Category: Current Affairs
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Wikipedia for Women (and why AI desperately needs it)
‘Unsurprisingly, I got stuck on Vatican City.’ Interesting piece yesterday in the news about Lucy Moore – a UK academic archaeologist and curator – who has completed a project creating a Wikipedia page for a woman in every country in the world. “She has now written biographies of 532 women since 2019, when she first…
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“You’ve got to ask yourself, would you risk brain surgery just to be able to order a pizza on your phone?”
You’ll probably have seen the news this week: Musk’s company Neuralink have implanted their chips in humans for the first time, and the patient is apparently doing fine, with the chip managing to read neuron spikes with some success. Typically for him, there’s a lot of marketing hype and not a lot of detail… and…
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Harry Potter and the Death of the Hallowed
In celebration of 20 years since the first Harry Potter book was published, I thought it’d be a good chance to look back to one of my own offerings in which I offered a radical reading of Potter’s relationship to his magical art. During a short speaking tour on Mutiny in the US with Peter Rollins,…
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‘When We Rise Up, We Must Not Lift Away… Real Hope is Horizontal’
Thrilled to announce that my talk at TEDx Exeter is now online! It was a huge honour to be asked to close the event, which was on the theme of hope. ‘Instead of getting out of our heads, we must work with our hands.’ In Countering Political Turmoil with a New Summer of Love I look…
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‘Sometimes the Burned Landscape Blooms Most Lavishly’ | ‘All This Is Temporary’
Beautiful – and important words here from Rebecca Solnit, via Robert Macfarlane. Something all writers – and politicians – need to digest: On that same plane, I’m really grateful to Barry Taylor for sharing this talk given by Mark Fisher in February 2016, in which he gives a rather brilliant summary of his thinking… and,…