Tech reporter for the Boston Globe, and author of You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves...makes a great gift!

Boston
Joined April 2010
Hiawatha Bray retweeted
Example: Harry Potter's big flaw is that the world makes zero sense. Think about it for 5 seconds and you'll find nine plot holes But nobody cares because: 1) Rowling nailed the vibes *perfectly* 2) the pacing is excellent 3) the characters are all interesting
Stop trying to write a perfect book, there's no such thing and never will be Instead, focus on doing at least three things really well. Accomplish that and people will overlook the inevitable flaws
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Hiawatha Bray retweeted
Where we are going there is no training data
A real frontier where there is no training data.
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From the smart new liberal magazine The Argument, a blazing indictment of the DOGE foreign aid cuts, complete with receipts. theargumentmag.com/p/elon-mu…
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What's Russian for "mic drop?"
My daughter's friend in grad school, upon being asked by a member of her dissertation committee why she didn't include a Marxist perspective. "I grew up in the Soviet Union. I don't practice recreational Marxism."
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If you're bitten by a tick, you can get yourself tested for Lyme disease. Or...you can test the tick. A new $40 home test can tell within minutes whether the tick that bit you is a Lyme carrier. bostonglobe.com/2026/06/17/b…
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Yep. I just don't get it.
The paradox of soccer is that there's nonstop action and the clock never stops, and yet it's the most boring sport ever known to mankind.
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Hmmm....wonder if he has a point.
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Phil's been busy...
Here's something many people don't know about me - Before I publicly dissected the long list of problems in the 1619 Project, I contacted the New York Times through their official channels to request a series of corrections to unambiguous factual errors in its content. The editor - Jake Silverstein - brushed me off and refused any correction - a pattern he also exhibited toward other critics from across the spectrum. Before I publicly broke the story about Kevin Kruse's plagiarism in Reason, I contacted Princeton's academic integrity officer and alerted him to the problems I had found, giving them a chance to respond and address it internally. They ignored my email and later claimed to have lost my email after I went public. Before I published my findings on Quinn Slobodian's habitual manipulation of source materials to alter its plain meaning through misquotation, I submitted an article to Contemporary European History (the journal where the worst examples appeared), highlighting the problems with the passages and asking for a correction through their official process. They desk-rejected it, brushed me off, and falsely claimed that Slobodian's piece had been thoroughly vetted in peer review. In fact, one of their own referees had flagged the same problems over a year earlier and recommended rejection of the article. Before I published an expose on Nancy MacLean & Sandy Darity's similar manipulation of W.H. Hutt quotations in their article for History of Economics Review, I (along with 2 coauthors) submitted a response comment to this journal asking for a correction through its official processes. The editor gave us a complete runaround where he imposed an arbitrary length limit requiring us to cut the content, sent the trimmed version to a referee, then rejected the piece because the referee said we didn't sufficiently address the very same things we were forced by the editor to cut. When I then asked the editor to issue a simple corrigendum to the most egregious misquotation (one that transformed Hutt's explicit attack on the racism of white Afrikaners into a defense of Apartheid), he refused and tried to pass it off as a difference of "interpretation." Before I published an expose of a leading covid masking model in the Wall Street Journal, I sent a comment to the medical journal that published it alerting them to a math error that changed their entire set of results. The journal acknowledged the error was real but refused to publish my piece on the grounds that the "next release" of the model would be updated to reflect it - even as politicians up to and including Joe Biden were trumpeting the erroneous results all over the news.
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Superbly said.
Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas
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I wrote about the Pope and why Christian tech critics often have a more compelling response to the AI crisis than their secular counterparts. Simply, Christian writers aren't afraid of "human nature" talk, and they understand THE question of the AI Age is: what are people for? 🧵
Pope Leo and other Christian thinkers have captured the gravity of the AI revolution in a way that many secular thinkers have not, @Tyler_A_Harper argues. theatlantic.com/culture/2026…
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