Fifteen Minutes
Inquiry
Literary Criticism for an AI Age
In my humanities-dominated circles, I risk being labeled a heretic by admitting that I think AI prose can be quite skillful, often better than what most college students are capable of.
Trust the Ultra-Process
We Americans love to talk the talk, but we keep chomping on burgers, guzzling sodas filled with corn syrup or aspartame, and munching on fries. At this country-wide drive-through, my car is first in line.
Chucking Out HOLLIS: Harvard Library's New AI Tool and the Mess of the Research Process
Undoubtedly, the Collections Explorer exposes me to the nooks and crannies of Harvard Library’s vast collection in ways that would have taken me hours to uncover on my own. Yet there is something troubling about how the tool smooths over the entire research process. Not only does it surface sources for you, it interprets them with tidy AI summaries that make it dangerously easy to accept, skim, or skip over a source entirely.
MAHA’s Milk and Other Melodramas
From gold toilets and red hats to Versailles-adjacent ballrooms, MAGA is recognizable as much through its imagery as through its politics. And for MAHA, one symbol rises above all others: whole milk.
Literary Criticism for an AI Age
In my humanities-dominated circles, I risk being labeled a heretic by admitting that I think AI prose can be quite skillful, often better than what most college students are capable of.
Trust the Ultra-Process
We Americans love to talk the talk, but we keep chomping on burgers, guzzling sodas filled with corn syrup or aspartame, and munching on fries. At this country-wide drive-through, my car is first in line.
Chucking Out HOLLIS: Harvard Library's New AI Tool and the Mess of the Research Process
Undoubtedly, the Collections Explorer exposes me to the nooks and crannies of Harvard Library’s vast collection in ways that would have taken me hours to uncover on my own. Yet there is something troubling about how the tool smooths over the entire research process. Not only does it surface sources for you, it interprets them with tidy AI summaries that make it dangerously easy to accept, skim, or skip over a source entirely.
MAHA’s Milk and Other Melodramas
From gold toilets and red hats to Versailles-adjacent ballrooms, MAGA is recognizable as much through its imagery as through its politics. And for MAHA, one symbol rises above all others: whole milk.
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The Universal(ly Replicable) Mind of Bill Evans
The notion that one could make a generative AI model that sounds like Bill Evans, that an act of such unique human creativity might be automized, is unnerving. To make an AI music generator “play like Bill Evans” is actually a rather strange thing to say, because how exactly does Bill Evans play?
We’re All Chinamaxxing
Sometimes the mask feels like it fits, and other times it doesn’t.
The Stories We Tell About Food
One hopes that as we reach adulthood, these just-so stories about food become fuzzy — more nuances, spectra, and uncertainty. The world is complicated.
To Substack Or Not to Substack
What brings all of these people to this platform for writing? Are we witnessing the emergence of a new public forum? A newly accessible location for language? What does the popularity of Substack as a less established, institutional space for writing, even at so established an institution as Harvard, mean?
The Great Leveling
Advanced AI models pose unprecedented challenges to Harvard’s meritocracy. What comes next?
The Meme-ification of News
Humor as a coping mechanism is nothing new, but only now has this copium infiltrated our media ecosystem to such a radical extent.