As I neared the end of my PhD program and was editing and revising my dissertation, I was asked one question more than any other: “How long does it have to be?” It’s not a stupid question, but it is one born from ignorance. Ignorance about writing, broadly, and academic writing, specifically. Ignorance about scholarship and the purpose and value of academic work. And ignorance about how humans learn and demonstrate mastery of a subject. ...
By the time Ilia Malinin took the ice in Milan, his gold medal was a foregone conclusion. The twenty-one-year-old American is the greatest in the world. He is the two-time reigning world champion. He is the first and only skater to perform a quadruple axel. He is the “Quad God.” He was entering the free skate with a five-point lead, and his closest rival, Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama, just turned in an uncharacteristically poor performance. ...
Commercials for AI products proliferated during this year’s Super Bowl. Anthropic wants you to know they aren’t going to show us ads. Amazon wants you to know Alexa isn’t going to kill you — probably — and that their Ring doorbell can help find lost dogs (I can’t help but notice the conspicuous lack of conversation around lost people). AI.com wants you to know something, I guess? And OpenAI wants you to know “You Can Just Build Things”. ...