digest

March 2026 Digest

Curated content for the science-lovers.

Welcome to the Ghost edition of the newsletter! As a reminder, there are now two membership tiers: Ally ($2/mo or $20/yr) and Accomplice ($5/mo or $50/yr). Hosting ain't cheap, so consider supporting! You can also make a one-time donation.

This is a free post for all subscribers. Don't forget to check out my explainer post on why I switched to Ghost.

Action Items (Massachusetts only)

Baystate Health is trying to remove gender affirming care for minors, which there is no reason for them to do under Massachusetts law. In just a few clicks, you can write a letter urging them to stop. Share widely! https://actionnetwork.org/letters/demand-baystate-health-resume-gender-affirming-care-for-minors-in-accordance-with-massachusetts-law

Science

A paper by a friend and colleague on how to improve agency among engineering students, moving from "empowerment" to a more liberating framework.
Related: A call for papers on feminist science education!
Another study on how disabled, Black international women come to identify as engineers.
A resource for teaching green chemistry using a feminine-coded example: nail polish removers!
An article that reveals various gender biases in GPT models. For example, prompts with more typos were identified by the GPT-3.5 Turbo as more likely to come from a female user, and GPT-4 found it acceptable to torture a man to prevent nuclear war, but not a woman. Weird stuff that shows these tools are far from "objective".

News

A harrowing look into the conditions of women in the global south who deal with training AI, as well as content moderation. This is the standard and has been for a while.
The head of safety at Meta's AI department recently authorized an OpenClaw agent to her work email, after which the tool proceeded to delete a huge portion of her inbox. If this is how they treat their own data, why should we expect them to keep our data safe?
A cute piece from Nature on how the Pokémon franchise has inspired scientists. I for one just finished replaying Pokémon Black 2 in honor of the franchise's 30th anniversary!
Privacy for the people, by the people: someone made an Android app to detect Meta smart glasses near you. My personal approach to smart glasses or any other "AI wearable" is smash on sight. Don't record me, jackass!

Opinions

A thought-provoking piece on AI doing social science which interrogates the worth of scientific journal articles. I personally plan to publish as much of my research as possible in open access.
An interpretation of a public opinion poll carried out by the Searchlight Institute and Tavern Research. I can't speak to its accuracy, but given how many of my engineering students don't understand me when I say "LLM" as a general term for ChatGPT, Claude, et al., it's not too surprising.

Watch History

An impressive video on an online transfemme phenomena that is critical without being cruel. In 2026?? Unheard of!!
One of the more useful takes on the Epstein files from someone with genuine class analysis.
A moving piece on returning Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Bops, Vibes, & Jams

In just a few weeks, we got new albums from Bruno Mars, Iron & Wine, BLACKPINK, Gorillaz, Mitski, Hemlocke Springs, and J. Cole. So much to go through! Too much, even! The best among these that I've listened to so far is the new Bruno Mars album, The Romantic. It feels timeless, like it could have come out 50 years ago but will also be played 50 years from now. Fav tracks: "I Just Might", "Why You Wanna Fight?", "Something Serious".

Wholesomeposting

This is a new digest category where I plan to post memes and other fun stuff. For example...

Amherst, MA is finishing construction on the new library, so they gave the public a change to sign the last beam being placed. My partner and I got to sign our initials with a heart, plus I got to write a message to the people of the future.