Guess what habit I share with Joy Buolamwini, Ezra Klein, and Agnes Callard?
Guess what habit I share with Joy Buolamwini, Ezra Klein, and Agnes Callard?
It was like getting a Subaru and realizing how many other people had been driving Subarus—for years
It probably appears conceited to name these people in the title and suggest we have something in common. But I’m of two minds on this so I’ll risk embarrassment.
I’ve never met Joy Buolamwini, nor do I remember when I first came across her work. A computer science scholar with a PhD from MIT Media Lab, she’s been a bright figure in critical computing for as long as I’ve been interested in the topic, at least a decade.
I heard Buolamwini speak last spring at the University of Washington about her new memoir, Unmasking AI—which has a very cool cover illustration—in conversation with Emily Bender—whom I heard in conversation with Ted Chiang last fall and now work in the lab where she’s a faculty associate, lucky me! Anyway, I didn’t take many notes because I’m working on being present—so hard these days with a little Times Square filled with work and friends blinking in my pocket—but in the Q&A someone asked how to make computers “unbiased,” a necessary act since tech will make the world more prosperous, and I uncapped my pen. I am interested in knowing how to thoughtfully answer questions that carry inside their formulation a worldview that clashes with my own.
To her credit, Buolamwini responded generously by recognizing that she, too, used to believe in the promise of technology to solve grand social problems. Over time, she said, she’s come to realize that while we can work towards more robust systems, “unbiased” is a misnomer.
Indeed. Tech doesn’t solve poverty or war. When you finally have a hackathon to make a better breast pump, you don’t really solve inequitable family leave policies. “Why do we believe technologies will make the world more prosperous?” She asked. “How did we come to trust machines to solve our problems?” I also wonder about this. She described one impulse to rely on technological solutions to solve human problems as “moral outsourcing,” a concept advanced by Rumman Chowdhury. And believing a machine can solve our immense social challenges does relieve a burdan, to be sure, and feeling burdened is unpleasant and people don’t like that feeling and are eager for relief.
At this point in the lecture, I was taking notes. And I was kind of falling in love with Buolamwini. I began to draw hearts instead of write when she described how she writes.
“Who has read The Artist’s Way,” she asked. I raised my hand. I had recently begun Julia Cameron’s book and do morning pages! The reference touched me because also in the past few years, I’ve realized I accept, and believe in, God/universe/higher power, and this a way of thinking that is central to Cameron’s practice of creativity, but it’s so rare—in my experience at least—for people in academic settings, especially public lectures, to explicitly discuss faith-based books or ideas, or anything with “woo-woo” involved—unless it’s under critique.
As important as this feels to share, it’s not the point of my essay. I have actually gotten a little off track. The habit I want to discuss isn’t prayer, or reading, or writing for that matter. It was when she was describing how she wrote her book—and I love a craft talk so I was all ears—Buolamwini revealed a habit that I’d always thought was my weird quirk.
When she said it, I felt like a boiled tomato brought under a stream of cold water, splitting open, peeling. I know that’s a vivid and unexpected image of a vegetable, but it’s apt. For a split second, I was activated, ready to rip. Could it be possible I had an odd thing in common with Joy Buolamwini?
I was ready to write the experience off as an odd coincidence when, a few days later, Ezra Klein, the New York Times opinion columnist and podcaster, mentioned this habit, nonchalantly, too.
Before I explain, allows me to share that I often listen to Klein because I find his voice, and way of thinking, intelligent and comforting. Rarely do I turn off his podcast once I’ve started—and I’m not afraid to turn something off or stop reading if I’m not grabbed. Keep in mind that I’m somewhat unadventurous. With the exception of learning to sail, a somewhat miserable experience I had last spring, I haven’t taken up a new hobby since 2010 when I started barre and Pilates.
I’m the kind of person who orders the same thing when I go to restaurants—if it’s a Mexican restaurant, the tortilla soup. Life can be unpleasant, if not downright terrifying. It’s sensible to control what I can, to keep steady. Besides, tortilla soup is usually delicious.
Anyway, I listen to Klein all the time but he’s never mentioned this habit, which was jarring since one of the pleasures of podcasts is a sense of intimacy, which of course is one way, since he knows nothing about me.
Then came Agnes Callard. He was interviewing the a philosopher and professor at University of Chicago about thinking; but, what I remember is that she also has this habit!
I felt like I had just bought a Subaru and suddenly noticed how many of them are on the road. Subarus are everywhere!
I was so surprised, I won’t compare myself to a blanched vegetable again, because reality is enough. I was bicycling on the Interurban, the part where the large sculptures in the median end, near Trader Joe’s, and I nodded at an unhoused person with a shopping cart just as Callard was describing her son’s great empathy for homeless people.
When I passed the cemetery, I decided her thinking was like Fibonacci’s spiral—deep, connective, and innate. Later, after I read Rachel Aviv’s 2023 article on Callard’s marriage, I couldn’t escape this sense that she was some sort of supernatural dragon, able to illuminate the strangest and most fascinating corners and crevices of this life with her fire. Which means I think she's a genius and we are nothing alike. In her conversation with Klein, she described a love for color, and as I circled around the lake to Ravenna Boulevard, I pictured her relaxing into chartreuse. But I digress. The point is she mentioned the habit (!!).
So what is our common habit? The oddity I never mention but is apparently widely practiced?
I like to listen to things—songs, usually—on repeat, especially when I’m writing. The song isn't done until I'm done. If my thought isn't finished, I play the song again.
It seems we all listen to songs repeatedly. Joy, Ezra, Agnes, and Monika. Maybe you?
Having something on repeat until my thought has been thought all the way until the end helps me think all the way to the end.
It feels important to try to explain why this is revelatory for me, to realize I share a habit of banal repetition, an audio thinking aid. Buolamwini likes Gregorian chanting. I like Billie Eilish and New Age Spanish guitar music. Whatever Klein and Callard like I don't know, they didn’t elaborate and, since it was a podcast recording, I couldn’t ask.
Maybe you are, too, but I feel so enmeshed in a mediated and interconnected and asymmetrical world, where digital platforms and market forces grip our imaginations, that while this allows me to listen to Agnes and Ezra while I bicycle across the city or to write this newsletter on a phone at night in bed, at times, the embeddedness keeps me from being fully present, even when I'm disconnected.
What’s so lovely and odd about listening to music on repeat to write is that it’s not an aspirational gesture expressed through the market or as cultural capital—like preferring to wear a brand of clothing, or liking similar novelists, or feeling spiritual.
The habit is specific, bodily, and intentional. More agential than being left-handed, which isn’t a choice.
And I'm just marveling at the fact that I share this unremarkable habit with strangers—it feels like spotting a connection where there wasn’t one prior, one that is, in a way a spiritual practice. It's more special than a Subaru, and I don't drive one, but I do like the ease of stock photography and easy cultural references.
I began to write this essay in my head on my bicycle last spring, and at the time, I’d been listening to podcasts, then music, with one earbud.
When I ride, I use the right ear to listen to the world around me, to unconsciously intuit, to prevent crashing into benches, to wander, and so on.
And the left is for listening.
I think what I also learned is that it turns out I do have the ability to be of two minds.
Thank you for reading The Gift,
Monika
The Gift