Alison Booth

Urgent Email Redux, Contextual Help Tech Memory Laps 1

Remember your first email account? Curious about AI? See how helpful Claude can be! But do not volunteer when asked to help the LLMs shape your world and consciousness! This post semi-seriously proposes AI as a workaround for our decades of email overload.
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Flowers in Fall sunshine in Conservatory Garden, Central Park.

The waterfall surrounded by Fall foliage in the Harlem side of Morningside Park, with green pond in foreground.

This is an imported stalactite grotto with a girl who captured a goose statue at Kykuit, the astounding Rockefeller estate.

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Let me be sure not to feature my profile picture. Fall cheer pictured from NY. All posts I read are suitably concerned about latest events. We keep on. I share a talk (outtakes and images) I gave to the hospitable Victorian seminar at CUNY Graduate Center.

Oh no! All health to you!

Edgar Allan Poe and Edward Gorey were hired to a new government agency to design the big beautiful triumphal arch, but they got talking, got the best idea for a Dr. Strangelove remake. No one in the world ever saw anything like it! Made America, get it?

Alison Booth (@alisonbooth) Friends who are in New York Thursday 10/23, come join the CUNY Victorian seminar: 6pm, CUNY Graduate Center, Room 8301, where I will present “George Eliot and Virginia Woolf Will Never Be the Same,” ...

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Heroes for America: Ranking and Forgetting in Public A Nineteenth-Century Idea, a Proclamation for Statues in the Age of Chatbots

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In this post, I honor a book by Sheila Gerami that ties the 1901 Hall of Fame for great Americans to the 2017 unite the right rally in Charlottesville. But that ain’t all I share some AI chatbot absurdities about the proposed Garden of American Heroes in 2025.

American white girl , 1960-1970s Part III or so in My Race and Place

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Alison Booth chat Join now in the Substack app

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... I post weekly or so. subscribe for free. I look at race and place, statues, memories about changing technology and academia across a lifetime. Practicing prose and poetry and keeping some hope a bit apart from the news.

I am always looking for an escape from ideology. That’s why I admire the Department of Ideology Hunters. They know gender backwards and forwards when they see it. (Love Virginia Heffernan).

MAGA Gender Theory Trump's ideas about gender are way, way, way more complex than Judith Butler's.

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Alison Booth (@alisonbooth) After long silence, thoughts on not dying too soon, also known as living to 100. We are celebrating my mother’s 100 year. What’s it all mean, Mr. Natural?

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Autocomplete To be continued (feel free). creative commons license

UVA, with an Interim President, pays dear to a search firm and squanders human hours instead of serving the mission of learning! Instead of freaking out: share your pernicious or bizarre autocompletes. open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo...

I hope all is well! I sometimes get similar reviews from family members.

Paul G. Mahoney Paul G. Mahoney is a David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor and served as dean of the Law School from 2008-16. Mahoney's teaching and research areas are securities regulation, law and economi...

In a remarkably sedate Board of Visitors meeting (why, closed session for 1.5 hour at least), members of the community were able to hear the roll call to appoint Paul G. Mahoney the Interim President of UVA. www.law.virginia.edu/faculty/prof...

While I am feeling the changing of the guards in the library.virginia.edu/dh-center I take delight in
rewriting today: Substack newsletter. open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo...
A sabbatical in this day and age doesn't mean I'm going anywhere.

Why AI chatbots lie to us A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine needed to collect and format some data from a website, and he asked the latest version of Anthropic’s generative AI system, Claude, for help. Claude cheerfully agr...

Why AI chatbots lie to us | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A sensible account of why we must keep humans in the loop, ignore sycophancy, and keep a leash on "agentic" AI driven by the doubtful goals, roles, and notions that slipped into the pre- and posttraining. Humans still have work!

Inconvenient truths from @alisonbooth.bsky.social:
1. The narrative genre that ends in death is not (necessarily) tragedy. (See: biography.)
2. Reference entries (e.g. Wikipedia, Oxford Dictionary of Nat'l Biography, etc.) are not biographies. (Because genre, not bcse poorly written)
#DH2025

Richmond, Indiana 2 What one wants to remember

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I think about the secrecy of outsiders. As the white faculty family in a small town, we had little to fear, but we really were extremely bent to please. This post is wondering about Black-white relations in the 1950s where I was born.

How Many Statues are Enough? Mount Rushmore Ambitions and Iconoclasm

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Have a look, and share any statue interests of your own. Have you ever seen a Madonna of the Trail in person?

University of Virginia President Resigns Under Pressure From Trump Administration

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/u... After last night's headline, this outcome. What next, all y'all? There will be no university presidents safe from trumped-up charges in Newspeak. I actually invoked states' rights in my messages to senators and congressman this morning.

Richmond, Indiana Quakers of Earlham; National Roads

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... This begins My Race and Place, memories and investigations from childhood onward, probing privilege and contact zones. It's a thread in my Writing without Surveillance sabbatical newsletter.

The Fiction Folders Archaic documents

The second post has fun thinking about typing and the days of copy centers and sending originals to publishers. There will be more frequent posts at first to set up the sections or threads of this refreshing venture. open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo...

Writing without Surveillance Samples from an archive before email, before the Internet, before AI; a content provider experiments in a time of catastrophe as if we still send SASEs.

I am just starting alisonbooth.substack.com/p/writing-wi..., my year of writing in genres I supposedly outgrew after I got my tenure track job. I need my other favorite Substack authors for the most timely insights. What I past feels urgent to me but runs along memory lane.

@megsmith.bsky.social Like the Rocovery Hub for American Women Writers and your "infrastructure as mutual aid." I'm serious about satirizing the throwback National Garden of Heroes and the data implicit in the list of people offered as subjects for statues. #ACH2025

@lyndamk.bsky.social shares praise of www.sucho.org
Love the image of the skeuomorph blue "floppy" disk on the life raft, fits with the rowing crew metaphor. The organized collaboration.

@lyndamk on @datarescueproject.org #ACH2025 keynote. Sped-up precarity of meta/data now. Not to hoard, but proceed with calm, expert care. Their data is knowledgeable in all senses: not noise or "raw" data, and because they know this loss has precedents, e.g. 1890 census.
Also DataRefuge.

Every one of the examples in this talk is splendid and exciting to me. Such genuine doing-good with human-scale collaboration and tech-critique and repurposing. Love the cardboard boat.

📣Tune in to the “Digital Blackness” panel at #ACH2025 today (06/11) at 7p ET!📣

Panel will feature presentations from #DigBlk’s @dejaworkman.bsky.social, @weygudey.bsky.social‬, & @dburgher.bsky.social, and chaired by @jimccasey1.bsky.social‬.

Register at ach2025.ach.org/en/

Jugaad is bricolage with a geopolitical edge? Not to romanticize resourcefulness and mashups (gerry-rigging) under deprivation/duress. But we're in the conditions of scarcity, find resistant abundance without othering.

Looking forward to #ACH2025. It opening with a webinar with closed chat makes me speculate on which friends and colleagues are responsible for the emojis flying up the screen.