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Most interviews with Emily and Alex have assumed quite a bit of prior knowledge. This one not so much, so it's a good explainer for laypersons:

Dr. Allison Lester sits down with Dr. Emily M. Bender and Dr. Alex Hanna authors of the AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want for a conversation about what ChatGPT is, what it is pretending to be, and what we lose when we treat it like an all-knowing answer engine.

Together they ask: What is a large language model, actually? Why does “search engine” framing mislead people so quickly? What gets erased when we focus on convenience, from labor and surveillance to environmental cost?

They talk resistance, agency, and the classroom, including why banning is a dead end, how to protect learning without turning teaching into policing, and what it means to be human together in an era of synthetic text.

For the neurotypical people in your life:

If you’ve ever wondered what AuDHD feels like, this video walks you through the lived, everyday experience of having both autism and ADHD—at the same time.
Especially for adults who were diagnosed late, the experience isn’t always what people expect. It’s not just a mix of traits. It’s a whole different way of thinking, feeling, and processing the world.

In this video, I explore the emotional, cognitive, sensory, and social patterns that show up again and again in AuDHD adults—and how they’re different from ADHD or autism alone.

Whether you’re figuring this out for yourself or finally putting words to what you’ve always felt, this is what AuDHD feels like from the inside.

A good account of events around Robin Ince's resignation, and an answer to the obvious question that had been bugging me:

I knew star forts were a thing. I never realised how big a thing they were. Fascinating.

Most of us take cities for granted. We stroll through winding streets and charming grids assuming they emerged naturally — shaped by markets, neighbours, architects, maybe a poet or two. But here’s the plot twist: for most of history, the people designing cities weren’t architects at all. They were military engineers.

I was surprised to learn the scale of their influence.

This film uncovers the unexpected, global story of how armies, empires, and state bureaucrats shaped the streets we walk on. From Hippodamus in ancient Greece to Roman marching camps; from star forts in Renaissance Italy to Vauban’s geometric super-fortresses; from Spanish colonial grids to British cantonments; from Haussmann’s anti-revolution boulevards to the Cold War suburban dispersal — military logic has been quietly directing urban life for thousands of years.

It’s the hidden operating system of global urbanism: streets as troop corridors, plazas as mustering grounds, boulevards as insurgency-prevention tools, grids as surveillance devices, suburbs as blast-radius management. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Featuring historical maps, satellite images, global case studies, and a narrative that drags these military ghosts into the daylight, this film reframes everything you thought you knew about cities. If you care about design, history, power, and why your street looks the way it does… this one’s for you.

I'm reading the book at the moment, and it's brilliant. I'd already been struck by the Utopian parallels between fascism and neoliberalism, but I confess I've only just started to get a grasp on contemporary Marxist economics this year, know little about Soviet history, and have never read any Marx. [Gasp!]

The book is also a very useful history of neoclassical economics, which I assumed was born more-or-less fully-formed in the late 19th century, but apparently many key components were still falling into place until well into the 20th century.

Also this:

A really nice quick piece on induced demand for parking, and the solution. (i.e. Stop doing it!)

This is quite sweet…

… but what's really amusing is the response from fellow USians:

Andor ruined the rest of Star Wars for me. The original trilogy was one long homage to cinema, fittingly for the nostalgia-drenched 1970s and 80s. Everything since inadvertently commented on commercial culture. Andor deliberately told an urgently relevant story about our current time, made more powerful by shifting the setting to a very familiar galaxy long ago and far, far away.