Despite the misery of the current moment (in general, and for me in particular), it has actually been a productive six months, with a bunch of talks and a couple of publications, to boot.
On talks, I just got back from speaking at the “Beyond Borders, Beyond Binaries” conference at Kalamazoo College, where I was presenting on a pioneering gender program in Boston in the 1970s (more on that soon, because I now have a contract from The Baffler to write about it!). And in a couple of months I’ll be the discussant at UC Berkeley’s Hitchcock Lecture with Jules Gill-Peterson, for what promises to be a spirited Q&A.
And on papers, I have two small things out; the first, in collaboration with Abie Flaxman, looks at what applying Salome Vijoen’s fantastic idea of relational governance to data would look like. The second, a followup to the classic(?) “A Mulching Proposal”, applies the same satirical logic to the nonsense that is “pluralistic alignment”. They made me tone it down, alas.
Both (like I said) are small; there’s a ton of other stuff under review or in-process on political creativity, AI and biosecurity, the history of various gender identity clinics, LLMs - I do a lot of stuff. But it’s all “in process” and so not worth reporting out on yet!