Wednesday, November 26, 2025 →
Determined to finish at least one more novel this year, and this one fits the bill. Currently reading: Moderation by Elaine Castillo 📚
Newsletter
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.
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.
How the networking technology sector is changed by the introduction of AI.
Wednesday, November 12, 2025 →
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 peer with all the other people on the web, that is what we are still fighting for, and in fact, we need to rebuild.
“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
Sunday, November 9, 2025 • 1
“… 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 between and among texts. What follows is a discussion of the strategies of intertextuality.”
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.
Rhetorical velocity: A strategic approach in digital communication that asks the creator to predict the trade offs inherent to different tactics, using an old-fashioned press release to illustrate the idea in practice.
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, and the challenges and opportunities they pose for composition. This framework provides a critical vocabulary for compositionists seeking to help those who negotiate emerging networked publics.”
On virtuous cycles: “Culture is the core of the virtuous cycle, in which shared principles guide you toward collective goals.”
What is this site and why am I doing it?
Sunday, November 9, 2025 • 3
I’ve stopped posting on most social media and moved to the fediverse. I still browse other platforms to keep up with trends and friends, but I only post on IG (friends only) and here. What I share here is separate from but related to my professional life—I’m thinking out loud and making room for rough, unfinished ideas. I write mainly for myself, but if others find it useful, that’s great. This is how I approach learning and communicating online.
Practicing pluralism in risky spaces
Saturday, November 8, 2025 • 2
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 the folks at LGM who interviewed me on the subject a few years ago. Jill and I differed (and still do) on the meat of many issues, but have a lot of our thinking in common about how to handle disagreement and advance our ideas in common (and risky!
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
Saturday, November 1, 2025 • 3
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 nearly forty years old, it continues to offer insights into how we understand technology’s role in our lives. Haraway used the cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism, as a metaphor for understanding identity in an increasingly technological and scientific world.
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.