One Man's Notes

Having a big life re-evaluation moment with my wife. My City lecturing and my family are the non-negotiable bits, as is my wife’s (new) job, but we’re putting everything else up in the air: where we live, the rest of my working life. How we spend our free time.

It’s frightening but exhilarating.

It’s difficult to articulate how angry this piece about failed crowdfunding publisher Unbound makes me.

It’s one thing to fail. It’s quite another to lie consistently to authors and backers over what appears to be years.

20 years ago today, my commute was disrupted by the 7/7 bombings in London. And I accidentally stumbled into the beginnings of the “citizen journalism” age of news…

Doc Searls:

At this point, however, Medium is the pioneer that got Substack’s arrows in its back. And frankly, I don’t like either one of them, because they’re both silos, each with their own quirks and shortcomings.

Anna Wintour leaving Vogue:

Vogue editor-in-chief of 37 years and fashion mogul icon Anna Wintour will step down after the magazine’s next cover release. The inspiration for The Devil Wears Prada will continue her roles as Vogue’s global editorial director and chief content officer of publisher Condé Nast.

For context, I’m in my early 50s - so I was still at school when she took on this role.

Against AI: An Open Letter From Writers to Publishers:

At its simplest level, our job as artists is to respond to the human experience. But the art we make is a commodity, and our world wants things quickly, cheaply, and on demand. We are rushing toward a future where our novels, our biographies, our poems and our memoirs—our records of the human experience—are “written” by artificial intelligence models that, by definition, cannot know what it is to be human. To bleed, or starve, or love.

The iPad is already my preferred video editor for most tasks. It looks like that’s only going to get better with iPad OS26 later this year.

I’m excited! But not excited enough to risk the betas…

Forcing all prospective students to make all their social media profiles public is chilling. This will make it much harder for US universities to recruit - but maybe that’s the point.

It may be good news for other countries’ universities, though.

Candle in the rain.

Walking the tightrope between AI and audiences.

I get the feeling that a lot of business are gonna take a tumble into a dangerous canyon… 

What happened to student Rag and Rag Weeks?

Just corrected a 15-year-old typo on my blog.

Hurrah.

That typo was older than my oldest child. Some of my students were still in nursery when I made it.

Here’s @ayjay pointing out the major flaw in one of the weaker arguments for AI:

A useful mental exercise: when people say “AI isn’t going anywhere” or “AI is here to stay,” substitute for “AI” the word “cancer.” A great many things that are here to stay are really bad and should be resisted as energetically as possible