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New York Times
11 hours ago
- General
- New York Times
The Subversive Joy of BookTok
My professional life revolves around reading and writing books. But for years, I carried a little secret: I didn't read much for fun or pleasure. This wasn't always the case. As a teen I devoured books, and my library card was my most prized possession. In college, I passed the slow hours of my part-time job at a hotel gift shop lost in works of magical realism — where ghosts lingered, kitchen spices conjured heartbreak and love defied the laws of nature. But somewhere between graduate school and professional academic life, books became objects to analyze, critique or assign. After I spent my days deciphering dense academic jargon and grading student papers, the last thing I wanted was to crack open a book at night. Slowly, without realizing, I traded reading for binge-watching Netflix and doom-scrolling social media. But after November's election, the doom-scrolling that once numbed me only fueled my anxiety. I needed an escape from the barrage of dread. In a bid to improve my sleep and reduce the time I spent staring at my phone, I bought an e-reader. At first, I loaded it with books I thought I should read — prizewinners, critical darlings. But that just felt like homework. Soon, I was back to social media. Then, late one night, the algorithm led me to a whimsical and hilariously dramatic corner of TikTok known as BookTok, where people gush about novels that supposedly altered their brain chemistry, or that they wish they could inject directly into their veins. The algorithm caught on, and soon my feed was full of people speaking passionately about the thrill of a good story — reading on lunch breaks, or in moments where the joy of reading overpowers exhaustion. Of course, the algorithm also recognized my personal usage, filling my feed with queer and BIPOC creators and providing a different picture than someone else might get. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Fast Company
6 days ago
- Health
- Fast Company
AI has a resilience problem. Designers and researchers can help fix it
2012. I walk out of a gastroenterologist's office with a brochure titled 'Your Life With Ulcerative Colitis.' What the brochure doesn't say: A month later, I will wake up on the day of a critical midyear design presentation feeling too nauseous to leave my apartment, and will have to spend several weeks at my parents' house, where I will miss several more midterms. A year later, I'll stand at a boarding gate and feel too sick to take a five-hour flight and meet with potential graduate school advisers. I'll soon learn that, for me, these won't be one-offs. Instead, I'll live a life of constant flux, impossible to plan for. Desperate for some control as I push through academia, I turn to tech products. But technology can't help me. Digital tools excel at routines, but falter at exceptions. I can schedule weeks of meetings in a few clicks, but when I'm unwell, I'm copy-pasting the same cancellation message a dozen times. My personal-finance app keeps me on track, but only until an urgent-care bill throws things off. When my fitness tracker chastises me for not closing my rings during a particularly brutal flare-up, I shove it into my junk drawer. Technology is failing me when I need it the most. Happy paths 2016. I join Big Tech, working as a user researcher in early-stage and AI technology. Two things become immediately clear. First, my story is far from unique. Anecdotes from many hundreds of user interviews reflect lives riddled with chaos and disruption. Change—unplanned and planned—is the norm. Second, consumer products are largely designed for 'happy paths.' A clear-cut problem is solved by a superhero technology, resulting in a favorable outcome that is tied off with a neat bow. For the sake of clarity, efficiency, and technical ease, the zigzag realities of lives are often sanitized into an idealized arc. We trot out these squeaky clean stories as 'hero use cases' for a product idea—first to convince ourselves, then our executives, and, finally, our users. Today's explosion of consumer-facing GenAI products are built with the same recipe. We get heartstring-tugging stories with just enough complexity to feel real, without any of the mess. A dad uses AI to prepare for a job interview while reminiscing on parenthood. A parent brings a child's imaginary creature to life in a custom picture book. Some brands try to incorporate more chaotic realities (a storm hits restaurant patio seating) only to portray absurd overdependence on AI (waiters leave their customers drenched because an AI agent doesn't reseat them indoors). If you're like me, these ads make you want to scream: 'You're standing in the middle of the kitchen. How are your kids not interrupting your conversation with AI 27 times?' But in contrast to the 'hero use case,' taking kid snack breaks and asking AI to repeat itself over the noise of toddler screams are often cordoned off as 'edge cases' in product development. The implication: These occurrences are rare. But they aren't. Human journeys are not straight lines. They are dynamic, defined by change, interruptions, and curveballs. Some 60% of Americans reported experiencing an unexpected expense in the past year, though 42% don't have an emergency fund greater than $1,000. Households with two or more children have a viral infection in the household more than 50% of the time. And an estimated 28% of work time each year is lost to distractions. When technology isn't resilient to this reality, it breaks—sometimes catastrophically. Like when a Florida teen dies by suicide after his lengthy conversations with a chatbot turn darkly romantic. When AI-powered cameras mounted on public buses mistakenly ticket thousands of legally parked vehicles in New York because they fail to recognize alternate side zones. Or when AI weather models fail to predict the worst storms because extreme weather data doesn't exist in the training data. These outcomes are extreme, but the pathways leading there are deeply ordinary, broken by nascent technology that isn't resilient to the gritty reality of human behavior. Sometimes, the catalyst stems from the tech itself, like security vulnerabilities. Other times, it's agnostic of the technology, like mental health. But in all cases, the technology was not resilient to changes in context. AI's broken promise Years ago, you could blame technology as the limiting factor. But AI should, ideally, thrive on this sort of complexity—using its superpowers of pattern recognition, synthesis, and triangulation of thousands of data points about users and their environment. GenAI has introduced a new frontier around deep reasoning and human interaction that should make the technology more tractable and transparent. AI is uniquely positioned to help people anticipate and recover from change, the kind that they may not have seen coming. Yet the system didn't raise the alarm when a conversation overtly turned dangerous, much less recognize patterns that may suggest that it was headed that way. On issuing its 7,000th ticket in one day, the MTA's system didn't flag that this is an unusually large number of violations on a route. It's never easy to deal with the complex behavior of humans and societies. But when we keep designing to make already great lives 1% better, we are perpetuating a specific type of harm—one that happens when the people designing the technology aren't considering the real ways it might be used. As UX practitioners, we are uniquely positioned to start the conversation about how to change this. To move toward an AI UX rooted in resilience, we'll need to shepherd at least three main shifts in the way our products are designed. 1. Shift the user stories we tell—which directly map to the problems we choose to solve. UX must choose to foreground the hard, complex story. We all have one: a multigenerational household with life-stage changes, moves across the country, divorce, job loss, a chronic illness. Right now, a key barrier to centering these stories is that they extend ideation cycles, which is uncomfortable in an increasingly launch-first-or-perish climate. As a result, cleaner stories, like the product narratives described earlier, win out. To break this cycle, UX can introduce complex user stories to product teams starting with ideation, through prototype and concept testing—especially ones that cut horizontally across product ecosystems. This requires creating a new canon: an accessible taxonomy of types of complexity, curveballs, and changes that we can easily pull from. Such a taxonomy might take the form of brainstorming prompts, user journey templates, or a card deck or visualization used in sprints. This cracking open will take time, but the more we tell these stories, the easier they will roll off the tongue, and the more they can become normalized. 2. Shift how we leverage user data in AI-powered products. Today, user data collected by companies—while wide-ranging—isn't always curated or connected well. Most users, particularly younger generations, have resigned themselves to data collection and don't mind it, but also don't understand how the data is used or whether it benefits them. This is not an argument to collect more data. Rather, it's a call to connect existing data for more meaningful, tangible user benefits, like helping navigate blind spots and complexity. Consider a simple example: Ann's AI agent has access to a calendar app where she has blocked off time for a post-work run, a weather app that shows unexpected evening rain showers, and a maps app that she frequently uses to navigate to a yoga studio. This agent can now surface a timely suggestion: help Ann move meetings to shift the run to earlier in the day, or help her find a class at the yoga studio at that time. In reflecting how people really use their technology, this sort of cross-product dialogue and synthesis has the opportunity to leverage AI and user data to unlock resilience in the face of change. 3. Shift away from traditional definitions of 'seamlessness' and 'magic moments' toward ones that gracefully embrace failure, meaningful friction, and deep, explicit user feedback. AI advancements tend to tempt product teams to remove all friction and present users with auto-magical solutions to needs they weren't even aware of, from hyper-personalized AI-driven ads to 'smart' nudges on food and shopping apps. Common success metrics used today reflect the value we place on frictionless experiences: fewer clicks, greater session length, engagement with automation features, fewer user-submitted comments. This can cause a misleading overreliance on implicit behavioral signals that don't always reflect real intent. Take the example of an in-app pop-up: A user might spend a long time viewing it, even clicking on a link—not because they find it useful but because they can't find the exit. Even when users do provide explicit feedback, it's often not in a form that can be interpreted meaningfully, leading to undesired outcomes. Think, for example, of how OpenAI's models grew sycophantic after a thumbs-up on a response was used as a signal to make the chatbot behave more in that direction. Instead, how might we offer users more ways to provide granular feedback that can shed light not only on the 'what' but also the 'why'? This can be meaningful friction that can empower users to have their unique human context be better understood while harnessing the beyond-human capabilities of AI. One could argue that this, in fact, is the more magical experience. Finally, the pursuit of seamless perfection risks underplaying the shortcomings of AI itself—misunderstood accents, factual inaccuracies, biased imagery. These are a function of the technology, and are bound to happen. UX needs to treat these as predictable breaking points in the technology, build frameworks to classify them, and design intentionally with them as part of the user narrative. Of course, it's far simpler to sketch these solutions than implement them, but if AI is to work well for real-world problems, we need to tackle real-world complexity head-on. UX is in a powerful position to shift these mindsets. As it has done for domains like accessibility and product inclusion, UX can redefine the problems and narratives that emerging technology is built for, and reshape the UX to accommodate product and user realities to support resilience.
South China Morning Post
16-05-2025
- General
- South China Morning Post
Farewell, my pink lady, that beloved smelly but sturdy sofa
One good thing about Toronto's suburbia is that you can throw away your unwanted furniture, no matter the size – bulky or small, heavy or light – on your front kerb. But considering the municipal garbage disposal charge they make you pay it's hardly a perk. So now, there she sits, my beloved sofa waiting to be collected and crushed into pieces, looking sad and lonely, unwanted, abandoned, almost tragic. I can see it as I type these words from my front window. It has been a faithful companion since I returned to the Canadian city from Hong Kong almost a decade ago. But our relationship began long before that. My late mother bought it before my time. Our relationship first started when I interrupted my life in Hong Kong to go back to graduate school in the early 1990s because my dream of becoming a war journalist in Asia went nowhere. Say what you like about my pink lady, she was sturdy, definitely not the Ikea type. The original pink cushions were worn out and long gone. I took the striped light-brown ones you see in the photo from my neighbour when he threw his sofa away. I know that's kind of gross but I didn't want to throw away the whole thing and shop for a replacement. I laid flat on that sofa so many hours of the day for years I developed a weak back and constant lower back pain. It probably gave me scoliosis. My big yellow cat Bloomie made it worse by using me as his human pillow. One of the immutable laws of cats is that when they lie on top of you, you have to stay still for as long as they want. Now that I have done the unthinkable with my sofa, I don't know how to feel – melancholy, uncaring, dismissive, detached …? Surprisingly to me, none of these emotions/ideations have a hold on me, so I can pick and choose. I choose detachment.
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's reshaping of higher education tests America's appeal for international students
As he finishes college in China, computer science student Ma Tianyu has set his sights on graduate school in the United States. No country offers better programs for the career he wants as a game developer, he said. He applied only to U.S. schools and was accepted by some. But after the initial excitement, he began seeing reasons for doubt. First, there was President Donald Trump's trade war with China. Then, China's Ministry of Education issued a warning about studying in America. When he saw the wave of legal status terminations for international students in the U.S., he realized he needed to consider how American politics could affect him. The recent developments soured some of his classmates on studying in the U.S., but he plans to come anyway. He is ready 'to adapt to whatever changes may come," he said. American universities, home to many programs at the top of their fields, have long appealed to students around the world hoping to pursue research and get a foothold in the U.S. job market. The durability of that demand faces a test under the Trump administration, which has taken actions that have left international students feeling vulnerable and considering alternate places to study. 'All of the Trump administration's activities have been sending a message that international students are not welcome in the U.S.,' said Clay Harmon, executive director of AIRC, a professional association for international enrollment managers at colleges. Competitors see an opening to carve into US dominance Around 1.1 million international students were in the U.S. last year. A large decline in their ranks could cripple school budgets that rely on tuition from foreign students, who are ineligible for federal student aid and often pay full price to attend. It's too early to quantify any impact from the administration's crackdown, which has included new scrutiny of student visas and efforts to deport foreign students for involvement in pro-Palestinian activism. But many fear the worst. 'Students and their families expect and need certainty,' said Fanta Aw, executive director and CEO of NAFSA, an association of international educators. 'And they do not function well in a volatile environment like the one we have currently.' The U.S. has been rebounding from a decline in international enrollment that was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. As top competitors such as Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom rolled back recruiting efforts and made immigration policies less welcoming, the U.S. appeared ready to bring in far more students. Now, a few months into the Trump administration, industry experts say it's unlikely the U.S. will be able to capitalize. 'The U.S. was so perfectly positioned to become the far and away, clear first-choice destination for international students,' said Mike Henniger, CEO of Illume Student Advisory Services. His company works with colleges in the U.S., Canada and Europe to recruit international students. "Then it just went out the door." In Canada, where colleges saw enrollment increases during the first Trump administration, they are hoping for another bounce. In a letter following the recent election, a member organization for Canadian universities urged the new Liberal government to address immigration policies that have affected recruitment of foreign students. 'This is a moment of real opportunity for the country to attract international talent,' said Gabriel Miller, president of Universities Canada. America's appeal as a place to start a career remains resilient The U.S. holds strong appeal for students prioritizing career outcomes, in part because of the 'optional practical training' program, which allows foreign students to stay on their student visas and work for up to three years, said Lindsey López of ApplyBoard, an application platform for students seeking to study abroad. Graduates earning this post-college work experience were among the foreigners whose legal status or visas were terminated this spring. Still, the diversity and size of the U.S. job market could help American schools stay ahead of the competition, López said. 'The U.S. is the largest economy in the world,' she said. 'It's just the vastness and also the economic diversity that we have in the U.S., with a whole variety of different industries, both public and private, for students to choose from.' William Paterson University, a public institution of 10,000 students in New Jersey, typically has around 250 international students. It expects an increase in foreign students in the fall, according to George Kacenga, vice president for enrollment management. The school has focused on designing programs around STEM majors, which appeal to international students because they open access to OPT programs. Students have expressed concern about securing visas, but most of the school's international students are from India and report they are getting appointments, he said. In Shanghai, many students in Austin Ward's 12th grade class have either committed to attending U.S. colleges or are considering it. Ward teaches literature in a high school program offering an American Common Core curriculum for Chinese students. Ward said he avoids discussing politics with his students, but some have asked him about the U.S. government's termination of students' legal statuses, signaling their concern about going to the U.S. To Ward's knowledge, the students who planned to attend American colleges have not changed their minds. Frustrated with the stress the situation has caused, Ward said he wrote a letter to his U.S. representative on the need to protect international students. His students are coming to America to 'expand their horizons,' he said, not threaten the country. 'If my students have to worry about that, and if students are losing their visas, then America is not going to have that strength of being an academic center,' he said. ___ The Associated Press' education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find the AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at
Washington Post
12-05-2025
- Washington Post
Trump's reshaping of higher education tests America's appeal for international students
As he finishes college in China, computer science student Ma Tianyu has set his sights on graduate school in the United States. No country offers better programs for the career he wants as a game developer, he said. He applied only to U.S. schools and was accepted by some. But after the initial excitement, he began seeing reasons for doubt.
