my funniest “learning shakespeare in school” story is that my fifth grade class was supposed to put on a production of macbeth, but one of my friends had super christian parents who were morally opposed to stories about witches (lol) and for some reason the middle school teachers making decisions about all this in 1999 decided to pivot to a much less controversial play, the taming of the shrew
Here is an article from NPR about it (May 22, 2026):
Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click.
"Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said.
Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from.
"If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."
And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):
While Google already has “AI Mode,” the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model.
Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions—similar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.
And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for:
When Google first started implementing AI-assisted results, news publishers warned of “catastrophic” impacts on the industry, much of which relies on Google search to drive users to their websites.
Last year, news websites saw significant traffic declines as chatbots increasingly replaced Google search as the primary way to find sites and ask questions.
Small businesses also noted drops in traffic to their sites from Google, which has traditionally delivered customers.
Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy & research at Amsive, a digital marketing agency, warned as early as last year that Google’s planned changes to search are “going to have a devastating impact on the Internet.”
“It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,” she told Technology Magazine.
So I saw this news last week and finally switched over to duckduckdo and the difference is STAGGERING. It's like...search from 20 years ago. The results I want are at the TOP. I can't believe I waited so long to switch.
agreed, switching to duckduckgo last year was the single best improvement in my life. just remember to change the search settings > manage ai and turn all the different toggles to Off (duck.ai), Never (search assist), and On (Hide ai images)
“It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,” she told Technology Magazine.
So when the news sites go out of business, the content creators give up, the only places you can buy things from are the ones big enough to pay Google's going rate for being included in results, and the entire internet has been turned into an AI-generated ouroboros of shit... then what?
at some point we gotta acknowledge that getting the majority of your news and takes and general opinions from tumblr is not meaningfully different than getting it from tiktok even though on here it's in textual form. understanding the world through the lens of viral videos vs understanding it through breathless unsourced text posts written by dykeastarion69
#this is what made me switch to actually reading news sites regularly some years ago#(and when something's controversial or doesn't seem quite right I look up multiple news sources to try to get a fuller picture) (@thirddoctor)
A quick reminder that the Associated Press is totally free, and also often covers the news stories that Tumblr users say no one is covering. NPR is also free. So is ProPublica.
Also, here's a chart that might be helpful, in terms of determining bias and reliability: Interactive Media Bias Chart
in class and we were told to pull up chatgpt on our laptops to experiment with and the guy in front of me pulled up a deli menu and started looking at sandwiches
@specialagentartemis directed my attention recently to this piece on the misrepresentation and decontextualization of Audre Lorde's quote "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." It's very good and worth reading in full. But, to pivot to a completely different theorist, the memetic dumbing-down of that quote that the author identifies - the way it has become "a revolutionary provocation flattened into a reflexive shutdown" that "shows up most often as a thought-terminating cliché" is precisely what drives me up the wall about the popular reception of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's concepts of paranoid reading and reparative reading.
Namely, I have seen so many people use not even a quote from that essay itself, but a journalist's gloss of the essay, to effectively "clap back" at literary interpretations they disagree with or deem intolerably "paranoid," a kind of reactive and smug non-response that is not only against the spirit of the essay, but is, ironically enough, in and of itself a paranoid gesture. On the flip side, in response to this, you get people arguing, "Well, actually, paranoid readings are important and necessary, because we need to be able to criticize eg. racism!" even though Sedgwick literally never said otherwise.
In the essay, Sedgwick states, very explicitly, that paranoid readings are not inherently bad, and that they do serve a purpose in criticism. Her definition of "paranoid reading" is also more complex than simply "being critical" of something, or reading something in bad faith. In fact, the idea that paranoid readings are necessary to be critical of oppressive elements in a text is actually part of what Sedgwick argues against in the essay.
...for someone to have an unmystified view of systemic oppressions does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin that person to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences. To be other than paranoid, to practice other than paranoid forms of knowing does not, in itself, entail a denial of the reality or gravity of enmity or oppression.
I am saying that the main reasons for questioning paranoid practices are other than the possibility that their suspicions can be delusional or simply wrong. Concomitantly, some of the main reasons for practicing paranoid strategies may be other than the possibility that they offer unique access to true knowledge. They represent a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge. Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly.
Sedgwick's definition of paranoia is derived from Paul Ricoeur's concept of the hermeneutics of suspicion, which in turn is derived from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud; it's a form of literary analysis that probes texts for hidden meanings. Sedgwick identifies this kind of approach as central to antihomophobic literary criticism in the '80s and '90s; she also acknowledges that much of her own writing was governed by this approach. Decoding veiled meanings obviously has its uses in queer interpretation, especially for Sedgwick, who worked largely with nineteenth century novels, especially Gothic novels. However, at the time of writing "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading," she'd come to notice that "paranoid reading" was conflated with criticism itself; the way it was seen as the only means of antihomophobic inquiry, the only possible response to the recognition of the severity and structural omnipresence of homophobia.
...in the hands of thinkers after Freud, paranoia has by now candidly become less a diagnosis than a prescription. In a world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systemic oppression, to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious, or complaisant. I myself have no wish to return to the use of ‘‘paranoid’’ as a pathologizing diagnosis, but it seems to me a great loss when paranoid inquiry comes to seem entirely coextensive with critical theoretical inquiry rather than being viewed as one kind of cognitive/affective theoretical practice among other, alternative kinds.
What paranoia is, for Sedgwick, is faith in the spectacle of exposure, or the infinitely regress process of mining evidence of oppression. One example she gives is Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, in which Butler identifies drag as exposing the constructed and artificial nature of gender; Sedgwick is not only skeptical of the revolutionary qualities of exposure, but views Butler's argument as a reductive and limited understanding of the affects associated with camp as a sensibility. She also, significantly, uses a reading of Proust as an example of reparative reading. Although she doesn't mention this in the essay, it used to be common in academic criticism of Proust to claim that the women the narrator of À la recherche is infatuated with were "actually" men, as a reading of a veiled homosexuality to mirror Proust's own. Sedgwick instead performs a queer reading through an alternate route, attributing the narrator's revelations in the final volume of the novel to his detachment from normative hetero-reproductive generational cycles. (Note that her conception of a "reparative reading" is derived from Melanie Klein's theory of the "depressive position" - it is a reading produced by a search for joy that comes only in the wake of grief, trauma, and loss.)
...it isn’t that one is pessimistic and sees the glass as half empty, while the other is optimistic and sees it as half full. In a world full of loss, pain, and oppression, both epistemologies are likely to be based on deep pessimism: the reparative motive of seeking pleasure, after all, arrives, by Klein’s account, only with the achievement of a depressive position. But what each looks for—which is again to say, the motive each has for looking—is bound to differ widely. Of the two, however, it is only paranoid knowledge that has so thorough a practice of disavowing its affective motive and force and masquerading as the very stuff of truth.
I would highly recommend people read the essay in full - it's a bit dense, especially if you're unfamiliar with affect theory, but so astonishingly intelligent (and almost more therapeutic to me right now than my actual therapist).
again, “changing” still doesn’t mean you should have access to power. “Many men have had a Nazi phase but they’ve changed” I am sincerely so happy for them but I don’t want them making decisions for Americans at scale. Some decisions should come with lifelong consequences and on the whole, humbly accepting that you shouldn’t hold public office is not that big of a consequence.
A friend was arguing that orange does rhyme, with hinge, and I was like "hinge? how?" and she told me to say repeat hinge quickly, which... changed nothing. I was actually trying to think of how you'd say that even kind of sort of rhymes, but just remembered that she more or less has the pin-pen merger and I very much don't, and she says door hinge basically like Doorhenge. It's still not a perfect rhyme but not nearly as baffling as it sounded in my own voice.
(She grew up primarily in New Jersey and Nevada, while I was raised almost entirely around the Portland area and in the far north of Washington on the Canadian border, but I don't know if that makes a different in this case! Yay to accent discoveries anyway, though.)
i mean this so sincerely if you are a man in 2026 you should expect to be on thin fucking ice with the women in your life and if this confuses or enrages you then you are part of the reason why
if you aren't even aware that we are right now all of us living in an ongoing worldwide antifeminist backlash, that is not a oh-no-cute-oopsie kind of ignorance. that fully goes past "complicit" and enters "actively part of the problem" territory. it makes me contemptuous of you. it makes me not want to know you at all. i doubt i'm alone in that.
blakekathryn
janainaart
origamiaround
stormborns
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
izzy806
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
