iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Everything is awful and the news is sickening, but I’m glad to be reading my colleague Allison Cutseen‘s new book, which is smart and thoughtful and an example of the insights careful attention to literary works can yield. She took her time to write this and it shows.

Cover of Minor Moves: Black Girls and Unruly Performance in Antebellum Narratives.

183

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I just think it’s important to recognize that the reason parents are turning to club sports is that it’s where their kids can socialize with other kids, and not just be staring their phones.

“In a time of justified concern for children’s mental health and unease about the future, parents have latched on to sports as a lifeline — a kid throwing a ball around is a kid not scrolling YouTube. No parent wants their child to feel left out, and more and more, parents may worry that a travel league is the only way to set their child up to play beyond grade school.”

020

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Sorry for the paywall, but you will be surprised to learn that the expansion of club sports—which costs parents enormous sums—is backed by private equity. nymag.com/intelligence...

“In 2014, a pair of private-equity firms acquired Varsity Brands, a team-sports-apparel and competitive-cheer company, for $1.5 billion. The deal gave Varsity Brands ubiquity in the youth-sports ecosystem at the national level, from the competitions themselves to the uniforms and training camps. Just four years later, it was bought by another private-equity firm, Bain Capital, for a reported $2.5 billion. In 2024, it sold again to KKR for around $4.5 billion. Travel sports had been growing in popularity since the early aughts, but investments tended to be small and fragmented — a team here, a rink there. The new mentality was bigger and more straightforward: Own it all.”

131

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

This was riveting and informative. Also sad that so much of the sci fi I enjoyed as a kid seems to be guiding the very worst developments of the present.

Cover of Quinn Slododian and Ben Tarnoff’s book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. Photo of a tall white cloud, maybe left by a rocket, against a blue background.

040

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

The sun is orange and the air hard to breath.

The sun is an orange dot against a grey sky.

211

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Dense, deeply researched, this book focuses smartly on the 70s and 80s. The fight against authoritarianism it chronicles often ends badly, but the women at the center of this story never give up trying to bring better worlds into being.

Cover of Durba Mitra’s The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism. The cover art shows a colorful sphere ringed by what might be bodies.

33114

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Sublimation breaks open the immigrant novel with an amazingly original conceit and should probably appear in many syllabi soon, but I’m also having a hard time saying you should read it right away. I’m halfway through and feeling really mixed.

Cover of Isabel Kim’s Sublimation. Image is hard to describe but shows two women walking away from each other.

130

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

2. They have an equal problem with Sadiya Hartman, whom they mention by name twice and more if we include allusions to her like this (the first reference to Hartman appears in the next paragraph):

There is, however, a long-standing and deeply rooted current in contemporary humanistic scholarship that regards the idea of scholarly objectivity with profound suspicion. One version of this skepticism is purely epistemological. A scholar of literature or history may concede that there are genuine facts about the meanings of texts or about the past which prevail independently of our representations of them, while at the same time holding that scholarship is aimed, not at an accurate reconstruction of those facts, but rather at an edifying narrative.

130

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

What’s are examples of those who have failed to pay enough lip service to this all important ideal? 1. They really have a problem with transgender studies.

Much work in the philosophy of sex and gender is organized around the political project of securing social justice for trans people and other gender minorities, where this project is taken to presuppose the substantive thesis that trans women are women in every sense.

110

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

It’s not too extreme to say that they make this point categorically at its conclusion, even though they repeatedly concede that in the past the university claimed to do this even while advancing incredibly noxious ideas.

Part of the raison d’être of a university is that it should engage in disinterested inquiry — inquiry aimed at knowledge and understanding, both for their own sake and for the sake of further goods that require genuine knowledge and understanding, rather than ideologically informed opinion, for their promotion. This, at least in part, is what universities are for. Indeed, it might well be thought that one of the greatest contributions a university can make to society is to provide a model of what disinterested inquiry can be and how it might thereby be of value. If the pursuit of disinterested inquiry is compromised, it strikes at the very foundation on which a university should be based, just as the corrupt administration of justice strikes at the foundation upon which a system of justice should be based.

121

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

I often think of this final page from Persepolis vol 1: it feels like a widely shared moment for so many immigrants, a scene of subject making when you turn around to say goodbye to what you’re leaving even as you’re in the process of leaving.

Girl at the airport looking back at her parents, to see mother has fainted and is being carried away by her father.

120

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

This is a key paragraph that’s already getting a lot of press attention. Worth reproducing all of it.

110. Finally, I would like to employ the expression “to disarm,” which is close to my heart. Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home. AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible.

1185

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

Can’t say I understood everything in Nan Da’s “Literary Criticism in the Age of AI,” but the last two sentences hit me like a ton of bricks.

We know that people’s literary-critical inferences cannot be identical, for that would be a kind of death, but we also know it cannot be an interpretive free-for-all or just statistically approximated hearsay. ai may not care about any of this, of course, because, like Death, it cannot suffer the downstream consequences of faked comprehension and wrongful
inferences in its body or its life. But that would mean that we have to
care about those consequences—of fakery and wrongful inference—on
other people’s bodies and lives.

291

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Settle down beautiful flowering trees, my allergies can’t take it.

Pink flowers in full bloom against a blue sky.

050

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

We went to a vinyl cafe (you buy an expensive drink and listen to albums on headphones all you want) and I took this photograph as the sunlight came through a record.

A brightly colored album turned neon when held up to the sunlight.

0161

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

So many applicants now use LLMs like ChatGPT to write cover letters, they no longer communicate much or anything about the qualities of the applicant. www.ft.com/content/e5b7...

They were right to be distrusting: evaluations of the work done by the people hired in the post-LLM period no longer had any correlation to cover letter quality.

Another way of putting all of this is that the use of LLMs in job applications made the market much less meritocratic, with a 19 per cent fall in hiring for the most capable workers and a 14 per cent boost for the least capable. Oh, and the number of applications and length of cover letters roughly doubled, meaning more time needed to sift through less useful and often actively unhelpful submissions. Good job, everyone!

284

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

Saw this in a toy store window and somehow it seems like an apt response.

Colorful plastic chickens with their beaks wide open in shock.

130

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

I felt I needed to learn more about AI (even though the subject bores me profoundly), and this was a great place to start. Recommend highly! A few quick thoughts… 1/

1192

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

I enjoyed reading this a lot—even the sometimes-frustrating refusal to translate anything in a text that’s very polyglot—and think it’s take on AI is especially insightful.

Cover of Ryan Ruby’s Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry

081

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

I’ve been reading a lot about 20C Korea for something I’m working on, and I cannot recommend this new book by Kornel Chang enough. It’s about the U.S. occupation of southern Korea right after WW2, but it also feels all too generalizable.

Cover of A Fractured Liberation: Korea under US Occupation by Kornel Chang. Photo of Koreans disembarking from a ship overseen by armed U.S. soldiers.

1161

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

My commute to work the other day... but oh, the allergies.

Steps leading up past a tree in full flower with a bright blue sky above.

1191

Min Hyoung Song @minsong.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

One of the hardest stories to tell is of poor people living full and meaningful lives. When Life Gives You Tangerines is absolutely rocking this.

Poster feature a young woman and man holding hands in a field of flowers.

0100