Author: ljndawson
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And yet
Haven’t we been through this five years ago? I’ve been reading about Stephen Miller – I honestly cannot understand a person who grows up hating so many people. I cannot understand a glee taken in separating families and children; I cannot understand the rationale for what’s happening now. His family can’t understand it either. He’s…
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Drama
The new job is lovely. We do our work, we go home. I’m building conceptual models and taxonomy schemas, and the work’s being embraced and implemented. And I’m realizing…I have some peace now. I don’t know if it’s the industry – insurance and financial management vs. adtech – or the people, who are enormously helpful…
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Women’s Work
In my new job, I’ve been working on establishing nourishing routines. So every day, after work, I’m reading (I should be walking or lifting weights – eventually, I will be walking or lifting weights, but I’m not there yet; routines take time) – and I’m reading Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. I never got…
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The Gift of Routine
I don’t necessarily like living by the clock. Counting the minutes that I can check my phone before I have to leave for work. Coutning the minutes of the commute. Counting the minutes after I get home, when I can have dinner, wash the dishes, when I can read the book I’m entranced with, when…
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In Extremis
I’ve disappeared down the well. I started a new job last Monday, May 5, at Prudential. I’m working on creating taxonomies to describe business processes. It’s fun work – I never thought I’d have fun working in insurance and financial services, but here we are, it’s a brand new day, and I’ve learned something about…
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“Unreliable”
I’ve been thinking about Virginia Giuffre. From what I understand, she was training in Thailand for massage therapy, at Epstein’s expense, when she met her husband. She was only 19. So she kind of jumped out of the Epstein frying pan into the fire of a new relationship that got serious quickly. She didn’t start…
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And Another Thing…
2020-2021 was a big year that we all seem to have cumulatively repressed – we were inside for much of it, but then, suddenly, we were emphatically outside. Corporate life had quite the shakeup. Organizations were suddenly confronting injustice at all levels – race, gender, ability – and setting up teams and recruitment efforts to…
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Prey
Years ago, my kids graduated from hamsters to a rabbit. Lucy Bun – named after Lucille Ball because she was a ginger rabbit – was so sweet. For a while, she was a free-range rabbit, until she chewed a few charger cords (Macbook chargers are EXPENSIVE) and the lower spines of the Oxford English Dictionary.…
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The Old Wheel
“The old wheel turns, and the same spoke comes up. It’s all been done before, and will be again.” – Sherlock Holmes When I left publishing in 2016, a large part of my reasoning for the pivot was because I thought, after twenty years of shouting, cajoling, sweet-talking, and consulting about metadata, I didn’t have…
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Reclaimed and Resurrected
Today I’m announcing the revival of my consultancy, Numerical Gurus. As before, and based on my 30 years’ experience in media, I’m providing expertise on the following: And I’m adding a new area of practice: We’re in a highly-disruptive environment. Placing your trust in an astute, experienced, and nimble mind would be a worthwhile investment.…
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The Humans in the System
Computers are easy. People are hard. Because tech is built on binary code, it presents a pretty simple series of problems: on/off, yes/no, 0/1. People…are not binary. People are vast soups of insecurity, irritation, pride, integrity, curiosity, resilience, and terror. And they bring all of that to the desk with them. If you’re managing groups…
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What I Saw at the Evolution
Thoughts on a career in data governance I started my career in publishing in 1987, as an editorial assistant at Doubleday. (I was really bad at it.) From there I moved into bookselling, and then databases about books and bookselling, and then…well, a bunch of different companies, some of which don’t exist anymore, some of…
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AI Is Dumb
I don’t have a lot of patience for the claims being made by companies who are heavily investing in AI. It definitely has its uses – image recognition, mining through large repositories of text, etc. But one thing that AI has not yet perfected is decisionmaking. Computers – even sophisticated ones – are stupid. They…
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It Just Gets Darker
The balance between keeping my sanity and being a responsibly-informed citizen is so incredibly difficult. The “flood the zone” approach – which has gone on much longer than this administration’s first week – leaves me exhausted, which is the point of it. The obtuse misunderstanding of the way language works depending on context – the…
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You Know My Methods
Announcing the debut of exactly what the world needs right now: a new podcast, Good Night, Mr. Holmes! Every Tuesday, my partner in both committing and solving crime, Rachel Rushefsky, and I discuss the ITV Granada Sherlock Holmes series starring Jeremy Brett and a pair of Watsons. Side discussions include, but are not limited to:…
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The Erasing
Well, they haven’t got around to changing Denali back to McKinley, but the caving to fascism has, in a lot of ways, shot past mere capitulation into actual erasure. In NYC, there is a monument to Stonewall in Greenwich Village, which was where gay rights really began to kick off, in large part led by…
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Bad Men Doing Bad Things
Recently, I was disturbed by a not-new paper about AI written by a woman who was fired from Google for questioning their AI program. Timnit Gebru used to work in Google data science labs and was on the bleeding edge of AI research, when she began to realize AI’s roots in eugenics. It fundamentally has…
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There Was a Penis On My Car
Let me start by saying that I love New York City. Let me also add that, contrary to popular belief, Staten Island is not New Jersey – it is, despite its physical distance, very very much the fifth borough of New York City. Last week, it snowed. Now, I park on the main drag, right…
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Therapy at Arkham Asylum
I started regularly going to therapy in August of 2015. My life had hit a crisis point, and it was clear that I needed an assist getting back on track. I called up the local hospital system and got an assessment appointment, and was directed to go to Bayley-Seton Hospital – which was in the…
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I am not a replicant
New year, new…job-hunt! And boy, has the world changed since the last time I went looking for employment (2019). In five short years, the entire ecosystem has been overtaken by AI, bots, and virtual interviewers (also bots). It is very hard to find any signal in all the noise. Some things I’ve noticed: That last…
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A Matter of Duty
To every, “What are your plans for the holiday?”, my answer was, “Spending time with family in Boston.” I don’t have family in Boston. I brought family with me, in the form of my portion of Mom’s ashes, as well as the old key to the church that Dad presided over from 1971 to 1995,…
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Three Murders, One Conclusion
A lot happened the week of December 4. Luigi Mangione shot the CEO of United Healthcare. A day or so later, possibly even the same day (because nobody cares to understand the exact timeline), two teenagers in NYC were stabbed with what appears to be a screwdriver (and one was killed) for not being able…
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The Adjuster
I’m obsessed. With several things – the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO in broad daylight in Midtown Manhattan; the assassin’s escape, particularly how he’s proven the NYPD to be rather inept despite over $5B in funding and cameras all over the city; the response of social media across the political spectrum (which is extremely rare,…
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“[T]he Only Surprise To Me Was That the Rioting Had Not Happened Sooner”: A letter from my father
I really wish I had found this 1989 letter from my father earlier. It’s a problematic letter because it is truly from the past, where terminology is not at all carefully thought through. But I think it retains a level of truthfulness that increasingly we’re not going to be finding much of. Dear Laura Jo… [Responding…
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De-Nazifying Blogging
Thanks to https://bsky.app/profile/loudpoet.com, who shared Anil Dash’s post about Substack with me on Thursday night, I came to the inescapable conclusion that I can’t blog/newsletter on a platform that is actively supporting hate speech – and using the content of non-bigots to provide cover for that hate speech. So I’m back to WordPress. I was…
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When Money Ate Mike Tyson
In the 1970s and early 80s, Saturday afternoons before dinner were for Wide World of Sports with Jim McKay. That is, when we couldn’t get the Oklahoma University games – which was most Saturdays, because we were in Delaware. Dad would be freshly showered from whatever yardwork or workout he’d been doing, slumped on the…
New Virago 