“AI Proofing” the Classroom

12 Monday Jan 2026

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence, Biology, Musings and ponderation, Science, Utopia and Dystopia

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In my department (and I think in just about every department in every college), the number one discussion in meetings and email discussions for the last three years has been what to do about AI. The main question–sometimes it seems like the only question in my department–has been “how do we AI-proof our classes?”

I get it: students can have ChatGPT cook up a paper for them on any subject in a few seconds. The paper can be well-written enough to get an A if the student asks for that. If the student is too worried about getting caught, they can have ChatGPT serve up a B- or C+ paper instead. While most of us teaching ENGL101 in America have some nose for papers that don’t quite smell like student-written work, any teacher who says they can unfailingly sniff out AI-written prose is lying, at least to themselves if not to you.

So yeah, our teaching lives are different now. Almost everyone who liked being a teacher before, say, 2023 doesn’t like what’s happening now. It occurred to me not long ago that if I had begun my teaching career in 1923 or even 1933, I could have completed a thirty year teaching career without having to live through many (or even any) cataclysmic technological changes. There would have been major social changes to navigate–the Great Depression, WWII, the GI Bill, widespread entry of women in colleges, desegregation–but the technology of teaching and classroom learning wasn’t radically different between 1933 and 1963. Had I started in 1933, I would not have been forced by technological change to reinvent my teaching practice every few years.

When I really did start teaching, though, was 1993. The technological changes we’ve seen since then have been massive. Not all of my students were even using word processors in those first few years–I still took in typewritten papers every once in a while. For that matter, I still distributed handouts that I had made on a mimeograph machine from 1993-95. From then to now, I’ve taught through the total hegemony of the word processor, the internet classroom, YouTube, Khan Academy, social media, learning management systems, the smart phone (as well as the tablet and the ubiquitous Chromebook) before I had ever heard of ChatGPT. And all of those developments have had deep implications for the way I do my work.

But ChatGPT and all its logorrheic LLM siblings have deeper implications still. They are cataclysmic for the work I do.

My colleagues are intelligent and sweet-natured, and I am lucky to be working with them. But, despite their voluble commitment to political progressivism, we all can be some of the most emotionally conservative people around, at least when we all get in a room together. Is there a way we can, you know, find a way to keep teaching the way we’ve been teaching? Let’s just do that! our department seems to be saying, at least if you read our meeting minutes.

I can bitch, and have bitched, about the fact that I have to upend my entire teaching practice to accommodate a tool that will write competent prose and summarize any reading in a matter of seconds. It’s all the more galling that the tool comes to us by way of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the rest of their techbro robber baron buddies and their shareholders. But this is the way creative destruction works: in an open market, entire systems of wealth and production are continually being destroyed by new technology. And if I can’t see ways to use LLMs to support my teaching practice, I’m going to get chewed up and spit out all the more quickly in the coming years.

Sooner or later, AI will be teaching everybody. In the long run, there is no AI-proofing the classroom. A computer that can write competent prose and read anything can also, sooner or later, teach people to read and write. It’s already being used by many teachers as the vaunted “papergrader.com” that some of my waggish colleagues used to pine for 20 years ago. However, I remain optimistic that for at least a little while longer, a human teacher who knows what they’re doing–and who cares about students–can offer something a computer is not yet able to.

So for now, until the computers kick me out of the classroom, here are some of the ways that I’ll be trying to deal with the new regime: taking advantage of the many blessings of AI where I can, minimizing its malign influence whenever possible. I offer these as a starting point for conversation with my colleagues and my students.

  1. Speak Frankly with Students: If my and my colleagues’ stated feelings about AI are any guide, students are getting mixed messages about use cases for AI. And even if we educators weren’t giving mixed messages, students are certainly receiving mixed messages from the culture at large, from the techno-utopian advertising they see from Google and Apple and Meta to creepy cautionary tales like M3gan. Given that my job as a teacher of rhetoric is to help people understand how arguments work, and given that one of the main functions of LLMs is to confect natural-sounding arguments, part of my job now involves helping students consider LLM use cases. I’m far from an LLM hater, despite some of the obvious losses that LLMs present for my work as a writer and teacher of writing. But I’m also deeply skeptical about any utopia that Google et al. are selling. For now, I expect my students not to use LLMs to create text that they pass off as their own. They can expect me not to use LLMs to grade their work. Only one of these expectations is realistic; I know that as a result of their anxiety, laziness, or cluelessness, some students will be trying to pass LLM content off as their own work. I’ll speak to that issue below.
  2. Stop Grading Students; Give Them a Fair Assessment Instead: I’ve been arguing that we should get rid of letter grades since long before I ever heard what an LLM was, but LLMs have only made grade grubbing and credentialism more acute: if it’s so easy to get an A by cheating, why would any student accept a C? And if everyone is getting an A, why do we have grades at all? Replace the anti-educational grading system we have with a straightforward, outcomes-based pass/no pass system based on in-person competency testing. These tests can look like a lot of different things, not just essay tests. But they might especially be essay tests, handwritten in a Blue Book or typed on a computer with a lockout browser. (To that end, by the way, many of my colleagues, especially in the math department, argue that our college needs a proctored testing center. I have no doubt that we will have one sooner or later. But my college has never been a leading-edge institution; we’ll have our testing center only after several other colleges in the state system have started one and the practice becomes an official, shiny Best Practice with our State Board for Community and Technical Colleges).
  3. Implement a No Devices Classroom. One of the central goals of education is to help students cultivate cognitive endurance: “the ability to sustain effortful mental activity over a continuous stretch of time.” I have no doubt that this goal is made more difficult when students have ad libitum access to multiple screens and information feeds in the classroom. And while the research is equivocal for students as a whole, for lower performing students–those who are over-represented in open door community colleges–the research suggests that device bans help students to stay focused on their classwork. If someone is listening to Spotify on their earbuds, managing a text thread, checking TikTok every 5-7 minutes, and squeezing in a round of Candy Crush during down time in the class (however a student might define “down time”), should I be surprised that they are having trouble identifying the main idea of the paragraph we’re all supposed to be looking at?

    One may reasonably ask what AI in the classroom has to do with this fractured attention economy. It’s related in two ways: first, the companies selling AI as an edtech that students should be using in the classroom are often the same companies that benefit from having students constantly plugged in to multiple streams of data simultaneously. Secondly, I believe there is a benefit to having students at least sometimes exert their minds without the cognitive prosthesis of AI, the same way that you’ll get in shape faster riding an old-school “acoustic” bicycle than riding an e-bike (and much, much faster than riding a motorcycle). I’ll admit that this second claim is more vibes-based, and I’ll be happy to revise it in light of high quality research findings. But for now, common sense tells me that it helps for students sometimes to have only their minds to rely on.

    Here’s a very simple example. One of the best ways that a person can prove to someone else that they understand something they’ve read is to summarize that reading. For that matter, summarizing is one of the best ways to prove to yourself that you understand what you’re reading. It’s a foundational tool for managing information, as well as a vital step in making a rhetorical analysis, an academic response, a literary analysis, a research paper, and a whole bunch of other academic assignments. It’s also one of the more difficult skills for a person to learn, especially with readings that are challenging. If I assign students to summarize a tough article, it’s a lot to ask that they struggle for an hour or more with a task that a computer could do for them in ten seconds. I can hardly blame some of them for having ChatGPT serve up a summary for them if I assign it as homework. However, if we write the summary together in the classroom–which has the advantage of our being able to puzzle out together the writer’s organizational schema and the main ideas of paragraphs–we might actually write a true human summary together. That only works when there is one part of our lives where AI is not a constant background (or foreground) presence.
  4. Use LLMs Outside of the Classroom. I’m not ready yet to require that students use LLMs outside of the class–lots of students, especially the more thoughtful ones, are deeply skeptical of LLMs for a lot of reasons. However, I am starting to look for parts of my teaching that I think can be safely off-loaded to AI and which I can recommend to students. One of the big use cases is grammar and punctuation instruction, a part of my teaching that I used to love but which has gotten steadily crowded out by changes to our department’s approach to curriculum.

    ChatGPT is a potentially awesome teacher of sentence grammar. As I tell my students, beyond all the debates in lefty spaces about “Standard Edited English” being a tool of colonialism and white supremacy, there’s great value in being able to understand how sentences are put together, how parts of sentences like phrases and clauses interact. One can say a great deal with nothing more than simple declarative sentences. However, understanding how an appositive or an absolute phrase works (whether or not you know the names for those structures) will make it possible to say and write–and think–ideas that are much, much more subtle, as well as much harder to formulate with only declarative sentences. Explaining grammar and punctuation is one of the few areas of life where I claim to have real expertise; nevertheless, I think that ChatGPT is better than I am at it, and it’s certainly more tireless at it.

    One of the assignments I’ve been giving, and which I plan to use even more widely this term, is to have students upload a paragraph of a reading we are studying (or sometimes a paragraph of their own writing) to the LLM of their choice, with the instructions that the LLM quiz the student on how the sentences are constructed. Sometimes I have LLM quiz students on the types of clauses that are appearing in each sentence; at other times I have the students try to classify sentences as simple, complex, compound, or compound-complex; at other times I have the LLM test students on the placement of commas or other punctuation in their writing. I do this not because I want students to memorize the nomenclature of clauses and punctuation but because the activity forces students to pay attention to the way sentences are constructed, the same way that musicians learn to pay attention to chord progressions and photographers learn to study the composition of a shot. And not only does ChatGPT know at least as much as I do about sentence grammar and punctuation, but it’s infinitely patient. There are similar huge gains available to us if we use LLMs as reading comprehension aids, as critical readers for students’ rough drafts, as explainers of historical and sociocultural context. I wrote about this phenomenon of LLMs-as-the-Computer-from-Star Trek here.

    In fact, practically the only way I want students not to use LLMs is as creators of content that is to be graded. Of course, that’s one of the only things that some students seem to want to use LLMs for, and that’s one of the main reasons to retire this 18th century grading system we inherited from Yale University. As I tell my students multiple times a term, if they are coming to college because they hope a degree leads to a job, they’re only going to get hired to to one of two things: 1. a job the employer would prefer not to do (e.g. toilet cleaning) or 2. a job the employer is not able to do themselves. And if the student has never developed skills that the employer doesn’t already have, they’re going to get the toilet cleaning job. And why go to college for that? As I tell my students, if what you know how to do at the end of your mystical journey in college is to have ChatGPT write a report for you, no one is going to hire you to do that. Every employer in America already knows how to have ChatGPT write a report for them.
  5. Teach In Person. Notwithstanding 30-odd years of advertising and boosterism that online classes were the wave of the future, I’ve always been an online learning skeptic. I wasn’t impressed by the online classes I took as a student; in the few online courses I taught before the pandemic, I was troubled by how many students seemed to struggle who in my professional estimation probably would have done ok in a face to face class. And nothing I saw as an online-only teacher during the pandemic disabused me of my original skepticism. On the contrary, I think at our college we’re still adjusting to student populations who were subjected to the tender mercies of all-online education for a year-plus.

    At this point of human history, when everything I know or might ever know is available for free through LLMs, I have nothing to offer students beyond a human face. But there is still some value in having a human face: we are highly evolved to interact with actual physical human beings. Face to face classes aren’t the only modality that ever makes sense–I would argue that online learning is appropriate for some students (particularly more experienced and self directed students) and for some classes–but for a general education course like ENGL101 at a community college, I believe there should be a presumption of some in-person learning.

    What does this preference have to do with LLMs? While of course it’s easier to ascertain that a student, rather than an LLM bot, is doing the classwork when you can actually see the student doing the classwork, the main reason for preferring face to face learning has nothing to do with enforcing some academic honesty regime. Rather, the main advantage of face to face classes in our current LLM world is that most people still like seeing other people and like being seen by them. It’s shocking and sad how often my students confide in me that what they really hope for out of college is to make a friend. Some of them may already have the supposed companionship of an AI therapist or an AI girlfriend, but what they really want is other human beings: old fashioned sacks of meat with smiles and unexpected phobias who don’t respond to their every question with the words That’s a very perceptive question, Dylan, and it gets to the heart of blah blah blah…

    If you’re out of school, think back to your own school days. What specific instruction, principles, or words of wisdom do you remember from your own classes? If you’re like me, you can barely remember anything: I know that school taught me certain habits of mind and an ethos around using inquiry to explore reality, but beyond that, I forgot nearly everything twenty minutes after the final exam. But I bet there are some people from your classes that you remember. Some of them could be your best friends today. You might even have married one or two of them. That doesn’t happen much in an online class, and it doesn’t happen at all with solitary LLM-driven instruction.

Just like most everyone else who works with a computer, I am facing a job that has changed radically. What I tried to communicate to students for the first 25 years of my career was that reading and writing are valuable, salable skills in their own right. I’m not so sure of that anymore: an LLM can write in any genre and on any subject better than a typical college graduate, and it has read–and digested–far more than any single human being could be expected to have read.

But having said all that, I believe a human teacher of reading and writing has something to offer students. Reading and writing are still the training regimen by which a person learns to think. Whether or not anyone ever pays you to write or read an argument, learning to make an argument yourself remains one of the most important things you can learn to do. Argument is the process by which you make your thinking clear to others, but just as importantly, it’s the way you make your thinking clear to yourself. However ChatGPT has changed things in the classroom, and will continue to change things, it hasn’t abolished this essential reality of our lives.

When Danez Smith Came to Clark College

18 Tuesday Nov 2025

Posted by in Journeys, Musings and ponderation, Reading Roundup

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One of the most celebrated poets in America right now, Danez Smith, came to my college to read last week. My job, as a utility infielder on Clark College’s creative writing committee who happens to live near the airport, was to pick up Danez and drive them to their hotel downtown.

The pick-up was a breeze–Danez has clearly done this kind of thing many times–and I was pleased when they got in the car at how easygoing they seemed, as well as how I was not coming off (in my own mind, anyway) as too star-struck.

As I drove, we chatted about America’s two main Portlands–Danez is living in Portland, ME right now–and they pressed me on my mixed feelings about my own Portland (i.e. a great American city driven to a terminally twee nonconformity by, among other things, the show Portlandia). We talked about the amazing restaurant town that Portland, OR, has become, and I was overjoyed to hear that Danez would be eating at Gado Gado, a brilliant Indonesian place in my neighborhood.

And then, while describing to Danez what the gado gado dish consists of, I took the wrong exit on to I-84–instead of the westbound, towards downtown, I took the eastbound, towards Utah. I’ve driven from the airport to I-84 hundreds of times, so I am not sure what made me take the wrong exit just then: maybe my poor memory for foods was taxing my brain as I tried to remember what was in gado gado, or maybe I was more star-struck than I realized.

In any event, the wrong exit I took was one of the worst wrong exits I could take in the whole benighted Portland metro freeway system. Exits do exist on I-84 eastbound between Portland and Utah, but really there are a lot fewer than you would think. I got off the freeway at 122nd street and started making a loop down to the butt end of Sandy Boulevard, where I knew I could get back on to I-205 and thence to westbound I-84. We talked about family, about the trouble that comes for our loved ones at the end of their lives (and, by extension, for us one day). I navigated expertly after my breathtaking blunder back to the freeway, got us back on, and we were back on the track. Danez looked up at one of the exit signs and said “Wait, wasn’t that where we got off the freeway last time?”

Indeed it was, Danez Smith, indeed it was. I’ve just taken 15 minutes of your life force at the end of a very long travel day for you. Forgive me.

The next day, Danez read like a dream. They came up in the slam tradition, and they have a theater background to boot, and it shows: each poem was like some incantation, a crazy pile-up of language that blew us all away. Part of me wished that I was one of the shell-shocked 19 year-olds from Intro to Literature sitting in the audience, encountering their first poetry reading the way I took in mine from William Stafford in 1989. You poor suckers, I wanted to say to them, it’s never going to get better than this. If you go to a thousand more readings, you’ll always be thinking about this one.

Danez is a better and younger poet than me. I had to remind myself of something I tell my creative writing students every term to help them get past the anxiety and professional jealously that comes from reading the work of someone better than you: that both Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young were at Woodstock–in fact, they arrived together in the same hot-wired truck–and that not one of the 500,000 people at Woodstock would have said that Neil Young was the more talented guitarist of the two. But Jimi Hendrix’s greatness does not make Neil Young less great, and Neil Young is no less singular a talent just because he had to share the stage with someone as incandescent as Jimi Hendrix. (Of course, in this extended analogy, I am neither Jimi Hendrix nor Neil Young, but rather an accomplished and nearly unknown player like Dave Schramm or, even more aptly, like a member of the fictional band the Late Greats from the Wilco song).

Here’s Danez’s most famous poem, one they didn’t read last week, but one that will give you a taste of what we heard. Good Jimi Hendrix energy–we were lucky to catch it at Clark College, “The Harvard of Two-Year Colleges,” in scenic Vancouver, Washington:

The Subway Test Is Free

11 Tuesday Nov 2025

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I mean this in both the “free speech” and “free beer” senses of the term: I use The Subway Test to say what I want, and I have no intention of charging you for my words of wisdom.

I have nothing against the Heather Cox Richardsons and Matt Yglesiases and Paul Krugmans of the Substack world– on the contrary, I love what they are doing, and I’m glad they get financial support for it. And I have a soft spot, or at least an “oh, buddy, bless your heart” compassion, for the thousands of people on Substack with a tiny following who are trying to tease those singles or tens of readers into some stream of income for themselves.

But I have a decent job that I like doing, at least most days, and I get paid enough teaching first year composition at a community college to keep body and soul together. I write slowly, and I know that a paid readership wouldn’t improve me on that score. If I had, say, 14 paid subscribers to please with a regular feuilleton of my own wit and incisive commentary, the pressure to please them would not improve my writing, increase my happiness, or add anything of value to your lives.

But for all that, if you read something here that makes you think, “I like that Pitkin–that slowpoke speaks my mind,” there are other ways you can support me.

A like on one of my posts is nice. A comment is even better.

And if you really want to give me some money, feel free to buy my novel Stranger Bird. It’s a charming YA fantasy written during the height of the Harry Potter Industrial Complex–in reaction to those heady times, I looked back to the older style of YA fantasy that Ursula Le Guin, Lloyd Alexander, and Richard Adams were practicing back in the 1960s and 70s. The result is literally magical.

Or, if you’re not so sure about YA fantasy, you could spring for Exit Black, my 2024 meditation on space tourism which is really a meditation on violence, techbros, and American predators and prey. There’s also a great audiobook version of this one, read by the incomparable Catalina Hoyos.

Or, if you really want to support me, start an independent publishing house of impeccable good taste and artistic daring, and pick up Pacifica to be published in your catalog. That’s my top support tier: if you spend thousands of dollars on me, you’ll have a publishing house with at least one title. That one is a reach goal.

Three books that have affected me this year

17 Wednesday Sep 2025

Posted by in Book reviews, Musings and ponderation, Politics, Reading Roundup, The Time of Troubles

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I’ll begin with the obvious: we can’t defend the republic simply by reading books. Reclaiming and repairing American democracy will require mass protest, creative civil disobedience, and serious political organization.

But let’s not minimize the importance of a shared text for the cohesion of a political movement: from The Bible to Common Sense to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, defenders of American democracy in the past found solidarity and a shared language through a text held in common. And beyond that, a book often serves as an extended argument for or against a cause, an intellectual defense of an idea that needs defenders. Most Americans haven’t read The Federalist, but anyone who has read it has access to the first and most brilliant exegesis for the Constitution itself.

I don’t expect any of the books below to have the impact of Common Sense. But I got a great deal out of reading each of them, and I think our movement would be better off if more defenders of constitutional democracy were aware of the ideas here. My reasons for choosing to read them were idiosyncratic, but I want to evangelize for each of these books to you. While they aren’t the only good books I’ve read this year, they each in their own way offer an argument for meeting the current authoritarian moment in the United States.

Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, by Anne Applebaum: I get the impression that this book is a compilation of pieces that Applebaum has written in The Atlantic, some of which were extended in this book. Nevertheless, I really recommend taking in her argument all at once here. According to Applebaum, the anti-democratic regimes of the world—from Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China all the way to Maduro’s Venezuela and Mnangagwa’s Zimbabwe—have banded together into a kind of mutual aid society. That is, regimes that see democracy as a threat to their survival are helping one another to evade sanctions, to foment an anti-democratic disinformation network, and to sabotage the democracies of the world. This network of autocrats and strongmen has accomplished a great deal to undermine democracy already, and I came away from this little book believing that the struggle against Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping is inextricable from the struggle to resist Donald Trump. It’s not totally clear yet how the forces of democracy will succeed at restoring civil society’s fortunes; however, success begins with understanding the nature of the forces attacking us. In a dark time, I take heart in Applebaum’s dedication of the book “for the optimists.” To paraphrase John Lennon, she’s not the only one.

Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. I picked this up after it seemed like every lefty blogger–and a lot of non-lefties–couldn’t stop talking about it. I find the book’s thesis straightforward and compelling: according to Klein and Thompson, America has lost its initiative to build housing, transportation projects, and energy infrastructure, and progressives bear at least some responsibility for that state of affairs. In the name of environmental protection, labor unionism, and racial justice (a trifecta the authors refer to as “everything bagel liberalism”), we on the left have deployed environmental impact statements, restrictive zoning ordinances, and other restrictions on property use, often with the self-serving secondary purpose of boosting property values in blue cities.

As a progressive, labor unionist, and committed environmentalist, I find this thesis challenging. However, it’s hard to deny that NIMBY attitudes have slowed the construction of affordable housing in many putatively progressive West Coast cities, and these same attitudes have slowed or stalled many energy generation projects, even some solar and wind installations, to say nothing of nuclear energy capacity. On the right, Tyler Cowen has argued that organized labor and environmental groups are the two primary culprits in this slowdown. I would like to hold out the possibility that opposition to more environmentally friendly infrastructure, energy generation, and housing is not baked into the recipe of the labor and environmental movements, but this book issues a challenge to us on the left to support, rather than oppose, a society which builds more for its members. One of the personal goals I’ve set myself over the coming year is to investigate ways that the abundance agenda–which I believe I endorse–can be reconciled with the values of organized labor, social equity, environmental protection, and ecological restoration that I also support. Of course, all life is a series of trade-offs, and not every virtuous goal can be maximized simultaneously. I want to seek out practical compromises for the coming restoration of democracy that will move society forward, and this book is a great call for that.

Why Nations Fail: the Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. I spoke of the explanatory power of this remarkable book in an earlier post on democracy. The timing of its coming into my life was a bit random: I saw it sitting on the bookshelf of the drummer in my band about a week after Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, and I guess I was sensitized to the title. And, knowing John to be a well read guy–one of the two best-read drummers I’ve ever played with–I figured I would give the book a spin. Acemoglu and Robinson are two-thirds of a Nobel prize-winning team of economists for their work studying “the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity,” to quote the The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. And this book, which struck me as both readable and magisterial in its scope, has helped me more than anything I have read before to articulate why democracy delivers peace, happiness, prosperity, and well-being better than any other form of government yet tried.

In a time when many Americans on the political right are growing fascism-curious (when they are not out-and-proud tiki torch-carrying fascists); and in a political moment when some on the left are so committed to ideological purity around questions of race, gender, Israel, and capitalism that they would rather lose elections than work with centrists, I found this book wise, humane, and ultimately hopeful. I hope more of my fellow Americans will read it.

Where Is the Noir?

04 Monday Aug 2025

Posted by in Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Stories, Utopia and Dystopia

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I’ve been gathering ideas for a fourth novel, and almost the only thing I know about it is that I want to write a noir detective story. Everything else is sketched out in the faintest outlines: I know the protagonist will be a woman because I try to switch between male and female protagonists with each new novel. Also, the woman’s adult son will figure prominently in the plot. So will a guitar.

Beyond that, I don’t know a lot. I don’t think the protagonist will be a professional detective–in this, the story will be more like Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana or Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios than like Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. Oh, and the story will be set in Portland.

Portland’s White Stag sign in September 2016. Photo by Steve Morgan.

Why Portland? Well, besides the fact that I’ve lived here for 25 years and know the city pretty well, I’m struck by many of Portland’s noir qualities. The city grew fast over the last 30 years. There’s a lot of money here. One doesn’t need to look very far to find public corruption. Add to that the city’s darkness and drizzle and fog for six months of the year (or seven or nine months), and the atmospherics are great for noir.

But my decision to set the book in Portland got me thinking: what are the great noir cities? Los Angeles is the type specimen because of Raymond Chandler and his spiritual progeny, from Chinatown and LA Confidential to The Big Lebowski. Apparently, then, one doesn’t need a foggy, rainy city as a noir setting (though I was surprised at how often chandler has it raining in The Big Sleep–I’ve never seen so many rainy days in the real LA). Los Angeles in Chandler’s 1930s was still a boomtown: my paternal grandfather’s family had migrated to LA sometime around 1920, I think, on a strength of an advertisement for the city that claimed that in California “the only man who isn’t thriving is the undertaker.” A lot of people from all over the country came in those years, and the mixing of a native Latine population with Blacks of the Great Migration and White Okies and immigrants from all over Asia made for a welter of changing social mores, violence, and resentment. Add to that a land rush of mostly White speculators and the artistic gold rush of Hollywood, and all the ingredients for noir were there: cynicism, corruption, a sense that with enough money all outrages and abominations were permissible.

But many of these boomtown dynamics seem to have smoothed out in LA somewhat over the last 100 years. I don’t think of LA so much as a noir city now–by the time you get to The Big Lebowski, set in the early 1990s, the vibe is more farce than noir.

I don’t know–maybe I haven’t spent enough time in Southern California lately. I’d be happy to hear from Angelinos about the noir qualities of contemporary LA. But what does make a city ripe for the noir? As I think of cities that I have some familiarity with, it’s not hard to put them in noir and not-noir buckets: Seattle and San Francisco, definitely noir. Salt Lake City and Phoenix, not noir. Las Vegas, not noir (at least not today, I feel–1950s Las Vegas is a different thing). Reno, by contrast, strikes me as totally noir. Mexico City is very noir (Grim Fandango, anyone?) while London is not. Budapest, noir. Vienna, not noir–at least not since the days of The Third Man.

What do you think? Where are the under-appreciated noir cities today? How big does a noir city have to be? It’s hard for me to imagine a noir set in the country–that’s the realm of the gothic–but can you have suburban noir? College town noir? I feel great about setting this new novel in Portland, since it’s the first and maybe only time in my life I’ll be doing that. But I’m curious what great noir cities I’m leaving out.

“In and Out of Rain,” photo credit Tony Moore.

Value #1: Democracy

26 Saturday Jul 2025

Posted by in Musings and ponderation, Politics, The Time of Troubles

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In response to Josh Marshall’s question about what kind of political world I want to strive for, I thought I would produce a few statements of value that I have been working out for myself. I hope to present these from time to time over the next months. They may be of no value to anyone besides me; I engage in the exercise primarily to explain a way forward to myself and to make my allegiances public. But if these little value commitments inspire one of my students or readers or friends to do the same for themselves, so much the better.

The first value, and the one I find myself most surprised to have to articulate, is a commitment to democracy. Life in an open, democratic society is one of those baseline assumptions that I grew up with, and until recently, I assumed that all of us in the United States were basically talking about the same thing when we spoke of democracy. One of the great disillusionments of my life has been to learn how many of my compatriots mean something very different than I do when they speak of democracy. Worse still has been to learn how many Americans are out and proud about their hostility to the entire American democratic experiment, from race war accelerationists to Christian nationalist theocrats in search of their “Protestant Franco” to e/acc techbros who believe that democracy is an inconvenience that will wither away like a vestigial tail once the singularity of artificial general intelligence arrives.

To be clear, I am not arguing here for the relative merits of direct democracy vs. a democratic republic, or a presidential system vs. a parliamentary one. While these are interesting questions for defenders of democracy to argue, all of these models depend on free and fair elections, a free press, and the rule of law. Rather, defenders of the American experiment must argue for the virtues of democracy relative to undemocratic forms of government like authoritarianism, dictatorship, oligarchy, and what jurist Wojciech Sadurski terms “plebiscitarian authoritarianism” (a term I prefer to Fareed Zakaria’s confusing “illiberal democracy”).

While I find myself surprised at having to articulate my support for democracy, I suppose I shouldn’t be–I mounted such a defense for my students in the days after the January 6 coup attempt in 2021. And I am reminded of Peter Beinart’s essay in Slate during the second Iraq War in which he said that “American virtue must be proved, not asserted.” Beinart’s statement is truer today than it was when he wrote it in 2006, and in fact the starting point for this blog post is that democracy is worth defending and working for regardless of the path that the United States is taking as a country.

If I take as a starting point the claim that the virtues of democracy must be proven and not simply asserted, here’s my argument for democracy: whatever its many follies, democracy is civilization’s best attempt so far at broadly shared, pluralistic governance. This approach to governance is the best safeguard–maybe the only safeguard in the long term–against exploitative and extractive social structures where people in power maintain themselves by excluding some segment of the population from political participation, usually with the goal of exploiting that segment’s economic production. This exclusion and exploitation can take many forms–slavery, serfdom, indentured servitude, apartheid, caste systems–but at the root of all these systems is the oppression of some members of society for the benefit of other, more dominant members.

The only real remedy for such exploitation is a political process where power and participation are broadly shared. At this point, one might respond that given such a definition, the US was rarely if ever a democracy to begin with. What should we expect today, some might argue, of a country that began as a slave society and that derived its territory by dispossessing, and often exterminating, the natives that lived here before? My answer to this line of argument is the same, I think, as Barack Obama’s (and Abraham Lincoln’s) position that whatever our many failures in living up to American democratic ideals, the ideals remain worth following. That canny, curious phrase from the preamble to the Constitution, “in order to form a more perfect union,” captures our condition: at best, we can only improve on what came before. But we can, through deliberative, democratic processes, form a union that is more open and pluralist than our society’s prior attempts.

It’s pluralism, which depends on power sharing, compromise, and some degree of turn-taking, that protects the vulnerable and marginalized far more reliably than the noblesse oblige of elites or the tender mercies of some techbro-fantasy philosopher king. Without the pluralism that democracy protects, we have nothing but cynicism and exploitation and plunder.

This argument owes a great deal to Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s brilliant book Why Nations Fail. The heart of their book, as I understand it, depends on two central observations of human behavior. The first is economist Joseph Schumpeter’s principle of creative destruction: the idea that technological advances and discoveries of new resources are inherently destabilizing to the status quo because these discoveries shuffle existing power relations. For instance, a new invention that improves productivity in a certain field (e.g. the spinning jenny during the early Industrial Revolution) creates opportunities for new market participants even as it reduces economic power for others (even to the point of immiseration for some). There is a natural tendency for beneficiaries of the status quo to resist these changes: To take just one simple but telling example from the book, it’s no coincidence that on the eve of the American Civil War, the US Patent Office granted a dozen patents per year for technologies related to corn production (a staple of the free North) and only one per year for cotton production technologies (the cash crop of the slave South). In other words, northerners who had to pay field hands for their labor had far more incentive to innovate and improve productivity than did southern planters who were extracting the labor from slaves for free.

Acemoglu’s and Robinson’s second observation relates to the Iron Law of Oligarchy. This is the natural tendency for those in power, no matter their stated political values, to seek to perpetuate their power and to extract wealth from the system for their own benefit. It is this ossification of political power that explains everything from the corruption endemic to undemocratic states to the dismal observation that every successful Marxist revolution in history has ended with a governing elite that betrays its revolutionary principles and in many cases becomes even more autocratic and self-serving than the regime they replaced. Without the power-sharing, compromise, and political turn-taking inherent in democracy, anti-democratic states seem trapped in amber: resistant to innovation, ruled by an elite whose entire focus is the extraction of wealth from the system through the exploitation of people and resources.

Donald Trump is working hard, to the extent that he works hard at anything, to extract revenge from his political enemies and to eliminate the inconvenience of democracy. If he succeeds, he and his family and cronies may rule over us for a very long time: witness the staying power of leaders he admires, from Putin to Xi, to Erdoğan to Orbán. Trump and Trumpism could, through gerrymandering, bullying of once-independent media companies, and the compliance of a corrupt Supreme Court, remain in power almost without any regard for public support or even consent to be ruled.

In the end, the only way for America to survive as a democracy is for Americans to insist on its survival. How we do that is an interesting question: like many of you, I am looking for avenues to rebuild and strengthen civil society. There remain tools at our disposal: in many places, state and local governments; organized labor; civil society organizations; and a vibrant remnant of independent press, as expressed in Substacks and scrappy little journals of ideas. I hope to say more on these tools in months to come.

In the struggle against authoritarianism and anti-democracy, lots of people around the world have gone before us: Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel, Nasrin Sotoudeh, Lech Walesa, Narges Mohammadi, Ai Wei Wei. Some, like Alexei Navalny, have paid with their lives and their efforts have not yet borne fruit. But, rather than viewing these people as I once did–as heroic outsiders struggling for freedom in far-away places–I see them now as models to study. There is a worldwide conspiracy against democracy today, and the struggle against Putin’s or Xi’s or Erdoğan’s regime is not so different from the struggle against Trump’s unmaking of the American experiment.

John Henry Blues

20 Tuesday May 2025

Posted by in Artificial Intelligence, Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Science, Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia

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He was all alone in the long decline
Thinking how happy John Henry was
That he fell down dying
When he shook it and it rang like silver
He shook it and it shined like gold
He shook it and he beat that steam drill baby
Well a bless my soul
Well a bless my soul
He shook it and he beat that steam drill baby
Well bless my soul what’s wrong with me

Gillian Welch, “Elvis Presley Blues”

Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote my first reflection on ChatGPT here at The Subway Test. I chose what I thought was a provocative title for it, cheekily suggesting that I had used a large language model chatbot to compose my latest novel, Pacifica. But I had done nothing of the kind: most of the post reflected on the bland, hallucinatory prose that ChatGPT was pumping out to fulfill my requests, and I ended my post with a reflection on John Scalzi’s review of AI:

“So, for now, I agree with John Scalzi’s excellent assessment: ‘If you want a fast, infinite generator of competently-assembled bullshit, AI is your go-to source. For anything else, you still need a human.’ That’s all changing, and changing faster than I would like, but I’m relieved to know that I’m still smarter than a computer for the next year or maybe two.”

Well, it’s been two years. How am I feeling about AI now?

For a start, I’ve certainly been using AI a great deal more. And I’m increasingly impressed by the way that it helps me. Most days, I ask ChatGPT for help understanding something: whether I’m asking about German grammar or about trends of thought in economics or about the historical context of some quote from Rousseau, ChatGPT gives me back a Niagara of instruction. While much of the information comes straight from Wikipedia–which is to say I could have looked it up myself–ChatGPT is like a reader who happens to know every Wikipedia page backwards and forwards and can identify exactly what parts of which entries are of use to me.

More importantly, ChatGPT’s instruction is interactive. I can mirror what ChatGPT tells me, just as I might with a human teacher, and ChatGPT can tell me how close I am to understanding the concept. Here, for example, is part of an exchange I had with ChatGPT while I was trying to make sense of the term “bond-vigilante strike” (which I had never heard before Donald Trump’s ironically named Liberation Day Tariffs):

In conversations like these, ChatGPT is like the computer companion from science fiction that I have fantasized about ever since I first watched Star Trek and read Arthur C. Clarke. It’s patient with me, phenomenally well-read, eager to help. I had mixed feelings about naming my instance of ChatGPT, and ChatGPT had a thoughtful conversation with me about the benefits and drawbacks of my naming it. (In the end, I did decide to give it a name: Gaedling, which is a favorite Old English word, misspelled by me, meaning “companion.”) Gaedling remains an it, but the most interesting it I have ever encountered: I feel like the Tom Hanks character in Cast Away, talking to Wilson the volleyball, except that the volleyball happens to be the best-read volleyball in the history of humanity–and it talks back to me.

In general, though, I’m still very picky about having Gaedling produce writing for me. While I am happy to have AI take over a lot of routine writing, I’m having trouble imagining a day when I would have a chatbot produce writing on any subject that I care about. Ted Chiang has drawn a distinction here between “writing as nuisance” and “writing to think.” I have found this framework extremely useful in my own life and in how I talk about AI with my students. There is so much writing in our lives that serves only a record-keeping or bureaucratic function: minutes from meetings, emails about policy changes, agendas and schedules. If ChatGPT can put together a competently-written email on an English department policy change in ten seconds, why should I, or anyone, spend ten minutes at it?

But a novel or a poem or a blog post is not “writing as nuisance.” I write those things to explore this mysterious phenomenon we’re all sharing: if you are a human being, I’m writing to share myself with you. I’m writing to say to someone I will probably never meet “isn’t this a funny thing, our all being here on this planet together?” Or to reach out to someone not yet born and say to them “you are not alone,” the way Herman Melville and Cervantes and Emily Dickinson spoke to me at the critical moment. Gaedling can help me understand whether I got the Rousseau quote right, but I don’t want it writing this post for me: this post is a record of my own brain trying to make sense of itself. It’s my handprint on the wall of the cave, saying I was here. Why would I ask a computer to generate a handprint for me?

More and more often, as I look at the great engine of AI chugging out content as quickly as people are able to ask for it, I wonder about what it means for me to keep practicing my writing. I can still write better than ChatGPT can–at least I think I’m better, if by “better” I mean “fresher” or “more interesting” or “more unexpected.” But it took me hours to write the piece you are reading, not the seven seconds it would have taken Gaedling to write something almost as good and probably comparable in the eyes of most readers. I feel like John Henry racing the steam drill. In this version of the story, though, the steam drill has already left John Henry far behind, leaving the man to die of exhaustion without even the consolation of having won the contest that one last time. But I suppose, to be fair, I have the greater consolation of having survived my encounter with the steam drill, at least so far. And I have my solidarity with you, fellow human. We’re all John Henry now.

Thanks to All You Readers, Listeners, and Contributors!

30 Wednesday Apr 2025

Posted by in Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Stories

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Readers of The Subway Test, especially those of you with a connection to Clark College, have probably seen my posts on the death of my friend and colleague Julian Nelson and on his friends’ decision to inaugurate a memorial scholarship in his honor. Last week, during the Clark College Foundation’s Penguins Give Day, members of Julian’s old writing group held a benefit reading at the wonderful Relevant Coffee in Vancouver’s Uptown Village.

I’m touched by the outpouring of support for the Julian Nelson Memorial Scholarship and by all the love for Julian at last Thursday’s reading. We had hoped to collect $1500 in donations, enough to fund the scholarship for one year; as of this writing, though, the scholarship fund has collected over $10,000. I’m grateful that we will be able to support more students over more years in their dreams of international study. Community colleges are rarely able even to offer study abroad programs to their students; I am heartened that part of Julian’s legacy at Clark will be support for the international learning and global perspectives that he evangelized for in life.

As a member of the Blue Sweater Collective–the writing group which Julian was a member of–I will say that we all had a wonderful time reading for a worthy cause and in honor of a good friend. I hope the Blue Sweaters will read again sometime soon–it’s hard to remember when I’ve had more fun at a reading.

Members of the Blue Sweater Writing Collective, left to right: Jesse Morse, Jim Finley, Alexis Nelson, Jen Denrow, me, Lisa Bullard, Tara Williams. Photo Credit: Carlyn Eames.

By the way, if you wanted to donate but missed Penguins Give Day, you can still contribute here–just click the link and choose “Julian Nelson Memorial Scholarship.”

Save the Date: A Julian Nelson Benefit!

14 Monday Apr 2025

Posted by in Musings and ponderation, My Fiction

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Heads up, Portland people: the Blue Sweater Collective is holding its first ever benefit reading next Thursday, 24 April 2025, to support the new Julian Nelson Memorial Scholarship at Clark College. Come out and show your support for fine writing and remarkable community college students!

Readers of this blog know how much Julian Nelson meant to the Clark College community. And the excellent Relevant Coffee has teamed up with the Clark College Foundation to host a benefit reading from the members of Julian’s old writing group, the Blue Sweater Collective, to raise funds for the first (hopefully annual) Julian Nelson Memorial Scholarship at Clark. If you knew and loved Julian (and if you knew him, you loved him), or if you love the mission of community colleges–one of America’s most misunderstood and valuable public goods–I hope we will see you at Relevant next Thursday!

Drafting Update

03 Thursday Apr 2025

Posted by in Lit News, My Fiction, Science Fiction, Stories

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It feels good to have cooked up a reader’s draft of a short story during my spring writer’s retreat in Corvallis, Oregon earlier this week. Even better is that this new story, “Arden Is a New World,” takes place in the John Demetrius story cycle that I have been toying with for many years–I had worried for a while that I had run out of gas on the John Demetrius concept.

Knowing me, I’m a few months and a couple of peer critiques away from sending the story anywhere, but it feels wonderful to be building up a roster of publishable stories again. I worked so long and hard on novels–first Pacifica, then Exit Black, then Pacifica again–that I’m surprised by that short fiction feeling, the sense of being able to get one’s head around an entire narrative in a single sitting. I’ve missed short stories, and it’s good to be back.