Ted Chiang on Artificial Intelligence
Ted Chiang is a science fiction author who wrote the story that became Arrival (via Metafilter). Recently in The New Yorker: How much can you optimize for generality?…
Category: English
SAR Announces 2021-2022 Native Artist Fellows
SAR Announces 2021-2022 Native Artist Fellows …
APLA Graduate Student Paper Prize 2021
The APLA Board invites individuals who are students in a graduate degree-granting program (including M.A., Ph.D., J.D., LL.M., S.J.D. etc.) to send papers centering…
A Sandbox for a Specific Type of Narcissist – Clubhouse, the Allure of Live Audio and Dangerous Rabbit Holes
A nasal voice is rambling on in a long monologue about how to best pitch a startup on Clubhouse when I log on sometime in March. It is…
Entrepreneurship and Technologies
Everyone is an entrepreneur – a new ethos is sweeping through our economic world. While the promises of ‘being your own boss’ and ‘deciding about your working hours’…
Can the Holy Spirit Be Livestreamed?
A pastor reaches out to his global congregants online to emphasize the importance of pandemic lockdowns. Pastor Samuel K Majok—Online Ministry Every Sunday, during her fieldwork, Cristina…
What a comedian in blackface says about German media, prevailing racism & ignoring colonial histories
It all started with a Tweet… German public broadcaster from Bavaria aired a comedian who impersonated an African dictator (including blackface/white gloves) to “satirically” address recent cases of…
In the Journals – Militarization
Officers wearing a traditional late 1960s uniform (left) and a new demilitarized uniform featuring a blazer (right), Riverside County Sheriff, 1969 by Stuart Schrader via Journal of Urban…
Jason Manning, “Suicide: The Social Causes of Self-Destruction” (U Virginia Press, 2020)
The conventional approach to suicide is psychiatric: ask the average person why people kill themselves, and they will likely cite depression. But this approach fails to recognize suicide’s…
Maurice Rafael Magaña, “Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico” (U California Press, 2020)
In Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico (U California Press, 2020), based on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, Maurice Magaña considers how urban a… Visit…
Jack Glazier, “Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race” (MSU Press, 2020)
Paul Radin was one of the founding generation of American cultural anthropologists: A student of Franz Boas, and famed ethnographer of the Winnebago. Yet little is known about Radin’s life. A leftist…
Cultivating a Destination’s Band of Brothers
A 2017 Destinations International (DI) policy brief states, “The devotion of members is the biggest asset to any advocacy organization, even more so than funding”. This assertion rings…
Cultivating a Destination’s Band of Brothers
A 2017 Destinations International (DI) policy brief states, “The devotion of members is the biggest asset to any advocacy organization, even more so than funding”. This assertion rings…
GPT-Neo: An open source alternative to GPT-3
Access to GPT-3 remains limited, but “EleutherAI,” a “grassroots collective of researchers working to open source AI research,” has released GPT-Neo: GPT-Neo is the code …
A Brief Lindbergh Update
One of my more popular posts of late has been The Fall and Rise of Lindbergh: A Javelina Story. In that post, I tell the story of a…
Alex Dent discusses Digital Pirates
Interview by Ilana Gershon Digital Pirates: Policing Intellectual Property in Brazil Ilana Gershon: At the heart of this book is the intellectually productive argument that intellectual pro…
Kaleidoscope of truth
Sandhya I. Fuchs (LSE and University of Bern) will talk about “Kaleidoscope of truth: Legal fictions, real cases and controversial proof in the production of the Prevention of…
Juned Shaikh, “Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor” (U Washington Press, 2021)
What is the history of caste in a city? Indian modernizers assumed that the various processes of modernity, including industrial capitalism, would attenuate caste and create the possibility…
James S. J. Schwartz, “The Value of Science in Space Exploration” (Oxford UP, 2020)
The Value of Science in Space Exploration (Oxford UP, 2020) provides a rigorous assessment of the value of scientific knowledge and understanding in the context of contemporary space explorat……
Ep #72 Weaponised Photography & Sex Work: Camille Waring on Online Intimacy & Lens Based Violence
The Familiar Strange · Ep #72 Weaponized Photography & Sex Work: Camille Waring on Online Intimacy & Lens Based Violence Before we dive into today’s episode we’d just…
Parading with the Pharaohs
Yesterday there was an extravaganza parade in Cairo parading the embalmed remains of 22 ancient Egyptian pharaohs to their new “eternal” resting place in the National Museum of…
Colonial Hyperbole, with gaps
There are some crimes that are longer-term than others… As I am finding from spending part of the morning exploring archival images, such as this one. A ‘British…
Cascades Winter Villages in the Wapato Valley
Documentation in the Lewis and Clark journals, especially for that of 1806, is of the Cascades tribe seasonal round, the seasonal lifeways of the tribes of the lower…
Picturing the “Enemy”
My friend Karim Ben Khelifa, an award-winning photographic journalist who I met over a decade ago, has produced an extraordinary film (“The Enemy”) on his experience as a…