※ a daily word game that doesn't suck
OK, I’m kidding with the faint praise—Bracket City is easily the best thing I’ve seen on the internet in about a year. It’s billed as “a nested clue puzzle...
※ 🚨🥳🍾 my favorite place on the web is back from the dead
Hi there! I feel urgently compelled to spread the word / share my joy: TXT.FYI is BACK, BABY! That’s right, “the dumbest publishing platform on the web” (in...
※ Turing detectives
Hi there, Normally I wouldn’t send out another newsletter so soon, but I’ve got a new piece of work I’m eager to share: an interview I did for Quanta with...
Analyzing the 192 movies I saw in 2023
Hi there, Every year around this time, Steven Soderbergh (one of my filmmaking heroes) publishes a list of everything he saw and read during the previous...
Dispatches from Cydonia (or: Who's worth reading about AI)
Hi there! It’s been a while. I took a 2.5-year pandemic-motivated detour in my career (future newsletter topic), and since I wasn’t doing any public writing,...
2020 stocking stuffers
Hey there, It's been a long year, and there are many Important Things you should be reading. Here are three of none of those things. A short article I wrote...
The AI I wrote about right before quarantine is now helping me laugh through it
Hi there, I recently finished a longform feature for Quanta on "artificial common sense"—my first piece of science writing produced under quarantine...
A GIF-splainer to inoculate you against the coronavirus infodemic
Hi there, Sorry for the clickbaity sounding subject line. But I actually believe it's true, and I want to help spread this GIF, because it really helped me....
great un-splanations
Hi there, You may not have ever heard of the artist John Baldessari. He popped up on my radar earlier this month by dying. But I'd known of him before that...
Y Kant AI Read?
Hi there, I just spent the last two months researching a neural network from Google named BERT. By certain measures, BERT can now "read" better than humans....
Making it “ert”
Hi there, I have the usual, nominal reason for writing to you, which is to share some new work that I’m proud of. But mostly I’m just using that as an excuse...
Machines like me
Hi there, So there's this guy named Hod Lipson who literally believes he's invented self-aware robots. But he's no crank; he runs a laboratory at Columbia...
secret worlds
Hi there newsletter-ers, I wrote a thing a few months ago that made me feel more alive (work-wise) than I had in almost a year. It was about the discovery of...
※ Tame Twitter, "a spiraling process", and 2 podcasts 1 robot
Hi there, Welcome to the relaunch of my newsletter! It’s been a long time since I’ve written—and, consequently, this letter is a bit longer than usual—but I...
※ 2017 Stocking Stuffers ※
For the past two years I've wrapped up the year with a little "work I'm most proud of putting out into the world" list. This year I'm doing something...
My Machine-Learning Season ※ Transitions
Hi there! It's been a while. I hope your summer was great. The best part of mine was the swimming lessons I took my small children to, for two weeks in July...
※ Interregnum ※
Hey friends, I've had a draft of this issue hanging out in my text editor of choice for months. Nothing was happening that seemed "of note", but I kept...
Issue 3: Greatest Hits/Greatest Misses of 2016
Hi everyone, Last year I started making an annual list of stuff I worked on during the past year that I was proud of. It's like looking at a work-photo-...
Issue 2: Keep Seeing (Part 2), or: 🙌 enthusiasm ✖️optimism booster shot 💉
I wanted to get this out to you before Thanksgiving. It's been a weird month. On Election Day, I felt like $1m. I put the following image on my Facebook feed...
Issue 1: Keep Seeing (part 1)
Welcome, new subscribers from Twitter! I’m sending this out earlier than I’d planned because one of the projects I was hoping to share with you just got...
Issue 0: Limerence Care Package
TIL this great word: This is pretty much what I do for a living, but with STEAM ideas. I meet-cute with them, become infatuated, convince a publisher or...