There are so many reasons for people to be suspicious of one another right now. It’s tiring. I think we are all weary.

Yes, I wrote something about brainrot. Yes, I know you may find this cringe. But I wrote a whole dissertation about the way animals shape culture. I see it happening now, with AI & can’t help worrying that our attachments to nature might be used make us more comfortable with the new unrealities.

We’re back to using paper again on campus, and the debates are heating up in the faculty copy room.

Maybe you’ve seen those viral TikTok bunnies, on trampolines? If you have, don’t judge me, but I was briefly fooled by them. I wrote about thieves of joy, and how those unknowing bunnies are a little icon of this moment: one where our sense of reality is starting to glitch.

Professors are being encouraged to assign less reading material, because the kids can’t process it. But I am genuinely concerned about kids losing the ability to effectively skim: a crucial navigation skill. Preference-based scrolling through slip doesn’t teach this.

I’ve started to feel like friction (something I’ve never particularly liked) has become a weird attractor for me. It’s like some mineral that I’m missing from my diet, and I have to eat bitter things in order to get it.

Trailer is out! This summer we're releasing a seven episode limited series podcast on AI in schools called The Homework Machine. Its based on over 100 interviews with teachers and students, and the student interviews especially are funny, gut-wrenching, real talk from the youth.

If I could like this ten times, I would. Reading it felt like a big, long, yes. Thinking about having my students read it in the fall.

"I am less like a moth, when I read a book, and more like a mammal." I always love @beamarovich.bsky.social's work, and I can't wait to read more of her reflections on mystery and others' interior lives in the digital age.

Performative reading is getting dragged online. In part, it’s triggering suspicion: there’s a lot of moral outrage about technology, so it’s a good time to virtue signal with a book.

Exbodiment: I love that way of putting it. I agree that this is a difficult, and deeply intuitive, practice that’s at risk right now.

AI like ChatGPT is trained to follow a protocol when they talk about religion: no bias, no advocacy (essentially no theology). But ChatGPT admits that complete neutrality might be impossible. What happens when a machine built for objectivity starts doing theology anyway?

“If the hipster represents cultural taste as sorting algorithm, and the nerd represents cultural taste determined by sorting algorithm, the zombie is the point at which we stop consuming culture-commodities altogether and start directly consuming the sorting algorithm itself.”

I just picked my 9 year old daughter up from summer camp this weekend, and I can’t look at news about the Texas floods without crying.

“What people describe as ‘the end of the Internet’ isn’t a real end. We are waking up—the Otherworld’s glamor has faded and we are coming to in the mortal world.” Loved this; though I’m pretty convinced that otherworlds are a feature of our mortality, not a bug.

Sean Illing interviewed The NY Times reporter who wrote that now infamous article about everyone cheating their way through college.

For my religious studies & theology friends who have been interested in the spiritual uses of AI: “Within self-optimisation culture online, where some want a weekly workout routine, others essentially want a personal spiritual trainer.”

Forty years ago Donna Haraway proposed the cyborg as an ironic feminist myth of resistance. Today, I feel more like a cyborg than ever & authoritarian-style politics are infused with the destabilizing irony that Haraway used as a tool of critique. I wanted to see how her political myth holds up.

My prediction for how this will play out: Most colleges will doubledown on AI even as employers realize their graduates know next to nothing. Elite colleges will market themselves as being non-AI. Not using AI will be a bespoke luxury commodity that's highly sought after.

For those of you who’ve read that piece in The NY Times on ChatGPT and spiritual psychosis (or that similar Rolling Stone piece), Katherine Dee explains it as just another enchanted response to a new technology (it’s happened before, it will happen again).

Is theology dying? Personally, I think it is. @beamarovich.bsky.social interviewed me and many others on this topic and wrote an excellent piece for The Other Journal. I recommend reading it. theotherjournal.com/2025/06/is-t...

Like you’ve never dared to do before, lol

A wonderful 'kind of report' on the death, or something, of the academic discipline of #theology, by @beamarovich.bsky.social. #academia theotherjournal.com/2025/06/is-t...

“But perhaps the affirmation of being valueless to a culture with questionable values…is one of the best things we can pass along to others, in whatever conditions of struggle they might find themselves in, and in whatever form they stumble upon theology.” Great piece from @beamarovich.bsky.social

It's been a really rough week at my place of work, but this conversation with @beamarovich.bsky.social and many of my friends has made me feel buoyed and accompanied in my professional despair theotherjournal.com/2025/06/is-t...

This is the weird paradox that makes the continued existence of theology so tenuous and unlikely…

What do you do when your academic field feels like it’s on life support? I talked to some of my colleagues in theology about the difficult feeling of watching something important change (maybe even end). We also talked about what it means to keep showing up anyway. open.substack.com/pub/beatrice...

Steak & Shake, cashing in on the sexual politics of beef tallow.

Remember when Republicans used to be really into states’ rights?

Land snorkeling - paying attention to where you actually are, in the flesh, and what you’re actually seeing - is apparently a summer travel trend this year. Being where you actually are, and paying attention to it, is a travel niche that people will shell out $ to do.

Politics is at least 75% gossip.

I often hear that things feel overwhelming and that people aren't sure what to do to make things better. Here is a "what to do 101" with lots of great baby steps that move us toward the world we want to live in. kettering.org/feeling-para...

As many of us people who study or work in tech tried to tell y’all, move fast & break things was always about POWER, not progress.

This very old tree on my street just fell down the other morning. I heard a large boom, and there it was.

Death spiral. AI-edited 'nonprofessional' opinion content will erode what's left of your credibility as an actual news journal *and* still fail to outcompete with the frothing ragebait and unhinged conspiracy theory people can get from a million other places. I give this paper three years.

From protest anthems to whale songs, music has always played a vital role in the environmental movement. But what if singing, itself, is a form of environmental activism? Hildegard of Bingen probably would have said that, at the very least, it was activating something important in and for the earth.

An idea: a course (religious studies/theology) on reading. The content could source primary texts in different traditions & engage with secondary lit to help students understand practices that have developed for reading and talking about these texts (lectio divina, midrash, etc…)

"AI is no problem because I can always tell the difference between real human thought and crap computer writing" is the new "Donald Trump will never be elected President of the United States."

What is a reasonable time limit for an academic talk in the year 2025, in this time of depleted attention spans? How long do you think you’re physically capable of listening to someone talk about a complex idea that you might only be half interested in?

Another piece on the rise of Christianity among Gen Z. From the interview sound bites, from young tradcaths, it’s really difficult not to read the rising interest in Christianity as clearly correlated with a hard rightward turn, and a sense that the left has abandoned family, marriage, and virtue.

Contrapasso

An insanely good piece on the history of literacy, and a reflection on how generative AI in its origins is both similar and different: on the origins of writing as statecraft, it’s transformation into soul craft, and the question of whether AI will be similar.

No, seriously. It's a colossal hype bubble. VC tech bros have poured 100s of billions into it and now they need to keep inflating it for as long as possible. It's their only chance of seeing actual return on their investment.

I just finished teaching a college course called Doing Nothing. I thought that teaching a course about doing nothing, and wasting time, might heal me from the post-pandemic teaching burnout that’s never quite gone away. It didn’t, exactly. But it did do something else.