Society

(I'm interested in questions of agency, and how automation and artificial intelligence serve to undermine this – agents versus agency, I've previously argued. It's particularly striking that "agents" are being marketed as an easy way to optimize one's personal and professional life – totally stripped of the term's history (philosophy, psychology, even

Yesterday, researchers at Princeton’s AI Lab and CITP submitted comments to the National Science Foundation on the 2025 National AI Research & Development (R&D) Strategic Plan. Recent advances in AI, particularly with foundation models, are poised to have transformative effects on society. The question is not whether AI will reshape our economy and institutions—

Our brains, evolved for tribal politics and campfire stories, are ill-equipped for the moral ambiguity of a system with no soul to save or damn.

No.359 — The who cares era ⊗ Possible Futures Issue 1 ⊗ Global electricity review ⊗ Fuel-cell aircraft ⊗ Gen Alpha slang

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Good morning, everybody. What a beautiful day. What a beautiful North Carolina day for a graduation. Incredible. Thank you, President Wente, Provost Gillespie, members of the Board of Trustees and Katy Harriger, my faculty sponsor, for this precious Wake Forest honorary degree. I am honored [...]

U.S. Scouting Service Project

It’s ya boy coming in HOT with some MAJOR truth bombs about how REAL Americans can take back control from the big government elites who are LITERALLY destroying our freedoms daily! COMMUNITY …

Bessemer at the height of Jim Crow must have been wild. From Unregistered with Thaddeus Russell, Ep 263 with Killer Mike on Dec 13, 2023: “So in Bessemer, in the late 50s, there was a sort of panic…

On changes in the US governing regime, depicted as revisions to the Constitution.

If everything feels broken but strangely normal, the Soviet-era concept of hypernormalization can help

A tiny but crucial agency that maintains physical coordinates like latitude and longitude in the US is struggling as the Trump administration forces out federal employees.

If legend is to be believed, three disparate social forces in early 20th-century America – the temperance movement, the rise of car culture, and the Scots-Irish culture of the South – c…

The president may be thirsting for a new four-engine jumbo jet, but many governments and royal families are unloading their fuel-guzzling palaces in the sky.

Even a limited nuclear conflict could cause years of potentially devastating impacts to climate and societies.

Black empathy toward "Gingers" went beyond understanding, as Black folks extended an invitation to the cookout, but not so fast...

Not long after The Intention Economy came out in May, 2012, Robert Thomson, Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal, wanted the book's opening chapter to serve as the cover essay of the Marketplace section of an upcoming issue. Harvard Business Review Press didn't like that idea, so I wrote an original piece based on the book,…

What is Cadaver? Cadaver is a command-line WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) client for Unix-like systems, including Kali Linux. It allows

Beyond Flags and Anthems—The Moral Courage to Defend Democracy

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of interviewing Niko Stratis about her new book The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. You can read an excerpt here. A little ghost for the offeringThe Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by

Many of those who were loudest in denouncing cancel culture then are now curiously silent in the face of Donald Trump’s assaults on free speech.