Sep 1, 2025

Why Write?

If there is one question that I have returned to over and over in various hand-written journals, it is the basic question of why write anything at all. This could be taken to be asking myself why I am writing, or why others choose to write, or what the purpose or point of writing is more broadly. It could be a question about motivation, or impacts, or addiction. It could be a provocation, to myself or others. But the mystery remains. Why engage in this dangerous business?

Mar 28, 2025

Peeping Tom, Triptych

I don’t go to see much in the way of contemporary dance, but on a whim, I decided to get tickets to the Power Center to see Triptych, a performance developed by the Peeping Tom dance company from Belgium. Comprised of three pieces—The Missing Door, The Lost Room and The Hidden Floor—created in 2013, 2015, and 2017, respectively, the performance ran just over two hours, including a partial intermission. This post is a bit of a break from what I’ve been writing lately, but it feels worth highlighting, if only to help keep at least some attention on artistic endeavours. Just as a warning, I have not refrained from spoiling anything in here, so you might want to stop reading if you’re planning to see it and want the full effect.

Mar 24, 2025

Markets for Content

I don’t carefully track the numbers, bit it seems like various sectors of the media have been hit hard by layoffs recently. Earlier this month, Disney announced that it was shuttering FiveThirtyEight, the data journalism outlet that Nate Silver started what now feels like a lifetime ago. According to the Wall Street Journal, FiveThirtyEight only had a staff of about 15 people, but the move is part of a broader consolidation and job cuts at the company.

Feb 10, 2025

Force of Law

I do not feel particularly well qualified to write about this, but it seems to me that recent events have dramatically and urgently gestured at the nature of the rule of law, and the tenuousness of reliable enforcement. Since coming into office, the new administration has been carrying out actions that many legal experts suggest are illegal. In several cases since then, judges have issued orders which demand a pause on particular actions. Most recently, the New York Times reports that a judge has now ruled that the White House has failed to comply with a court order. While less splashy than various overt actions, this kind of failure act seems to me like to very close to the red line suggested by various commentators, including conservatives.

Dec 8, 2024

Chatbot Roulette

Nov 16, 2024

What is a Podcast?

What is a podcast? I expect we all have our own slightly idiosyncratic answer to that question. For me, podcasts are defined partly by some software I use on my phone that regularly downloads audio files from various feeds, which I periodically listen to, often as I’m doing other things. Most of these recordings feature two or more people engaged in a long-form conversation. Some of these take the form of interviews, in which a regular host interviews a rotating series of guests. Others feature rotating subsets of the same group of hosts, talking together about various issues. A few shows, like Hardcore History, are just long monologues, not so different from an audiobook.

Sep 29, 2024

Bespoke Navigation

I don’t normally do this, but I recently did a short bike trip in Michigan, and I thought I would write a brief post about it, in part because it cued various other ideas which have a more direct connection to the kinds of things I normally write about here.

Jul 30, 2024

Credible Estimates and Open Science

Jun 22, 2024

Altair vs. Bokeh (part 3): Scatterplots

This is my third entry in a series comparing two interactive data visualization libraries for python, Bokeh and Altair. In part 1, I went through a basic overview of some of the differences in terms of syntactic style and defaults. In part 2, I went slightly deeper into some of the interactive features and more fundamental limitations. In this part, I want to deepen the comparison further, by exploring the basic capabilities each package offers with respect to a basic chart type, namely scatterplots.

May 27, 2024

The OpenAI Library

The New York Times recently ran a brief article about the reading room in OpenAI’s office in San Francisco. The article was heavy on images and light on text, but the overall theme was the tension between the company’s GPT models—which have been trained on vast swaths of human culture, and are therefore able to regurgitate, remix, and approximate it—versus embracing the design and aesthetic trappings of a traditional library reading room. The article mentioned a handful of books that could be found in the OpenAI library, but many more were clearly visible in the photographs that accompanied it.