The Early Modern Commons

The Stone and The Shell

Recent Posts

Liberally-educated students need to be more than consumers of AI

10 September 2023

If I'm buying a thinking process, I really need to understand what I see when I look under the hood.

We can save what matters about writing—at a price

31 July 2023

Writing is a way of learning. And we can save what matters about it if we're willing to learn something ourselves.

Using GPT-4 to measure the passage of time in fiction

19 March 2023

Large language models are valuable research assistants, especially when they refuse to follow instructions. … Continue reading →

Mapping the latent spaces of culture

21 October 2021

To understand why neural language models are dangerous (and fascinating), we need to approach them as models of culture.