Whatever you’re working on right now, whatever it might be, I ask: try to leave a little space for a courtyard.

— “The Courtyard,”, by Caleb Sasser

Get Me Risa Heller! (NYmag.com) If you’re Jeff Zucker or Mario Batali or Jared Kushner and you’re trying to survive a bout of very bad press, she’s who you call.

“Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine,” published in 1958, was one of my favorite books when I was a little kid. I read and reread it many times.

It’s a book about a boy and his friends who teach a computer to do their homework. They read to the machine from their textbooks.

That’s not how computers actually worked …until recently, when voice recognition and machine learning has caught up to 65-year-old kiddie sci-fi.

I’ve been thinking about that book quite a bit recently. And so has David Owen at The New Yorker.

What a Sixty-Five-Year-Old Book Teaches Us About A.I.

Pink Floyd songwriter Roger Waters is a loud and proud anti-Semite, and Frankfurt canceled his performance there.. (By Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing)

The latest historical American Girl doll is from the 90s and makes zines. It comes with a PC that makes dial-up noises.

jwz: The Dream of the Nineties is Still Alive

Every presidential administration wants to fix America’s ‘crumbling infrastructure’ until they discover the business interests profiting from disrepair.

— It Is Happening Again. By Erik Baker at n + 1

The South Has Got Something To Say (Dissent Magazine)

New books by Adolph L. Reed Jr. and Imani Perry explore the South from the Jim Crow era to today through memoir and interview.

The thing I find most suspicious/fishy/smelly about the current hype surrounding Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, and other AI applications is that it is almost exactly six months since the bottom dropped out of the cryptocurrency scam bubble…. To me it looks very much as if the usual hucksters and grifters are now chasing the sweet VC/private equity money….

— Charles Stross, Place your bets

Jamelle Bouie: The Founders Were More Creative Than You Think

The Supreme Court’s originalism “rests on a cramped view of the framers of the Constitution and their ability to think and reason. In the hands of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and other conservatives on the Supreme Court, the founding fathers are small-minded and provincial, unable to think beyond the narrowest possible interpretation of the words they wrote.”

Putin and the Right’s Tough-Guy Problem. (Paul Krugman)

The right has an unhealthy fixation on men who swagger and act like tough guys.