Week 4 of 2025. Week 1 of the second Trump circus. I’m fine. I’m a wreck. I can’t write. All I can do is write.
On his way out of the White House, Joe Biden freed Leonard Peltier from prison. It wasn’t a pardon, but still an act of clemency. Leonard can go home -- literally to home confinement. But home is home. The news hit me harder than I expected. My first car had a “Free Leonard Peltier” bumper sticker on it, and I think my earliest understanding of how truly hypocritical this country’s pronouncements about “liberty and justice for all” have been involved the genocide of First Nations people... and the imprisonment of Leonard Peltier.
Kin and I watched Conclave last night, and I’m always thrilled when I can watch a thriller without having had the plot twist spoiled for me. I knew the film was about papal intrigue (pretty clear from the promo imagery of Ralph Fiennes in vestments); but my jaw was literally on the floor during the final minutes of the film -- a film that was already beautifully staged and beautifully shot and magnificently acted. (I might be “ride or die” for Stanley Tucci, and certainly in Conclave he just dominates every scene he’s in. In this house, we stan Isabella Rossellini too, and despite being a nun among a gaggle of cardinals, she just exuded strength and righteousness.) The score was gorgeous too.
But my god, my god, the ending. I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard anything like that in cinema: such a clear articulation [redacted in case you haven’t seen the film].
The weather was unbearably cold this week -- too cold for much of it to even walk the dog in the mornings. I was already planning on shifting my workouts around as I spent 6 hours in Central Park yesterday, volunteering for the Fred Lebow Half Marathon -- I typically do my long runs on Sundays, but that wasn't going to happen. This time last year, I volunteered at the same race, and the weather was worse: freezing rain. Yesterday was windy and cold, but as it wasn’t anywhere near as cold as earlier in the week, it somehow seemed tolerable. The volunteers I led were great -- faith in humanity restored a little.
Central Park, Sunday, 5:45 am
Ostensibly yesterday was my “rest day.” So I ran on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I decided to do Monday’s strength workout at the gym in the apartment building, which meant that on Friday, when I lift and then run, I had to deadlift and then run -- no easy feat. I pulled it off, although I was utterly exhausted stepping off the indoor track.
Stepping off the indoor track and almost running into The World’s Greatest Gender Theorist, who apparently is a member of my gym and was heading in for a swim. Thankfully I had too much of a “jock brain” to blather about how earth-shatteringly important her work has been; how, if things had gone differently for me in graduate school (LOLSOB), I’d have liked very much to have done my PhD in Comp Lit with her.
At ballet on Friday night, the teacher said I was “very good” and he even had me demo the waltz with another silver hair -- a woman who I learned in class has 800K followers on Instagram. I don’t think she was thrilled to be partnered with such a horribly awkward novice dancer as me.
Or maybe she wasn’t thrilled that I didn’t gasp in excitement when the teacher called her an Internet sensation. I was fan-girled out from my run-in at the gym.
Also, the teacher said I was "very good," and that shit always goes to my head.
On Monday, Kin and I went to Au Cheval with the Burger League. Folks rave about the burger there, and they recommend you get the add-ons: the fried egg and the two thick slabs of bacon. But with all that mess, the burger really only tasted like “fat.” “Taste” isn’t the right word, as it wasn’t so much a taste as a sensation. I didn’t love it.
On Thursday, we ate at Tonchin, which once upon a time had a Michelin Star for its ramen. This was, I think, the best bowl of ramen I’ve ever had -- perfect broth and perfect noodles. (Often you get one or the other.) The gyoza weren’t perfect, and the Japanese non-alcoholic beer was terrible. The noise-level was also such that a conversation was impossible (then again, all manners are sort of out the door when you’re trying to navigate slurping ramen.) So I'll pretend to know why they're Michelin starred no more.
On Friday, I met Lee and her daughter at Bibble and Sip, which I chose for the highly instagrammable pastries (but I think I’m the only one who took a picture of my food). The coffee was pretty good, but the pastry was cute but otherwise forgettable. It was so good to see Lee -- it’s been forever (or about a decade, I reckon), and C and I got along like gangbusters as she was happy to rage against AI with me.
"Brownie-filled alpaca croissant,"" the label read. It was not filled with a brownie, but with chocolate mousse. I wasn't mad, but I wasn't pleased either.
I sent out two very rage-filled newsletters last week: "Your Job Here is to Realign the Stargate" and AI Unleashed. I’m recording a couple of (likely rage-filled) podcasts this week. I’m preparing a presentation for next week (for NYC principals so I don't know that I'll bring the full rage). I’ve got two newsletters to write this week, along with a foreword to a book collection on critical ed-tech and AI. And then my own book proposal, which I still need to hammer out.
I’m hoping that I can pull it all off.
The AI news is hard to keep up-to-date with -- I still think it’s a lot of the Bannon tactic of “flooding the zone with shit” as much as it is any technological breakthrough. (Generative AI is, after all, just bullshit generation.) But everyone is so high-anxiety over every little announcement that it’s really hard not to feel wrung out by the onslaught. And this doesn’t even account for the fascist politics of it all -- I’m just talking “the tech”... although you can’t really separate the two.
I keep reading people who I’ve respected offer these full-throated endorsements of this bullshit-at-scale, and it’s disheartening. It's disheartening because I think that AI is a mirror. If you can see yourself and your thinking -- in content and in form -- in the AI, then it’s not that the AI is good or right; it’s that you and your thinking are hegemonic, are already part of the ways and means of privileged ideas. I don’t see myself in the AI mirror. Because literally my existence is not the corpus. My body of work, my body -- outside the model.
(Well, actually my work is part of the corpus because in addition to being a bullshit machine, it's a plagiarism machine, and Hack Education and this blog have been pilfered for content. Rather, I mean the writing of women is largely excluded from the corpus because, well, we've largely been excluded. Same goes for people who write in languages other than English. People of color. And so on.)
Kin and I are listening to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Often I find great solace in history -- not that "we've been here before" necessarily, but "we have all seen some shit." But in this case, it's terrifying, because it all feels so casually relevant: the "oops, genocide" of banality and bureaucracy, made more efficient now, thanks to AI.