Here is my current context window: that year-end stock-taking feeling and how it intersects with the quantified life. This can be a melancholia-inducing activity, but there is a nice little overlap between the two as well: my incomplete list of work-adjacent reading and listening that I really enjoyed this past year.

I have spent much of the past two years studying and thinking about teaching and learning in AI times. Most writing about the humanities dying/re-incarnating/becoming relevant/becoming irrelevant tends to irritate me, with the exception of these two pieces. 1. Doing AI Differently: Rethinking the foundations of AI via the Humanities A. White paper by Drew Hemment and Cody Kommers at the Alan Turing Institute. Also 2. Fabian Offert and Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal critique ‘critical AI’ 

Speed up the breakdown by Quinn Slobodian in the New York Review of Books was the most illuminating piece of writing I read all year about contemporary ideological formations girding American politics, technology, and government.

‘You want to imagine what this tastes like? Fuck you, says AI’. Georgina Voss writes beautifully on what it means to visually consume food and food photography in AI times in Vittles magazine. 

Re-writing the Californian ideology by Nadia Asparhouva in American Affairs 

The critical legacy of Chinese cybernetics by Gary Zhexi Zhang in Combinations Magazine

End of the Line: How Saudi Arabia’s Neom dream unravelled. A visual investigation by Alison Killing in the Financial Times. (Paywalled)

The unsustainable boom in India’s Silicon Valley by Krishn Kaushik and Chris Kay in the Financial Times (Paywalled)

Is European AI a lost cause? By Benjamin Bratton in Noema Magazine in conversation with Francesca Bria on Reclaiming Europe’s Digital Sovereignty 

Online/Offline Forms of Dissemination. (On memes, posting, and being online since October 7th.) A transcript of a long panel discussion at the newly opened Ibraaz London curated by Shumon Basar.

Symbiotic machines: Do we have to understand to create? By Christina Agapakis. Reading a scientist thinking scientifically and reflexively about AI is really the best thing (Follow her on Substack)

I make it a point to read almost everything Ethan Mollick writes about AI in work on his Substack, One Useful Thing (even if I don’t always finish every single post..)

Podcasts that I actually manage getting around to listening to regularly and help me feel smart and informed about things I know little about like economics (Ones and Tooze), and Indian politics (In Focus by The Hindu) It would be remiss of me not to shout out my Friends with Podcasts: Tobias Revell and Radha Mistry’s new-ish podcast Futur-ish.

And here’s what I am looking forward to reading next:

Anti-mimetic: Why some ideas resist spreading by Nadia Asparhouva (can you tell that I am a NA fan?)

Caste and chappals. Chandu Maheriya. Translated from Gujarati by Hemang Ashwinkumar in Equator Magazine.

Guten Rutsch is my favourite greeting for this time of year. See You in 2026.