this is critical and very important

"kai su, teknon"

ask me what it's like to be an unbounded professional in an org that understands itself as a bunch of arrows between bounded boxes

There's a first word angle, too: "In one YouTube comment, the mother of a child with Down syndrome wrote that her child said “mama” and “dada” for the first time right after watching the show."

Doctora Older is underselling, it’s EXCELLENT political science fiction. I love these books

Fascinating piece about why your world is the way it is

i mean sure, why not

LinkedIn posts, too

An underrated addendum to the Bowling Alone story is that North America's largest bowling operator (Bowlero) is a publicly traded company whose business model involves buying mom and pop alleys, shutting down the leagues, and trying to attract casual, higher paying, one-off players.

Support independent news written and edited by humans!

‘The grieving are not allowed to grieve, the reunited to celebrate. The repeated disruption of Palestinian funerals and prisoner releases has been bolstered by military orders that proscribe and punish expressions of Palestinian emotion.’ @selmadabbagh.bsky.social: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...

Nice to see @michaelerard.bsky.social in the gift shop

The second issue of The Book Supplement is here 📚🎉 Book reviews, not too long, delivered every few weeks. Read and subscribe (it's free!) to support independent book criticism. 👇

I was starting to really dig the new pope, but I see he’s getting into the adversarial ventriloquizing of God as well, which reveals another layer of the whole sorry business.

Then couth

First step is to get kempt

today's goal: be ept, apt, and full of hap

In Um… I have a chapter on Kermit Schafer, who made a media empire out of bloopers in the 1960s—some original recordings, others re-creations (and controversially so).

While I’m giving advice, you’ve packed too much for the trip. You will only wear 50% of the pants and read 50% of the books.

A periodic reminder that the index to Bye Bye I Love You rocks, one of its many charms. Amazon now sells the book for under 20 bucks. bit.ly/4s21RW3

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but even bureaucrats get the blues and have to step off the ride for a while. What you do is far more challenging. So take a break. Assess. Gather yourself. Consider the path thus far traveled. Move on. Be glad you’re not a bureaucrat.

A periodic reminder that the index to Bye Bye I Love You rocks, one of its many charms. Amazon now sells the book for under 20 bucks. bit.ly/4s21RW3

I’d really like seeing more studies about how students actually use AI, sort of like this one. theconversation.com/college-stud...

I approve this ship

Today is 56 years since my father returned from Vietnam, where he'd spent a year as a Special Forces medic, AMA

Nativism will ruin Maine (and everywhere else it exists) www.pressherald.com/2026/03/27/w...

How we name our COVID variants today

“I found a writing voice, the voice of a person who was informed, fair-minded, and always temperate — the voice, not of the person I was, but of the person I wanted to be.” — Tracy Kidder www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/b...

Superb resource to study human brain development, out in @nature.com 🧪🧠 An atlas showing how patterns of functional connectivity between brain regions change from birth to old age “Functional hierarchy of the human neocortex across the lifespan” www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I wrote this book which argues it’s fine and better for kids to type, actually. I am not doing any interviews on the topic any longer, and instead. Also I have been interviewed by more people at this point than ever bought the book so maybe read it!

We Have Always Been Surrendering Cognitively

the AI book club scams still come; this latest one has no punctuation in it, as if real humans were known to be so inconsistent in their use of it that they eschewed it entirely

Pretty presumptuous of such people to think they get to direct the wrath of God like it’s a firehose

If you want to preserve human cognitive skills, increase distress tolerance.

This sexy paper posits "System 3," or reaching for artificial cognition support outside of individual judgments--as if humans have always been brains in vats: disconnected, isolated, stewing in their own juices. They call an escaping brain "cognitive surrender." papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Depend on readers for the party invites, not your living, is the future

1992: Treaty of Maastricht signed in Maastricht 2026: skeleton of d'Artagnan found (maybe) www.dutchnews.nl/2026/03/rema...

This article on cuts to NIH funding shows the difficulty in measuring the "value" of scientific research in any substantive, societally salient and politically translatable way. 1/2 www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Excellent reporting from the UAF student newspaper www.uafsunstar.com/news/alaska-...

I never thought my first appearance in the LRB would be a letter correcting Steve Shapin, but there you go

I used to think Angus King had his eye on the ball. He has to go.

There has been a faith in the revelatory power of the verbatim's raw phonetic details that comes from a positivist orientation and a bias for the written over the spoken. The bigger the difference between the two, the more damning the truth to be indicated. But something else is going on here...

It's why I often wonder whether the chaotic global disorder of the 17th century might be a more useful historical frame of comparison for our own era then the relatively ordered global system of the late 20th.

Wow! "An Agent-First Preference in a Patient-First Language During Sentence Comprehension", in which we report the first-ever language processing #EEG study on an Austronesian language, is among the 10 most-cited articles in Cognitive Science in 2023! 🧵1/ #TopCitedArticle doi.org/10.1111/cogs...

I approve this metaphor

GC has 25+ years of exp & IP background. This isn't a startup running w an inexperienced 5th year as the only lawyer. Which means this was a deliberate decision in the state with the strongest common law rights of privacy in the country. It's a dare. It's all press is good press as a legal strategy.

In her latest short story, Zeinab Ghassan Khaddour explores how a group of migrant Syrians find a temporary homeland in their diverse dialects, offering a poignant reflection on how language becomes the ultimate lifeline in the face of loss. 🔗 https://bit.ly/words-that-dont-sink-a-short-story

Re-upping this

There has been a faith in the revelatory power of the verbatim's raw phonetic details that comes from a positivist orientation and a bias for the written over the spoken. The bigger the difference between the two, the more damning the truth to be indicated. But something else is going on here...

This is more devastating than a verbatim transcript.