“The Handmade Beauty Of Machine Age Data Visualizations”
“What Is Happening To Writing?” – On Writing In An AI Era
“I have about 50 ideas sitting in my Substack drafts folder. It is tantalizing to imagine that I could simply open a Claude Code terminal window, direct it to these drafts, and tell it to output a year’s worth of Res Obscura posts. This, of course, is not a hypothetical but simply what a a […]
A “Semi-Optimistic” Look At The Decline Of Reading In An Age Of Brainrot
“I am not alone in feeling that students who came of age at this time have been harmed, cognitively, by that combination of brainrot outside of school and the loss of a physical connection to classic works of literature in the classroom. Ironically, however, that very literature was once profoundly controversial. What we now call […]
“AI Makes The Humanities More Important, But Also A Lot Weirder”
“Language models are a genuinely novel teaching tool. Their impact is still uncertain. What that means is that now is exactly the time when people who are genuinely passionate about teaching and learning for its own sake — not as a scorecard to judge politicians, not as a source of corporate profit — need to take an […]
AI Can Research, But We Still Need People To Interpret Research
“Generative AI has made it absurdly easy to generate a lot of text or images. But it hasn’t made us any better at subtracting the useful, meaningful, or simply interesting stuff from text and images — isolating the gold from the fool’s gold.”
3 Case Studies For Using GenAI As A Historian
“The headaches that LLMs have caused in the classroom are (I believe) more than counterbalanced by what they can offer as tools for research and self-directed learning. For this reason, I’m now even more optimistic about the long-term impact and utility of AI tools for historical research — and, by extension, for other forms of […]