Posts from beehaw.org

Our continent has a long tradition of preserving and sharing knowledge through oral literature—songs, proverbs, and legends. During the colonial era, foreign researchers, institutions and labels recorded African musical heritage and took them away. Today, many of these sound recordings remain caged in museums abroad or locked behind academic paywalls, accessible only to researchers and those who can afford them.

Research undertaken by Daniel L. Metzger and colleagues is the latest in a long line of studies demonstrating that, far from not knowing who they are, trans youth have a very firm grasp of their gender identity. It builds on research by Kristina R. Olson finding very low rates of detransition among trans youth, and research by Michael Zaliznyak demonstrating that the decision to come out and begin medical transition is an extremely slow one that usually requires years of gradual processing and sustained effort.

I’m aware that I’m falling into the AI trap of personifying these results, writing as if Google’s AI imagines and presumes. Google the company, of course, wants this too–it wants me to see my search results as a conversation with a helpful problem-solving buddy. The company has aims down the line to introduce actual agents that can search for you, jumping on the latest Silicon Valley obsession to basically make a version of Google Alerts that are worse for the environment. Maybe its current version of search is something of a test balloon for an eventual service it can charge for.

There is no doubt that many creators recognize the competition from GenAI as an existential threat. In the U.K., a survey released in January 2026 by the Society of Authors, the Association of Illustrators and other creator organizations found that around a third of illustrators and literary translators, and more than half of photographers, had lost commissions to GenAI. Among the authors, more than 85 percent reported decreased earnings and feared that GenAI could imitate their style. Also in January, the French division of Harlequin, which is part of publisher HarperCollins, announced a trial with an AI translation company. According to the Association of Literary Translators of France, the trial saw translators’ contracts being terminated and replaced with lower-paid work editing AI-generated translations.

Companies including Meta, Open AI, Google, and Anthropic have scraped nearly all available data from the internet to train their AI models, and have been accused of using copyrighted material without consent. Tech companies have said it qualifies as fair use, which allows the use of such material for research and other purposes. Some countries are trying to balance the need for good data with the need to compensate creators.

Your book, like Elizabeth Hinton’s “America on Fire,” delves into a decades-long cycle that’s played out in many US cities: Police violence, followed by uprisings, followed by promises for reform and blue ribbon commissions that ultimately produce only “modest change and a photo op.” Did you come out of your reporting with a solid idea of what a better process would look like?

I don’t know what “automated activity” they detected, I post one or two comments, once every couple of weeks.

The machine before me looks like Frankenstein’s homebrew version of Guess Who. Its main panel is composed of three rows of portraits. Some show men in 1930s suits, others women in flapper dresses, still more are simply blue people-shaped silhouettes. Below each portrait is a simple on/off switch. To the left of the portraits is a slide selector alongside a list of locations. Above that is a radio dial and filament lights indicating a current setting. At the bottom of the machine is a readout displaying a cryptic code ‘01-QU-1-11’. And, to the right, most enticing of all, is a big red lever.

Let’s look beyond the specifics for a moment and consider what happened here.

The Luddites see Big Tech as having eroded commonality: the common good, the social fabric, the institutions of collective interest. Luddism, as they conceive of it, is a communal, spiritual, and political project centered on three things: reclaiming collective agency away from Big Tech and its attention-fracking, data-capturing, social erosion project; re-enchanting public life through public events that help people experience connection; and fostering a world rooted in localism, public goods, care, fun, democracy, and what one Luddite I spoke to referred to as “collective effervescence.” Collective effervescence, I suspect, was what I was surprised to encounter in myself that winter day by the Apple Cube. The phrase, first coined by the sociologist Emile Durkheim, refers to the electric and exhilarating energy you might find at raves, protests, marathons, and houses of worship: the feeling you have when you’re connected to something larger than yourself.

This was like a month ago for a pride event but it’s still a fun fit

For decades, publishers have done everything in their power, from the legal to the not-explicitly illegal, to rank as highly in Google Search as possible. For many websites, traffic from the search engine was their single greatest source of audience and, as a result, revenue.

These trans handypeople are going Tool 4 Tool.

Hopefully more states follow suit.

The Game Narrative Reader is a collection of links built to resemble an anthology textbook. It’s a survey of key topics in video game narrative design, composed from essays and articles published elsewhere by their respective authors. It’s meant as a resource for students, educators, and practitioners.

I wanted to share something I’ve been building for the past few months.