Katie Dippold and crew are managing Southern Gothic in a off-Cape island. It's not just Hiro Murai direction that makes Teddy Perkins feel like a plausible Widow's Bay resident.

Prompt engineering, via Philip K. Dick's "The Penultimate Truth" (1964).

* Arendt, Irigiray

I loved talking to @npr.org's Meghna Chakrabarti for On Point this summer. They re-aired the interview this weekend if you're curious to give it a listen! Link in comments.

Excellent new work out from my lab exemplifying how philosophy, cognitive science, and computer science must put their resources together in order to make headway on characterizing the capabilities of AI systems, especially when those capabilities are in a mentalistic idiom.

It was a pleasure to host yesterday's @interintellect.bsky.social salon with @carissaveliz.bsky.social. The book is superb, an exemplary work of what we sweet summer children used to call a public intellectual.

The theological arachnics she would have unleashed on the name, message, and prophesying of Anthropic appearing at a joint press conference about a papal encyclical... My Adam Curtis doc would note she passed away in 2010, the year of the first ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge...

How about some 20 minute Tiny Desk lectures on politics and History

in the u.s., print and ebook: bookshop.org/p/books/the-... in canada from arsenal direct arsenalpulp.com/Books/T/The-.... and the week we hit the bestsellars: lithub.com/the-independ...

We are nearing capacity and the event date, and in addition to zeugma I have some free codes to offer. DM me in interested.

As tech companies have started blaming science fiction for their AI's shambolatry, it's time to face up to Melville's culpability for the Canvas hack.

A diamond in the rough podcast on health and AI, a rare combination of front-line ER experience with genuine knowledge of the AI research landscape. codeandcure.buzzsprout.com/2502446/follow

Theology as a subset of spiritual care makes much more sense, pedagogically and intellectually, than spiritual care as a downstream, unsophisticated repackaging of theology.

"What is a problem with individual liberty revealed by Emerson? Palantir just needs to confirm its exact coordinates. Also, any 'close readings' of further Emerson will be reported to the administration."

Film you've watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, Marvel, Disney, or Ghibli.

The ethical parallel is the complete vapidity of "alignment" from data, as if norms were optimization. You can't infer a negative ("Don't recommend self-harm") from sheer absence of behavior. Which is why even with ghost work behind the scenes LLM's will continue to violate.

How a neurosymbolic approach outperforms an LLM (VLA) on a novel problem-solving task AND consumes much less energy in the process. arxiv.org/abs/2602.19260

Oh, you saint America don't love you So I could never love you In spite of everything -- The Song Book of Ezra

I just lost my wedding ring at Newark airport terminal C in the bathroom near departures when you first enter near door 3. ~10:30am Eastern Time Friday April 17th Our flight doesn't leave until 2pm DM ME IF YOU GET INFORMATION ABOUT THIS @phoenix-rights.bsky.social is at lost & found now

The future should not be defined by those most insulated from the consequences of their actions. But it has been. I wrote why, and how we could try and change our future briefs: substack.com/@monikabiels...

I'm not "past deadline," my draft is so powerful I cannot release it to reviewers.

Looking forward to this book and the May @interintellect.bsky.social salon discussing it.

Did I mention I am hiring? Yes, I’m going to repost this frequently

He keeps asking "Will I get to heaven?" in a plaintive, spaced-out tone because he simply has no clue what to do with an adversary who will not respond to him and can't be belittled and badgered into a deal.

If I were a Polymarket-betting critter I could have made so much money on "Some AI figure in the Epstein files will veer off topic to take a shot at Pat Langley."

Had been thinking for a while of getting to Tristram Shandy, but anno gemini 2026 it's a little much to see the medical fraud is named Dr. Slop.

As the New Yorker floats an ontological shrug about Claude's "self" (with in-house philosophical backing), his concept of "pre-emptive registration" deserves a strong revival to take on "alignment," "explainability," and other "well, we humans aren't so _____ ourselves" muddles.

CALL FOR PITCHES @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not. Details below!

Stirring insight into Twin Peaks, which invites revisiting Mulholland Drive and even his artistic credo "Catching the Big Fish." It takes an odd persistence of psyche to have "captured not only personal pain but a shared longing: for time to stop and atrocities to end and goodness to prevail."

a fantastic book, and an actual example of a "mechanical turk"

A legal asylum-seeker who works at Chipotle and plays music at a church in Maine went missing. His pastor searched and searched, eventually finding his abandoned car with the keys on the floor. ICE grabbed him. No criminal record. No explanation.

The thread has some great teaching insight, and it makes me think this article would pair well with the Kevin Roose Claudeswarm post as a perspective on how narrowly the terms of "adoption" are imagined.

As Chief Executive Function Officer it's time to sound the alarm-- if I don't do something useful with this draft I'm going to lose psychic permission to keep drinking coffee.

This wasn’t an easy one to record: on the murder of Renee Nicole Good, Gestapo comparisons, and the gendered dimensions of both the murder and the right’s defense of it podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i...

The fact I am enjoying Ducks, Newburyport, the fact holy-moly is it long, Faulkner's like enough already, Faulkner if lived on North Shore, Benji's whole chapter just on fried oysters...

"Hi Carol. Our feelings for you poets haven't changed, the republic just needs a little space." #philsky

The day they introduce ethics into what we do, they might as well shut us down. — Slow Horses S2, E3

Are you a student passionate about computing research? Spend your summer with the CRA-WP DREU program. Don’t wait - learn more and apply today: https://cra.org/cra-wp/dreu/

‘Death remains my intimate shadow partner. It has been with me since birth, always hovering close by. I understand one day we will finally waltz together into the ether. I hope when that time comes, I die with the satisfaction of a life well-lived, unapologetic, joyful, & full of love.’ —Alice Wong

Massholes can be difficult, painful, yet necessary channels of care, like asbestos remediation (a good frame of AI critique, btw, as the podcast bros come and go/talking of abundance and AlphaGo).

November in Boston is here, changing my username to a clever seasonal affective disorder nickname (just my username).

I Saw Satan's Gradient Descent

It is hard not to think about posthumous baptism, taking over the dead's identity to bolster one's tradition (in the name of saving them)-- reanimating them in media for a different kind of canon-formation attains another level of perversity.

Adrienne Mayor's "Gods and Robots" discusses this myth and many other ancient robot legends across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Now I can't wait to read this book as follow up.

This is Boston coffee nerd excellence

Liaising between religious studies and computer science has only become more fraught as tech claims religious connossieurship with the unblinking assuredness of Zuckerberg with Sweet Baby Ray's, making me all the more grateful for pieces like this.

Build It Or Not, You Are Still Going To Die: Ernest Becker's Chaplaincy To AI Ethics

Mr. Murdoch said he would take care of the flowers himself.