Christine Wenc

I just came from a deeply-informed talk about these supposed guardrails. They’re nonsense.

Assetizing academic content and the emergence of the ‘assetizen’: education platforms, publisher databases, and AI model training - Higher Education Higher Education - Academic content, such as teaching materials and academic publications, has become an economic resource. This has occurred through assetization as the key economic regime in...

New OA article just out on "assetizing academic content" led by @jkom.bsky.social with me, @keanbirch.bsky.social & Klaus Beiter, exploring how academic materials are turned into value-generating digital assets by HE institutions, edtech platforms, and AI companies link.springer.com/article/10.1...

What Mira Nair Taught Zohran Mamdani The mayor’s famous filmmaker mother reveals the origins of his ferocious ambition.

Cannot believe that I got to profile an extraordinary filmmaker, who happens to be the mother of NYC’s new mayor, and think about intersections of art and politics, and how familial love might produce a buffer against the corrosive politics and cynicism of our time. My story about Mira Nair:

YouTube video by Putumayo World Music North African Groove (Official Putumayo Version)

(I know about it because of this recording which has other great stuff on it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=enVt... )

YouTube video by Maz Hoc Amina Annabi - Dis Moi Pourquoi

Here is a great non-English song: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tqgu...

I saw this exhibit in Prague back in 1995 and those images are still in my head

cars may kill a lot of people everyday but at least they are also very expensive and insanely inefficient means of getting around

They're Coming for Our Daughters The conservative plan to shrink girls’ futures

The Heritage Foundation has released a 250-year roadmap to “save America.”

The document is a how-to guide for subjugating girls & young women: a detailed plan to push them out of college, funnel them into early marriage and motherhood, and then trap them there.
jessica.substack.com/p/theyre-com...

Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.

CALL FOR PITCHES

@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.

We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.

Details below!

Same method by the way, used by tobacco companies who addicted multiple generations to cigarettes: by deliberately targeting children and teenagers. Because nobody starts smoking when they're 35. (See Allan Brandt's book The Cigarette Century)

TECH OVERSIGHT REPORT: UNSEALED COURT DOCUMENTS SHOW TEEN ADDICTION WAS BIG TECH’S “TOP PRIORITY” - Tech Oversight Project New documents show the tactics Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok execs used to disrupt learning, prey on minors, and co-opt the PTA to control the narrative with parents WASHINGTON, DC – Today, The Tech ...

"The documents provide smoking-gun evidence that Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok all purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing, and how that mass youth addiction was core to the companies’ business models."

Thank you MacDowell Colony for suspending your reference letter requirements! You are correct that they create a "barrier to applying" to writer & artist residencies for many people. I hope others follow your lead. @macdowell1907.bsky.social

JW: And how do you view the academic freedom aspects of these conditions? MS: They are so multitudinous, it's hard to know where to begin, especially in a Q&A like this, where a bit of brevity is required. Earlier, I said that one way of thinking about technofeudalism's origin is through the collapsing distinction between information and money, which coincides with digitization. Well, at least inside and between the technofeudal enterprises, I think that collapse is almost complete. Proprietary data and/or capta is a currency unto itself. So, if capta (and especially capta in natural language form) is the reserve currency of technofeudalism, you can expect the technofeudal enterprises to be protective of the control they currently enjoy over that currency. They are the money printers. And it is in their interest to enclose existing corpuses of information, to monopolize the creation of new information, to crush competing or new entrant information producers, and to use their monopoly powers to create artificial shortages which drive up exchange values. Colleges and universities are an existing, durable infrastructure for creating information. Many of the sources of value for technofeudalists, from computer networks to encryption to LLMs, were made possible by the U.S. public university infrastructure. From a feudalist or monopoly power perspective, that is a rival that cannot be allowed to continue to persist unmolested. It must be colonized, absorbed, controlled, or destroyed. If you accept that premise (and I know not everybody will, so many of the threats to education, let alone academic freedom, follow directly and almost become self-explanatory.

Re-upping this interview with @biblioracle.bsky.social from earlier this week which helpfully made me put some shit that had been burbling in my head to page.

academicfreedomontheline.substack.com/p/the-techno...

"The European Commission appears to want to kill the concept of the infinite scroll...The Commission found that TikTok’s design...could push people into ‘autopilot mode’ — which would put the company in breach of DSA rules, which protect users from addictive design."

Before corrupt oligarchs took over Legacy Media.

Doing art badly is good and sacred

One reason Minneapolis remains in the world's eye is we have one of the most robust & independent media ecosystems remaining in the country. You all need this...and more! @mprnews.org @startribune.com @sahanjournal.bsky.social @minnesotareformer.com @minnpost.bsky.social @racketmn.com etc.

It Turns Out Waymos Are Being Controlled by Workers in the Philippines During a Congressional hearing, Waymo's chief safety officer, Mauricio Peña, was grilled over the company's reliance on overseas workers.

Once again, it turns out “fully autonomous” means “a guy in the Philippines.”

Peloton Institutes Mass Layoffs After Pivoting to AI Peloton's doubling down on AI doesn't appear to have paid off. The company slashed 11 percent of its workforce this week.

“A new slew of AI equipment, featuring cameras that watch your every move, was somehow even more expensive than their already considerably pricy lineup of exercise equipment.”

“And shockingly, the company’s doubling down on AI doesn’t appear to have paid off.”

thinking about this type of $129 water bottle (with “self cleaning” light magic!) ending up at Salvation Army in a couple years

Generations of women have been and continue to be held back, pushed aside, ignored, and discounted by very ordinary everyday men

ERC PhD studentship: The Ethics and Philosophy of Science of Machine Learning | Scholarships and Student Funding | Student Administration This is a four-year ERC funded PhD studentship (starting in September 2026).

Good news - we have a new ERC-funded 4-year PhD Studentship at the University of Edinburgh, based in Philosophy and our Centre @technomoralfutures.bsky.social, supervised by Dr Emily Sullivan; the project applies philosophy of science to assessing ML's epistemic & social value. Apply by 16 March!

And not just rich and influential men.

the Epstein files are really devastating because they remind me of how many girls and women miss out on professional opportunities, mentorship and careers because of how many powerful, rich and influential men only view girls and women — and interactions with them — through the lens of sex

(correct to 25 years *ago*)

Book writers could make a living between advances (which were far more then than they are now) with magazine writing. Today Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion would be working as FT adjunct English instructors making $25,000 a year, no benefits, while struggling to get even one book done in their spare time

25 years I could still get $2000 for a reported story in an ALT WEEKLY. You could get thousands more for a big magazine. Now I'd be lucky to get $200 at ANY outlet. It's why I stopped freelance writing and switched to specialty editing instead--I had to

Do not love how this industry has been shredded and remade into a teetering heap of gig work

Freelancers fighting each other for a dwindling number of scraps, generational talent falling out of the ecosystem entirely, former staffers struggling while billionaires stuff their pockets

A fucking mess

Join The 51st The 51st is a worker-led nonprofit news source for D.C. Our reporting is rooted in our conviction that local journalism is meant to make people’s lives better — no paywalls, ever. But that's only…

6/ The Post has lost over 375,000 subscribers in just over a year. If 10% of those readers subscribed to The 51st instead, we could hire 10 reporters and five editors, dramatically scaling our coverage of the city at this critical time. 51st.news/signup

this. a lot of people don't get how difficult good reporting is, especially investigative journalism. it takes years of practice to build up the necessary skillset, and it often requires supporting infrastructure. yet the pay for 99% of reporters out there is abysmal