Hi from the final week of November! From the midst of workshops and paper revisions, here’s what I’ve got for you:

#1 On Saturday this week, Juho Pääkkönen will defend his PhD thesis Credibility-building for social science big data at the University of Helsinki. I’m looking forward to joining the festivities (along with celebrating the first 20 years of Demos Helsinki the night before).

#2 Mother Media is among the many academic books I have not managed to take the time to read, but I did enjoy this podcast with the author, Hannah Zeavin: Berkeley Talks: The complicated role of media in motherhood (Out of context, just for the laughs, this is a great one-liner: “I did this to myself, but we can also blame Marshall McLuhan.”)

#3 For another Berkeley related pointer, this one about mental health in academia, check out “Action is my coping mechanism”: Wendy Marie Ingram on building community care in academia ”Departments need playbooks. People need to know whom to call, what to say, what not to say, how to shepherd someone to professional care. Programs need to define success. In this work, a metric can be a person who stays in school, a person who returns to care, a lab that normalizes questions about wellbeing in a one on one, a committee chair who knows how to respond to a disclosure. Scale is not only reach. Scale is fidelity.”

#4 Last week brought another excellent letter from the KIOSK by Owen D. Pomery: When in Rome. This as a response to AI is worth reflecting on: “How does one respond to this? I genuinely have no idea, but personally, I think I might just slow down. Because I can’t out run it, I can’t even keep up with it. All I can do is watch it thunder off into the distance and hope for some kind of hare and tortoise outcome. I can’t keep up with a person who is trying to shave seconds of their daily schedule by using Monday.com, or Grammarly, or using AI to choose their flowers. It’s a race I seen no value in taking part in. Going slow is the one thing it can’t do.”

-A