Apparently someone took a hairdryer to Charles de Gaulle airport to manipulate a temperature sensor to win a bet on #Polymarket. Weird--but not new! My recent @aeon.co essay on weather gambling mentions early 20th-c. data manipulation & bribery for exactly the same purpose.
aeon.co/essays/what-...
Working on a lecture on prediction markets for my History of the Future course @ruhistorydept.bsky.social . In 2025 I went onto #Polymarket to see how many different #TaylorSwift topics there were to bet on, and there were exactly 13. Of course there were. Polymarket (Taylor’s Version).
Thank you Chris Westfall for such an interesting and wide-ranging conversation on Risky Science podcast about prediction markets, betting on disaster, and the long history of weather gambling--from rainfall insurance to catastrophe bonds to wildfire markets.
open.spotify.com/episode/464X...
it’s a trap dot gif
This looks fantastic and I am excited to incorporate it into my undergrad courses on the history of data
Agree; it’s heartening to see @inquirer.com meeting the moment while serving the best city in the world.
I’m really excited to share that Made by History is partnering with @inquirer.com & will be publishing again soon.
Historians, pitch us at madebyhistory@inquirer.com.
There was actually a little spike in the Polymarket "Strait of Hormuz traffic returns to normal by end of April?" market this morning. At this point I just assume any unhinged posts including a specific deadline are designed to move the prediction markets...
@ruhistorydept.bsky.social
Special thanks to @kimberlychong.bsky.social & @giuliadalmaso.bsky.social, whose brilliance and wit surrounded me as I wrote the first draft. Most of all, thanks to @jmburns.bsky.social for talking about catastrophe endlessly with me. 2/2
My latest on catastrophe markets and the long history of weather gambling in @aeon.co
aeon.co/essays/what-...
Grateful for feedback from terrific readers along the way: Jackson Lears, Ann Fabian, Meagan Wierda, @jeroenputtevils.bsky.social & @urbanhistoryua.bsky.social, & editor Sam Haselby. 1/2
This is absolutely the intent--faculty need to be united in rejecting this kind of automation (more accurately: abdication), no matter how "safe" you think your position might be now.
This is absolutely brilliant.
My book has a cover! IN LATIN AMERICA YOU COULD BE FREE: AN AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY tells the story of the place and promise of Latin America in the political imagination of African Americans and of their movements to the region in the antebellum period.
Out on Basic Books, November 11, 2026! 🥳
Congratulations!!! This looks so fantastic.
I would suggest the excellent review essay by Jeroen Puttevils et al., "State of the Field: Histories of the Future," History 109, no. 384-385 (April 2024): 150-172 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....
For ease of navigation and sharing, I have turned my little list into a website: standwithminnesota.org
"I am now left to raise our son and to continue teaching him, as Renee believed, that there are people building a better world for him. That the people who did this had fear and anger in their hearts, and we need to show them a better way." www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...
"The media has largely let [tech companies] set the terms of the debate, right down to the terminology used in any discussion of these systems."
From @nannainie.bsky.social & me in @techpolicypress.bsky.social on how to spot and resist anthropomorphizing language about so-called "AI".
A map of the US with each 2025 billion-plus dollar weather and climate disaster geo-located on it. Source: Climate Central
After the US admin cancelled the $B Climate + Weather Disaster dataset, @climatecentral.org hired the scientists who ran it and set it back up.
Now the 2025 numbers are in: it's 3rd highest year on record and highest year w/o land-falling hurricanes.
More: www.climatecentral.org/climate-serv...
YES! We don't want this!!! //
The data center rebellion is here, and it’s reshaping the political landscape
As the buildout of AI infrastructure alarms communities, it is fast emerging as a potent electoral issue across the political divide.
www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...
OpenAI is now facing a total of 8 wrongful death lawsuits from grieving families....who claim that ChatGPT, in particular, the GPT-4o version, drove their loved ones to suicide. Soelberg’s complaint also alleges that company executives knew the chatbot was defective before it pushed it to the public
This is important (and not good, in my opinion): anyone with advance knowledge of a specific event in geopolitics, business, sports, culture, etc. can easily cash in on minimally regulated prediction markets. What could possibly go wrong...?
Flu activity is very high and rising in many parts of the country, with levels similar to last year's big season. Be careful out there. caitlinrivers.substack.com/p/widespread...
Excerpt from Critical AI article: ‘As they promise gains in efficiency and productivity, LLM research assistants purport to “streamline”—or bypass—the challenging, recursive, and often messy work of identifying, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing the existing research on a given topic. Over decades of practice, educators have come to understand these processes as themselves integral to building students’ intellectual abilities and skills. Indeed, from the standpoint of learning, the process of research and writing is often more valuable than the final product handed in for a grade.’
So many aspects I could quote from this, but this was the first that stood out to me. read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/...
"We envision a resistance that is...a repudiation of the efficiencies that automated algorithmic education falsely promises: a resistance comprising the collective force of small acts of friction."
"How to Resist AI in Education" by me & @cnygren.bsky.social
www.publicbooks.org/four-frictio...
I’m sorry, but it is disgraceful to be an academic who uses this technology to conduct research. It should be prohibited in all of our scholarly institutions, including universities and journals.
So embarrassing & one of many reasons I am glad I am no longer a member of @historians.org . V disappointing to see the largest professional organization of historians get right in line with "let's boil the oceans training LLMs on stolen work so we can paraphrase the internet badly & inaccurately"
Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things
Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.
You know that thing where students use AI to write their papers, and it hallucinates quotations and sources?
Well now, it's in you podcast feed too!