Writing in the Real World
It’s been a summer of major changes in my life: completing grad school and moving on to my first job as a fellow at Arizona State University. As I adjust to a new position where I am “doing” almost as...
View ArticlePamphlet #3
I’m very excited to announce that a version of my essay on David Foster Wallace has just been published online as the Stanford Literary Lab’s third pamphlet. Here’s the lead-in: If there is one thing...
View ArticleMultitasking
It’s been a busy month around here. I spent a fantastic week visiting the New America Foundation in DC and getting to know the people behind ASU’s Future Tense partnership with NAF and Slate Magazine....
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The Legacy of David Foster Wallace
Last week saw the arrival of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, a wonderful collection of essays by Wallace critics, friends and colleagues. My piece in the collection, “Becoming Yourself: David...
View ArticleWhat if Computers Know You Better Than You Know Yourself?
Our digital breadcrumbs now tell stories about us that are deeply secret, moving, surprising—and often things we don’t even know about ourselves. These days when a computer crunches the numbers and...
View ArticleWhat Algorithms Want
We spend an awful lot of time now thinking about what algorithms know about us: the ads we see online, the deep archive of our search history, the automated photo-tagging of our families. We don’t...
View ArticleAlgorithms Aren’t Like Spock
In reality algorithms have to run on actual servers, using code that sometimes breaks, crunching data that’s frequently unreliable. There is an implementation gap between what we imagine algorithms do...
View ArticleFacebook Trending Topics
The recent scandal with Facebook’s Trending Topics news module goes deeper than the revelation that it was humans all along hiding behind the algorithm. It should come as no surprise that Facebook has...
View ArticleFrankenstein Bicentennial Dares
Two centuries ago, on a dare to tell the best scary story, 19-year-old Mary Shelley imagined an idea that became the basis for Frankenstein. Mary’s original concept became the novel that arguably...
View ArticleArt by Algorithm
I wrote an essay on algorithmic aesthetics and the future of creativity for Aeon.
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