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LitHub – Tom Zoellner on the Antebellum Precedent of Trump-Era Censorship: “In the days before the Civil War, the South worked hard to censor any literature that cast slavery in a negative light. Officials in Charleston, S.C. went through mailbags for abolitionist newspapers. Legislatures passed laws banning any publication that may show “a tendency to …
“After more than 18 years with The Washington Post, the Capital Weather Gang will return to its roots as Capital Weather, an independent offering, starting May 31 at CapitalWeather.com. We are deeply grateful to The Post for believing in local weather journalism and helping us grow from a small blog into one of the nation’s …
Bird History: “Making this list was the hardest thing I’ve ever done: “I love bird names. And in a world with more than 11,000 kinds of birds, ornithologists have had to dig deep to come up with unique titles for each one. While literal descriptions have their place (I’m delighted every time someone asks me …
Ethan Mollick – One Useful Thing: “If you go to your favorite social media site, you will find it full of posts that start to look suspiciously similar to each other: Many of the comments to these posts are also generated by AI. So are an increasing number of academic papers and New York Times …
The New York Times Gift Article: “The Trump administration is dismantling a $368 million deep-ocean observation system that was put in place a decade ago to monitor coastal environments, marine ecosystems and powerful currents that affect the global climate. The National Science Foundation said it would send ships in June to begin removing more than …
New York Fed – Liberty Street Economics: “Youth unemployment has risen dramatically since the pandemic—as has the prevalence of remote work. Our analysis suggests that these trends are related, with remote work making it more difficult for managers to train and mentor new employees. Accordingly, companies may be reluctant to hire less-experienced workers in distributed …
NBC News: “Roughly 2,000 U.S. diplomats have been laid off or forced to retire, taking with them decades of institutional knowledge, crisis response experience and highly specialized language skills…” See also At the Breaking Point – The State of the U.S. Foreign Service in 2025 – A Report by the American Foreign Service Association
The New York Times Gift Article: “President Trump’s upheaval of the federal government has led to an exodus of more than 10,000 lawyers since the beginning of 2025, a striking loss of legal talent that has left some agencies pushing to find attorneys to carry out his agenda. Roughly one in five lawyers who worked …
Robert Glasser: “Are people using AI, or is the organization learning from it? What changed because we spent those tokens? And who moves discoveries from individuals to teams to organizational capabilities? Ethan Mollick has been writing about AI adoption in organizations for a while now. In Making AI Work: Leadership, Lab, and Crowd, he makes the …
New York Mag – Intelligencer [no paywall]: “Steven Rosenbaum started writing his book The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality in 2022, around when ChatGPT launched. Initially he didn’t use it at all, “But as the writing moved forward into 2023, 2024, it got better and I got better at using it,” he said. …
Kottke: “How do dictionary makers keep track of similarly suffixed words, like those ending in -ism, -graphy, -ness, or -ology? With a computer, it’s simple, but how did they do it before the computing age? Starting in the 1950s, lexicographers at Merriam-Webster typed all of the words in the dictionary out backwards and organized them …
Biased AI writing assistants shift users’ attitudes on societal issues. Sci Adv. 2026 Mar 11;12(11):eadw5578. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adw5578 – Artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistants powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to make autocomplete suggestions to people as they write text. Can these AI writing assistants affect people’s attitudes in this process? In two large-scale …
