Victoria Livingstone in Time Magazine:
This fall is the first in nearly 20 years that I am not returning to the classroom. For most of my career, I taught writing, literature, and language, primarily to university students. I quit, in large part, because of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.
Virtually all experienced scholars know that writing, as historian Lynn Hunt has argued, is “not the transcription of thoughts already consciously present in [the writer’s] mind.” Rather, writing is a process closely tied to thinking. In graduate school, I spent months trying to fit pieces of my dissertation together in my mind and eventually found I could solve the puzzle only through writing. Writing is hard work. It is sometimes frightening. With the easy temptation of AI, many—possibly most—of my students were no longer willing to push through discomfort.
Academic philosophers—people for whom philosophy is a profession—like to joke about their discomfort on airplanes. As you make light conversation with your neighbor, the question of what you do for a living tends to come up, and then you have to cope with other people’s ideas about what it is to “do philosophy.” A friend from graduate school confessed that he hated these conversations so much he would pretend to be a mathematician. (Why not a financial adviser or a travel agent?) A colleague from my first job at Johns Hopkins would head things off by saying “I teach philosophy” rather than “I am a philosopher.” It definitely sounds more approachable. But when I still felt the novelty of being a professional philosopher—and pride at having survived the rigors of graduate school—I was not about to dumb it down. I was even eager to tell people I was a philosopher. Follow-up questions fell within a range: Who are your favorite philosophers? Does anyone listen to you? Isn’t that a job from the olden days?
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CISCO BRADLEY’S The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (2023) chronicles a vital and now-vanished facet of American musical and cultural history in New York City from the mid-1980s to 2015. The book investigates how, amid hypercommercialism and mutating audio technologies, bold musicians, expert and amateur alike, impelled by a big-hearted DIY ethos, made new, imaginative music as public, independent, and free as possible by exploiting urban niches and cultural interstices, using dive bars, loft spaces, garages, warehouses, restaurants, and cafés as musical laboratories for experiments in sound, installation, and performance.
A fruit fly’s brain is smaller than a poppy seed, but it packs tremendous complexity into that tiny space. Over 140,000 neurons are joined together by more than 490 feet of wiring, as long as four blue whales placed end to end.
When Bernie Sanders was asked in a 2016 Democratic presidential debate what “democratic socialism” meant to him, he 
In 2021,
The Nobel prize has been awarded in three scientific fields — 
Ars Technica: People who are not mathematically inclined usually see all those abstract symbols and their eyes glaze over. Let’s talk about the nature of symbols in math and why becoming more familiar with mathematical notation can help non-math people surmount that language barrier. 
The climate debate is in a strange place. We’re told we face an epochal, civilization-ending calamity within our lifetimes. But when scientists bring up unconventional new ways of managing that risk, we’re told we mustn’t even talk about them.
Vice-Presidential debates are normally for the archives: the transcript gets recorded and then filed away. Strain your memory and try to recall: Who won the debate between John Edwards and Dick Cheney? Biden-Ryan? Even Harris-Pence, just four years ago? In the rush of the Presidential race, these events were simply speed bumps. The best way to approach Tuesday night’s version was with a certain measure of historically earned skepticism. Was there any reason to think that this Vice-Presidential debate would actually matter—would even be remembered—by Election Day, now a little more than a month away, when so few have in the past?
Scientific breakthroughs rely on decades of diligent work and expertise, sprinkled with flashes of ingenuity and, sometimes, serendipity. What if we could speed up this process?