Ess Jay

Sincerity Wins The War Hello Where’s Your Ed At Subscribers! I’ve started a premium version of this newsletter with a weekly Friday column where I go over the most meaningful news and give my views, which I guess is what yo...

Newsletter: There is nothing inevitable about artificial intelligence, outside of the media's continued deference to the power. For a better tech industry - and a better world - the media must become more accountable, more sincere, and fight for the truth for the public.
www.wheresyoured.at/sic/

TONIGHT! 7pm PT. Earth Day at City Lights continues! 🌱

Malcom Harris joins us in-store to discuss WHAT'S LEFT: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis [@aaknopf.bsky.social]

The event will be broadcast on Zoom, so if you want to catch it online, register here: citylights.com/events/malco...

In Rural Canada, CBC Brought Us the World | The Tyee It sparked the careers of many artists. Now as the election nears, we risk losing it.

“It doesn’t matter if the CBC is good or bad, it’s both. It is ours, and it is us.”

BC and Yukon Book Prizes 2025 Shortlists Announced - BC and Yukon Book Prizes The West Coast Book Prize Society is pleased to announce the names of the finalists vying for recognition in eight categories at the 41st Annual BC and Yukon Book Prizes: Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize aw...

We're excited to announce the finalists of the 2025 BC and Yukon Book Prizes! These books represent the amazing talent and creativity in BC and Yukon, and we're honoured to be able to celebrate the work being done in our region.
bcyukonbookprizes.com/2025/04/10/b...

CBC’s Surreal Task: Report on the Guy Who Wants It Dead | The Tyee Poilievre has vowed to defund Canada’s public broadcaster. Try covering that.

"Prime Minister Mark Carney [is] promising a $150-million boost to the CBC budget.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre . . . has promised to defund the public broadcaster . . . and is refusing to take questions from its reporters." @thetyee.ca

Carney pledges $150-million funding increase for CBC/Radio-Canada – with more to come Pierre Poilievre accuses Liberal Leader of failing to explain where the additional public money would come from

Preserving and protecting @cbcradiocanada.bsky.social needs to be one of our top election issues of concern. PP has declared that he will defund it if elected, a surefire way to quicken Canada's descent into the disinformation hellscape currently holding the US hostage. @savethecbc.bsky.social

Unfortunately: "*It’s now April 2, so for extra clarity (in case it wasn’t clear enough), note that the beautiful carriage turned back into a pumpkin at midnight. Though, somehow . . . a glass slipper remains — so maybe the headline will be usable in the future after all. But not today."

YouTube video by Centre for Media, Technology & Democracy Canada’s (Dis)information Crisis: 3 Major Threats Going Into the 45th Federal Election

@taylorowen.bsky.social "After the 2016 U.S. election Canada was remarkably resilient: polarization was low, trust in journalism was high, and news consumption remained strong.
Fast forward to 2025 . . . “almost everything that gave us resilience is either gone, or getting much, much worse.”"

U.S. professors who left Yale for University of Toronto raise alarm about Trump crackdown The professors, who are vocal critics of the U.S. President, have taken up roles at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy

“As a historian of the 1930s, of totalitarianism … of this unhinging from empirical reality that happened in Russia, I was able to see certain things sooner in my own country than I would have otherwise been able to see.” @marcishore.bsky.social

Alma Lee's @writersfest.bc.ca has grown to be such a fun and unique lit fest experience.

"If you are tired of the drumbeat of inevitability that insists English faculty adopt AI into our teaching practices . . . you are allowed to object. There is no path to ethically teach AI skills. Not only are we allowed to say no, we ought to think deeply about the why of that no."

Ukraine’s clandestine book club defies Russia’s push to rewrite history Risking discovery and even prison, teenage readers meet in secret to discuss texts that Putin’s troops are trying to erase

I’m always rooting for the urgent rebellion of creative well-read teenagers.

The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem Meta pirated millions of books to train its AI. Search through them here.

"Internal communications show employees saying that Meta did indeed torrent LibGen, which means that Meta could have not only accessed pirated material but also distributed it to others—well established as illegal under copyright law"

@savethecbc.bsky.social

Privacy isn’t about hiding—it’s about trust and control over our own information. In her #SXSW 2025 Keynote, Signal President, @meredithmeredith.bsky.social breaks down why our privacy matters.

We’re celebrating both International Women’s Day (March 8th) and Women’s History Month (March) virtually tonight starting at 8pm central.

Click twitch.tv/djjakerudh then and be inspired by brilliant and groundbreaking artists from the 1970s, ‘80s & ‘90s punk, post-punk, new wave and indie scenes!

From the Oldest Forest in Montana - Orion Magazine When a forest gets to be this old and untouched, it becomes something more than a forest.

"In these possibly last days... I will not tell you how many tons of carbon per acre the old and mature forests absorb," Rick Bass wrote in 2022. "Know that it is a lot. That data and science are out there."

On the importance of our old growth forests as they face new attacks.

Guernica-inspired. The clocks do seem to be surrealistically melting backwards.

Happy publication day to Ira Wells' ON BOOK BANNING 🎉🎉🎉Just in time for Freedom to Read Week

"What emerges in this deceptively slim and powerful volume is the voice of a devoted reader – ON BOOK BANNING is a testament to the life-altering power of books and ideas."—Quill & Quire

Praise be to the Humanities.

“When profit becomes the only motive for culture, originality ceases to be. The algorithm only knows what is – it cannot invent what has not yet been.” Dolores McElroy

It's hard to shake the sense that if generative AI were any other tech trend—without the AGI mythology, the industry-wide bias confirmation, the historic levels of investment many firms treat as sunk costs—the AI boom would either just be one pretty successful app or dead in a ditch altogether.

Hell, yes. Sign me up. I’m tired of having conversations with colleagues who’ve willingly descended into the AI inevitability trap.

National Survey: How Do Canadians Really Feel About the CBC? — Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy Canadians Want to Reform and Grow the CBC — Not Cut It, National Survey Finds Oct. 23, 2024 The future of CBC/Radio Canada has become a fixture of political debate, but to what extent does the pa...

Oct 2024; the McGill Center for Media, Tech, and Democracy published a national survey of Canadians on public service media titled "Do We Need the CBC?" - the public's answer is yes. You can find the full published study hyperlinked in this article: www.mediatechdemocracy.com/all-work/can...

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich Drugs in the Third Reich

Based. bookshop.org/p/books/blit...

Judith Butler: To Imagine a World After This, Democracy Needs the Humanities Many young people tell me that they fear there is no future. When they ask about the future, they are also asking: what is still imaginable or for what may we still hope? To say there is no future,…

“The beginning of democracy requires a transport into a necessary fiction.” Judith Butler on why democracy needs the humanities.

There's a Public Enemy lyric for this.

#OTD two monumental figures in American and specifically Black literary experience and history were born. Happy birthday Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison.

Tom Robbins obituary Novelist whose biggest seller was Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which Thomas Pynchon hoped would change the ‘brainscape of America’

For so many of us weirdos, Tom Robbins' writing cushioned the blow of coming to terms with the zig-zag absurdity of existence. From @theguardian.com