Vivek Narayanan

Robin Williams' daughter has some quality thoughts on AI slop

National Defense Ministry Honors 11 Soldiers for Refusing Illegal Orders National Defense Ministry Honors 11 Soldiers for Refusing Illegal Orders Honored for rejecting illegal orders during martial law, Marine death probe

The South Korean Ministry of Defense has awarded medals of merit to 11 officers for disobeying direct orders of superiors during the martial law fiasco, orders that they deemed to be contrary to the constitution and endangerment to democracy.
www.chosun.com/english/nati...

For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper Now I let it fall back in the grasses. I hear you. I know this life is hard now. I know your days are precious on this earth. But what are you trying to be free of? The living? The miraculous task of ...

For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper
Joseph Fasano

Now I let it fall back
in the grasses.
I hear you. I know
this life is hard now...

essay by Eileen Myles/ poem by Leslie Scalapino— both amazing

Papyrus Pantoum under a rising moon,       we step along a ridge of white sand—

Congratulations to Arthur Sze for being named the 25th U.S. Poet Laureate!

We featured his poem, Papyrus Pantoum, in April.

Read here:
spare.poems.com/poem/Papyrus...

Rue Rue Jo Cox, Députée Britannique, a street sign in Burgundy reads, Assassinée pour ses convictions. No British road is named after her, I found on returning home, for fear it could have proved controversial. I remembered in Shakespeare rue even for ruth, called 'herb of grace' because it was used in exorcisms, by the angel to clean Adam's eyes, and Gulliver back home for his nose against the smell of his countrymen.

I think about this poem by Ian Duhig — about Jo Cox, the Labour MP assassinated by a man shouting ‘Britain first’ — every day at the moment. No other contemporary poet has looked so clearly at the political reality of the far right as a minority who must always be appeased

Peter Navarro’s Remarks About ‘Brahmins’ Profiteering From Russian Oil Sparks Controversy The remarks caused an outrage in India with many calling it ‘casteist' and 'sinister' and denouncing it as an “anti-Hindu” narrative.

A couple of thoughts on the Hindu nationalist response to Navarro's comments. Brief 🧵 --

thewire.in/diplomacy/pe...

RK's very duplicitous and hard to pin down on Modi as well. One gets the sense this is someone whose public statements and positionings are very carefully callibrated and stage-managed.

Don't know the answer, but I know Khanna's a shifty, slimy chameleon on most if not all matters. And he banks on silicon valley money.

The Woman Holding Chinese Mining Giants Accountable - Inside Climate News Jingjing Zhang has fought polluting Chinese companies for decades. Now she’s teaching lawyers across the Global South how to do the same. Her work has never been more urgent.

The Woman Holding Chinese Mining Giants Accountable insideclimatenews.org/news/2408202...

Looks like this is working fine, but still testing it. Would you all please go and add a couple seed lines of your own? The more seed lines the programs have to choose from, the more interesting the results. *Remember to add lines to all four games / tabs, so we can see how they work.*.

Please let me know if you're having any issues: all lines preserved.

I should say also that the collaboration can also happen over a period of time: add your lines and then someone else will later.

I think of such experiments as ways to humanize the machine, as opposed to mechanizing the human, which is still the metaphorical thrust of most current approaches to technology.

The results can be startling. Adding additional grammatical specifications to the lines that have to be entered will help unlike lines lock together.

For now, this will be up for about a month until September 17. Please send me feedback if you can!

Explore with friends, please, if you can, for maximum estragement: I use this as a teaching aid in the classroom, and these games are most interesting when played simultaneously with as many people as possible, and as many entries as possible.

3) poems where independently conceived questions and answers are randomly combined with each other (Desnos Q&A); and 4) poems where conditional "If" clauses are randomly combined with consequences (Desnos If-Then).

There are four games here (see tabs at top): 1) poems with fixed stanza lengths (Desnos II) ; 2) poems that can be specified with variable stanza lengths-- so for instance, specifying (8,6) would give you sonnets (Desnos III);

The Desnos Machine is a "language event": a variant/descendant of the surrealists' "exquisite corpse" but applied with specific formal and/or grammatical constraints that can enhance meaning-making and help us explore how form interacts with content.

the-desnos-machine.replit.app
THE DESNOS MACHINE

Hi all, a few of you may know/remember that I've been exploring tech-assisted collaborative / mass poetry composition / performance for many years. Here, some brand new incarnations of Michael Scharf's and my *Desnos Machine*.

Galatea 2.2 - Wikipedia

I was unhappy with the ending of Galatea 2.2 (1995!) when I read it in like 2003, but now when I think, it was not only very prophetic but may offer us a way of thinking out of our delusions and the ai hype/ mess we're in. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galatea...

Mapusa Mogi : A 100m long Ceramic Mural by Orijit Sen An ongoing community-centric public art project in Goa

You really gotta watch the whole video

"This wall is looooong" 🤣

www.kickstarter.com/projects/533...

BOOK REVIEW | A Breath of Fresh Air: Vivek Narayanan's 'After' | Outlook India Vivek Narayanan’s ‘After’ is a modern retelling of the ‘Valmiki Ramayana’ that keeps the characters of the text grounded.

www.outlookindia.com/books/book-r...

Hearts, Minds, NRIs Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge isn't actually about the Indian diaspora

I’ve been writing a series about how to understand Indian identity via Shah Rukh Khan films. Here’s the first piece on Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge

open.substack.com/pub/popcultu...

⚖️1/ A historic ruling by a US Federal Court determined that defending the civil rights of caste-oppressed people does not constitute religious infringement. This news follows the court’s dismissal of a lawsuit, which claimed that caste protections violate religious freedom.

This is pretty essential reading I think— demystifies “AI” aka Large Language Models aka Bullshit Machines in wonderfully lucid language : how they work, what they might be helpful for, and why you should never ever trust them.

Anticipation of the Inevitable Bloody doesn't capture their blood. Bloody, here, was an end, though their blood hasn't stopped

Today’s Featured Poem:

“Anticipation of the Inevitable” by samodH Porawagamage from becoming sam published by @burnsidereview.bsky.social

Read here:
poems.com/poem/anticip...

A Touch of Salt on My Confession Unlike Jesus I have no gift For self-deprecation

Today’s Featured Poem:

“A Touch of Salt on My Confession” by Abdourahman A. Waberi. Translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson from When We Only Have the Earth published by @univnebpress.bsky.social

Read here:
poems.com/poem/a-touch...

A Strange Time to Be Trans In this particular culture war, some self-described skeptics look less like truth-tellers than merchants of doubt.

The "survivorship bias" of thinking that trans adults who didn't receive treatment as children turned out okay. Important essay by @notquitehydepark.bsky.social
We need to take care of our trans and nonbinary kids

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

The World Is Made Every Day by Alok Dhanwa | Seagull Books Now available in India. Forthcoming in the rest of the world in October 2025. Poetry that serves as a powerful testament to the struggles and resilience of India's marginalized, capturing the spirit o...

Alok Dhanwa, the cult Hindi poet, available for the first time in English in my translation. The World is Made Up Every Day, out now in India (available in US/Europe in October).

Order here: seagullbooks.org/products/the...