru.com/shop/p/mi…

Someone reminded me of the story of Charlie the goat, who played Black Philip in “The Witch,” and had two modes: sleeping or asshole. Method actor or brilliant casting? www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/gene…

🚨 Cat in a basket 🚨 🐱

For the old heads, “No Alternative,” the 1993 AIDS benefit compilation album, turns 30 today. www.stereogum.com/1541231/n…

Made the mistake of telling my family I’ve had “Like a Rock” in my head all day, and now my family is streaming Bob Seger videos and old Chevy commercials.

“More than one-fifth of college students are parents, and about one-tenth are single mothers.” www.nytimes.com/2023/10/2…

Here are some pictures of my cat sleeping like a weirdo. 🐱

My biggest complaint about the slow, excruciating car crash of Twitter/X is that all of my journalist friends moved to Bsky and all my geek friends moved to Mastodon.

One of the stranger parts of watching Golden Bachelor, which otherwise mimics the shiny gloss of the rest of the franchise, is how much they openly discuss death, grief and dying. www.nytimes.com/2023/10/2…

More human and humane: Hilariously (sadly? regretfully?), since I’ve been writing online for public audiences since about 1997, I’ve been thinking about the art of posting, community building, and who benefits and how, for a very long time. All of this (https://blog.ayjay.org/the-three-paths-of-micro-blog/) …

Very excited for the movie: Finished reading: Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann 📚 “For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression. “Only in the mid-nineteenth century, after the growth of industrial cities …

I’m a dummy, but I can’t log into mastodon.social since connecting with micro.blog. What am I doing wrong? Or do I need to log in elsewhere?

Microblogging on the open web - and why care? book.micro.blog

My phone camera has been busted for most of the summer, but tonight I have an appointment to get it fixed. When it is, it’s all over for you suckers (I’m going to post a lot of photos).

While noodling around on other things, I ran across the omg.lol domain (https://home.omg.lol/), clicked around, found Neatnik (https://neatnik.net/), and this fun PHP project where he created a year-long calendar that automatically resizes to fit a single page. See the whole year on one sheet of …

This is one to watch: www.theverge.com/2023/10/2…

Finished reading: The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin 📚 When I realized I’ve read more about him than by him, I had to rectify that problem. So many of the geopolitical problems he discusses are still relevant, and Baldwin’s voice is as clear and urgent as ever.

Finished reading: Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver 📚 It holds up.

Finished reading: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 📚 I forgot how much I love Kingsolver. After I finished this one on a road trip, I turned around and reread Poisonwood Bible on a camping trip.

As a professional poster (derogatory), this is exactly the kind of posting stream I’m interested in supporting for institutional communications. When you speak on behalf of a company or institution, you need the power to own your own platforms and content, the agility of posting to multiple …

My daughter is into block printing at the moment, so I am too. I started carving this shrimp past weekend without a plan, and now I wish I had some background to it, so I’m going to play with making a second stamp that implies water. A shrimp’s gotta shkrimp. 🎨

My ultra rural friend wants to use the Libby app to listen to and read library books but can’t get a library card in her county without paying an exorbitant fee. She lives in an area of the Midwest that is mostly farmland, depopulated by age and brain drain and the death of family farming, and her …

One of my toxic traits is that I think I can make everyone love beets. Another is that I think I can make everyone love beans.

I’m a new poster posting.