Weekly Picks – March 9, 2025
Credit (left to right): Nicolas Nova (Flickr / CC BY); NASA/ Johns Hopkins APL/ Ed Whitman; Seguace di hieronymus bosch, cristo al limbo, 1575 ca. 02 (CC)
This video below is a few years old, but was featured this week on Aeon. It made me think back to those occasional late nights and early mornings my friends and I used to spend at cafes and diners. Plugging in the laptop, sharing meals, or grabbing some drinks; our own little community-making. Extending the liminal hours, buoyed by company despite being sleep-deprived. The film continues the showcase throughout one cycle. This is the kind of everyday I hope is never lost.
This week’s collection:
- Asteroid Hunters | The American Scholar
- AI Search Has A Citation Problem | Columbia Journalism Review
- Slumlord Empire | Protean Magazine
- Is There a Mainstream Media? | The Point Magazine
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
“There are millions of asteroids in the solar system and probably hundreds of thousands in orbits that enter the inner solar system. Astronomers first learned of the existence of asteroids a little more than two centuries ago. The knowledge that asteroids come near Earth is barely more than 100 years old. Most of these asteroids are small objects and therefore difficult to find, and only in the past few decades has our technology been able to detect them. On top of that, many of them are not visible from the ground, either because the asteroids are not reflective or because current terrestrial telescopes can’t be pointed close to the sun.
. . .
Asteroid detection was made much more efficient by the development of digital photography, but a few events spurred the field along, including the impact of the comet Shoemaker Levy 9 on Jupiter in 1994. Astronomers Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker and amateur astronomer David Levy discovered a comet that had broken into fragments that were headed straight for the largest planet in our solar system. Asteroids and comets were known to be a fundamental part of the formation of our solar system, but to be able to observe one hitting another planet today—that was a new thing. Scientists went wild. They pointed both ground-based and space-based telescopes at Jupiter, and the whole world watched as the comet’s fragments hit the planet one by one. Big plumes of material rained back down on the upper part of Jupiter’s atmosphere, leaving bruises that were captured in images. It looked as if the planet were having an ultrasound.
“That was my first observing run ever,” Kelly Fast, NASA’s acting planetary defense officer, told me when we met at NASA headquarters in Washington. She grew up in Los Angeles with views of the Hollywood sign and Griffith Observatory out her bedroom window. In 1994, Fast was a young astronomer visiting the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, where all eyes were on the Shoemaker Levy 9 comet. She and other scientists were captured on VHS tapes laughing, hugging, dancing, leaning over the small circular screens of their computers. “We were like kids in a candy store,” Fast said.
Being able to observe the impact was not only scientifically interesting, it was also a reminder, a wake-up call that asteroids and comets are still colliding with planets in our solar system. In one of the 1994 tapes, Fast recorded a TV news anchor covering the event: “Scientists say if a fragment the same size hit Earth, it would leave a crater the size of Rhode Island.”
In recent history, two collisions on Earth have been large enough to do significant damage. On June 30, 1908, a 40- to 60-meter asteroid disintegrated in the atmosphere over the Tunguska River valley in Siberia, releasing a shockwave that devastated more than 2,000 square kilometers of forested land—an area roughly 2.5 times the size of New York City. Then, on February 15, 2013, a previously undetected 18-meter asteroid exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, causing an airburst and shock wave that struck six cities in the region. No one was killed, but the blast injured more than 1,600 people, mostly from broken glass.
Those asteroids were considerably smaller than the 140-meter space objects that NASA astronomers are mandated to look for. If an 18-meter asteroid can do that, I certainly don’t want to see anything larger heading our way. Of course, asteroid hunters aren’t looking only for asteroids larger than 140 meters; that is simply the priority. If smaller asteroids come up in their scans of the sky, they log those, too.
“This is the only natural disaster that can be prevented,” Fast likes to say. That and, “We find asteroids before they find us … so we can get them before they get us.””
2. AI Search Has A Citation Problem
“AI search tools are rapidly gaining in popularity, with nearly one in four Americans now saying they have used AI in place of traditional search engines. These tools derive their value from crawling the internet for up-to-date, relevant information—content that is often produced by news publishers.
Yet a troubling imbalance has emerged: while traditional search engines typically operate as an intermediary, guiding users to news websites and other quality content, generative search tools parse and repackage information themselves, cutting off traffic flow to original sources. These chatbots’ conversational outputs often obfuscate serious underlying issues with information quality. There is an urgent need to evaluate how these systems access, present, and cite news content.
Building on our previous research, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism conducted tests on eight generative search tools with live search features to assess their abilities to accurately retrieve and cite news content, as well as how they behave when they cannot.
We found that…
- Chatbots were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead.
- Premium chatbots provided more confidently incorrect answers than their free counterparts.
- Multiple chatbots seemed to bypass Robot Exclusion Protocol preferences.
- Generative search tools fabricated links and cited syndicated and copied versions of articles.
- Content licensing deals with news sources provided no guarantee of accurate citation in chatbot responses.
Our findings were consistent with our previous study, proving that our observations are not just a ChatGPT problem, but rather recur across all the prominent generative search tools that we tested.”
“Sovereignty and property have been conjoined to one another in modern political thought since at least the 16th century. The nature of sovereign power as imperium (supreme executive power) in relation to dominium (absolute ownership) and the question of the extent to which a sovereign could interfere with the property rights of his subjects informed the major theories of the state; the analogy of sovereign (absolute) power and that of a property owner shaped the political imaginaries of European political philosophers from Hobbes to Locke, and from the Spanish through to the British, lay at the foundation of the modern colonial order. Sovereignty as imperium became the basis for the colonial acquisition of Indigenous territory and the making of land into property (dominium).
Property in its financialized real estate form has come to dominate neoliberal economies. The ideology of real estate is now finding direct geopolitical expression, as it shapes the forms of power being exercised by Trump and his entourage. While the United States has, since its very beginnings as a settler colony, been what historian Allan Greer terms a “real estate monopsony,” taking to a logical extension the British imperial tendency to act “as an improving landlord” (in the words of Ranajit Guha), Trump’s approach to dominance without hegemony is rooted more narrowly in the basic mentality of a real estate developer: acquire property, or more accurately a “site” (deracinated from its history), develop it and then lease, rent or sell it for the sole objective of profit.
Historically, the theft of Indigenous lands involved a whole panoply of legal technologies—lawfare, for short—including surveying, mapping, registration of title, in some instances treaties (signed in colonial bad faith), and in others, contracts for sale. All of this was framed as part of a civilizing mission of improvement. The ideology of the real estate empire—be it personal or national—dispenses with this legitimating narrative. Instead, it advances an overwhelmingly bare and explicit profit motive as the alibi for the violence of slum clearances, managed decline, gentrification, and financialization.”
4. Is There a Mainstream Media?
“It’s true throughout history that we tend to get very excited and even a little Panglossian about the arrival of any new revolutionary communications technology. At the end of the nineteenth century, Nikola Tesla predicted that his new telegraph was going to abolish war. And then a few years later, the inventor of the radio said the same thing—it would make war impossible. That was just a couple of years before World War I broke out.
In the case of the internet, being able to communicate with one another so much more easily is making it harder for us to understand each other. Users’ experience, confirmed by social science, has shown this to be the case, in a media landscape in which the mainstream media has left the scene. Social media promotes lies and antipathy much more effectively than it does truth or empathy. According to that same Oxford survey, we now rely upon so-called influencers to guide our path through this landscape, far more than we do any brand or even any journalist, and they tend to be partisan. Number one on the survey’s list was Tucker Carlson, followed by Joe Rogan. The only conventional TV anchor or journalist to make the top ten was Anderson Cooper, and he came in number seven after Ben Shapiro and Alex Jones.
. . .
It’s not a story about bad faith and much less about bad people. It’s mostly about changes in technology and related changes in commercial incentives—big, giant forces that have transformed journalism—and along the way some bad decisions got made. These two forces have always shaped our understanding of what counts as news, and therefore, our sense of what’s real beyond our doorstep, what we can actually apprehend with our own senses.
But I also think—in what has been a very confusing and even frightening time in the industry I grew up in—some organizations in the “mainstream media” have made mistakes that accelerated the institutional slide toward irrelevance.”