“The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us,” media theorist and CNN columnist Douglas Rushkoff wrote in 2013. “They are Facebook’s paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers.” Instead of paying firms to conduct research on consumers, by constantly engaging with Meta’s products, we provide it for them, he argued. More than a decade later, this sentiment couldn’t feel more true. Ultimately, Muse isn’t really a personal assistant — it’s a digital panopticon disguised as an imp.
October 2026
Booked Solid: You’re overdue to meet these LGBTQ+ BIPOC librarians doing the work in Ohio
In this Q&A with The Buckeye Flame, BIPOC LGBTQ+ librarians Amia Brown and Lisa Sanchez of Cleveland and Lajmar Anderson of Dayton share their own perspectives on librarianship, shaped by their experiences as LGBTQ+ people of color and their relationships with libraries.
Your browser is suspiciously without a Sec-Fetch-Mode header
It's not news that "AI" crawlers are an ongoing plague and that broadly the plague is getting worse. There seem to be more and more crawlers, and they're getting past more precautions. One possible future for the web in the face of this is websites with less features, at least for the general public, because fewer features means less to crawl and less crawler impact. Another possible web future is one of pervasive gatekeepers that must be satisfied to allow you access to many or most websites.
Students should only use AI for things they already know how to do well.
Most educators agree that there should be some guardrails regarding how students use AI in their independent work. Here, I argue for this guiding principle: Students should only use AI for things that they already know how to do well.
Former Rutherford County librarian sues after firing over book relocation
Nearly six months after her firing in a dispute over where children’s books should be shelved, former Rutherford County Library System Director Luanne James is suing the library system, its board and eight board members.
Many libraries got their start in or because of Philly
As the birthplace of the American Library Association, the first research library and the iconic Free Library of Philadelphia, Philly is an important space for library history.
This Minnesota school banned more books than most states
Parents objected, a new library assistant was fired and books that included ‘Charlotte’s Web’ and a kids’ cookbook were gone from a public school near Lake Vermilion.
‘Whose stories are allowed to exist?’ Midland teacher raises alarm over book bans
“It’s horrifying, because banning books is one of the hallmarks of authoritarianism,” she says of the growing restrictions. “They say it's about protecting children,” “I think it is about controlling what narratives are allowed to exist in the public space.”
Publishers Killed the Paperback, Then Blamed Readers
In 1939, the 25-cent paperback made America a nation of readers, delivering thrillers, classics and Pulitzer-winning books. So why did the Big Five publishers just kill the mass market paperback?
As They Supposedly Battle AI Slop, Major Publishers Reportedly Cover Their Books in It
An agent says they’ve started making publishers agree in advance not to run entire unpublished manuscripts through LLMs in order to generate promotional text—something that had apparently become an issue. “Ostensibly, that was meant to protect authors from tech companies, but it also applies to the company buying and publishing the book,” the anonymous agent said.
Recent Comments