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...

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it). But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

At a time of profound public confusion over vaccine policy and access, the City of Boston will host free vaccine clinics throughout the city through Dec. 15.

oof www.thenerdreich.com/libertariani...

Oh. My. God. www.popsci.com/environment/...

🟠 Orange Line closure: the MBTA has announced there will be no train service between Forest Hills and North Station this Saturday, September 27 through Sunday, September 28. Use shuttle buses between Forest Hills and Back Bay. Use the Green Line between Copley and North Station. mbta.com/orangeline

So many of the half-baked AI implementations are happening in professional arenas that have been hollowed out by extraction and divestment. No journalist needs a writing aid unless they’re being paid too little to write too much, no teacher needs a commenting tool unless they’re overextended.

If I'd known ahead of time that @imaniperry.bsky.social would be the emcee and interlocutor with Justice KBJ tonight, I would have paid double.

Do you love public transit and science fiction? Of course you do! Now you can have them at the same time! Next Tues, 9/16, at 6pm, an astonishing panel of activists and creators are coming together to talk about the future of transit. Seriously do not miss this one-of-a-kind event. luma.com/0olo6szj

WATCH: Tonight on public television across the nation, the premiere of the new documentary “Becoming Thurgood.” It’s so good. Check your PBS and public television schedules. It is part of #HBCUWeek on PBS.

The "using AI for completing assignments is like using a forklift at the weight room" analogy leads me to notice that most gyms I visit have many weight machines and comparatively few free weights. Extending the analogy - if gen AI is the forklift, then is the instructor the weight machine?

Overheard on the first day of my "responsible AI" course: "I thought this was going to be another one of those 'rah-rah AI' classes until I saw that he has us spending the first month reading the print edition of @karenhao.bsky.social's _Empire of AI_".

Win the battle, lose the war? www.wired.com/story/anthro...

This weekend is Get Out the Vote (GOTV) weekend! JOIN US! We will be knocking doors in: West Roxbury Charlestown Roslindale Roxbury Join us! RSVP here: bit.ly/R4BRoxbury bit.ly/R4BRoslindale bit.ly/R4BWestRoxbury bit.ly/R4BCharlestown More to come! Let’s go! 💪🏿💪🏿💪🏿

I was doing some random research and I found out Jamaica Plain High, Hyde Park High, Mario Umana Harbor School/Tech & the Charles E. Mackey School were all closed in 1989… No one has laid eyes on a letterman’s jacket, basketball, football or baseball jersey or even a t shirt from them all since.

Always-on recording with notification by a giant corporation such as Meta = bad. Always-on recording *without* notification by a "smaller, underdog startup" = sure; why not?

I wasn't prepared for the conversation with a recent graduate who was going to apply to medical school but decided that they could have a bigger effect, on more people, by..."pivoting" to work on solving the existential risks posed by AI.

What? It doesn't accept "Luddite"??

"AI fluency frameworks in higher education advocate for teaching responsible usage of AI, but none of them talk about the impossibility of our current situation." substack.com/@marcwatkins...

i think a lot about how zotero is actually one of the technologies academia actually should be pushing on students and faculty versus the lake-guzzling, town poisoning, and labor exploiting chatbots

This fall, I'll teach from/with @karenhao.bsky.social 's _Empire of AI_ in an undergrad/grad course on "responsible AI". @hchoi.bsky.social is also going to teach that book in one of her courses. If you will, too, then let's talk: we'd like to compare notes! +

“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”― Zora Neale Hurston

"When Ms. Morris said she was afraid to cook with the tap water because of the sediment, the Meta employee suggested that she try boiling the water before using it. The company has denied that its employee said that." www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/t...

"Asked how he sees the impasse between content creators and AI companies being resolved, Zhao said these tools were not designed to be the ultimate solution." www.theregister.com/2025/07/11/d...

🗣️Today we're launching a campaign to raise $250,000 to keep Global Voices alive and thriving. 👉🏿We’re ad-free, paywall-free, and community-powered — but funding cuts and a tough media landscape are putting us at risk. #KeepGVStrong🌱 globalvoices.org/2025/07/09/s...

I teach a "Foundations of HCI" class covering the history of Human-Computer Interaction going back to Vannevar Bush's Atlantic article in 1945 & explaining how U.S. gov funding for science catalyzed this field. Here's a public lecture I gave summarizing: www.hcde.washington.edu/news/article...

haha "This episode originally ran as 'Capitalism: What Makes Us Free?'" www.npr.org/2025/07/10/1...

‘Sinners’ on Max Will Include a Black American Sign Language Version

The lastest Nurturing Minds newsletter is out! Read Junk, chatarra, & screen time here: nurturing-minds.beehiiv.com/p/junk-chata...

"Amnesty International is seeking a consultant to deliver two distinct research outputs addressing the deployment of facial recognition technologies (FRT) and their associated human rights harms. +

"Calling time savings an 'AI dividend' reveals everything wrong with how we're thinking about this technology. Dividends go to shareholders, not workers." substack.com/@marcwatkins...

(This is about USA-based companies.)

Something really important about organizations’ decisions to adopt AI tools which people need to understand is this: it often comes down to a room of a handful of people who are simply uninformed and think it’s just a new norm they’ll be left behind on if they don’t find a use for it in their work.

Does your work explore mis/disinformation, scams, hate speech, or other forms of harmful information online? We are convening a CSCW workshop to bring together a global community focused on information disorder. We welcome 2-6 page submissions, due August 1. cscw2025infodisorder.netlify.app