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Christine Wenc

@clearwing3.bsky.social
5.1K followers 4.1K following 643 posts

Funny Because It's True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire. Say Wenc like sense. Agent: Daniel Greenberg@lgrliterary. The House on the Rock shaped my brain.

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Christine Wenc @clearwing3.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
It is very similar for editors.
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Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
A "radical intentionalist," writes Eryk Salvaggio, treats an AI model as a 'mind' to be interpreted rather than a product that was designed. It is "a strange and dangerous relationship for designers to have with a product they are literally designing," he writes — and worse as a basis for policy.
buff.ly
To Make AI Rules, Policymakers Must Resist the Influence of ‘Radical Intentionalists’
In industry rhetoric, a radical intentionalist stance dominates any interpretation of model behavior, writes Eryk Salvaggio.
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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
"I honestly don’t believe that rogue AI is going to kill us all, but if we are not mindful about cultivating a life of experience and meaning, we may allow AI’s presence to prevent us from living." (Invite @biblioracle.bsky.social to talk to your students-mine were very inspired when he visited us!)
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Financial Times @financialtimes.com · 19/09/2026
AI chatbots give wrong answers to financial queries ‘most of the time’ ft.trib.al/oImlEFY
ft.trib.al
AI chatbots give wrong answers to financial queries ‘most of the time’
Report finds some chatbots ignored upcoming tax changes and hallucinated rules
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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I've been doing this for a couple years, so maybe this is the cumulative effect of tech-free policies at secondary schools & across a growing number of disciplines, but my students this term are so attentive it is actually freaking. me. out. a. little.
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Hildur Knútsdóttir @hildur.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
This post is making the rounds again for some reason and therefore I feel I must inform you that they’ve hired another one so there are now TWO forensic pathologists working in Iceland.
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Sara Pritchard @sarabpritchard.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
It's Here 🥲
Cover of my new book, Transforming Night
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Ed Yong is offline @edyong209.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Briefly popping my head back in to unveil the cover of my upcoming book, LIFE BEYOND MEASURE: Nature's Hidden Wonders at Every Scale. It’ll be out on April 6 in the U.S. and April 29 in the U.K. and you can pre-order it right now! www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/757705... 1/
A book cover featuring a beautiful closely cropped portrait of an Anna's hummingbird. The cover says LIFE BEYOND MEASURE: Nature's Hidden Wonders at Every Scale, by Ed Yong. The image also says US: 4/06/27 and UK: 4/29/27
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Amalia H @amaliah.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Slightly nervous for any university administrator to read it, but thanks to the work of scholars such as @cjdenial.bsky.social & @benpatrickwill.bsky.social our first-year humanities program has a pedagogical statement on gen AI, with reading list! core.humanities.uci.edu/index.php/ge...
core.humanities.uci.edu
Our Pedagogical Approaches to Generative AI in Humanities Core
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Christine Wenc @clearwing3.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
This is awesome.
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Daniel José Older @djolder.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
"The University of Chicago’s undergrad social-sciences division will go “analog” this fall, implementing a blanket policy banning technology in class and AI assistance on coursework across the division’s core courses." www.chronicle.com/article/u-of...
chronicle.com
U. of Chicago Bans Tech, AI in Social Sciences Core Courses
The new restrictions apply to students and faculty members.
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The Verge @theverge.com · 14/09/2026
For years, GM had been collecting all sorts of data on its customers — such as how often they sped or whether they drove at night — and selling it to brokers to generate risk profiles for insurance companies. Drivers were usually unaware of the degree to which their data was being collected.
theverge.com
Your car is selling your data
The amount of data about you that many cars collect — and sell to third parties — is staggering.
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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Many "existing peer-reviewed studies that say AI is an effective learning tool are based on flawed methodologies and analyses that rely on misapplied, miscalculated or misinterpreted statistics." Good to see the severe limits of research on AI in education covered in IHE here.
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Straight talk time: Doomerism is BORING. It's the same fantasties rehashed over and over again, just louder each time. And with each iteration it seems that new audiences are being reached, and a new group of people needs to be talked down from unnecessary fear. >>
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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Last year, I was having a conversation with Eugene Rabkin, who recently released a book on how he thinks fashion has changed over the years. He brought up what I think is an interesting point. He said fashion used to feel special, both in terms of the product and presentation.
Portrait of Eugene Rabkin.Cover of the book Torn: Fashion and Post-Modernism
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 25/06/2025
New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41... We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance 1/
nature.com
Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology - Nature
An analysis of research papers and citing patents indicates the extensive ties between computer-vision research and surveillance.
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Christine Wenc @clearwing3.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
There's also a ton of popular online discourse around what is effectively symbols, metaphor, mythology, close reading, amateur historian sleuthing, etc.-- all to find meaning in movies, TV shows, famous people, current events, and so on that can't be expressed by numbers and machines
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Christine Wenc @clearwing3.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
This is I think a really significant issue that almost nobody knows about.
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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
This essay is brilliant and everyone should read it. When you're done, might I persuade you to then read my interview of @melaniemitchell.bsky.social from earlier this year, wherein she talks about the history of AI, cultural and embodied cognition, Oliver Sacks, and AI agents? More brilliance.
buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com
Reflections on AI from Melanie Mitchell, thinking human
My conversation with one of AI's "OG" researchers and theorists
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Christine Wenc @clearwing3.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
There's a whole chapter on how the 9/11 issue came to be in my book. (It was made by the people on the cover photo which was taken soon after they moved from Madison, WI to NYC, a few months before 9/11). www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/chris...
hachettebookgroup.com
Funny Because It’s True
Discover the real truth behind the original fake news with this in-depth history of beloved humor publication, The Onion. In 1988, a band of University of Wi...
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Every half-ass plan for our extinction that they provide just turns me on. No internet, you say? No online banking?? No 2FA to use the bathroom at my job??? Baby I was a latchkey kid in the 1980s. You’re describing my platonic ideal. Extinct me.
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Christine Wenc @clearwing3.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
In the mid-90s I answered the phone for a psychopharmacologist to NYC's B-list celebrities. He booked in 15-minute blocks, didn't take insurance, grossed $30K/wk, and tried to cheat me out of my paycheck twice. The Prozac rep visited regularly and they'd smoke cigars and whoop it up in his office
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Christine Wenc @clearwing3.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
100%. Both in the sense of having to now read for bizarre AI-generated weirdness/errors as well as the suddenly increased volume. You also now wonder if writers are using LLMs without telling you. (Editing is my day job, and the *human* connection is what I have always valued most in that work)
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Alison Gopnik @alisongopnik.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
In the Times this morning- Henry Farrell James Evans and I on why we desperately need the social sciences to understand AI and its impact , just at the moment when the admin is trying to destroy them. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | We Can’t Know Our A.I. Future if We Don’t Study It (Gift Article)
Just as A.I. is poised to change the world, we’re losing our best ways of studying what that change will look like.
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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
hard discrete q: you can assign one and only one essay/article/chapter of approx 30 pages to a group that wants to discuss the politics of aesthetics (in some sense, today) and has already read The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. what is it?
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
I find that, no matter how many ways I acknowledge LLMs etc are changing, people dismiss me as “crazy” or “unserious” because I refuse to attribute those changes to “intelligence.” I will say again, automated language production and intelligence are completely different things.
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Christine Wenc @clearwing3.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
This is really good.
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Natasha Singer @natashanyt.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
In 1979, @nader.org documented how companies were flooding schools with corporate-sponsored learning materials. My new book, "Coding Kids," traces corporate influence in classrooms from then to now. If you or someone you know is interested in these issues, please pre-order the book today!
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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
One of those things you were pretty sure was true but now you have causal quantiative evidence in the American Economic Review: business schools trained CEOs to pay workers less in pursuit of maximizing shareholder value www.aeaweb.org/conference/2...
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
My most unpopular of unpopular opinions: we gotta get rid of the phones.
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
They’ll keep telling us it’s inevitable but NYC and other large school systems are starting to say no to AI, recognizing it’s not a legitimate tool for k-12 learning. Even some universities are putting their foot down, like U Chicago (and some law schools) www.nyc.gov/mayors-offic...
nyc.gov
Mayor Mamdani and Chancellor Samuels Put Students First with Nation’s Broadest Generative AI Moratorium in Schools
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 03/09/2026
We're just hurtling toward immense destruction & suffering & the entire US political class has agreed it's better not to talk about it. "Insanity" barely covers it.
nytimes.com
U.N. Says World Will Miss Its 1.5-Degree Climate Target
Carbon removal combined with emissions reduction is the only remaining pathway to avert catastrophic levels of warming, a new report warns.
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John W Buaas @johnwbuaas.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
From Wendell Berry's essay, "The Work of Local Culture"
"I was walking one Sunday afternoon several years ago with an older friend. We went by the ruining log house that had belonged to his grandparents and great-grandparents. The house stirred my friend's memory, and he told how the oldtime people used to visit each other in the evenings, especially in the long evenings of winter. There used to be a sort of institution in our part of the country known as "sitting till bedtime." After supper, when they weren't too tired, neighbors would walk across the fields to visit each other. They popped corn, my friend said, and ate apples and talked. They told each other stories. They told each other stories, as I knew myself, that they all had heard before. Sometimes they told stories about each other, about themselves, living again in their own memories and thus keeping their memories alive. Among the hearers of these stories were always the children. When bedtime came, the visitors lit their lanterns and went home. My friend talk about this, and thought abut it, and then he said, "They had everything but money."
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Andromeda @ulveheksa.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Questionnaire by Wendell Berry
Questionnaire by Wendell Berry

1. How much poison are you willing to eat for the success of the free market and global trade?
Please name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks with the names of your favorite evils and acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared to make for culture and civilization? Please list the monuments, shrines, and works of art you would most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and the flag, how much of our beloved land are you willing to desecrate? List in the following spaces the mountains, rivers, towns, farms you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes, the energy sources, the kinds of security, for which you would kill a child. Name, please, the children whom you would be willing to kill.
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Peter Greene @palan57.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Wendell Berry's Rules for New Tech. Berry just passed, and will be missed. His list was already old when I discovered it, but remains useful. curmudgucation.substack.com/p/wendell-be...
curmudgucation.substack.com
Wendell Berry's Rules for New Tech
Wendell Berry was born in 1934 and grew to be a writer across a wide number of forms, as well as working as an activist and farmer, mostly in rural Kentucky.
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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Wrote this as a comment on a post about the MIT AI report--something I've been thinking about a lot. What MIT did with the report was assert values about humans and community that those at universities have wanted to hear from an institution, which is part of what makes the report so important.
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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Also: a lot of decisions have been made about AI in ed by people who had not tried LLMs, did not understand how they work, were not in the classroom, did not really understand how students were likely to use them, and were driven by FOMO rather than by data/knowlege/understanding/learning.
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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Good thread about how students need to know things regardless of whether they will use LLMs later. This is so clear in writing instruction, where using LLMs to "brainstorm" or "edit" has become a thing that students are told to do when they have no experience brainstorming or editing themselves./1
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Ghost in the Machine @ghostdoc2026.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
AI is a marketing term. What is being sold? GHOST IN THE MACHINE is coming to @pbs.org and YouTube September 14th at 10pm ET / 7pm PT!
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Per Axbom @axbom.com · 28/08/2026
The idea of "falling behind" by not going all-in on "AI" is a marketing ploy used to create artificial urgency. It's not a fact. If you don't walk down one path you walk down another path. Both have unknown outcomes. The claim of "falling behind" is the wording that should deter you from that path.
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Oisín McGann @oisinmcgann.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
This is set up for laughs, but it’s actually one of the best demonstrations I’ve seen of how being capable of producing convincing sounding language and understanding meaning are two completely different things. A chatbot does not understand you, it just has automated responses based on your words.
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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
One of the best things to come out of this AI era has been the conversations between those who teach high school and those who teach college. We should have been having these conversations all along, and we definitely need to be having them now. Always appreciate hearing what Marcus Luther thinks.
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Gil Durán @gilduran.com · 27/08/2026
Many describe my book as shocking/scary. But here's the secret some readers have figured out: It's also *funny*! If you think of it as an extended roast, it hits kind of different. I don't want to make readers afraid. I want to make them bold and energetic.
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Charles Logan @charleswlogan.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
“And before you ask, we kept the business school, obviously. We’re ditching knowledge, not money.”
mcsweeneys.net
Our University Does Not Require Books, Paper, or Human Knowledge
“Such a radical shakeup in learning has never happened before, as far as I know. Is there even a way to learn about whether or not something has happened bef...
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Christine Wenc @clearwing3.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
If you gave that $10 million to WRITERS, to write books, stories, poetry, and journalism, you would completely transform the state of American literature almost inconceivably for the better within 5 years.
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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
While they are conducting their research, I know some great people who could take an additional $10 million and figure out how to design some really wonderful writing assignments for students to complete without AI so that we can compare. Let us know if you know of any funders!
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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
At the center of my message to faculty yesterday was: 1.) We may not be adequately prepared for how angry students are about tech. 2.) They are not all angry for the same reasons. 3.) Being angry at it doesn’t mean they aren’t using it. The sense of entrapment fuels the anger.
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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
New MIT report on AI calls for less emphasis on grades, more on project-based learning, recognition that programs for undergraduate research assistants are educational experiences that should not be replaced even if AI agents can do the research for less $$, more emphasis on community. /1
aiandeducation.mit.edu
Report – AI and Education
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
“All social science Core classes will transition to an “analog” approach for the upcoming academic year, restricting in-classroom technology use and banning AI-assisted writing and grading for students and professors.” chicagomaroon.com/53262/news/s...
chicagomaroon.com
Sosc Core to Institute AI Ban, Technology-Free Classrooms This Fall
All social science Core classes will transition to an “analog” approach for the upcoming academic year, restricting in-classroom technology use and banning AI-assisted writing and grading for students...
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