In the middle of last spring semester, the TikTok algorithm suddenly keyed into my role as a teacher and starting surfacing two parallel streams of videos. First, I was seeing professors like those on #ProfessorTok complaining about students—these professors often claim to be offering students insight into how college
Early in the first meeting of my school’s AI Book Club in Spring 2024, in the midst of a conversation about Fei Fei Li’s The Worlds I See, a colleague launched into the kind of anti-AI comment that’s become familiar in the last few years. She
I taught three sections of my long-standing Digital Literary Studies elective last spring, and in late March, four separate students hit on the same object of study for their blog posts. All at once, it seems, my students’ feeds had filled with Fruit Love Island, an AI-generated show
I recently read W. Patrick McCray’s excellent book README: A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines (2025), and its central thesis that the history of computing is bound up in books resonated, because the origins of my love of computers and my love of books
In a January 2016 interview on the Hard Fork podcast, Jonathan Haidt makes a striking assertion about the potential effects of the smartphone and social media bans he’s been promoting for the last several years. Hard Fork co-host Casey Newton, who elsewhere in the interview notes that he