The poem: https://poets.org/poem/singularity
Tag: artifical-intelligence
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One of my very realest things: my 1964 Hermes Rocket, acquired from the granddaughter of a mechanical engineer in Asheville. In my experience, engineers take very good care of their typewriters. -
My SG-1, with Howard Knob in early fall 2026. Buy the book! Eddie Huffman, Doc Watson: https://uncpress.org/9781469680354/doc-watson/
Pilgrimage stories, from people of various famousness:
https://www.fretboardjournal.com/features/imposing-doc-watson-hitchhikers-musical-memoir/
https://gardenandgun.com/remembering-doc-watson
The soundtrack: https://docwatson.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-club-47-2
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Here are three reality-adjacent (and typewriter-enabled!) flashes of hope: two from this week, and one from way back that’s finally finished its lesson.
- An error in the New York Times.
September 23rd’s web page featured this headline for a story in The Athletic:
Tragic news, marred by what we still call a “typo.” (You might need to look for it again, unless you are a former English teacher proofreader-type too.)
Frequent and discerning readers of The Gray Lady know that repeated words, misspellings, and false start sentences are not uncommon, even in 2026. They are invariably corrected the next time you think to refresh the page–but they still happen (and some make a cottage industry of noting them).
Whenever I encounter one I treasure it. Because it means there is a real person on the other side of my screen, in Times Square or L.A. or Paris or Baghdad, going hell-for-leather to make deadline. Not an A.I. agent. (Well, not until AI starts putting the right titration of typos into its prose to meet its ends.)
I have held for a few years now that soon actual “typos” will be precious, almost-boutique experiences, like face-to-face schooling. Because they will mean a real person is passing through an experience alongside you, sharing your time and space and making sense of the world too. I think that time is already now.
(And as a waggish friend noted: “I also love that the NYT could misspell ‘analyst’ but spell ‘Krzyzewski’ correctly.”)
2. The Kids Are Alright, and Angry.
I brought Stanford’s AI howler to both my undergrad sections of preservice teachers this week.
We use my collection of manual typewriters for reflective writing, to find the contemporary themes of historical reading and make connections to experience that transform ideas into learning. Inevitably, work with these beautiful hands-on machines invites excursions into what technology does, can’t do, and might do to and for the yet-hypothetical classroom of their subject and level.
As I never tire of reminding them: my phone distraction / using AI “for brainstorming”/ reality bending teaching problem today is their problem in @ 3 years. What are they going to do about it?
I have to screenshot the image from the NYT story, in case you have somehow missed it. You need to have the same chance to react that they did.
The first photo was snapped of three undergrads at a “Lunar New Year Party in 2024.” I imagine this was a late night dining promotion, like midnight breakfast during exams. The second appeared in online university promotional materials last week.
The student on the right in the original photo, Billy Ramirez, seems remarkably good-humored about the revision, though also unsparing. After all, university students, staff, and faculty of color are used to having their images centered, altered, or removed, as suits the branding need of the moment.
“To see me erased like that so easily was kind of very upsetting,” Mr. Ramirez, who is Hispanic, said in an interview on Tuesday.
Mr. Ramirez, a senior who is majoring in human biology, said there was “a comedic element” to the matter. Nevertheless, he said that he was frustrated by Stanford’s move, which he learned about from a friend.
The other students in the original photo “did not respond to emails on Tuesday.” The student on the right in the altered photo could not be reached for comment, obviously, because she does not exist. (Her AI sister Tilly might be game to offer some word salad, in a language or two, maybe.)
My own undergrads’ response didn’t start with racial / ethnic erasure, though. Instead they zeroed in on the revisions to make the other two students more conventionally attractive.
“They made them hotter,” was the first, dismayed comment in one class. “It’s the dining hall late at night. No one is camera-ready. People are just wearing whatever and trying to get something to eat.”
We went on to talk about that mix of aspiration and self-loathing that powerful advertising sparks inside us. Obvs, they agreed.
But then a student said, “If I see the second photo in an ad, it makes me not want to go to Stanford. No one really looks like that. Where would I fit in?”
In one acid take that student undid a century of marketing campaigns, and decided to let be be finale of seem.
I tried the counterpunch: “But what if you are the UComm employee who has to finish this web page and two more before midnight. You do not have the actual image you think you need! Can you see why maybe, just this once, you could fudge it with AI, and make up people who don’t exist?”
Absolutely not, both groups roared back at me. Not even worthy of response. Authenticity above all. Reality above all, said the room.
“Besides,” came the coup-de-grace: “This same university will bust you for using AI to write a paper.
“How can they turn around and use it themselves?”
3. The Canoe
Twenty years ago I helped start a microschool in the North Carolina piedmont. It did not survive past its first year. The experience taught me gratitude for institutions, for existing infrastructure that doesn’t need to invent a way to get attendance to the front office by 9 AM every day, etc.
But in class this week, another lesson from that time came back to me. One of our organizing team was tech-savvy, and used PhotoShop (oh innocence) to place the name of the school in many becoming photographs that supported its vibe. Our building backed on a lovely river; one photo depicted a Coleman canoe nosing into a sun-dappled autumn stream, with the school name now proudly lettered in gold on the transom.
We are all dazzled, excited by how our nascent website would be zhuzhed up by these gorgeous images. We will have so many prospective students applying!
But one of the teachers contemplated the pictures silently for several moments. Then she asked,
“What do we tell the student who shows up on the first day and says, ‘I want to see the canoe’?”
She was right.
The trust of a young person in the intentions and credibility of a new school comes down to whether or not it is what it says it is.
How can a student know they are safe–know they can relax and trust–know they are free to do the work they are here to do–without that rock-solid confidence?
The photos were forgotten.
The young people are done with appearances and promises.
They just want to see the canoe.
Lead image borrowed from The Happy Adventure, with thanks.
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Here’s an image of the bicentennial Freedom Train at a stop in Georgia, 1976.
What a happening the Freedom Train was! An eighteen-month tour of the rails across the contiguous 48 states. A rolling collection of +/- 500 artifacts that represented America in all its post-Watergate malaise.
Touted by pardoner-in-chief Gerald Ford as exemplifying “the spirit of free enterprise at its best.”
Not sure if he ever actually said this; it’s a screenshot from the promotional press pack archived at Ford’s Presidential Library, designed to get big donors on board and manufacture hype and pep. My passion for all things physical, objects in the real world, is piqued upon remembering this rolling exhibition! There’s abundance of online records about the train itself and its itinerary (train people being even more obsessive than typewriter people)–but an exhaustive catalog of exactly which artifacts made the cut was tough to find.
This Troy University page is the best I came up with, which takes us to BhamWiki (“an ever-growing encyclopedic resource for anyone curious about Birmingham, Alabama and the region around it“). And we are happy to find a Remington No. 1 typewriter on the roster, as part of the “Innovations” car, in august company. ‘Merican ingenuity FTW!
(NB: This is not a Remington No. 1, but IS an image of the 14-ton Underwood No. 5 typewriter created for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915, then refurbished for the 1939 NYC World’s Fair, and I will take any opportunity to post it. Check out Mary Ech’s terrific post for more about it. Can such things be?)
I have a gauzy, madeleine-like association cascade of the Freedom Train steaming across my seven year-old consciousness. How did seven year-olds come to know such things were happening, in the mid-70s? How did anyone?
I suspect it was featured in the Weekly Reader that year, which I probably had access to in 1975-1976 in my super-groovy, open floor plan, carpet-squares-and filmstrip-viewer, mixed first-and-second grade classroom at Cunningham year-round Elementary School, Aurora, Colorado.
The Internet Archive shows Weekly Reader coverage of the 1947-1949 Freedom Train (which was its whole own huggermugger, full of citizenship paeans and racial tension):
…but it is silent on the ’76 one. And I didn’t have a National Geographic World subscription yet either…so how did I know about it? Dad was still active-duty Air Force, so maybe he brought home news of it.
I did not finally see the train, in the actual event, that I can remember. But I wanted to!
I remember the longing to see it. The promised thrill of Important Things being brought to us, in all their irreducible actuality, all the way out here in the provinces. Left over from the previous era of whistlestop tours and medicine shows and itinerant entertainers, maybe, when the only way to experience something was in the flesh and folks would pay what they could to have it.
(I did see the King Tut exhibit later that year at the National Gallery, though! That deserves its own post, someday.)
It is no surprise that early efforts to revive the Freedom Train for the 250th came to naught, or at least much-reduced form: “on April 15, 2026, Reading No. 2100’s excursion as the 2026 Freedom Train was canceled, citing “a lack of financial backing from corporate sponsors, difficulty negotiating access with major freight railroads, and tight timelines leading up to the 2026 semiquincentennial celebration.” Trains are on the outs. And it’s a big loss.
Trains aside, there is not much real stuff to touch this July 4th, especially in DC. The State-Fair atrocity on the Mall is full of VR and other simulacra. The permanent built environment of the nation’s capital city is fenced off in the name of security, but also to hide the shame of a monstrous fixer at being unable to fix everything.
I lived in DC twice, once for a year between the summer of ’76 and ’77, and again for six years after college. I still consider it “my city,” though of course I know it has been changed and Chipotle-homogenized like everywhere. (What did Joan Didion say about knowing even in the moment that it would never be quite the same again? Like that.)
(And can you believe they closed The Biograph? It’s a CVS now.)
I remember how frustrated little me was that we got to DC in summer of ’76 after the Bicentennial fireworks. Though I still remember seeing them splendid in ’77 over the Washington Monument, from a distance and a rise somehow.
And both that year, and when I returned as an adult, I gloried in how accessible everything was. In ’77, Dad would circle the National Mall on Saturdays until street parking opened up on Constitution Ave. and we could walk over and see the Wright brothers plane, the moon landing capsule, the Spirit of St. Louis. (When I grew up I discovered there were also other museums in the SI–but to this seven year-old, it was Air and Space, ride or die.)
And during my 90s term in office, I helped coach my first school’s cross-country team. The Dupont Circle location of its first campus precluded any actual sports facilities, so we ran and ran. We had several loops mapped through the city and Rock Creek Park. We would fly down Connecticut Ave, somehow get over along the Potomac, and run under the overhang of the Kennedy Center.
I lived in Arlington, in a crummy group house at Court House metro. You could park at the Iwo Jima memorial and run across Memorial Bridge and back, waving to Lincoln at the turnaround. Or even blast up the steps Rocky-style and salute him personally, if it was early on a weekend AM and you could juke across the traffic. Turn around and stand where MLK did and behold the reflecting pool, not caring what color it was.
The country I love is a place of unlimited access and invisible barriers, both. As today’s gorgeous NYT piece on the colossus in New York Harbor asks, “Is Liberty peaceable or vengeful? A nurturing presence, greeting all who come, or an unstoppable revolutionary?” I have found it to be all of these things–but most of all, when it is at its best, it is real, not pretend.
No Freedom Train for you to go see today, probably. And if you are in DC, I hope you don’t endure the metal detectors and military presence to see the definitely-not-for-kids late-night fireworks.
I hope instead you spend some quality time with something real that means liberty and possibility to you, and maybe take a moment to consider what this place has opened in your own reality. (A manual typewriter is a promising option, supra.)
And, of course, how to pay it forward and make opportunities for others. The most American of values, as Learned Hand reminded us in 1944. Here’s Bret Stephens’ masterful reflection on his address last week:
…the judge said, the spirit of liberty lay in a combination of humility, curiosity, generosity and restraint. It was “the spirit which is not too sure that it is right,” the one that “seeks to understand the mind of other men and women” and “weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.” It was an elusive spirit, one that could exist only “as the conscience and courage of Americans create it.”
Fugitive virtues this year–but still ones we can each seek in our own hearts and choices. Which also burn in Woody Guthrie’s last verses of his unofficial national anthem–the ones we never get around to singing–
As I went walking I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me. -
Today is the day! My book is published!
Human Teaching: How Recentering What’s Real Sustains Your Practice is now available, in paperback only (no digital download!) at this link.
I am pricing it at near-cost through the end of February–because I am so excited to get these ideas out into the world, and continue the conversation that started in these pages. I hope you’ll order yours today!
In Human Teaching, I use a combination of word-processed, typewritten, and hybrid pages to explore the relationship between seeking out unmediated reality and thriving in your teaching practice.
As our lives become more and more virtual–more and more invaded by screens and algorithms, and the billion-dollar efforts behind them that compete to extract our attention–I am more and more convinced that the way forward has always been beneath our feet, before our eyes, and right under our fingertips.
Maybe this moment, despite it all, is the first moment in which we can truly see reality for the endless source of sustaining power that it has always been. If we choose to stop fleeing from it in the name of speed, convenience, and ease, we may find that friction is our friend.
We may regain our living, breathing teaching selves by losing the stories we’ve been told we have to believe.
The core of the book is the “Five Spot”: a scheme for understanding the research-based principles of sustainable teaching practice that have infused my burnout prevention work with preservice and practicing educators for years.
What’s the “Five Spot”? Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:
- While the themes that underlie educator burnout are complex and interwoven, I think we can engage the most urgent ones in five moves. Five is a manageable number! It is counting on your fingers; it is the days in a school week. It is how many periods I taught each day, when I was a middle and high school teacher from 1993 to 1999. It’s a handful—and it’s just enough.
- At the school where I began my career, a “five spot” was what they paid you to sub for an absent colleague’s class. If someone called out sick, and you had planning period during one of their classes, you could volunteer in morning meeting to cover for them. Sometimes they would leave a plan; usually it was study hall. But when you were done, you would go to student accounts, and the woman who ran the shop would hand you a five-dollar bill out of the cash box. And now you had money for an extra value meal at McDonald’s up the road (at 90s prices), which you could just make in a lunch period if you really boogied. Maybe these moves are like that “five spot”: do a little extra, extend yourself a bit—and immediately start to see something better in your day, something sustaining and lovely, that wasn’t there when you got up that morning.
- Jazz fans will have thought of the third thing first. The Five Spot Café was a storied club in Greenwich Village from 1956-1967, where some of the most innovative musicians of the period played residencies, sat in, and cut records. Thelonious Monk had two long stands there; Ornette Coleman made his east coast debut there with his avant-garde improvisations. It was an unpretentious, inclusive, and adventurous place, where food and drinks were cheap and all were welcome. Being part of the new thing was everybody’s business, not just a select few. I hope the same sense of freedom, openness, and possibility comes through in these pages.
I will blog a bit about each of the elements of the “Five Spot” in the coming weeks, so keep reading to find out more!
My sincere thanks to Dr Richard Polt, curator of The Classic Typewriter Page and editor of Loose Dog Press, for his unflagging enthusiasm for this project since I proposed it to him eleven months ago.
When I began this journey with real-world words in the depths of covid-dark December 2021, his was the first page of the “Typosphere” I found. His terrific book The Typewriter Revolution is required reading for anyone who wants to make manual typewriters part of their lives in a digital world.
I wanted so badly to publish this work with someone for whom the typewritten bits were a feature, not a bug. And boy howdy: did I ever choose wisely!
So get the book, and let me know what you think! And thanks so much for reading.
Here we go!
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I am just back from the annual professional meeting of folks around the country who run programs like mine.
Like nearly all academic meetings, it took place in a big city, in a hotel that is also a conference center. The action went down in one big ballroom and an assortment of smaller meeting rooms spread around wide central spaces, where coffee and food intermittently appeared and then was cleared away.
It was furnished to be “nice” twenty years ago but, like all such spaces, showed the constant wear and tear of hosting one such event after another. A spot of ripped upholstery here, a missing light switch fixture there, the scuffs on the walls that inscribe a story of people constantly coming and going, presenters moving chairs and tables in an effort to make their session more collaborative, or less.
I brought a typewriter with me, as above: my bulletproof 1965 Hermes Rocket, which has traveled with me to Hawaii and Ireland and many places in-between. My session was on manual typewriters in 2025 as an interpretive lens to understand the nature of educator burnout and find new ways through it. (Also the topic of the book I have coming out very soon with Loose Dog Press: watch this space!)
So I got to bring the Rocket with me, and invite participants to take it for a spin. Maybe one of the latent powers of a manual typewriter in 2025 is that it is always exactly what it is, where it is. After all, it is the only object in this photo of my session that is really its own, singular thing: the tables and chairs are anonymous, and even the “slides” aren’t real.
In every session we found ourselves sitting with strangers at a round wedding-reception-type table covered by two massive industrial tablecloths and were asked to interact, to break ice, to discuss, to synthesize, to report out, above all to network. The incongruity of the importance of the work we are striving to do at these meetings, juxtaposed with its trade show surroundings, always jars me and creates an anomie in my soul so consistent I have learned to brace for it.
I remember attending my industry’s biggest meeting twenty years ago in San Francisco and standing on one of those terrible banquet chairs to see one of my mentors receive the organization’s highest honor, a lifetime achievement award. A deeply moving moment, thousands of lives changed for the better, world-shifting impact on education—taking place in a corner of the Moscone Center that would probably feature a refrigerator display in two days.
My local district in opening a new elementary school on Monday, years after accepting the fact that the historic WPA-constructed building was too close to a flood-prone river to possibly be reclaimed, Hurricane Helene displaced the kids from it anyway; they have been meeting for a year in donated halls, and so having a home at last is a major achievement. But of course, as one of my sons (a former student of the school) commented upon viewing an online video tour, it looks like a Hampton Inn inside.
I have not seen the video but do not need to. I know what educational “nice” looks like. I know exactly what he means. Indestructible carpet with fierce patterns overlaying neutral texture that will hide stains and wear for two decades. Ranks of plastic tables and chairs that can be rolled around and reconfigured, but never really fit together. Indirect lighting that will still make everything cold and sallow.
(I also read that the university building where I was so splendidly taught by that grad school mentor just re-opened after a comprehensive refresh. In the photos, I see the Hampton Inn aesthetic, filtered through a lot more money.)
I am grateful to the designers and the builders and everyone for a new building, don’t get me wrong. I just want to note that any public institutional space has to meet its contemporary demands to look “nice,” to accommodate hundreds, and to last for fifty years.
Spaces that tick all those boxes will never be humane spaces. They will never build in the evidence of human existence that so many of us find comforting in older, lived-in educational spaces. Worn spots on terrazzo floors where three generations of chairs have been scraped. Formica tabletops with the edges worn from students leaning over books, then laptops, late into the night. Chalkboards from the 60s peeking out around the edges of whiteboards from the 90s that were mounted right on top of them, to not leave divots in the drywall.
My favorite educational meeting has always happened in the same physical place, and has since the late 70s. It’s a Catholic retreat center near Dayton. I am not Catholic, but I read in its low-slung brick and monastic rooms and stained-glass chapel a strong presence of the liberation theology of fifty years ago. Ecumenical, peacenik, a little woozy, earth-tone woodcuts of venerated elders and saints painted on burlap. The rooms redolent of thousands of urns of coffee and the adequate but unpretentious on-site dining service. Brick and coffee and just a little warm damp: a terrarium, nearly, for people who seek to care for other people.
Overwhelmingly human and cozy, Feels like home to me, anyway, who is old enough to remember Air Force Base chapels built in the same vibe. Feels like room to sit and rest, room to hole up and read, room to make a new friend. The meeting itself the historic home of the last educational moment, IMHO, when we took seriously the interpersonal, the autobiographical, the human becoming of our work. The last moments before Reagan and measure-to-manage became commonsensical, before the ground opened and swallowed it all up in a conflagration of accountability that now feels like the only way to do school. (But isn’t.)
Of course, the real kicker is that every educational space that feels humane now was just “nice” when it opened, according to whatever “nice” meant at the time. The modernist / Brutalist cement and chrome piles I remember fondly from undergrad were built in the 60s as interruptions of the previous century’s brownstones. They only feel human to me because I was a human in them. (Oh look, one of those just got torn down and replaced too.)
Maybe the real point of this reverie on human living in inhumane spaces is that only by living in them do cold spaces warm up. Places where we do sacred work become sanctified. Churches and schools. Why does an empty classroom feel different than an empty hospital ward, than an empty prison cell? Exactly.
Maybe one of my deepest disquiets about online Zoom classes is that Zoom will never feel lived-in. A Zoom meeting is always the same, because a Zoom meeting is not a place. Evening class in Zoom can never feel different than every other meeting you have had in Zoom that day. It is the same not-space, and unless we who teach there make a real effort to make it otherwise, what is conveyed therein will just be more content to be consumed and optimized and turned into deliverables and accountabilities.
(And easily 1/3 of the sessions at my meeting were about incorporating AI into the teaching, writing, and mentoring work we do: another irreality that is changing the scope of what we can imagine doing with our students. For another day.)
We need real places to feel ourselves as real people undertaking real experiences. A sentence even John Dewey, that Lorax of experience, could not have imagined uttering in his day.
Don’t know how to end this. Maybe with the suggestion that we all notice and value what the real spaces we live in do for us. Whether welcoming and accommodating or brutal and indifferent, we make ourselves and each other as we share those spaces and work toward our shared intentions.
What do we want them to feel like? What can we do to make them more so?
Whatever they start out as, they end up…ours.
This whole blog SHOULD be about my amazing encounter this week with Bryan Kravitz of Philly Typewriter. What a shop, what a project! Typewriter Valhalla! More to come!
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I really have no time for blogging today, but I have to share Wikipedia’s “Signs of AI Writing” advice page that I stumbled across while not sleeping last night. It is sort of an internal white paper for those who edit that remarkable resource: not definitive, but trying really hard to be helpful.
I had no idea this existed. But it turns out to be the most explicit list of tells, bugaboos, and quirks of LLM output in fall 2025 I that have ever seen.
Last week I taught my doc seminar on scholarly writing, and was informed by my doc students that “em dashes mean AI wrote it.” A quick web search shows I am a few months behind this supposed wisdom, and it is included.
(Though sadly, the only essential thinkpiece on the issue is not.)
The first takeaways are pretty breathtaking. I will quote widely from the page (linked above) because no time to paraphrase.
[snip]
LLM writing often puffs up the importance of the subject matter by adding statements about how arbitrary aspects of the topic represent or contribute to a broader topic…Words to watch: stands as / serves as / is a testament/reminder, plays a vital/significant/crucial role, underscores/highlights its importance/significance, reflects broader, symbolizing its ongoing, contributing to, enduring/lasting impact, watershed moment, key turning point, deeply rooted, profound heritage, steadfast dedication, indelible mark, solidifies …
AI chatbots tend to insert superficial analysis of information, often in relation to its significance, recognition, or impact. This is often done by attaching a present participle (“-ing”) phrase at the end of sentences, sometimes with vague attributions to third parties…Words to watch: ensuring …, highlighting …, emphasizing …, reflecting …, underscoring …, showcasing …, aligns with…
LLMs have serious problems keeping a neutral tone, especially when writing about something that could be considered “cultural heritage”—in which case they will constantly remind the reader that it is cultural heritage…Words to watch: rich/vibrant cultural heritage/tapestry, boasts a, continues to captivate, groundbreaking, intricate, stunning natural beauty, enduring/lasting legacy, nestled, in the heart of …
LLMs often introduce their own interpretation, analysis, and opinions in their writing, even when they are asked to write neutrally, violating the policy No original research. Editorializing can appear through specific words or phrases or within broader sentence structures. This indicator often overlaps with other language and tone indicators in this list. Note that humans and especially new editors often make this mistake as well…Words to watch: it’s important to note/remember/consider, is worth mentioning …
[/snip]
It goes on and on; you should check it out.
We are of course beyond “gotcha” AI moments, at least in my institution. We are encouraged to “teach the controversy,” surely, and encourage students to begin to use these tools critically because job skills.
But if you are someone who cares about words, or was taught to, or make at least part of your life with words, I ask you: what do you notice about these “tells”?
That they are, and have always been, the hallmark of inexperienced writers trying to find their way into what they have to say.
When we who care about words say that AI output is “bad” I can begin to see now what we mean. It is vague; it pretends to perspective it does not have; it leans into gravity while being featherweight.
In other words: it is a lot like the papers many of our students would be writing on their own–if they were actually writing their papers.
So where’s the problem?
The problem is: until you write like this on your own, and get told you are writing like this and shown how to do better…you will continue to write like this.
Worse, you will be satisfied with this writing as “enough.” It looks “smart” and “authoritative,” so it must be.
And this is only the writing-skill part of the deeper issue, described in the lengthy quote from an associated page:
[snip]
LLMs are pattern completion programs: They generate text by outputting the words most likely to come after the previous ones. They learn these patterns from their training data, which includes a wide variety of content from the Internet and elsewhere, including works of fiction, low-effort forum posts, unstructured and low-quality content for search engine optimization (SEO), and so on. Because of this, LLMs will sometimes “draw conclusions” which, even if they seem superficially familiar, are not present in any single reliable source. They can also comply with prompts with absurd premises, like “The following is an article about the benefits of eating crushed glass”. Finally, LLMs can make things up, which is a statistically inevitable byproduct of their design, called “hallucination“…
As LLMs often output accurate statements, and since their outputs are typically plausible-sounding and given with an air of confidence, any time that they deliver a useful-seeming result, people may have difficulty detecting the above problems. An average user who believes that they are in possession of a useful tool, who maybe did a spot check for accuracy and “didn’t see any problems”, is biased to accept the output as provided; but it is highly likely that there are problems.
[/snip]
If you care about writing–or if you don’t care about writing, but do care about critical thinking, bias, or plausible-sounding and confidently-expressed things being accepted as true–well then, there is much to fear here.
Thoughts?
My typewriter sits in the corner and shakes its shaggy head at me…
Image borrowed from this Axios story on the apparent currency of the term “clanker” for undesired and ineffective AI. Image possibly AI generated, who can know anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
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My view this morning. How’s yours? 
Works cited:
NYT—Open AI’s New Video App is Jaw-Dropping (For Better or Worse): https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/technology/openai-sora-video-app.html?unlocked_article_code=1.q08.UUYt.5QX7omLx3jYN&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
*I am not really a Pavement fan, though “Slanted and and Enchanted” was pressed upon me by the hippest guy I know. See? I have no strong feelings about Nickelback, but I wish them well.
**That whole last bit is Wendell Berry—sure ain’t me, but I love it. See the page “Typewriter Agonistes” for link.
***Elliot Eisner taught me the next, done, good stuff; can’t cite it on my little phone but you should read him, a lot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliot_Eisner
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Why yes, that IS the original paper support, thanks for noticing! 
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Christie Hemm Klok, for the New York Times, as linked below. I might get to yell “first” in the Typosphere for blogging this terrific NYT article on the rediscovery of the “MingKwai” Chinese typewriter.
It details the thrill of Tom Mullaney, an obsessive history professor (I thought I had it bad) searching out, finding, and saving the only extant example of this machine from oblivion.
I have never seen any Asian language typewriter in person, but the gorgeous photos here really give a sense of the engineering feat accomplished in this protoype.
Imagine!
Any two keystrokes, representing pieces of characters, moved gears within the machine. In a central window, which Mr. Lin (YuTang, the inventor) called the Magic Eye, up to eight different characters containing those pieces then appeared, and the typist could select the right one.
Mr. Lin had made it possible to type tens of thousands of characters using 72 keys. It was almost as if, Dr. Mullaney said, Mr. Lin had invented a keyboard with a single key capable of typing the entire Roman alphabet.
He named his machine MingKwai, which roughly translates to “clear and fast.”
Ibid. It was never manufactured. Lin had a single prototype made in the 30s at his own enormous expense, and tried to sell it to Remington, the General Motors of the era’s American typewriter industry. It failed during the demo; he went bankrupt; the machine was stashed at his job, then moved here, then there, and was presumed lost.
“Gone the way of most obsolete technology…had most likely ended up on a scrapheap. The right person hadn’t been there to save it, to tell its story.”
What is worth saving?
I think typewriters tend to be! My typewriter collection does not enter Dr Mullaney’s rare air, for sure. All of my machines were made in the hundreds of thousands, if not more, and none could be considered truly scarce. Though some, like the 1967 Hermes Ambassador that tops my blog, are definitely scarcer than others.
But the course of the Ambassador is exemplary of the path I think once-precious things often take when they become outmoded. It got stashed in the back of a dry closet, under a cheap plastic cover someone had the presence of mind to replace before forgetting about it for decades. And that afterthought by some anonymous someone is why it surfaced in an estate sale, perfectly functional, when so many others that were left uncovered in damp basements or attics do not. (Cover your typewriters, children!)
I think so many manual typewriters are still around because they were so expensive. They were workaday tools–well, some were more stylish than others, and they had different price points, so maybe they were more like automobiles than tools–but they were dear to acquire, about the price of a laptop today. So even when they were no longer needed, and were replaced by an electric or a desktop computer, folks couldn’t imagine tossing them out.
That cover wasn’t an afterthought. The Ambassador was a luxury model! I like to imagine that it was the owner’s child, or grandchild, that finally made the choice to store it safely. Maybe because they had been told over and over that it wasn’t a toy. You can’t play with it. It’s precious. Treat it like something precious. And that someone–or their child–did.
So maybe that’s why one generation’s expensive stuff tends to still be around for future generations to rediscover, reassess, and decide if it has anything new to offer in a present-day recontextualization. The kids get told to take care of it–and they do.
But…what about the true ephemera of our daily lives? Will we miss any of it when it is gone?
Cruise FB Marketplace’s “free stuff” section in a college town right around the end of July, when all the student apartments are turning over, and wonder. Will anyone ever miss flatpack furniture? Entry-level vacuum cleaners? Futons? (So many futons.)
So much hideousness. Here in my personal college town, our sustainability-branded university students used to collect all the discarded stuff, spend a few weeks cleaning and sorting it, and then sell it back to the incoming frosh in “The Big Sale” that happened at Legends, proceeds to scholarships. A one-day Black Friday delirious feeding frenzy of plastic and upholstery and area rugs. It was a gas.
Unimaginable with social distancing, “The Big Sale” got cancelled during COVID…then, like so many things, just quietly never started up again.1 I have a mediocre electric fan from the last one in 2019. It cools nothing, but reminds me of stomping around the bedlam of that sunny hot morning in a packed Legends with my then six-year-old in wide-eyed tow. Glorious memory.
You miss the ephemeral stuff if you have reason to miss it; you miss stuff if it has a reason to matter. It was from the last “Sale.” I didn’t know it was the last sale, any more than Lin knew the typewriter would be the only one ever made. The meaning got loaded into it after.
And of course you can’t save everything just in case it matters later–because that is the high road to hoarding. If you never throw anything out, how will anything ever be precious?
You have to miss something for anything to matter. Like Sheryl Crow sang, “there ain’t nothin’ like regret / to remind you you’re alive.” Better to lose too much and make space for the new, run the risk of having tossed something you long for, than be hemmed in by stacks of everything in case some of it happens to matter to you again…
Right?
So: save some of it, I guess?
Maybe that is how to honor a past you were part of–and, eventually, as you grow older and more judicious about what is beautiful, a past you weren’t part of too.
But also, let the world have its way with ephemera, which of course is most everything. Burn through stuff made to be burned through.
What matters will become clear later…and we will have the delectable chance then to rediscover what once we could not even see, and treasure it up in our new world for the preciousness it brings us from the old.
Ibid. - Besides, Legends was torn down this week. Victim of Helene, supposedly–but also was hard to program the last few years, and nothing that doesn’t fill up right with value stays as-is on this campus. Will it be missed? Maybe if you saw Hank Williams Jr there, or Dave Matthews, or A Tribe Called Quest…some hyperlocal cred to be collected if you did. I saw a great band there once featuring students I taught in middle school twenty years earlier. That is enough for me to miss it–especially because it will almost certainly be replaced with some “nice”, institutional building with all the soul of a Holiday Inn Express. ↩︎
