Something I thought about:
- Books for children that reflect reality vs. books that show possibility and how the job of a children’s writer is to make children’s worlds bigger. This doesn’t mean that books have to be upbeat or that we’re, as Maggie Smith says in her viral poem "Good Bones," “trying to sell them the world.” But children’s books should somehow make their understanding of the world bigger — whether that’s regarding friendship and emotions or facts about nature — broadening, not limiting perspectives.
Something I did:
- Finished a pb ms revision.
- Did a close reading of a manuscript for my diss.
- Failed to finish a complete rough draft of the chapter I want to wrap up soon.
Something I read:
- This essay about what happened to author Sara Gruen is bonkers.
- I thought this was a good way of framing our fear of technology/A.I. (Ted Chiang via Jason Kottke). It isn’t about the tech itself, but how humans will use it extractively and punitively (as they have with so many past technologies):
I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.
Let’s think about it this way. How much would we fear any technology, whether A.I. or some other technology, how much would you fear it if we lived in a world that was a lot like Denmark or if the entire world was run sort of on the principles of one of the Scandinavian countries? There’s universal health care. Everyone has child care, free college maybe. And maybe there’s some version of universal basic income there.
