\n\nThe failures are the curriculum. The error messages are the syllabus. Every hour you spend confused is an hour you spend building the infrastructure inside your own head that will eventually let you do original work. There is no shortcut through that process that doesn’t leave you diminished on the other side.
\n
The machines are fine. I’m worried about us. (by Minas Karamanis)
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-03T09:07:30-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2026/04/03/the-failures-are-the-curriculum.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2026/03/13/its-newsroom-still-does-not.html", "content_html": "\n\nIts newsroom still does not hire or assign trans journalists to cover trans issues — a de facto ban that exemplifies prejudice — and it suppresses the expression of dissenting queer viewpoints internally.
\n…
\nOn at least five prior occasions dating to 2022 medical groups, experts, advocacy organizations and parents themselves have taken the extraordinary step of issuing public statements saying that The Times had distorted their positions. In every case we could find, the misrepresentation went in only one direction, twisting words to fit the outlet’s political agenda against gender affirming care and more broadly against trans people themselves.In one case, the parent of a trans child said she had been cruelly deceived and manipulated by a Times reporter.
\nThe Times has preyed upon not only trans families, but on its own readers who understandably lack a detailed understanding of trans issues and rely upon honest brokers of fact.
\n
Does The New York Times Want to Eradicate Trans People? assignedmedia.org
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-13T13:50:20-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2026/03/13/its-newsroom-still-does-not.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2026/03/12/war-is-not-logical-or.html", "content_html": "\n\n\n", "date_published": "2026-03-12T23:51:06-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2026/03/12/war-is-not-logical-or.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2026/03/05/researchers-set-out-piles-of.html", "content_html": "War is not logical, or righteous, and it has nothing to do with justice; war is just a horror that sweeps into people’s lives and upends them, and no matter what you do, right or wrong, good or bad, war leaves you shattered.
\n
\n\nResearchers set out piles of pebbles in the gardens, with a few small crystals incorporated into each. The chimpanzees immediately sorted the crystals out of the piles. Then they carried them in their mouths, turned them in the light and held them up to their eyes like old-timey prospectors.
\n
Chimpanzees Are Really Into Crystals - The New York Times
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-05T02:13:22-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2026/03/05/researchers-set-out-piles-of.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2026/02/28/key-witness-who-disputed-ice.html", "content_html": "Key Witness Who Disputed ICE Account of Fatal Texas Shooting Dies in Car Accident nytimes.com
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-28T02:45:19-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2026/02/28/key-witness-who-disputed-ice.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2026/02/24/what-ai-does-in-helping.html", "content_html": "\n\nWhat AI does in helping us code is take away the drudgery and let us do the part that’s creative and soulful. And what AI does in other creative disciplines (like writing, illiustation) is it takes away the soulful part and leaves you with the drudgery.
\n
revolution.social - Silicon Valley Has Lost Its Moral Compass (with Anil Dash)
\nAn important observation that helps explain how well-intentioned and astute and progressive-minded people can end up on different sides of this issue. (Super weird to find myself a sort of centrist, but here we are.)
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-25T00:08:56-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2026/02/24/what-ai-does-in-helping.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2026/02/24/literary-hub-fascism-is-not.html", "content_html": "Literary Hub » Fascism is Not an Idea to Be Debated, It’s a Set of Actions to Fight
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2026-02-25T00:08:50-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2026/02/24/literary-hub-fascism-is-not.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2026/02/24/i-know-how-to-make.html", "content_html": "It is quite possible that there is no resolution to the present situation until one side is thoroughly destroyed as an ideological power and political entity.
\n
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2026-02-25T00:08:38-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2026/02/24/i-know-how-to-make.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2026/02/24/back-in-june-medical-researchers.html", "content_html": "I know how to make comics, and like most Minnesotans that I come across, we’re all just using our skill sets to help others right now. We’re all fighting in the ways that we know how.
\n
\n\nBack in June, medical researchers discovered a similar racial bias in large language model (LLM) psychiatric diagnostic tools. In that case, results showed AI tools often proposed “inferior treatment” plans for Black patients whenever their race was explicitly known.
\n
Doctors Catch Cancer-Diagnosing AI Extracting Patients' Race Data and Being Racist With It
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-25T00:06:03-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2026/02/24/back-in-june-medical-researchers.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2026/02/21/the-republic-of-poetry-has.html", "content_html": "\n\nThe Republic of Poetry has no borders. In this republic no human being is illegal. In this republic no one is thrown on the other side of the fence after building the fence. Every time the fence goes up, you must tear it down.
\n
From Martín Espada’s Hampshire College Commencement Address, May 19. 2007.
\nI recommend the whole thing, it speaks to our present moment in striking and stirring terms, starting with this James Baldwin quote at the beginning: “The reality in which we live is a reality we have made, and it’s time, my children, to begin the act of creation all over again.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-21T19:22:24-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2026/02/21/the-republic-of-poetry-has.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2026/02/16/this-isnt-over-it-may.html", "content_html": "\n", "date_published": "2026-02-16T01:11:51-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2026/02/16/this-isnt-over-it-may.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2025/09/24/the-element-of-chance-a.html", "content_html": "This isn't over. It may not be over for a long while yet. But I am 100 percent convinced that we are going to win. (7/7)
— Dax (David J.) Schwartz ([@snurri.bsky.social](http://snurri.bsky.social)) February 15, 2026 at 8:00 PM
\n\nThe element of chance — a key part of the original artwork, and a quality prized by the Surrealists — is preserved in that the user cannot choose the material. Huberman called it the work’s “magic randomness.”
\n
Dial-A-Poem Goes Global, Expanding to Brazil and Beyond - The New York Times🎁
\nHow did they write a whole article about the old and new Dial-a-Poem and not once mention Dial-A-Song?
\n", "date_published": "2025-09-24T22:11:33-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2025/09/24/the-element-of-chance-a.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2025/09/03/they-play-pinball-in-a.html", "content_html": "\n\nThey play pinball in a bar for about five minutes on screen, sharing a machine while they drink their beers. Every time one of them loses a ball, they do a very cute switch where the one at the wheel surrenders their position to go lean on the side of the machine, and vice versa. Each reveals something about their past while they do—the confusing intensity of Delpy’s feelings for a bad ex-boyfriend, and Hawke’s petulant frustration at having traveled all the way to Europe just to get dumped.
\n
Pinball Is Getting Too Fancy | Defector
\n", "date_published": "2025-09-03T21:25:28-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2025/09/03/they-play-pinball-in-a.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2025/03/29/i-drove-miles-in-rural.html", "content_html": "\n\n\nA funny thing happened on the way to defunding the police.
\nThe American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of 2021 was used to fund body armor and cameras, vehicle video tech including LPRs, and a whole array of hardware and software for police departments and sheriff’s offices.
\n
State of Surveillance: Everyone’s watching - Cardinal News
\nCardinal News, serving southwest and southside Virginia, is doing Pulitzer-quality work on police surveillance.
\n", "date_published": "2025-03-29T21:38:49-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2025/03/29/i-drove-miles-in-rural.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2025/03/18/i-think-you-can-get.html", "title": "\"I think you can get enlightened through reading a Jack Kerouac novel\"", "content_html": "Wow, David Keenan really gets Kerouac — I’ve never heard anybody communicate the delirious joy of reading Kerouac with such fierce clarity and urgency.
\nIn this episode of The Library of Lazy Thinking, host Glenn Fisher talks with David Keenan about one of Kerouac’s most challenging books, Visions of Cody (which I’ll admit I put aside years ago and haven’t finished). In the middle of the book, there’s a long transcription of some recorded conversations with Neal, which struck me as indulgent at best: Kerouac being lazy and letting his fascination with a tape recorder substitute for writing. Keenan handily convinced me to take a closer look:
\n\n\nThere’s none of that cynicism that he’s presented something in order to create an effect. He’s creating the structure in real time in front of you and kind of exposing the scaffolding behind it. And he does it so wonderfully in Visions of Cody, so many times.
\n
\n\nOne of the things I love about Visions of Cody is the way that he will say, well, wait, let me start again. And he will go back and describe that whole scene from another angle yet again. As if there are a million ways of witnessing this one unfolding in time. …
\n
\n\nThey jump into the tape section where they’re actually recording — it’s him and Cody and Carolyn Cassidy and a few other people, Herbert Huncke, are coming in and out. And even in that, they’re reading some of the text that’s been written previously in the book and discussing it and Cody’s like, “well, why did you describe me having that sort of forlorn face, sort of looking down,” and they obsess over the tiniest little minutia all the way through the book!
\n
The real gift in this episode is a new way to contextualize Kerouac’s disconcerting break from the counterculture in his later years. It doesn’t fully redeem him, but it makes it make sense: it was coming from the same sensitive soul that he bared to us in his books.
\n\n\nKerouac, in the tradition of James Joyce, was a yes-sayer. Someone who came to say yes. And that’s the hardest challenge. And I think that’s what broke Kerouac’s heart in the end — that he was hijacked by people who were activists. People who wanted to say, “only once this is solved will we be able to live in heaven”. Whereas Kerouac said we’re living in heaven, alongside the gift of suffering.
\n
Apple Podcasts: The Library of Lazy Thinking Podcast: David Keenan on Visions of Cody, Jan 16, 2025
\n", "date_published": "2025-03-18T23:05:06-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2025/03/18/i-think-you-can-get.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2025/01/14/soy-bomb.html", "content_html": "\n\nThe most surreal thing about the Soy Bomb Incident, though, in retrospect, is how long it lasted. “I was very surprised I got to dance for so long!” Portnoy said in a recent interview. “But no one filming the event had any clue that it wasn’t part of the act.”
\n
\n\nPortnoy, it turns out, was a performance artist, and he considered “Soy Bomb” a two-word poem. “Soy … represents dense nutritional life,” he (sort of) explained, “Bomb is, obviously, an explosive destructive force. So, soy bomb is what I think art should be: dense, transformational, explosive life.”
\n
This may not be news to anyone who didn’t, like me, stop paying much attention to culture about 24 years ago, but I was delighted to learn that the Soy Bomb guy (yes, a direct inspiration for my nom de blog) turned out to be a performance artist who continues to do all sorts of intriguing projects: strangergames.com
\n", "date_published": "2025-01-14T17:01:10-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2025/01/14/soy-bomb.html", "tags": ["art"] }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2025/01/11/in-case-you-or-anybody.html", "content_html": "In case you or anybody in your life needs this reminder:
\n\n\nFirst, breathe. Meditate. Journal. Dance. Hydrate. Get enough rest. If you’re an artist, CREATE.
\n
And I couldn’t help quoting this also, because it’s startlingly insightful, yet obvious — once you see it.
\n\n\n“The left seems chaotic because the right reaches toward the past, and there’s only one past,” Barnes said. “But there are infinite possibilities for the future.”
\n
Surviving President Tr*mp: Lessons from the 1960s and Octavia E. Butler by Tananarive Due on the occasion of Trump’s first inauguration and sadly only more relevant today.
\n", "date_published": "2025-01-11T15:35:02-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2025/01/11/in-case-you-or-anybody.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2025/01/03/a-couple-good-technicalbutapproachable-articles.html", "content_html": "A couple good technical-but-approachable articles that are worth your time. First:
\n\n\nThe incentives, economics, and privacy considerations around in-app web browsers is a fascinating and important story
\n
… but this article has almost nothing to do with that. Instead, it’s about how passkeys may still be the future of authentication. Ricky Mondello » Magic Links Have Rough Edges, but Passkeys Can Smooth Them Over
\nAnd next, if you haven’t heard about how Apple was supposedly “caught listening”, you will soon:
\n\n\nOne of my weirder hobbies is trying to convince people that the idea that companies are listening to you through your phone’s microphone and serving you targeted ads is a conspiracy theory that isn’t true
\n
Like you and everyone you know, I’ve had experiences with perfectly-timed-and-placed ads that, combined with my profound untempered categorical distrust of Meta, have nearly convinced me that they’ve got constant access to my phone’s microphone. But not Apple, and, after a lot of reflection I’m solidly with Simon Willison on this whole thing: “they spy on you, but not like that."
\n", "date_published": "2025-01-03T14:34:03-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2025/01/03/a-couple-good-technicalbutapproachable-articles.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2024/12/19/to-know-that.html", "content_html": "\n\nTo know that the world is baffling, to know that you’re doing the best you can, so you don’t have to blame yourself for your choices: I don’t have any advice other than that.
\n
When You’re Sick, You’ll Wait for the Answer, but None Will Come - The Stranger by Conner Habib
\n", "date_published": "2024-12-19T23:37:50-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2024/12/19/to-know-that.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2024/11/01/a-situationist-statement.html", "title": "A situationist statement designed to destroy the other records around it", "content_html": "\n\nThe Durutti Column’s 1980 debut album — confusingly titled The Return of the Durutti Column—originally came packaged in a sandpaper sleeve, a detail that couldn’t have been more at odds with the music inside. The sandpaper was a Situationist prank dreamed up in part by Factory Records boss Tony Wilson
\n
Time Was Gigantic… When We Were Kids | Pitchfork
\n\n\nUnder Tony Wilson’s command, Joy Division and A Certain Ratio assembled at Alan Erasmus' flat in Manchester. They were reportedly paid £15 each and given a pile of 4,000 sheets of sandpaper, with Ian Curtis taking on the bulk of the work while his bandmates watched a porn film in another room. Despite Curtis’s efforts, Factory creative director Peter Saville was underwhelmed: “To me, it looked like a DIY thing that was, really, the antithesis of what I was trying to do. It looked a bit homemade.”
\n
The Return Of The Durutti Column – The Story Behind The Sleeve – Long Live Vinyl
\n\n\nThe album sleeve is a very rare collector’s items as there were only 2000 made, and there are 3 different variations of spray-paint on the sleeve. … The sleeve design was inspired by a 1959 book called Mémoires by Guy Debord, a Marxist theorist, writer and filmmaker.
\n
Durutti Column: The most punk album cover ever. - Audio and Sound
\n", "date_published": "2024-11-01T13:14:26-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2024/11/01/a-situationist-statement.html", "tags": ["music","punk","art"] }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2024/04/21/this-is-an.html", "content_html": "\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-04-21T20:23:15-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2024/04/21/this-is-an.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2024/04/19/i-only-know.html", "content_html": "This is an AI Free Zone! Text created by Large Language Models is spreading rapidly across the Internet. It’s well-written, artificial, frequently inaccurate. If you find a mistake on Spaceweather.com, rest assured it was made by a real human being.
\n
\n\nI only know of him because I spent the entire 1990s in thrift stores and used bookshops, and everywhere I went, I saw Rod McKuen’s name.
\n
Rod McKuen was the best-selling poet in American history. What happened?
\nDid I write this?!
\n", "date_published": "2024-04-19T15:15:56-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2024/04/19/i-only-know.html", "tags": ["poetry"] }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2024/04/19/when-critics-dismiss.html", "content_html": "\n\nWhen critics dismiss AI outright, I think in many cases this weakens the criticism, as readers who have used and benefited from AI tools think “wait, that’s not been my experience at all”.
\n
Molly White: AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?
\n", "date_published": "2024-04-19T13:04:21-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2024/04/19/when-critics-dismiss.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2024/03/05/too-skeptical-to.html", "content_html": "\n\n\nToo skeptical to make many friends there, I frequently rode my electric scooter around campus to systematically sample the offerings at each of the 19 cafés, and then take advantage of the arsenal of targeted functions on the Japanese toilets in every bathroom.
\n
“The day after shooting the video, I was fired.”
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-05T22:13:36-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2024/03/05/too-skeptical-to.html" }, { "id": "http://randomwalks.micro.blog/2024/02/04/eagle-pass-shelby.html", "content_html": "\n\nEagle Pass’ Shelby Park — which, in a you-can’t-make-this-up level of irony, is named for the rebel Gen. Joseph Orville Shelby, said to have planted the last Confederate battle flag in the river in 1865 as he fled to Mexico
\n
Eagle Pass is today’s Fort Sumter. Biden must federalize the Texas National Guard.
\n(Despite appearances, this is not an “impending second U.S. civil war” fansite.)
\n", "date_published": "2024-02-04T23:52:50-04:00", "url": "https://randomwalks.com/2024/02/04/eagle-pass-shelby.html" } ] }