Can AI in Schools Serve the Public Good?
Data and attention are some of the world’s most valuable commodities, and our personal tech products are wildly efficient extraction tools. AI companies are the latest horde of prospectors in this cognitive gold rush, and their new frontier is the classroom.
You Don’t Make Friends with Factoids
“We didn’t want just another disaster post. We wanted a story that lived in its own rhythm — honest, emotional, and co-created with the person who lived it. That meant slowing down, listening harder, and building trust. The result was What Famine Feels Like, a rare first-person narrative by Dalmar Ainashe, a hunger expert at CARE who lived through famine as a child. It wasn’t just a story about crisis — it was a story about voice, agency, and how storytelling done right can change lives.”
Persuasion in a time of Brain Rot
“We’re not under the old attention regime anymore. We’re in the age of attention warlords, where persuasion doesn’t happen in op-eds but in viral clips and newsfluencer feeds. If you want to shift culture or win campaigns, you can’t just chase legitimacy — you have to capture attention, build trust, and speak in the native language of the algorithm.
Climate Doomsday vs. AI Apocalypse
The most likely AI bottleneck won’t be misalignment or stolen weights — it will be the ecological cost already baked into humanity’s future. It’s a future grounded in heat, in scarcity, in a power grid held together by fragile cables and unstable clouds.
Object Lesson
A look into how Travis Nichols' Rolling Stone piece on the Greenpeace Energy Transfer trial in North Dakota came about, and how it can serve as an object lesson for rapid response communications.
How to use AI for comms . . .
A guide to best practices for using artificial intelligence for marketing and communications work without losing your humanity or taking on unnecessary risks. OpenAI, Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Cursor, ElevenLabs, Sora, MidJourney, Suno, Veo3