Write what you mean. It’s my most fundamental writing advice. Tucker Carlson apparently did that. According to a text revealed by the New York Times, here’s a text that Tucker Carlson sent the day after the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol: Tucker Carlson January 7, 2021 — 04:18:04 PM UTC A couple of weeks ago, I…
We’re about to see a wholesale restructuring of how people get the feeds of information that matters to them, especially news. Right now there are three types of players. News organizations create news content and surround it with advertising. Consumers consume news and ads, sometimes paying for subscriptions. And between the two are intermediaries. The…
Oh, wait. They actually didn’t. When companies make mistakes, I analyze their apologies. So I headed over to Fox News to see what the network was saying about its recently settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. Fox and its on-air talent were accused of knowingly lying about the nonexistent failures and fraud in Dominion machines in…
I think of words as a medium I can use for the clearest possible communication. So it was very strange to see artists using words as art materials — and often, for the purposes of obscuring communication rather than clarifying it. Some thoughts on “Turn of Phrase” at Bowdoin College Bowdoin is in the charming…
How do you punctuate what you write? I like rhetorical questions, think we use way too many em-dashes, and disdain exclamation points. But how well do I follow my own rules? One way to analyze punctuation habits is with “just the punctuation,” a fascinating tool that allows you enter any collection of text and X-ray…
I admit it: I’m obsessed with why ChatGPT and other AI services can’t be funny. I’m convinced the answer is that true humor demands an unexpected shift in perspective, and AI machines, trained to mimic patterns in what they’ve read, have problems with both “unexpected” and “shift in perspective.” Monty Python is the master of…
Yesterday I published ChatGPT’s version of my bio. It is highly plausible but full of falsehoods. Today, I reveal what was false and attempt to figure out the source of the lies. In what follows, quoted material is from ChatGPT’s response to “Who is Josh Bernoff?” The numbers count the lies. There are 14 lies…
Associate deans at the Vanderbilt University office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) sent an email to the whole Peabody College community after a man shot eight people at Michigan State University. The deans made the ill-considered choice to use ChatGPT to write the note. But regardless of that choice, such post-shooting sympathy notes are…
An advocacy group called “The Dawn Project” aired an ad challenging the safety of Tesla’s Full Self Driving feature during the Super Bowl. The ad is a good example of dishonest fearmongering. Before I analyze the ad, let me clarify two things. First, this ad appeared, not nationally, but in local markets like Washington, DC…