My father died on Saturday, April 8. He lived 97 years. Until struck with COVID, he had never had to stay in a hospital. In the last three months, he mustered all his strength to overcome the virus’ results: internal bleeding, then post-COVID pneumonia, then the side-effects of medication, and…

There has been much praise in human chat — Twitter — about Ted Chiang’s New Yorker piece on machine chat — ChatGPT. Because New Yorker; because Ted Chiang. He makes a clever comparison between lossy compression — how JPEGs or MP3s save a good-enough artifact of a thing, with some…

AI helps expand definitions of literacy — In The Gutenberg Parenthesis (my upcoming book), I ask whether, “in bringing his inner debates to print, Montaigne raised the stakes for joining the public conversation, requiring that one be a writer to be heard. That is, to share one’s thoughts, even about oneself, necessitated the talent of writing as…

The right-wing, Muskian myth of ‘free-speech absolutism’ — The New European commissioned me to write this explanation for folks over there explaining what is behind Musk’s claims of free-speech absolutism. Elon Musk, recent convert to the cult of far-right fascism known as the Republican Party, is currently suffering history’s worst case of buyer’s remorse. He also claims to…

From my vast experience of three weeks, a guide to diving in — An academic friend asked for help joining Mastodon. I wrote a detailed email in response that I thought it might be useful to others. I’m also going to teach a master class in Mastodon at my school on Dec. 5 — much interest, I’m told — so here is my…

Jonathan Freedland’s ‘The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World’ — This is perhaps the single most effective chronicle of the Holocaust I have read. Jonathan Freedland does not attempt to convey the full scope of the Holocaust or of Auschwitz; that is an impossibility in any literature. He tells the story of one man, Rudolf Vrba — born Walter Rosenberg…

A federated future and suggestions for citizens and institutions — Maybe we’ll look back and see that Elon Musk did us, the civilized citizens of the net, a favor by forcing us off our cozy if centralized, corporatized, and corrupted internet to find and build an alternative future grounded in the founding principles and dreams of this networked age. How’s…

Indeed. That is precisely what inspired the creation of this program. As I say in orientation, it is important to learn why we do--have done--what we do the way we do it, how we got there, what are the roots (usually economic) of those process, products, norms, and tradition …

The great man has spoken of the internet at last — In 2006, Jürgen Habermas, the preeminent theorist of the public sphere, spoke of the internet for the first time, only in a footnote, all but dismissing the net as “millions of fragmented chat rooms.” Many have waited for more. Now, in a paper recently published and translated, Habermas finally reflects…