Kristen Ghodsee at The MIT Press Reader:
Twenty years ago, in November of 2005, Duke University Press published my first book: “The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the Black Sea.” Produced in the wake of socialism’s global collapse and the riot of Western triumphalism that ensued, I deployed both qualitative and quantitative methods to advance a simple, but unpopular, argument: For most people in the former Soviet bloc, capitalism sucked.
By writing the “small histories” of men and women laboring in Bulgaria’s vibrant tourism industry in the decade following their country’s mad dash to embrace democracy and free markets, I explored how and why this small southeastern European country transformed from a relatively predictable, orderly, egalitarian society into a chaotic, lawless world of astonishing inequality and injustice. I wrapped my critiques of the rampant neoliberalism of the “Wild, Wild, East” in thickly descriptive accounts of the lives of chambermaids, bartenders, tour guides, cooks, waitresses, and receptionists. I wanted to show, not tell.
More here.
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In a town on the shores of Lake Geneva sit clumps of living human brain cells for hire. These blobs, about the size of a grain of sand, can receive electrical signals and respond to them — much as computers do. Research teams from around the world can send the blobs tasks, in the hope that they will process the information and send a signal back.
Turning to philosophy to learn how to live is nothing new, of course. But the explicitly inspirational and instructional valence of much that appears today under that heading, even from academic presses, is striking — as is the apparent consensus that the central task of philosophy is to guide seekers to a greater acceptance of imperfection and insignificance. Sometimes these books focus on a particular school of philosophy, giving readers an “-ism” — existentialism, Buddhism, Taoism, and above all Stoicism, now practically a genre unto itself — with which to identify. Others staple together eclectic smatterings of received ideas into less partisan surveys on how to cope with failure and disillusionment.
The emergence of agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to trigger a “Cambrian explosion” of new kinds of personhood. This paper proposes a pragmatic framework for navigating this diversification by treating personhood not as a metaphysical property to be discovered, but as a flexible bundle of obligations (rights and responsibilities) that societies confer upon entities for a variety of reasons, especially to solve concrete governance problems. We argue that this traditional bundle can be unbundled, creating bespoke solutions for different contexts. This will allow for the creation of practical tools — such as facilitating AI contracting by creating a target “individual” that can be sanctioned — without needing to resolve intractable debates about an AI’s consciousness or rationality. We explore how individuals fit in to social roles and discuss the use of decentralized digital identity technology, examining both “personhood as a problem”, where design choices can create “dark patterns” that exploit human social heuristics, and “personhood as a solution”, where conferring a bundle of obligations is necessary to ensure accountability or prevent conflict. By rejecting foundationalist quests for a single, essential definition of personhood, this paper offers a more pragmatic and flexible way to think about integrating AI agents into our society.
Questions about voting patterns have long been the object of inquiry from thinkers across a breadth of fields, and especially in social science domains like 
The discovery of the structure of DNA in the early 1950s is one of the most riveting dramas in the history of science, crammed with brilliant research, naked ambition, intense rivalry and outright deception. There were many players, including Rosalind Franklin, a wizard of X-ray crystallography, and Francis Crick, a physicist in search of the secret of life. Now, with 
A couple of weeks before his 
You know instantly when you’re in Kate Atkinson’s world. It’s dark, slightly Gothic, mordantly funny, keenly observed, highly textured and always full of surprises. Atkinson my not be easy to characterize — she’s a master of every genre she tries — but one thing’s for sure: You’ll be completely absorbed.
As a child, I imagined America as a truly democratic place where I could speak, disagree, and still listen. I even used to quote half seriously, “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” from an American movie I watched, when I argued with my little friends. That line felt like a promise. I thought that was what America looked like. Later, I realized that the promise was harder to keep. I remember when I saw Charlie Kirk being killed while debating, I felt lost, totally lost. What about freedom of speech?
I attended The Curve, a conference of ~350 top AI lab leaders and scientists, safety activists and alarmists, political advisors and lobbyists, journalists, and civil society leaders. The event took place in Lighthaven, a quirky cluster of houses in Berkeley that have been retrofitted into small conference spaces. Many sessions were in living room-sized spaces, so it was all very personable and informal — an impressive feat by the organizing team.
“Today I would say the whole world should be paying particular attention to this class of problem, which I’ll call the problem of democracy,” she noted in her preamble.
I’m going to roll up my sleeves and attempt a dirty, but I think necessary, job. I’m going to try to defend the humanities, or at least humanities scholarship, as it exists in its current form. I should say, before I do, that my road to something like a permanent job in the humanities has been a winding one. I remember, as a graduate student, being driven absolutely insane by how sanguine my professors were about our discipline. They were trying to reassure me, I think. But they succeeded only in making me envy and then resent them. So, to you, the reader, I say: wherever you’ve been, I’ve been there, too. I know the adjunct life. I know precarity. I know indifference. I know downright hostility. I’ve taught at diploma mills and in the Ivy League and everything in between. I understand.