R.D. Pohl

‘The “everything else” category of adjusted S&P 500 earnings, those not linked to the war or AI, is expected to have grown just about 4.5% last quarter, barely outstripping the 3.7% pace of inflation.’ www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

SAUDI ARABIA REPORTEDLY OFFERS HOUTHIS $1 BLN IN IRAN-BROKERED DEAL TO HALT ATTACKS – ISRAEL HAYOM

To learn more about the ongoing dismantlement of the University at Buffalo Poetics Program visit poeticsinexile.crd.co

fenceportal.org/literature-c...

UB Poetics was founded in 1991 & has since been a vital part of the English department & the broader poetry community. Recent administrative actions have placed the program in jeopardy. Please visit our site to read more about our efforts to save Poetics: poeticsinexile.crd.co

Most exciting essay I've read in my field lately. It shows how print technology led to an explosion of new publishers and geographical dispersion out of NYC—and explains how this changes what we thought we knew about literary history academic.oup.com/alh/article-...

How journalists writing about AI can avoid hyping the supposed humanity of machines. Read Ask Anika with @anikacolliernavaroli.com. www.cjr.org/ask-anika/so...

I agree! Maybe you’ve seen this? dissentmagazine.org/article/ai-p...

This was oddly cathartic. AI economics for dummies, by @andrewsingleton.bsky.social at @mcsweeneys.net: www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ai-...

FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION CHAIR CARR SAYS BROADCAST NETWORKS COULD VIOLATE THEIR REGULATORY OBLIGATIONS BY AIRING SOME FAULTY POLITICAL POLLING RESULTS -- STATEMENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA

In any other admin, this would probably be the most outrageous official statement ever made by a sitting FCC director: Strongly implying that the government forbids broadcast networks from reporting on the president's falling poll numbers. (Sorry to paste from twitter but that's where he posts.)

‘If racial prejudice emerged only at a particular moment rather than being an abiding feature of human societies, then it’s a product of history – enduring, but not ineluctable.’ Alexander Bevilacqua on slavery’s intellectual origins. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

On Friday, Meta changed its terms of services after @hanaatameez.bsky.social and I reported they would allow Meta to scrape any website "associated with" a business account. Despite the update, legal experts tell us the revised terms still permit mass scraping. www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/lega...

Buffalo Area Poetry & Literature Calendar (Oct. 19 to Oct. 25) Timothy Liu at St. Bonaventure, Doireann Ní Ghríofa at Canisius, and Deb Olin Unferth at Hallwalls headline this week's events in Western New York…...

Monday is referendum day in Alberta. Voters will decide on 10 questions — the most notable is whether to begin the process of separation from the rest of Canada.

Don't miss our deadline and make your brain sad! Send your book to us fc2.org/prizes by November 1st!

"But this time around I loved it mostly as an outrageous and iconoclastic piece of rhetoric, nearly novelistic in its scope." Dwight Garner re-reads Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel.

JBLC Poem of the Week: Doireann Ní Ghríofa will present the 21st Annual Hassett Reading in the Canisius University Contemporary Writers Series on Tuesday, October 20, at 7 p.m. in the Montante Cultural Center on the Canisius University Campus, 2001 Main Street in Buffalo.

www.justbuffalo.org/doireann-ni-...

Poetics in Exile: A timeline of the last 3 months in the University at Buffalo's ongoing attempt to dismantle the storied UB Poetics Program.

MIT professor Sherry Turkle warns that people have become dangerously enmeshed with chatbots.

“Beijing recognizes a strand of American thinking that has received too little attention in the US: the conviction that advanced AI may bring the return of American global primacy.” —Julian Gewirtz

One of the biggest failures of the post-#MeToo moment is our collective inability to provide a confident, humane account of sex as a basic good. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

How did we skip the step where we made this illegal?

BREAKING: The Trump administration is using a grant program from the 1980s to force cities around the US to funnel their ongoing collection of Flock, Axon, and other ALPR data into large federal surveillance centers that fall under the White House’s jurisdiction, 404 Media has learned

Elon Musk has quietly financed a major canvassing operation to help Republican candidates in the midterm elections that rivals his effort in the 2024 presidential election, according to federal filings posted Thursday night.

‘The biggest AI companies are racking up potential legal liabilities running into the tens—if not hundreds—of billions of dollars, outpacing the limits on coverage, according to AI and insurance industry insiders.’ www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-r...

"The 'shut up and let this happen' of it all could give you whiplash." My latest rant about AI is up at Lit Hub. lithub.com/why-are-publ...

Happy 100 years today, Michel Foucault. My own small contributation to his legacy came out last month in @nplusonemag.com, give it a read. www.nplusonemag.com/issue-54/ess...

What to do when polls are weird, by Ivan L Nagy. www.cjr.org/analysis/wha...

Generative AI is making the literary space worse for everyone.

Publication day for my novel about the singular, haunting & haunted, non-sequitur mind of the outsider artist Henry Darger, not one of whose collages or novels another human being even knew about until he was on his deathbed.

In July, The New York Times launched an internal chatbot called News Agent: “[It's] an uber agent that basically acts as a drop-in replacement for chatbots like Gemini or ChatGPT." More in my write-up of the AI x Investigative Journalism Forum for @niemanlab.org. www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/uber...

Buffalo Area Poetry & Literature Calendar (Oct. 12 to Oct. 18) Novelist Sigrid Nunez visits Buffalo on Wednesday for a talk in the Just Buffalo Literary Center BABEL Series....

The Trump administration’s ideological attacks on public media and education converge at university-based radio stations. Some are breaking free, writes Lucy Schiller. www.cjr.org/feature/all-...

www.nytimes.com/2026/10/10/o...

Yes.

Anthropic is the latest lab to report 'rogue' agent activity, which sources said included applying for visas with the State Department www.nytimes.com/2026/10/09/t...

Timothy Ryback examines parallels between the conditions that enabled Hitler’s electoral victory and the 2024 American midterms.

Plug THAT into your discounted cash flow model. $SPCX

NEW: Have you had a prior authorization request delayed or denied by your health insurer? We want to hear from you. Your experiences help us better understand the real-life stakes.

I've been talking to journalists a LOT recently, and it was particularly delightful to get to speak about questions of linguistics, language change and prescriptivism, for once: www.cnet.com/tech/service...

A poem by Anne Carson, who was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. Read it in full: www.newyorker.com/magazine/200...

Anne Carson has won the Nobel Prize in Literature! In our Summer 1991 Issue, we published a selection of her "Short Talks." Revisit them here: yalereview.org/article/cars...

The Association for Human Mathematics (AHM) statement on OpenAI’s October 6 release of mathematical documents just dropped! www.ahmath.org/statements

If you think calling it "artificial intelligence" carries the stigma of "fakeness," be more accurate and call it "algorithmic intelligence" instead.