Jan 4, 2026

Infrastructural Failures

Susan Leigh Star has noted that infrastructure is often invisible until it breaks. We all know that we are ensconced in a whole network of pipes and wires that provide water, electricity, and other systems upon which we depend, but at least for those of us lucky enough to have reliable service, it is easy to take it for granted that these things just work, until they don’t. Given the increasing interdependence of software and infrastructure, the recent Waymo failure in Los Angeles provided a useful reminder of the types of risks inherent in these kinds of distributed-but-centralized technical systems.

Dec 22, 2025

A review I recently wrote that I expect to write again

We are at a strange moment in scholarship, where a powerful new tool (language models) has been handed to people, and existing academic systems are scrambling to figure out how to respond. Even leaving aside the crisis around a potential deluge of AI-generated papers, there are many more conventional questions about what an appropriate use of language models is for domains other than computer science. Especially in the social sciences, my understanding is that established journals are struggling both to recruit qualified reviewers, and to know what appropriate standards should be, in terms of methodological rigor.

Nov 12, 2025

Language Model Hacking

With the widespread success of language models on many tasks in a zero-shot setting, there has been a huge surge of interest among social scientists in wanting to use them to code or classify documents, sometimes in place of human annotators. Given both the freedom to specify prompts, and the lack of connection to domain-specific training data, a concern naturally arises as to how easily people can manipulate their designs to produce a desired conclusion. This had been on my mind recently, and so I was delighted to see that a couple of recent papers specifically take on this question, both of which conclude that there is indeed considerable latitude to produce a desired finding by manipulating the choices involved. These are extremely useful and important results, although they also open up some questions for me, which I wanted to think through here.

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.