Kristin Gorski

A box filled with a dozen donuts. Aside from 3 classic glazed Krispy Kreme donuts are donuts covered in light green icing, graham crumbs and whipped cream, donuts designed with frosting to look like a tropical island, and donuts covered in green and white icing with toasted coconut and a cherry. They are flanked by pineapples, cherries, split coconuts, and halved limes

Krispy Kreme Island Time (2021-2021): A lineup of "tropical themed" donuts

1. Pina Colada: pina colada-flavored creme filling and icing, topped with coconut & a cherry

2. Island Time: creme filled, decorated to look like an island

3. Key Lime Pie: key lime creme-filled, covered in graham crumbs

People are using ChatGPT twice as much as they were last year. They’re still just as skeptical of AI in news. "For news organizations, our findings are in some ways bitter medicine."

People are using AI to research topics, answer factual questions, and ask for advice.

In essence, they're increasingly using it for tasks that were once the primary domain of search engines and, by extension, news publishers. www.niemanlab.org/2025/10/peop...

Bob Ross paintings to be auctioned to support public TV stations after federal funding cuts All profits will help public TV stations with licensing fees for popular programs that include "The Best of Joy of Painting" and "America's Test Kitchen."

Thirty paintings created by the bushy-haired, soft-spoken Bob Ross will soon be up for auction to defray the costs of programming for small and rural public television stations suffering under cuts in federal funding. https://to.pbs.org/4nEQMrw

San José State University - Details - Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Technology

My department is hiring! Tenure-track assistant professor in philosophy (AOS: philosophy of technology) jobs.sjsu.edu/en-us/job/55...

With Rental Registries, Cities Seek to Close Data Gap With Landlords Cities like Pittsburgh, Oakland and Rochester have passed ordinances to track property ownership and mandate inspections for rental housing. But landlords often resist.

In a new article by @patrickcsisson.bsky.social for Bloomberg CityLab, our Executive Director Katrina Forrest highlights the importance of rental registries and how they can improve housing quality, protect renters, and advance public health.

Read the piece 👇 www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Taking These 50 Objects Out of Orbit Would Cut Danger From Space Junk in Half Old rocket parts and decommissioned satellites are whizzing around in low Earth orbit, where they risk colliding with the ever-growing constellations of modern satellites being launched.

Old rocket parts and decommissioned satellites are whizzing around in low Earth orbit, where they risk colliding with the ever-growing constellations of modern satellites being launched. www.wired.com/story/taking...

And here we go. I never wrote this article, and yet it is cited here.

www.liberalbriefs.com/geopolitics/...

And of course, it sounds so plausible, I seriously checked whether I had forgotten it, or the footnote was slightly wrong.

#AIisnotresearch

The Harvest Supermoon rises behind the Statue of Liberty and the skyline of Brooklyn as the sun sets in New York City, Monday evening #newyork #newyorkcity #nyc #moon #harvestmoon #supermoon

Banned Books Week 2025 Resources to Educate, Inspire Action These resources and ideas from ALA, Unite Against Book Bans, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and others will help plan for Banned Books Week Oct. 5-11.

Banned Books Week 2025 Resources to Educate, Inspire Action
www.slj.com/story/Banned...

Out: Banning books 😒
In: Reading banned books 😇

Yellow graphic with photos of books falling in the background. Text on the graphic reads: "Happy Banned Books Week! To celebrate, we’re going to: Read our favorite banned book, Defend freedom of speech in schools, Show appreciation for librarians and educators, Remind our community how books allow us to learn about new perspectives, experiences, and places, Get another banned book from our local library"

We have the right to read what we want, no matter what politicians or school officials say.

Let us know what your favorite banned book is below. 📚

Stereo Commander C-105, a 1968 Italian hi-fi console by artist-photographer Willy Rizzo, featuring a sleek aluminum pedestal base, open purple acrylic lid, and integrated components like a turntable, cassette recorder, and 8-track player.

Stereo Commander C-105 design by Willy Rizzo (1968)

Illustration of a new Irish Tree Alphabet. Twenty-six trees represent each letter of the English alphabet. At the bottom of the image are lines representing the Ogham alphabet, horizontal and vertical lines, looking like simple trees. The Irish Tree Alphabet draws trees from existing native as well as non-natives that are now calling Ireland home due to the changing climate. The trees are drawn in ink with colored water pencil filling in the leaves and fruit. The work is rooted in the medieval Ogham alphabet which was used to write the early Irish language. The characters or letters were called feda "trees", or nin "forking branches" due to their shape. Each letter of the Latin alphabet is given a corresponding tree: A = Ailm (Scots Pine), B = Beith (Birch), B = Coll (Hazel), etc. The tree drawings were turned into a font called Irish Trees. Irish Tree Alphabet by Katie Holten was made for Visual Carlow in 2020. The font is available to download, so everyone can write with Irish Trees.

Nature and the environment permeate the language viscerally. Irish predates English by a millennium. Its early writing system, Ogham, written vertically as a series of lines and strokes, has an alphabet based on trees.​ The Irish language is a joy.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Opinion | ‘Reading Rainbow’ returns to a country far more hostile to books — and diversity "Reading Rainbow" returns after 19 years and, fittingly, lands a day before 2025's "Banned Books Week."

“When Burton was hosting the show, there did not appear to be many people arguing against the idea of introducing children to books by authors of different colors, cultures, ethnicities and experiences.” My column at @msnbc.com www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

Media Advocacy Workshop 2025-2026 Law Student Scholarship Program Now in its 31st year, the American Bar Association’s Forum on Communications Law is pleased to invite law students to apply for financial support to attend its Media Advocacy Workshop and Annual Confe...

Know a law student interested in Communication/Media Law?

Applications are open for the Forum on Communications Law's Annual Conference and Media Advocacy Workshop scholarships to attend the February 2026 conference in Phoenix.

Application information available on the Forum's website.

Video: a Japanese scientist was attacked by flies while giving the acceptance speech for his Ig Nobel Prize-winning research paper that proved painting Zebra-like stripes on cows led to a decrease in biting fly attacks.

California Refineries Close as Gasoline Demand Slips into Permanent Decline - CleanTechnica California’s refineries are closing not because of regulation, but because gasoline demand is shrinking as EV adoption crosses tipping points.

Texas and California added more clean power capacity in 2024 than the next 30 US states combined. In California, two Bay Area refineries (around 15% of that state’s capacity) are closing as demand for gasoline falls into permanent decline. buff.ly/lLMyPU3
#ShareGoodNewsToo

Instagram wants me to make content — I just want to post a photo Plain old pictures are out; content is in.

Instagram wants me to make content — I just want to post a photo

A waffle iron that forms keyboard waffles.

Seasonal greetings for both the #bookhistory and #digitalhistory folks: a keyboard waffle iron. 🗃️

Postdoc (flexible start): child language development across different populations and contexts, methods including behavioral studies, large-scale data analysis, and/or computational modeling. M. Cychosz, Linguistics, Stanford Univ. postdocs.stanford.edu/prospective/...

#linguistics

AI-generated ‘participants’ can lead social science experiments astray, study finds Data produced by “silicon samples” depends on researchers’ exact choice of models, prompts, and settings

People are running stats on LLM-generated participants and think they’re being social scientists when in fact they’re technically just playing a very strange video game. This is like saying you’re doing math research because you’re playing sudoku.

www.science.org/content/arti...

1990s Band or Offhand Comment from My Tween About My Outfit? 1. Pearl Jam1 2. Old Lady Curtains2 3. Blind Melon3 4. Alice in Chains4 5. Judge Judy in a Bathrobe5 6. Garbage6 7. Smashing Pumpkins7 8. Toad the ...

- Garbage
- Smashing Pumpkins
- Toad the Wet Sprocket

Research shows:
More H-1Bs → more patents
Fewer H-1Bs → more offshoring

Your choice, America.

"ESA plans to release imagery by next week. NASA will not be able to release any of its data, or even comment on it, until the U.S. federal government ends the shutdown."

Family vacations were just us standing in a parking lot eating ketchup packets. ‘Imagine it’s France,’ Dad mumbled, crying into a napkin.

Opinion | Why Young Men Are Losing Faith in Science

This is a call for science communication to be tailored very specifically. “… I’ve been unsettled by what appears to be a growing skepticism of science among some of my Generation Z students, shaped in part by the different online cultures these young people have grown up in”

#caturday plotting, scheming, cuteness & serious pre-pounce mode! 😹😻

L.A.’s Entertainment Economy Is Looking Like a Disaster Movie Work is evaporating, businesses are closing, longtime residents are leaving, and Los Angeles’s creative middle class is hanging on by a thread.

The most important human story in the entertainment industry right now is the severe downturn in film and TV production in LA and how it's affecting middle-class crew workers. I spoke to dozens of them for this story about the depressed Hollywood economy. www.wsj.com/business/med...

Macron remarks are notable- some quotes: "We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies."