1. Two upcoming LSE events, both f2f if you’re in London and online if you’re not:

a) Wednesday 20 March 2024 at 19:00 UK time, Judith Butler discussing her new book, Who’s afraid of gender?, with Sumi Madhok. More info here https://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/2024/03/202403201830/gender and online registration here https://lselive.eckoenterprise.net/events/20240320/login

b) Wednesday 27 March 2024 at 18:30 UK time What it means to be human in a world changed by AI with Madhumita Murgia, chaired by Kenneth Benoit. More info here  https://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/2024/03/202403271830/AI and online registration here https://lselive.eckoenterprise.net/events/20240327/login

2. The Parliament Matters podcast from the Hansard Society is finding its feet, I think https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLchpIkwdUkzZ7z90WFDKgERZN0J5T_tgG

Here’s Episode 23, The Foreign Affairs Committee: commentator or influencer? A conversation with Alicia Kearns MP https://youtu.be/w7IzPXk9-SU?feature=shared

3. An intentionally alarmist piece by Liza Featherstone for The New Republic, The Scariest Part About Artificial Intelligence https://newrepublic.com/article/179538/environment-artificial-intelligence-water-energy

“Researching this issue gives one all the feelings of a dystopian twentieth-century sci-fi movie about parasitical robots stealing our human essence and ultimately killing us off. At every point, we want to yell at the screen, “Don’t let the robots in there!” We wonder: Can’t they be stopped?”

4. Here’s some ’Faculty News’ from the Department of Education at Cambridge University, Synergy between students’ motivation and ‘thinking about thinking’ linked to academic achievement, which summarises a recent study of more than 1,000 teenagers in Greece by Ioannis Katsantonis & Ros McLellan from Cambridge University https://content.educ.cam.ac.uk/23-katsantonis-motivation

I’m still trying to work out whether this tells us anything that we didn’t already (think we?) know, viz. success (at school and elsewhere) breeds success. Here’s another take on success breeds success from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), Field experiments of success-breeds-success dynamics by Arnout van de Rijta, Soong Moon Kang, Michael Restivo & Akshay Patil https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1316836111 PDF below.

PNAS also have an interesting, wide-ranging feature, Front Matter, which highlights the stories behind the science https://www.pnas.org/front-matter

5. And, finally, an Engelsberg Ideas podcast on the extraordinary German filmmaker Werner Herzog that I found engrossing https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/ei-talks-werner-herzog/id1524774362?i=1000648181843

More Engelsberg Ideas podcasts here, a very eclectic mix https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engelsberg-ideas-podcasts/id1524774362

In the Herzog podcast, Geoff Andrew describes seeing The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser for the first time at the Arts Cinema in Cambridge in 1975 – so did I!