The Most Interesting Articles I Read This Week — August 18th 2023
It’s been a while since I’ve shared a post or other original work on medium, partly because I got COVID for the first time ever back in June and partly because I’ve just been busy. However, this week I’ve come across some really interesting and cool articles and I wanted to share them with folks.
First up is this really interesting, and important article from Alec Karakastansis from his phenomenal Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter Substack — What we don’t tell people talks about the pattern of people ignoring and distorting “the substance of the ideas held by people challenging the status quo.” It’s a great read and I highly recommend it. A great resource that came out of reading and sharing this article with a friend is the Solutions Journalism Network a really cool shift in focus of journalism that provides training.
Next, I came across These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI from Rolling Stone. This article discusses the work Timnit Gebru, Rumman Chowdhury, Safiya Noble, Seeta Peña Gangadharan, and Joy Buolamwini have done regarding AI ethics and the impacts the bias of people who create AI/LLM products (usually straight, white, men) have on marginalized people. As the article quotes, Temnit Gebru has “been yelling about this for a long time.” I’ve been following Gebru’s work for years and I watched as she was unfairly pushed out of Google after working on a paper that discussed the dangers of AI. The paper had been approved by Google but later they wanted all Google employees names removed. When Gebru pushed back she found out that she had been terminated.
Another article that really fascinated me this week was Ingenious Librarians from AEON. This article dived in deep into SUPARS — one of the first search experiments in the 1970s as computer terminals rose in popularity. This was a fascinating piece of information history and discusses how we can use the lessons from that time in history to inform us in the age of new search engines and technologies.
In Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds:A Crip Linguistics Manifesto the authors of this work argue “no way of languaging is bad” and define Crip Linguistics as “to critique language and language scholarship through the lens of disability,include disabled perspectives, elevate disabled scholars, center disabled voices in conversations about disabled languaging,dismantle the use of disorder and deficit rhetorics, and finally, welcome disabled languaging as a celebration of the infinite potential of the bodymind.” This was a really fascinating article and got me thinking a lot about language use. The authors provide a framework for people to think about abelism in their field and how to “envision liberatory languaging from a disability standpoint.”
In Helicopter Footage From Mass Arrest Reveals State Trooper Surveillance Capabilities, Tactics, and Communications, Unicorn Riot (a fantastic independent media organization) shows how footage they received from a Minnesota State Patrol Helicopter camera during the largest mass arrest event in Minnesota history shows the tactics the police used during that time. The video (linked in the article) includes police chatter and the article discusses in depth what’s happening during this time. This was a really interesting and great look into how police surveillance — especially AERIAL surveillance — operates.
Finally, this piece from the Everything is Amazing Substack took over my day for a bit this week. From 2022, but re-upped by the author this past week, In Search Of A Flood Like No Other captured my attention with the fascinating story of the Zanclean Megaflood, and event that led to the Mediterranean Sea filling with water in a period of about TWO YEARS. It’s just mindbogglingly staggering the amount of water that had to be moving in order to do this.
I hope you enjoyed this round up of some of the best articles I’ve come across recently. I hope to post more of these soon both here on medium and on substack. Enjoy your week!
