Category: Culture

  • AIs are Genies

    It’s time to rethink the metaphor of AIs as monsters out to eradicate or colonize us.  Artificial Intelligence is the subject of at least as much human fear and greed as it is of hope and altruism. Some of the dominant metaphors for where AI can go horribly wrong come from science fiction: the Skynet…

  • Can Colleges Change in Time?

    Douglas Belkin and Josh Ulick wrote an important piece in WSJ ($) this week: America’s Colleges Are Hurtling Toward an Enrollment Cliff. The subtitle makes the stakes more apparent: “Will the ‘demographic cliff’—the declining population of 18-year-olds—ease the brutal process? Depends where you go.” Overall, college enrollments are forecast to drop 13% over the next 15…

  • A Brief Rant About Political Fundraising Emails

    Survey after survey tells us that large percentages of Americans on both sides of the political fence are tired of the established parties and want alternatives. A lot of this has to do with policy differences, legislative gridlock, political polarization, and the 24-hour news cycle. But I think it also has to do with spam,…

  • Keyword: Litotes

    In language, a double negative and a positive are not the same thing.+ This piece is part of a “Keywords” series that I’ve slowly built over the history of The Dispatch. These keywords are tools that help me to think, lenses that let me see with clarity. Here’s one of my favorites. Mathematics and human language have different…

  • Is AI Slop Good for Brick and Mortar?

    Will untrustworthy AI products and advertising breathe new life into retail because that’s where trustable humans are?  It was spring. I walked the streets of New Delhi reckoning with an urgent Number Two and no place to deposit it. Public toilets, at least in that hood, seemed not a high municipal priority. Then, through gastrointestinal-distress-blurred…

  • Keyword: Ostranenie

    Art and other stimuli exist to nudge us out of automatic recognition into seeing things afresh, which is more important now than ever. Oh, happy day! My son returned last night from five months of study abroad in Auckland. La Profesora, his girlfriend, and I greeted him at the airport, after which we went our…

  • Retro Futures: “Sneakers” (1992) and Anthropic’s Mythos (2026)

    How does an early 1990s caper movie help us understand the threat and promise of today’s sharpest-edged AI models?  On April 7th, Anthropic announced that it had created Mythos, an AI so powerful that it can find long-undiscovered software bugs, making banks, hospitals, and other key holders of personal data vulnerable to hackers and scammers.…

  • My Neuroses’ Playlist & Another Modest Proposal

    My Neuroses’ Playlist In previous articles, I’ve mentioned how earworms plague me. There are four flavors of earworm: For example, I watched the end of the movie Kingsman, which features Bryan Ferry’s Slave to Love; it stayed in my head for days. In fact, just writing that last sentence brought it back. For example, the other morning I…

  • Will Teach for Food: a Mini Memoir

    Today’s job market for recent college grads eerily resembles the academic job market in the 1990s: what are the lessons? The great graduate job drought, a dejecting article by Anjli Raval from the Financial Times ($) arrested my attention this week. Recent college graduates face long and difficult job searches. In the U.K., there are 140 applicants…

  • Leaps of Faith (but not that kind)

    How can we escape closed-loop thinking? (Hint: it’s not logic.) La Profesora turned me onto a recent episode of Your Undivided Attention, a podcast by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin of The Center for Humane Technology. In “What Would It Take to Actually Trust Each Other? The Game Theory Dilemma,” Harris and Raskin talk with Professor…