Best metaphor I've heard is that using AI is like bringing a forklift to lift the weights at the gym. The point is to build YOUR muscles, not to make the weights go up and down.

thinking about potato house this halloween

Lots of lovely folks want to cook for neighbors, fill community fridges during SNAP shutdown but are intimidated. A mutual aid group in Flatbush, Brooklyn has been feeding 80+ people every single week for a year and a half or so now. Nobody is born knowing how to cook for 80, so here's our guide!

FREE PODCASTING EVENT IN NYC NOV 12 I'm looking forward to speaking with @brihreed.bsky.social @yoweishaw.bsky.social and @evrat.bsky.social about what it really takes to run an independent narrative podcast. RSVP here: www.journalism.cuny.edu/events/how-t...

AI has been creeping into the news all of us read, often without any disclosure. We call for clearly defined standards for U.S. newsrooms: 1️⃣ Clearly define what counts as acceptable use of AI and publish these standards openly 2️⃣ Require AI-use attestations for all writers

Appreciating all the yeses here…so I’d better see all of you sending big $$$ to NPR whenever we decide to do this.

lede = introductory section in journalism bury the lede = hiding the most relevant pieces of a story within other distracting information Allegedly, it’s spelled ‘lede’ to avoid confusion with ‘lead,’ which was the strip of metal that would separate lines of type.

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

Thanks XMTR Fest for an incredible gathering in St Leonards on Sea last week. Thanks to everyone who came to my discussion with Sarah Kate Kramer at our @soundfieldsjournal.bsky.social event. And huge thanks to the 90 of you who participated in the Sea Change audio swarm!

Some exciting news: Kodak announced two new types of film today, and, notably, said it would be directly selling the film to shops, sidestepping a complicated licensing agreement where Kodak hasn't had the right to sell its own film to stores www.404media.co/kodak-is-sel...

www.psypost.org/students-rate-identical-lectures-differently-based-on-professors-gender-researchers-find/# #AcademicSky - it never ends.

OpenAI's VP for education recently said the company wanted to become "core infrastructure" for schools and universities. Any infrastructure, though, always depends on habituating users to its technical affordances - so I've been trying to track how it's doing that 🧵 www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/t...

Calling all freelance fact-checkers! We're in need of some fact-checking assistance during the first week of October—hit us up if you're interested in fact-checking a very fun project. Email Chris ([email protected]) for more details.

"The arch of the moral universe may not, after all, bend towards justice, but it bends towards archives. Collect the scraps, I hear in my head like a whisper. Do not let them rewrite the world. Save all the evidence you can."

sound fields, a journal about the art + practice of documentary audio that i make w/ many brilliant folks just launched its second issue. The subject: archives. i wrote something for it about how to save the truth, we must all become archivists for the future: www.soundfields.org/02-letter-fr...

You know things are rough when the AAUP's advice on how to use social media is just "set all your accounts to private."

fact checking great journalists wa one of the main ways I leaned to be a journalist. I loved the job and getting to be professionally correct. And this fact checking piece in the New Yorker really get to the heart of it . www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

I love my 404 Media subscription and this piece is so illuminating and also funny! There's a real "pay no attention to the entire team of human contractors behind the curtain" energy to the folks using generative AI!

A third of jobs related to race, diversity, and equality that were created in U.S. newsrooms since 2020 are gone as of this summer. 
 @hanaatameez.bsky.social with a months-long investigation and new data on American journalism's turn away from DEI initiatives. www.niemanlab.org/2025/09/from...

This is in line with my observations around the people in podcasting/audio industry who are the most excited about LLM style podcast “innovations” are never the people who already make excellent podcasts.

The mental health benefits of not knowing any history right now must be massive. Moving through your day with total equanimity. What happens next? Who knows? Maybe something good

new NPR podcast alert -- sources & methods will look at national security news & why it matters. hosted by the incomparable mary louise kelly. check it out each thursday.

Some of the world's smartest people are deeply invested in the idea that LLMs are actually creative forces. They are not. They are vacuum cleaners attached to a firehose.

Midnight cricket party, Taughannock State Park, New York, USA on 16th August 2025 – by @kallipearl.bsky.social fieldrecordings.xyz/2025/08/18/m...

Found this @jasonkoebler.bsky.social story about why AI isn’t a viable business model for journalism to be extremely well done and oddly hopeful www.404media.co/the-medias-p...

Wish i could attend this!

Amazing: MIT researchers revealed how ChatGPT etc are destroying our brains and booby-trapped the report to expose those who want to use AI to ostensibly summarize the results. t.co/JXeTALBPds

Are you a journalist writing about a current heatwave? The images you choose are critical to the story. The @climateoutreach.bsky.social team have shown some ideas here which help stress the risks rather than the typical ice creams: www.climatevisuals.org/how-do-you-p...

Thanks to all the friends and strangers who attended SEA CHANGE last week during Tribeca. Still riding that sunset high of making a beautiful ruckus through the streets to the edge of this island. Next stop XMTR fest in the UK in Sept!

So terribly sad to lose my former CUNY colleague, a journalist and generous teacher students loved and learned from. Tom Robbins, Versatile Muckraker for The Village Voice, Dies at 76 www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/b...

Join us on June 11 for a sound walk unlike any you’ve ever done before. Details and rsvp tinyurl.com/seachangeswarm

this is maybe trite at this point but it is in your interest to find ways to create things. basically everyone wants you to be consuming nonstop. making stuff, from cooking to photography or whatever, can help you feel more in control. doesn’t even have to be something you share with other people

It’s honestly so weird to live in a country right next to my country where our federal election barely registers in the news cycle.

This is the secret. Everyone - EV. ERY. ONE. - thinks they're The One who won't be bested by an incisive interview. As long as the journalist is polite & just... keeps... asking... smart... questions, every last person they interview will think they're the only one to ever be on top of it.

Turn a pile of dirt into a cathedral to a God who has long abandoned you. Turn the fantastic wealth of the family that raised you into a curse that will never leave this house. Turn water into hotter water. Turn your google docs into a podcast.

"Adjusting for inflation, tenure-track faculty are now paid 10.2 % less than before Covid... While 'median pay increases for most higher education employees in 2024–25 remained strong, they have dropped...” www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t... #edsky #highered

Do you want to make longform audio documentaries? No idea where to start? My class with @radiobootcamp.bsky.social is back this June! It's online, and capped at 12 people. Sign up today, this thing always sells out radiobootcamp.org/classes/how-...

If you've enjoyed my posts and random findings on radio history, or sincere snark about podcasting, you will probably like the newsletter I've just started: continuous-wave.beehiiv.com

Ok so I was horrified when I first tried American Smart Food in 2020. Like all snack foods I thought I knew as a Canadian, it was somehow shittier here. But good news @jayasaxena.com - the original recipe still exists in Canada! (I mean it’s Canada so the oil is prob canola but cheese still #3!)

Issue 2 is shaping up to be soooo good!

Always look to see what the tech bros want for their own kids: small class sizes with human teachers, human tutors with expert content knowledge, cell phone restrictions in classrooms, high per pupil spending, the arts and humanities--and much more they say is too costly for public schools.

I’ve been having a wide variety of really intense anxiety dreams non stop for weeks. They are getting so weirdly specific : latest is I was debuting a 5-channel sound installation at a museum and when it started to play, someone had inserted “midroll” style ads like every 60 secs.

21 of my colleagues at New York Public Radio were laid off today. NYPR is also ending our iconic music program "New Sounds" unless the org can find financial support for the show or a buyer. A message from New Sounds host John Schaefer: www.instagram.com/p/DGgflm5xz1...

This was so moving and a reminder that we don’t have to live in a world without rituals, without attunement to the seasons, without ways of calling back to the Earth and offering something of ourselves. We can live an a world teeming with life💫❄️

Thanks to everyone who came out to celebrate the premiere of my piece Orchard Chorus with a wassail-inspired performance on Sunday. And thank you to Nika of Greenpoint Cidery and the Oral History Summer School and Wave Farm for the support of this project. (Online audio to come)

Following their listening party at On Air Fest and in anticipation of our forthcoming Archives Issue, @kallipearl.bsky.social @bartona104.bsky.social and Sonja Williams shared with us this annotated playlist of inventive vintage audio from the 1930s to 1970s. www.soundfields.org/thrifting