iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Is this why they're sweating? (A screengrab presented—not wrongly—in a journalism webinar about starting videos with a question the viewer wants answered).

A newscaster among raised gardens asking "what the heck is corn sweat?"

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Also the bigger news is the FRED MCP connector. (Which will mean, FRED officials suggested last week, fewer new kinds of other tools, since those are presumed to be less necessary given AI agential use).

In response to these challenges and opportunities, FRED has introduced the FRED MCP Connector to simplify connecting FRED data with AI systems. Using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the FRED MCP Connector enables users to find and retrieve data from FRED using an AI agent of their choice—which the FRED staff calls "BYOAI." Why is this a big deal? Up till now, FRED has been designed to be viewed and understood by humans. But an AI bot sees and interprets data very differently. And that means the FRED team must adapt how FRED is presented to this new type of viewer so that the data are conveyed back to the agent's master accurately and in a well-documented manner. There will be a demonstration of the FRED MCP Connector later today, and I encourage you all to attend.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

For Ezra Klein's latest podcast, interesting to consider the relevance of the recommendations vs. the topic—but hey, people who haven't should indeed read Gender Trouble. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Pieces on biopolitics getting an update today:

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Competitive hyperbole on offer as major banks issue guidance on SpaceX: www.investopedia.com/wall-street-...

At least 13 analysts now cover the company, and only one of them—Susquehanna International Group—has a neutral stance. SpaceX is the “apex of civilizational ambition,” Deutsche Bank wrote; “King of the Cosmos,” according to BofA Global Research; a company with “supernormal growth rates,” per Citi; and sporting “multiple trillion dollar market opportunities,” Goldman Sachs said.
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Virtually all give the company credit for owning and controlling its supply chain, and nod to its enormous potential given the space and AI theme, but some are much more bullish than others.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Books don't need to care about me to read them. www.ft.com/content/4651...

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/.
https://www.ft.com/content/4651ae29-51b2-416c-89bd-3427617b131a?syn-25a6b1a6=1

Interviewed after winning last year’s award for The Thinking Machine, his in-depth investigation of AI chipmaker Nvidia, Stephen Witt speculated that in future, his book might “respond to the reader . . . and then, on the fly, using AI, generate a unique bespoke text that speaks directly to their concerns”.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

Yeah. Someone might say it's like the Arc de Triomphe, but not even close.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

Alas, Gorsuch reminds me of me reading Agamben on modern politics. slate.com/news-and-pol...

n audibly hostile Justice Neil Gorsuch was no less impressed. He questioned Sauer’s reliance on “Roman law sources” and other obscure citations while pointing out that more relevant, authoritative sources cut against his argument.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

Each day I check “remember me” and wait. Each day the page forgets. As it does With the humble and the great.

A “remember me” check box for a web site sign-in.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

A bunch of gibberish about “St. Floyd,” straight white men are the original sinners, MLK was a communist…oh where was I? Right, so Critias was Plato’s uncle.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

The reporting is somehow worse than that: he asked and, given the evident mismatch in sizes, they told him sizes too big. Per The Guardian.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

— and those are telling a much more alarming story than $100 crude. Crack spreads are up 400% for jet fuel, for diesel, some 200% or more. In fact what Americans are seeing at the pump is a fraction of what cargo airlines and those needing diesel for trucks etc are.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

Anthropic out with a study on jobs most affected by AI. (It hews close to BLS/Fed studies, so not a hype job.) cdn.sanity.io/files/4zrzov... This table compares two groups of workers before ChatGPT launched (Aug–Oct 2022) to show who is most at risk from AI displacement.

Table titled "Differences between high and low exposure workers," showing demographic, education, and labor market characteristics for two groups drawn from the Current Population Survey: workers with no AI exposure (n=42,546) and workers in the top quartile of AI exposure (n=32,301). High-exposure workers have 38.8% AI task coverage versus 0% for the unexposed group. High-exposure workers are more likely to be female (54.4% vs. 38.8%), white non-Hispanic (65.1% vs. 54.5%), and Asian non-Hispanic (9.1% vs. 4.7%), and less likely to be Hispanic (13.8% vs. 24.8%) or Black non-Hispanic (9.7% vs. 13.2%). Education levels differ sharply: high-exposure workers are far more likely to hold a bachelor's degree (37.1% vs. 13.3%) or graduate degree (17.4% vs. 4.5%), while low-exposure workers are more likely to have only a high school diploma (38.9% vs. 17.7%) or less than a high school education (13.2% vs. 2.3%). In labor market outcomes, high-exposure workers earn a higher average hourly wage ($32.69 vs. $22.23) and are less likely to be union members (5.3% vs. 11.7%).

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Great reporting by @hunterw.bsky.social. This—and my god nothing else—brought a smile from the first sentence, since you know that setup means he would in fact end up admitting it. But then I imagined this two-hour call—like even with a scoop you might be, ok, I think I’ve got enough after far less.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

The Times gathered experts and asked them a comparable technological change to AI. Amazing to be the guy who is like “how does one measure a God? There’s no possible comparison.”

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Leave aside the content—pity the editor who clearly gave up.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 04/01/2026

Kalshi I guess sees an opening in the regime-change betting business: Trump admin (Jr. is an advisor) attacks a country → Kalshi tweets about it → volume spikes on adjacent "who's next" markets → repeat.

Two X posts by Kalshi showing bets on on world leaders out before 2027.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 04/01/2026

WSJ and Axios have mentioned Polymarkets re: the Maduro event contracts. But Kalshi showed similar action as Polymarket (potential pre-even movement w/ foreknowledge), but hasn't been noted. And I guess they see an opening:

Kalshi X post showing Maduro giving a thumbsup.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

Annals of simple-but-highly-effective diagrams:

An image of a mountain where the CIA lost a nuclear device with a curved arrow pointing to the top where they lost it.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

This NBER was updated just this past week. It suggests the real gains from holding stock come with movement into leadership: www.nber.org/papers/w34524

This paper documents that members of Congress exhibit significantly improved stock trading performance only after ascending to congressional leadership positions. Because competing for congressional leadership is largely driven by political ambition rather than personal trading gains, ascension serves as a plausibly exogenous shock to information access and influence, allowing us to estimate the causal effect of leadership status on trading outcomes. Prior to ascension, future leaders and matched non-leaders display similar returns. After ascension, however, leaders outperform their matched peers by up to 47 percentage points per year.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

Looks great! (Too bad for to be in NYC this week, but not next.) But I thought we learned today that this is now the way to promote things?

Local Power for Making NYC More Equal in the font/coloring of NYC Mayor-Elect Mamdani's election posters.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

This is their third story down tonight: they didn’t bury the lede; they made it the headline.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

A board advisor on that $1T Musk Tesla pay package is out with a defense. Leave aside the various ways of repeating "Musk is a singular genius" (yawn) it ends here, which is precisely what he knows the board and Musk led a wholesale change in Delaware corporate law this year to make far harder:

Responsible, shareholder-first governance ties leadership’s upside to sustained shareholder value, through a transparent and disinterested process. That’s exactly what Tesla has delivered.
Now, it’s up to shareholders to have the final say.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

Right beneath this was a thread for this, which says a lot about where energy modernization is really happening:

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

Thanks — I had actually gone to google trends but it gave me this...so I was like, what is everyone talking about?

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

For those interested, this goes through the U of Chicago financial statements etc. to draw lessons about the wider changes in higher ed as UChicago cuts world famous programs. www.investopedia.com/university-f...

Nevertheless, the results are clear: an endowment that often significantly trails its peers while piling on debt whose repayment hinges on UChicago's hospital growth delivering as promised. The irony is excruciating for a university that helped create modern portfolio theory and the efficient market hypothesis.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Not sure of this translation, but certainly an unexpected find as the quote of the day in Kenya’s Business Daily today. Xx

Foucault quote about choosing flows over unities

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

I ended up with less red, but given that I spent so much time as a full-time academic who needed to move a bunch, I've had to get myself into the headspace of moving where it might not seem ideal at first. And even in my reds, I'm like, well, maybe if I'm next door to friends I have there...

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

The worst people but not the worst legal analysis.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

Speaking of data—Google’s own research shows that AI Overviews are basically a stop sign for looking further, so how would AI lead to more search?

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

More substantively and for another time—it could be translating to everyday parlance, but this strikes me a very rare false step for you—to be pithy, no Aristotle doesn't give an f about you or your due—since the focus is on the community and its eudaemonia.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

Seriously. But an interesting look at a real split between Thiel world and actual tech founders (which Thiel et al. pretend to be but are just VCs with better agents). What robust intellectual dialogue they've come out to support!:

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

How often have fines been meted out in previous AI uses? And just how many AIs does one firm need?:

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

Update to 2022 top majors by the Census (but released today). www.census.gov/newsroom/pre...

The U.S. Census Bureau today released a new report that shows the demographic, social and geographic characteristics of bachelor’s degree holders by field of study. According to the report, Field of Bachelor’s Degree in the United States: 2022, bachelor’s degrees in business management and administration (4.8 million), psychology (3.7 million), general business (3.7 million), nursing (3.6 million), and general education (3.1 million) were the most common in 2022 among those age 25 and older.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

Ok but don't skimp on the "how many millions are in a billion" part first. (this happened to be right above this)

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

Sure they're going for sheer ignorance but I can list few reasons I'm not getting it at this point.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

“Birth-rate consultant” sounds so grifty. Could be a great researcher in training for all I know but what is the consulting angle other than “women should breed more in your area?”

In Belarus, for example, the fertility rate in 1988 was at replacement level; it fell to an abysmal 1.22 only nine years later. But then it rebounded, all the way up to 1.73 by 2015. Australia’s birth rate fell to 1.7 in 2001, only to bounce back to 2.0 in 2008. France’s rate followed a similar trajectory during the same period, as did Italy’s and Sweden’s. “To the extent you think the ‘World Population Prospects’ are wrong, that is the extent to which you are saying, ‘This time is different,’” Lyman Stone, a Ph.D. student and birth-rate consultant, told me.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

Annals of unfortunate-but-still-not-chancing-it acronyms:

A driving map showing the Museo MAGA near Milan.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

I didn't know one was supposed to have a favorite unit of time. Is mine the score? The atom—not the thing, but old English for the smallest unit of time? The Roman lustrum? Should I prove my knowledge of Kierkegaard and/or Heidegger and claim the Augenblick? So hard to choose.

A New York Times headline: 'Two Weeks' Is One of Trump's Favorite
Units of Time

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

There are so many horrific moments embedded in this well-written/reported piece (he met his wife how?!). But my eyes had skipped past the photo, reading along with the text, and when I looked up, I thought, yeah there's no improving on that description.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

Another data point on this take.

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