A (rare) personal note: if any journalist wants to hear about the French crisis from a historian whose family has spent 5 out of the last 6 years inside the French national public education system-including in the lycée that was set on fire in Nantes!-feel free to contact me.

Brave of Coxon to do a long-form, 25-minute interview with one of the biggest stars in the world and without hedging, without caveats, make the case for the dystopian utopia of universal luxurious jobless purposelessness if AI goes right. But he’s wrong thinking billions of working people and people in poverty will gladly trade a radical loss of meaning—through zero human production of art, music, science or indeed of anything—for improved quality of life (through a high-income UBI). Stewart is right that humans take great meaning from work. He is not arguing that people take great meaning from poverty. We are Homo faber, man the maker. The utopia most want is an end to poverty, inequality and domination, not an end to work and meaning.

The explosion of heating oils costs is a huge deal in a state that is not especially wealthy and where 50 percent of homes are still heated by oil. This is going to be really, really hard for a lot of people here.

this is coming for a lot of academic jobs, and the only thing that the academics will be able to do about it is reassure each other about how legitimate and important they are. they have no other leverage and no other constituency.

Harvard Business School is creating AI clones of its professors to give advice as part of a $699 package. If you’re a professor and still genuinely believe university admins are pushing AI (“Integrate it! Embrace the future!”) for good faith reasons I don’t know what to tell you.

I can't believe these small city-sized warehouses that hum all day and use massive amounts of energy during an affordability crisis got so unpopular, did we go wrong by saying they needed to be built to take away everyone's jobs or to destroy humanity, let's workshop this again

The anti-datacenter movement is literally the most rational response imaginable to an industry whose leaders have publicly said the best case scenario for their product is to get everyone fired. If you can’t see this then your brain is in late stage tech rot.

I bought a gratuitous number of energy drinks at the gas station last week and the cashier who—this is a neutral description of fact—was obviously a drug addict looked at me with such genuine concern that I exclaimed “I need these for fishing!” and that did not quell his alarm.