A Sociological Eye

    Would you like to read some of the interesting books suggested by Chicago Sun-Times for your summer vacation? Well, it's most likely you can't. That's because only 5 of the 15 suggestions are actual books! The rest are the hallucinations of whatever AI chatbot the editors prompted to produce the list. The authors are real. But the books are not. One of the fabrications, by the way, is titled, "The Last Algorithm." Just a little bonus irony! Apparently the newspaper was sold in a buyout agreement that involved firing 20% of the staff. The current hotness in the world of CEOs is the belief that the moment has come when they can shed a lot of white-collar workers and replace them with "nearly-free" AI LLM chatbots, just as years earlier they fired blue-collar workers and replaced them with robots. AI tools are remarkable--don't get me wrong--but they are also unreliable, because AIs lack both judgment and understanding of what they're doing. Ch...

  Look, I say this as a dad. As fathers go, I have sacrificed more than many--I'm a gestational father, who carried and delivered my kid like seahorse fathers do. I've dealt with the gauntlet of gender transition so that I can be recognized as a father, so that my kid can roll her eyes at me and say "Daa-aaaad!" when I tell a punny joke. Being recognized as a primary-parent father is important to me. But Father's Day is still an annoying holiday. Mother's Day has a grand political history. It was founded by Victorian feminist pacifists during the Civil War to demand recognition of the unpaid labor of love and care performed by women. It took hold in the imaginations of women of the time, who performed all sorts of labor as charity without pay in the 1800s and early 1900s, and wanted recognition of the vital work they did to save the lives of impoverished children, serving as an unpaid social safety net. It was a feminist holiday at root. Then it got commercial...