Tara McMullin

Revolutions are thus planetary phenomena. But there is more. What they really do is transform basic assumptions about what politics is ultimately about. In the wake of a revolution, ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate.

Research as a way of life is having the ability and the time to question the world around you and add to its understanding. It’s defined by our access and ability to contribute to production of knowledge and evaluate the information around us.

The problem when the asset is people is that people are intensely complicated, and trying to regulate how people behave is historically a miserable experience, especially when that authority is vested in a single powerful individual.

EMBEDDED: How do you keep up with the online discourse? How important is it to you to do this?

SAM COLE: Honestly the best way I know how to do this is talking to my friends. Everyone is experiencing a different internet these days. Algorithms have got us sorted and siloed away from each other, so one person is seeing memes and “discourse” and... See more

That is, they understand the purpose of chatbots and generative models to be the ability to force other people to see a particular version of reality. It is a tool of power that masquerades as a tool of knowledge.

Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, ‘professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers’ tripled, growing ‘from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.’ In other words, productive jobs have,... See more

I think of a comparably personal comment I once heard my colleague Judith Shapiro, former provost of Bryn Mawr and then president of Barnard, make to a group of young people about what they should expect from college: “You want the inside of your head to be an interesting place to spend the rest of your life.”

Worldbuilding, for me, was a form of expansive hope—a necessary imagination for being alive.