An extreme cold weather watch is in effect tomorrow Friday Jan 23 in the Twin Cities and Minnesota, where a general strike is planned. "ICE out of Minnesota: Day of Truth and Freedom" asks people not to work except for emergency services, not to shop, and not to attend school, with a march scheduled for 2 p.m. Central Time.

Part II looks back at a different approach to using AI for research; a collaborative AI tool we designed at my startup Thicket in 2015. At the time, we called the character designer dashboard.

For me, starting a company was brutal. This post highlights the moments that felt like breakthroughs and the setbacks that stung. Interwoven throughout are a few practical insights for other founders to consider, drawn from my successes and my failures, and the piece concludes with a few reflection prompts designed to help you anticipate pitfalls, protect yourself and your team, and make smarter decisions.

Synthetic research is officially here to weird up the research game. In my view, generative AI as a field is not currently transparent, unbiased, or reliably accurate, making the data that comes from these platforms generally not yet strong enough to support synthetic research. However, it can be useful in specific applied situations.

Higher education is under siege. Public trust is plummeting, institutional values are under attack, and the field risks obsolescence unless universities reclaim and recast their purpose for today’s world.

The Trump Administration has brought in two planeloads of White South Africans known as Afrikaners to resettle in the US, flying into cities in the South, where White colonizers — both slave owners and land owners — have historically settled.

It’s official: ✷ Tiny Little Cosmos has a home of its own. TLC has been a long time in the making. It’s my one-person creative studio for moments of transformation: the pivots, the expansions, the new beginnings that don’t quite have a name yet.