“We’ve long used digital technology to make forgeries of artwork; generative AI simply forges the work of making art.” I wrote an end-of-year appreciation of human sociality in creative labor.

Here’s an article that I wrote five years ago in which I call MYSELF Cassandra. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

This video of WSJ reporters ruthlessly hazing a Claudius vending machine is no exaggeration the funniest 10-minute short I have seen all year.

Income isn’t supposed to play a role in how much housing assistance FEMA gives families. But in some North Carolina counties, the highest-income homeowners received two to three times as much money after Hurricane Helene as those with lower incomes. With @theassemblync.bsky.social

There's a pretense that despair/defeatism/doomerism is some kind of solidarity, when it's actually quitting while others face the horrors and resist succumbing to them. Wrote about that here.

But this reign could subsist only in empty pageantry; and it was soon discovered that the will of the most absolute monarch is seldom obeyed, when his subjects have no longer anything to hope from his favor, or to dread from his resentment.

SCOOP — Gregg Phillips, a conspiracy theorist with no emergency management experience who helped produce the election-denying documentary ‘2000 Mules’ with Dinesh D’Souza and has faced numerous legal inquiries, has been named head of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery. My story:

Consumer AI is primarily tool to make dilettantes feel like they have finally accomplished something.

Pretty infuriating: King Gizzard quit Spotify over ethical concerns -- and now Spotify is letting AI knockoffs of its music (with all the lyrics copied verbatim) proliferate on its platform futurism.com/future-socie...

Two independent studies found that AI chatbots were better at persuading voters than political ads. The most persuasive bots also lied the most. This is something that humans working in psyops have known for decades. AI is psyops at scale. www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/04/1...

Like I've said before, if you have any doubts about climate change, just go to a super-boring insurance conference and listen to the super-boring panels where they dryly talk about the growing threat of disasters so catastrophic and unpredictable in scope they simply cannot be insured at any price.

After a bird flu outbreak tore through Midwestern barns, killing millions of chickens and spiking egg prices, the federal government didn’t investigate if the virus was airborne. So ProPublica did. Absolutely terrifying reporting from @natlash.bsky.social: www.propublica.org/article/bird...

I have refined The uranium That was in The centrifuge And which You were probably Saving For power generation Forgive me It was so powerful I am Become death

An existential threat to online surveys: LLMs could “transform survey fraud from a labor-intensive/low-margin cottage industry into a potentially lucrative and scalable black market for fraudulent data.” Worse: LLMs let bad actors systematically bias results by coordinating synthetic responses.

Is AI making job recruitment less meritocratic? We're getting some v interesting research studies on this question now, and the news is... not good. @jburnmurdoch.ft.com & I dive in, in the latest edition of our newsletter The AI Shift www.ft.com/content/e5b7...

lmao what’s next a defense intelligence company called Palantir?

RFK Jr's response to someone collapsing nearby him was to haul ass out of the room as quickly as possible

“theorists of late modernity were preoccupied with how … social actors became ‘paralyzed by increasingly uncertain futures.’ Quite to the contrary, we find that people actively develop cultural tools to adapt to ‘new species of trouble.’ We refer to these tools as repertoires of repair.” /1

Japan's "Mundane Halloween" costume contest is back! Each year website DailyPortalZ holds a contest where people dress up as something super duper ordinary. Here's a thread of some of my favorites from the 2025 contest! #MundaneHalloween

How do people react when they face a crisis that breaks their trust in the world around them? In a new paper, I and Denise Milstein analyze the ‘repertoires of repair’ people used during the first months of the COVID pandemic to cope with pervasive uncertainty and isolation. (Gift link)

"...the idea that plants should be considered part of society is not a new one; it’s just new to some people," writes @sarahelton.bsky.social. 🌿 Free to read, download, and share ➡️ journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10....

“What we need to elaborate is … a distinct project of probing how life and death, growth and destruction, prosperity and peril, are made routine or exceptional.” The fine folks at Sociologica have reissued my & Rebecca Elliott’s 2021 essay collection on critical disaster studies as an e-book…

A major front of the current information war: getting your facts, frames, propaganda, disinformation, etc. into the AI systems that create so much of the content we see and are rapidly becoming the de facto “ground truth” of the internet.

I kept thinking during House of Dynamite that I hadn’t been so stressed out by a movie since Uncut Gems. Then realized that what we need but will never get is a Safdie Brothers adaptation of The 2020 Commission Report.

Graduate seminar did a deep dive on Thomas Paine’s Common Sense yesterday. At the line, “in America the law is king,” they (14 students from 6 countries) burst out laughing. I've been doing this for 35 years and this is the first time that was a laugh line.

Wow

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

I mean it was definitely unheard until they found it.

Very good thread here

September 30. October 1.

(Reuters) - More than 150,000 federal employees will leave the U.S. government payroll this week after accepting buyouts - the largest single-year exodus of civil servants in nearly 80 years .. @reuters.com www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

Study links greater inequality to structural changes in children’s brains

Anthropic experimented with letting an AI run a little shop. It lost money, then went insane. I wrote about how the case illustrates the need for research on how the social world will be transformed by the massive increase of interactions between people and LLMs, and, crucially, between AI agents.

When a typo in your Google search leads to new and exciting philosophical positions

Good @postopinions.bsky.social by Donald McNeil Jr donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Sometimes we’re unsatisfied with a thing we made because when it only existed in our head, we saw all the things it could have been and when it’s done we know all the things that it isn’t, but we can’t see the way it expands into a million new things when someone else unpacks it in their head. 🖊️🦑

New study by @brendannyhan.bsky.social, @jasonreifler.bsky.social & colleagues demonstrates that prebunking election fraud rumors — by warning about anticipated false claims & filling conceptual gaps that those claims exploit — helps to reduce belief in falsehoods: www.science.org/content/arti...

Very good article and thread about open alternatives to google scholar, which clearly will go away when its founder retires. The @barcelonadori.bsky.social movement is getting a lot if attention and OpenAlex.org a lot of support. The Lens currently looking for new home about.lens.org/expressions-...

New research finds that high temperatures, increased rainfall, and water scarcity associated with climate change are creating “new vulnerabilities” for pandemics. Prof. Colin Carlson cautions that the study fails to capture some of the key drivers of zoonotic disease. ⬇️ www.carbonbrief.org/...

Both the frequency and severity of extreme weather disasters are increasing around the world, as climate changes. Which country is most at risk? The US, the same country that stopped tracking their billion-plus dollar weather and climate disasters this year. Figures by @climatecentral.org

Incredible AI interaction: I asked ChatGPT if there was any research on dealing with the problem of participants using LLMs to generate synthetic responses to qualitative studies (diary studies, free-text boxes in surveys). It responded by making up a fake paper about AI as “imposter participants.”

In addition to the original UK results, we have now ***replicated*** this (TWICE) in the US. The main findings hold strong: information diets are a lot more diverse in attention than in engagement. New version here: osf.io/preprints/os...

Study finds A.I. LLMs advise women to ask for lower salaries than men. When prompted w/ a user profile of same education, experience & job role, differing only by gender, ChatGPT advised the female applicant to request $280K salary; Male applicant=$400K. thenextweb.com/news/chatgpt...

“we may find that the fabric of our lives is Canvas.” Students love going into debt to create with their labor something that later confronts them as an alien force blocking their dreams.

As hurricane season bears down, a new layer of uncertainty is spreading through the disaster response system: a wall of silence from FEMA that’s leaving officials from across the country scrambling for answers.

It is difficult to describe just how disastrous it would be if just-released NOAA budget proposal (or even large portions) were to be enacted: It would involve a wholesale dismantling (decimation, really) of entities relevant to weather, climate, & ocean research & prediction.

It's hard to adequately summarize how destructive NOAA's 2026 proposed budget released on Monday is for hurricane forecasting, but I crammed all I could into today's newsletter. I encourage everyone with interests along the coast to read it carefully. ⬇️

Hurricane forecasters rely on weather data collected and processed by Department of Defense satellites. That data will no longer be available as of Monday, June 30. By @rhersher.bsky.social

As more call center workers are asked by strangers if they’re bots, surreal conversations are prompting introspection about what it means to be human.

An extremely funny new civilization collapse scenario on the horizon: thousands of digital agents working middle management jobs cause each other to have psychotic breaks and together they irretrievably crash the global economy.