Twitter launches 'new' Tweetdeck as the old version breaks down

If you've been having trouble using Twitter recently, you aren't alone — the service has been having issues ever since it started limiting the number of posts users could view each day. Although many of the platform's issues stabilized over the weekend, Tweetdeck remains broken unless users switch to the beta version of the list aggregator. Now, Twitter is gearing up to solve the issue by making that beta version of Tweetdeck the main version, announcing on Monday that it has "launched a new, improved version of Tweetdeck."

Despite officially launching, this "new" Tweetdeck still calls itself the "Tweetdeck Preview" while in app, and users still need to opt-in to using it in the menu of the original Tweetdeck interface. Even so, switching to the new interface does indeed restore basic Tweetdeck functionality for users that rely on its list aggregation features. Twitter says the process should be fairly straightforward as well, promising that saved searches, lists and columns should carry over instantly. Although Twitter says that the updated preview build should now support Twitter Spaces, polls and other features that were previously missing, it notes that Teams functionality is currently unavailable.

Twitter hasn't officially announced that it's retiring the old version of Tweetdeck, but in a thread discussing the issues a Twitter employee suggested the change would be permanent, stating that they were "migrating everyone to the preview version." 

Although switching to the new version of Tweetdeck potentially resolves the issue, many legacy users may still find themselves without access to the power-user tool in the near future. According to Twitter Support, the feature will become exclusive to Twitter Blue subscribers in the near future, noting that "in 30 days, users must be Verified to access Tweetdeck." It's unclear if that change will be applied to all users in early August, or if all users will have a 30-day trial of the new Tweetdeck before being prompted to subscribe.

FILE - A sign at Twitter headquarters is shown in San Francisco on Nov. 18, 2022. Thousands of people logged complaints about problems accessing Twitter on Saturday, July 1, 2023, after owner Elon Musk limited most users to viewing 600 tweets a day — restrictions he described as an attempt to prevent unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data from the site. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

UK universities draw up guiding principles on generative AI

All 24 Russell Group universities have reviewed their academic conduct policies and guidance

UK universities have drawn up a set of guiding principles to ensure that students and staff are AI literate, as the sector struggles to adapt teaching and assessment methods to deal with the growing use of generative artificial intelligence.

Vice-chancellors at the 24 Russell Group research-intensive universities have signed up to the code. They say this will help universities to capitalise on the opportunities of AI while simultaneously protecting academic rigour and integrity in higher education.

Harvard’s Admissions Is Challenged for Favoring Children of Alumni

Harvard’s Admissions Is Challenged for Favoring Children of Alumni

Harvard students and supporters marched through Harvard Square during a rally on Saturday to oppose the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmation action.

Unsolved Wendy’s outbreak shows challenges of fighting foodborne illnesses

Enlarge / A Wendy's old-fashion burger. Romaine lettuce on Wendy's burgers is thought to be the cause of the outbreak. (credit: Getty | Francis Dean)

We will never know for certain what caused a large, multistate outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 infections linked to Wendy's restaurants late last year, according to a new study led by investigators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The study, highlighting weaknesses in our ability to respond to foodborne outbreaks, lands amid a separate report published by the CDC finding that, in general, we're also failing to prevent outbreaks. In fact, cases from some common foodborne pathogens have increased relative to pre-pandemic levels.

In the outbreak last year, which spanned from July to August, at least 109 people in six states fell ill, with 52 needing to be hospitalized. Eating at Wendy's was a clear link. But it wasn't enough to crack the case.

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Pretty Much Pop #152: BELIEVE in Ted Lasso

Mark, Lawrence, Sarahlyn, and Al disagree about the Jason Sudeikis-headed Apple TV+ pandemic hit that's just wrapped up with its third season. Was it actually as good as everyone thought when its first season hit, or was its vibe just something we needed at the time? Should it have stayed slim and comic instead of becoming the stretched out, soapy dramedy that it ended up as?

For more, visit prettymuchpop.com. Hear bonus content at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by subscribing via Apple Podcasts to the Mark Lintertainment Channel.

Sponsor: Check out the Skeptoid podcast at skeptoid.com.

“Ominous sign”: Legal experts say Jack Smith "closing in" after piercing Trump’s “inner circle”

Lecturers don’t want a marking boycott, either. But we must fight those wrecking UK universities | Lorna Finlayson

Pay cuts are just one factor: working conditions are also getting worse and that’s bad for both staff and students

Since late April, staff at 145 UK universities have been refusing to mark students’ work. The marking and assessment boycott is the most recent action by the University and College Union (UCU), which represents academics and other university staff. With graduation ceremonies now upon us, the boycott is causing significant havoc. Just how significant is a matter of some dispute. But what is indisputable is that many students have had their marks delayed, and some will be unable to graduate as normal this summer.

Industrial action by (mainly) academic staff is always a hard sell. Lecturers are seen as relatively privileged people. The students being hit by their latest action have already had their studies disrupted by a pandemic and a series of strikes. Seen this way, the current marking boycott can look like a selfish step too far.

Lorna Finlayson is a philosophy lecturer at the University of Essex

Fraud "justice": Anti-LGBTQ decision based on a fake case showcases the Supreme Court's illegitimacy

She’s Going Into 6th Grade and Already Saving for College

Red wall Tory MPs put pressure on Sunak over net migration

Group issues 12-point plan calling for stricter immigration rules for care workers, students and refugees

Rishi Sunak is facing demands from “red wall” Conservative MPs to slash the number of overseas care workers, foreign students and refugees allowed into the UK in time for the next election.

The MPs from the 2017 and 2019 intake, who call themselves the New Conservatives, have issued a 12-point plan to cut net migration to Britain from 606,000 to 226,000 before the end of 2024.

A cap of 20,000 on the number of refugees accepted for resettlement in the UK.

Caps on future humanitarian schemes such as the Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong schemes should the predicted 168,000 reductions not be realised.

Implementation of the provisions of the illegal migration bill, which it is claimed would lead to a reduction of at least 35,000 from LTIM.

A raise in the minimum combined income threshold to £26,200 for sponsoring a spouse and raising the minimum language requirement to B1 (intermediate level). This should lead to an estimated 20,000 reduction in LTIM, the MPs claim.

Making the migration advisory committee report on the effect of migration on housing and public services, not just the jobs market, by putting future demand on a par with labour requirements in all studies.

A 5% cap on the amount of social housing that councils can give to non-UK nationals.

Raising the immigration health surcharge to £2,700 per person a year.

SpaceX launches groundbreaking European dark energy mission

Enlarge / SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket soars through the sky over Cape Canaveral with Europe's Euclid space telescope. (credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica)

A European Space Agency telescope launched Saturday on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida to begin a $1.5 billion mission seeking to answer fundamental questions about the unseen forces driving the expansion of the Universe. The Euclid telescope, named for the ancient Greek mathematician, will observe billions of galaxies during its six-year survey of the sky, measuring their shapes and positions going back 10 billion years, more than 70 percent of cosmic history.

Led by the European Space Agency, the Euclid mission has the ambitious goal of helping astronomers and cosmologists learn about the properties and influence of dark matter and dark energy, which are thought to make up about 95 percent of the Universe. The rest of the cosmos is made of regular atoms and molecules that we can see and touch.

Stumbling in the dark

“To highlight the challenge we face, I would like to give the analogy: It’s very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there’s no cat,” said Henk Hoekstra, a professor and cosmologist at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. “That’s a little bit of the situation we find ourselves in because we have these observations … But we lack a good theory. So far, nobody has come up with a good explanation for dark matter or dark energy.”

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Relaxing Into Risk

Most Thursday mornings you’ll find me in a co-working session with members of the Productive Flourishing Academy. 

Part of the routine in our coworking sessions is to start off with a word pulled from a deck of motivational cards. My friend, the group leader, pulls the card, and the idea is to use the word that emerges to create alignment or a point of focus throughout your day. 

When my turn came, she pulled the word “Relaxation”.  

Ummm… no.

“I have a mountain of tasks ahead of me and I don’t have time to relax today,” was my instant reaction.

Luckily, I have my own set of this particular card deck, so before diving into the task I had planned (which ended up turning into this piece of writing) I decided to pull a new card. Take that, universe!

So what card did I pull?  

“Risk.”

Well-played, universe. Well-played. 

Hustle Culture Tells Us: “You’ve Got to Work to Relax”

What am I supposed to do with these mixed messages? These two words — that are now at the forefront of my mind — seem to be at odds with one another. 

As I moved into the work I had planned to do during this co-working session (namely a speech I had to give the following week for Toastmasters, a public speaking and leadership club I’m a part of in NYC), I couldn’t get these two words out of my head. 

These ideas, risk and relaxation, don’t seem to fit together. More than that, they seem to be on opposite sides of the spectrum.

When I heard the word relaxation, what came to mind was an extreme state of rest, inaction, becoming sloth-like. 

To enter a relaxed state is something too often we feel we need to earn. I’m allowed to just relax? Without doing anything or accomplishing anything first? 

So when my friend pulled that card for me, I rebelled. Because I have a too-long list of things that need to get done (yep, violating the 5 Projects Rule) before I can even think about allowing myself to relax. Calm will have to wait.

I recognize this mentality runs counter to a lot of what has been written about here at PF, including pieces I myself have written. It just goes to show, we’re all in a constant state of learning and unlearning.

Risk, or Getting Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable  

Still, relaxation is a self-care practice — and a necessity — we can all get behind. But risk? Risk seems to imply anything but rest and relaxation, and seems, well, downright dangerous.

Risk implies action, making a change, getting uncomfortable, and putting yourself in a position to fail (the horror!).

It’s inevitably scary to take a step in a new direction. Our minds and bodies perceive this newness as danger and set off all sorts of alarms to try to get us to do anything but this risky behavior — fight, flight, or freeze.

Taking action, no matter how big or small, is inherently risky. 

Being Gentle with Ourselves: Ease Into Action & Risk

But what happens if I put these two words together? What if relaxation didn’t need to mean a full and complete stop to any activity, but instead it could mean an easing in? 

And what if risk didn’t require actual danger but simply meant trying something new? What if it was just about easing into the discomfort of putting myself in a slightly different position than yesterday? 

And as I was thinking all these thinks, and most definitely not writing my Toastmasters speech, it dawned on me that the exact combination of these themes — getting more comfortable (relaxation) with being uncomfortable (risk) — is one that continues to show up in my life. 

A recent example: I’ve been starting to get back into writing. More specifically, I’m starting to share my writing more frequently. Risk.

I’m leaning more and more into my instinct, and how it relates to both writing and sharing; this article is an example. Relaxation.

Ease can be about letting go. Letting go of expectations, of perfectionism, of the outcome. And that is inherently risky. Where are you holding on too tight? What small action can you take today to move yourself closer to where you want to be?

The post Relaxing Into Risk appeared first on Productive Flourishing.

AI as Answer Machine? Or Wordsmith? Or Something Else?

Last month on the blog, I floated the idea of thinking about generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard as technologies for learning. I drew an analogy to the digital camera I used as I learned photography. As I was developing a conceptual understanding of photography, I was also learning how to use the tool in my hands, with all its knobs and buttons, and these two kinds of learning informed and supported each other. Could we use generative AI tools in a similar fashion, teaching students to use the tools well as part of learning other skills, like writing and researching? If so, it might help to know what kind of tools we’re dealing with when we talk about ChatGPT and other AI text generation tools.

For instance, I saw this post by Simon Harris go around Mastodon a couple of weeks ago:

15yo: I use ChatGPT quite a bit.
Me: Oh?
15yo: Today, I asked it to give me the last digit of Pi.
Me: but there is no…
15yo: …exactly
Me:
15yo: Apparently, it’s 4

This is funny because ChatGPT is so, so wrong about pi. As an irrational number, pi has a nonterminating decimal representation; there’s no last digit of pi. The joke, however, relies on an assumption that ChatGPT is supposed to be some kind of answer machine, a tool for answering questions correctly. However, ChatGPT is famously not that. It’s well known for “hallucinating” facts and inventing citations. There are, in fact, a lot of educators who are worried that students will rely too much on ChatGPT and similar tools because these tools produce text that is factually incorrect. For example, check out this YouTube video of a chemistry instructor evaluating the accuracy of ChatGPT’s answers to various organic chemistry questions. Spoiler: It didn’t do that great.

So if these tools aren’t answer machines, what are they? I would argue that ChatGPT and similar tools are actually wordsmiths. They are powered by large language models that mix words together to create fluent prose. Ask it to draft an essay for you on a given topic, and it will put words together to do just that. Ask it to revise that draft based on your feedback, and it will do that, too. See, for instance, how Ethan Mollick used Bing to help him craft the final paragraph of his April 26th newsletter. Ask it to summarize a long text, and, because it’s good with words, you’ll get a pretty decent summary. It’s a wordsmith that actually doesn’t know what it’s writing but still produces intelligible texts.

This is, in fact, the other reason that educators are worried about AI text generators, because they can quickly produce acceptable responses to pretty standard essay question prompts, and educators are worried that students will use these tools to cheat, whether the essay question is of the “writing as assessment,” “writing to learn,” or “learn to write” variety. Because ChatGPT and its peers are good with words.

I’m struck by how the initial reporting and framing of these tools affect the ways we think about them. While AI text generators were seen as answer machines (albeit flawed ones), AI image generators have been seen as “smiths” of a different kind, working with pixels to create images. While a tool like ChatGPT making stuff up is seen as a problem, if I ask Midjourney or DALL-E (a couple of popular image generators) to give me a scene of robots playing basketball, no one worries about the result not being real-world realistic.

If AI text generators are tools for learning, as I argued on the blog last month, then I think it’s helpful to think of them as wordsmithing tools. Does a student struggle to come up with counter arguments for their thesis? Ask an AI tool to generate a few. Does a student freeze up when confronted with a blank page? Ask an AI tool to write a first draft. Does a student find it hard to adopt the right voice for their writing? Ask an AI tool to rewrite a draft essay in different voices. These are all wordsmithing tasks that ChatGPT and its ilk can handle pretty well.

Please note that I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t help students learn to develop counter arguments or to get past writer’s block or to figure out their writing voice. I am suggesting, however, that AI tools might be used to help students learn these skills, just as my digital camera helped me learn photography. Cynthia Alby uses the metaphor of learning to ride a bicycle with training wheels to talk about how AI tools might provide a kind of scaffolding for students learning writing skills. When I heard that metaphor, I was reminded of a 2012 blog post by Mark Sample, in which he talks about balance bikes as a different way to teach kids to ride bicycles. Learning with training wheels means getting help with balancing while learning to pedal, while learning with a balance bike means not worrying about pedaling while learning to balance, which is apparently easier for most kids. We might need to think carefully about where our students need the kind of support that AI tools can provide, and the answer might vary by student.

I’ve been using the training wheels and balance bike metaphors in my recent talks on teaching with AI, and I was all ready to bust out the “AI as wordsmith” argument above at a talk I gave earlier this week. But then I signed up for ChatGPT Pro to see what ChatGPT’s plugins are all about. Back in March, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced that the tool would have plugins that allowed it to communicate (in a fashion) with other web tools and websites. It’s taken me three months, but I finally started playing around with these plugins. I quickly realized that some of the advice I had given faculty earlier in the year about designing “ChatGPT-proof” assignments hadn’t been accurate for a while!

For instance, if I ask the free version of ChatGPT, which uses GPT-3.5, to tell me about the May 2023 Supreme Court decision that dealt with Andy Warhol’s art, here’s the response I get:

I apologize for the confusion, but as of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, I’m not aware of any specific Supreme Court decision in May 2023 related to Andy Warhol’s art. It’s possible that such a decision may have occurred after my knowledge cutoff or it may be a hypothetical scenario that hasn’t actually taken place. I recommend checking reliable news sources or legal references to get the most accurate and up-to-date information on any recent Supreme Court decisions regarding Andy Warhol’s art.

If I think about ChatGPT as an answer machine, I’m not getting the answer I want, but at least the tool is telling me what it doesn’t know. That’s an improvement over how the chatbot presented information at the start of 2023. But watch what happens when I use the same prompt in ChatGPT Pro with the VoxScript plugin enabled:

In May 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Andy Warhol Foundation in a copyright infringement case. The case was centered around a series of silk screen images that Warhol created based on a photograph of the late musician Prince, taken by photographer Lynn Goldsmith in 1981.

The court ruled in a 7-2 vote that Warhol infringed on Goldsmith’s copyright. The case hinged on whether Warhol’s images of Prince transformed Goldsmith’s photograph to a great enough degree to stave off claims of copyright infringement and therefore be considered as fair use under copyright law.

Goldsmith had sued the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (AWF) for copyright infringement after the foundation licensed an image of Warhol’s titled “Orange Prince” based on Goldsmith’s image of the pop artist to Condé Nast in 2016 for use in its publication Vanity Fair…

It goes on for another couple of paragraphs, and it gives me the news source it used to generate this summary of the case, a May 18th NPR report. This version of ChatGPT is indeed acting like an answering machine!

Quick sidebar: It is also now possible to share one’s ChatGPT correspondences with others. A few months ago, you needed some third-party tool to do so, but now ChatGPT has a share button for every chat. Thus the argument that there’s no “paper trail” for how one uses ChatGPT is no longer true.

I used ChatGPT for the above examples, but please remember that ChatGPT isn’t the only game in town. I asked Bing about the Andy Warhol case, and I got a similar summary, this time with three different news sources cited. Google Bard gave me a similar summary and added some text about how fair use works in the United States. Its sources, however, were meeting notes from a 2004 Congressional subcommittee hearing and a Quizlet created for maybe a law course? Your mileage may vary with these tools.

So are these tools now, in fact, answer machines? I’m going to argue that while they can be used in that way, a better way to think of them is as interfaces to other systems. Just as Siri or Alexa act as a voice-based interface to the apps on your digital devices, ChatGPT and Bing and such are text-based interfaces to, for instance, all the transcripts attached to all the YouTube videos. These tools are still wordsmiths, but wordsmiths used as interfaces.

To use a left field example, the fast food chain Wendy’s recently announced that it was working on an AI chatbot to take drive-thru orders. That’s AI-as-interface, with the chatbot, which is good with words, taking spoken orders for a cheeseburger and a Frosty and turning that into an order in the restaurant’s food production system. For a more academic example, consider Elicit, an AI research assistant that can help you find research in its corpus of 115 million academic papers that might address your research question. Ask it a question like “How should I form groups of students when using group work in the college classroom?” and (because it’s good with words) it will return a table of potentially relevant papers, summarized and tagged by intervention, sample size, and outcomes.

AI as answer machine, AI as wordsmith, AI as interface… I’m not sure where we’ll land with how we think about these tools, but I believe these framings are helpful in assessing what the tools can and cannot do and what roles they might play as learning technologies.

One more caveat: Most of what I’ve presented here is focused squarely on AI text generation tools powered by large language models. There are lots of other kinds of AI tools, like Cornell University’s Merlin app, which can identify birds by their songs, or that AI-powered agent that excelled at the strategic negotiation game Diplomacy, that don’t fall into any of the categories I’ve described here.

The best thing you are likely to read about the Supreme Court affirmative action decision — or rather the response to it — is Freddie’s take. Two points strike me as especially important: first, that the whole kerfuffle is a distraction from any actually meaningful racial politics in this country, since a candidate who has to go to Columbia or Amherst rather than Harvard is not exactly a victim; and second, that there’s a massive media freakout about this because so many people in our media are the products of elite universities. Several decades ago, when most journalists attended mediocre universities or, often enough, were not even college educated, we would have had a chance to have this story like this presented with some fresh, clear, well-seasoned perspective. But our journalists haven’t had any of that commodity on hand for a long, long time.

A Time Blocking Comparison: Sunsama vs. Fantastical

Habits change. Inspiration comes and goes. Workflows spring up and taper off. But for me, time blocking never changes. Time blocking has become fundamental to my work day, ensuring I have chunks of time to complete tasks and ensuring my colleagues know what I’m up to. Time blocking structures my day. Time blocking blocks out extra meetings. Time blocking pushes me forward.

I’m not sure if one could say there are many forms of time blocking. By and large, time blocking consists of putting tasks into your calendar with a time duration for completion. To my knowledge, nearly all forms of time blocking consist of tasks — rather than events — building out your calendar.

But some apps do structure various parts of the time blocking workflow differently. Today, I’m hoping to discuss the two apps I have the most experience with on the Mac: Sunsama and Fantastical. These are very different apps — one is a full-on productivity app with many productivity features; the other a calendar app on steroids. However, both have succeeded for me in some shape or form and both have fallen flat in other facets.

Many may not even consider Fantastical a productivity app at all. Recent updates have me thinking otherwise, though — you can now quickly drag and drop tasks into your calendar and use natural language parsing to set a duration for the task. Those tasks sync over to the built-in Reminders app or Todoist, providing integration with other productivity apps. And Fantastical also provides excellent meeting scheduling features. Think Calendly, but in a Fantastical style. Overall, I think Fantastical is right at home in any time blocking conversation.

To me, there are three major stages to a time blocked day:

1. Planning your day
2. Working through your day
3. Reviewing your day

Sunsama and Fantastical both play a role in all three stages, but differently.

Without further ado…

Planning

The planning stage for me consists of sitting down, looking at all my task silos, and building out a day to work on the most important items. I aim to complete this in 15 minutes or less. Some days I prefer granularity and specificity (“reply to this email”) and some days I prefer generalities (“email”).

Sunsama’s Planning Features

Sunsama does an incredible job helping you plan out your day. Each morning, Sunsama pings you with a reminder to build out your day. The planning process works in the following order:

1. What do you want to get done today?
2. How long will each thing take you to complete?
3. What can wait for another day?
4. How do you want the most important tasks structured in your calendar?

Sunsama rocks in the planning department. You can quickly drop all tasks you want to complete in a day in step #1. This is effectively your “Inbox” of tasks. Sunsama also integrates with Notion, Todoist, Clickup, Github, Exchange, Gmail, and more, ensuring you can actually bring in your emails and other tasks from a wide variety of apps all at once. This first step is basically the ultimate productivity inbox.

Once done, you can also tag your tasks “Work” or “Personal”, set an estimated duration time, and add any other notes to build out the task’s context. This can become quite granular and can take some time if you have many shorter duration tasks.

In step #3, you can defer the less important tasks to a future date.

In step #4, you can use some automation features by clicking a certain key to automatically build out your calendar based on the duration of each task created in step #1. Sunsama ties a tag (“work” or “personal”) to the calendar of your choice. This effectively creates a unique calendar event for each task you add in step #4 — perfect for notifying your colleagues what you’re up to each day.

Fantastical’s Planning Features

Fantastical doesn’t have a built-out planning workflow of any sort. There are no queues to sit-down and tackle your day. There are no task silos or multiple inboxes to bring in everything you want to do into one specific list. There are no pings or notifications to get you off on the right track.

However, since Fantastical integrates nicely with the Reminders app — which itself integrates with a few other apps on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac — you can still build out a planning workflow in Fantastical.

My planning workflow involves Spark (my email app), Reminders, and Fantastical. I tend to swipe important emails over from Spark to Reminders, which nicely show up inside Fantastical’s “Tasks” section.

From there, I can drag specific emails and tasks right into my calendar. Each task adds a default event with a default duration in your calendar, but you can quickly edit this by stating the number of minutes you expect the task to take by adding “[15m]” or “[120m]” to the task. Fantastical will then update the duration of the time block automatically.

The biggest hiccup for me with Fantastical’s planning process is the fact that time blocked tasks do not become calendar events. This means my colleagues can’t see what I’m doing during the day. If I need to block out time to notify my colleagues what my plans are, I’ll have to create a second generic time block within a calendar. This duplicates some of the planning work.

Action

As you work through the day, you’ll have to return to your productivity app to check in on your progress, mark tasks completed, and make changes to your plans. Again, Sunsama and Fantastical are very different in this regard.

Sunsama’s Time Tracking Features

Sunsama has two specific time tracking features some users will love:

1. Actual time tracking, i.e. tap the space bar to begin a task and track to the second how long it takes you to complete.
2. Less specific time tracking, where you notify Sunsama how long it took you to complete a task after finishing.

The first method provides an extra area to store notes as you work through the task. This works great for writing meeting minutes and referencing any other notes you added to the task when you planned out your day.

The second method is ideal for folks who get interrupted throughout the day and forget to toggle the task’s timer. This is definitely where I fall — instead of tracking down to the minute, I complete a task and mark how long it took me to complete, generally with a round estimate to the 15 minute mark.

Tracking time in Sunsama is fundamental to the last stage of time blocking: review.

Fantastical’s Ease of Use

Fantastical is king at capturing events and tasks throughout the day via its natural language parsing field. Simply typing task Pick up car from oil change at 3:00PM [15m] will create a 15-minute time blocked task at 3:00PM to pick up the car from the oil change. This is ideal for capturing new tasks and events throughout the day.

However, there aren’t any specific time tracking features baked into Fantastical at this point. Jumping in and out of the app is pretty easy and you can check off tasks in any calendar view or the Tasks list view in the left sidebar. If you want to be more specific about how long it took you to complete the task, you can change the “[15m]” moniker in the title of the task to the amount of time it actually took you. You won’t be able to review the difference between your planned duration and your actual duration this way, but it certainly helps in the review stage of your time blocked day.

Review

Finally, the review stage. What good is all this planning if you can’t go back, review, and learn from your mistakes? Reviewing each time blocked day can be important in different ways — you can review to ensure you don’t miss any billable time, you can review to determine if your expectations aren’t matched with reality, and you can review to provide a jumpstart to your next day’s plans. No matter the reason, review is fundamental to good time blocking.

Sunsama’s Built-In Review Process

Sunsama’s review process isn’t as built out as its planning process, but it’s still great.

When your day is about to wrap up — which can be set to any time you want — Sunsama will allow you to work through the shutdown routine. The shutdown provides analytics, breaking down how much time you spent working on work and personal tasks and which tasks you completed. There’s also an opportunity to write out your thoughts on the day and post those thoughts to Slack.

More than anything though, the shutdown routine in Sunsama triggers and somewhat forces you to step back from your computer. When it’s time to be done for the day, Sunsama can force you to be done for the day. If you’re aiming for a better work-life balance, Sunsama is certainly trying to do its part.

You can read more about Sunsama’s startup and shutdown processes in our article right here.

Fantastical’s Review Process

Just like the prior two stages, Fantastical doesn’t have a specific shutdown or review process. You can, however, ensure you have a shutdown routine through a few more manual ways.

First, I tend to create blocks at the beginning of my day labelled “Wake, prep, and arrive” and at the end of my day titled “Shutdown”. Both of these can be very easily created using a shortcut in the Shortcuts app, which you can trigger from anywhere in iOS or macOS. Once created, you have your day’s start and end times. This shutdown time block ensures you have the time you need to review your day and move into the next one.

Second, if you change the number of minutes for each planned task to the number of minutes for actual time taken to complete the task, you can review your day pretty easily in either of Fantastical’s Day or Week views. To view completed tasks, you’ll have to jump into the View menu and select Show Completed Tasks. Otherwise, completed tasks will disappear off your calendar. If you change that duration when you finish a task, you should be able to quickly tell where your daily plan went awry.

Wrap Up

Can you tell? Indeed, Sunsama is built for time blocking. In each of the above three steps, Sunsama has a feature or workflow to work through each day. Fantastical’s time blocking features are quite new, meaning any time blocking routines you want to use inside Fantastical will be more manual by nature.

And this is fine — some folks may find Sunsama’s built-in routines to be too stringent and structured. You may find Sunsama to be too granular — each individual email and individual task has to be added to your calendar, creating the potential for a calendar littered with short events throughout the day and constant need to interact with Sunsama as you work through your task list. Some folks may prefer the generalities and manualness Fantastical provides in these regards.

Or, planners will be planners — some folks will adore the top-to-bottom planned approach Sunsama provides.

You do ultimately pay for the specific Sunsama routines. There’s a price difference between these two apps, to be sure. For those who have endless buckets of tasks, Sunsama’s monthly cost will be a bargain. For those who either have better control of their buckets or want a more general approach to time blocking, Fantastical’s cost may be easier to stomach.

Hopefully the above breakdown provides two options on opposite ends of the time blocking spectrum to help build out your daily calendar.

Artists Unite for Pride: Discover New Work + Support LGBTQIA+ Youth at Artsy Impact Auction

In celebration of Pride, Artsy happily presents the Artsy Impact Auction: Artists for Pride, benefiting the Ali Forney Center. New works by a diverse group of emerging and established artists will be bid on through June 29th at 12 pm EST. TM Davy, Didier William, Jo Messer, Kyle Meyer, Kate Pincus-Whitney, Erin M. Riley, Emma Kohlmann, Caitlin Cherry, Elizabeth Glaessner, Jordan Nassar, Haas Brothers, Vickie Vainionpää, Leilah Babirye, Darryl Westly, and Nedia Were have come together in allyship to support the cause by way of sharing their talents.

Vickie Vainionpåå, Soft Body Dynamics 111, 2023

Ali Forney Center’s mission is to protect LGBTQIA+ youth from homelessness and to empower them with the tools needed to live independently. Through this partnership, the auction will directly support the critical care, direction, education, and career services that Ali Forney Center offers to these at-risk homeless youth.

Nedia Were, The Black Swan, 2022

We had the opportunity to speak with Simon Haas of the Haas Brothers, who have their Fairies Witherspoon piece featured in Artists for Pride (seen in the lead image). “This piece is from a body of work we call Fairy Berries. Each of these pieces is a little like a Faberge Egg, small and ornate,” said Simon. “These pieces are little meditations – they take a really, really long time and a steady hand, and the resulting piece is an opulent little world of its own.”

Kate Pincus Whitney, Gertrude Stein and Slice B Toklas Muss

“A lot of the work we make is playful, but an equal amount of it is intensely process-based. When I am doing beadwork or making process-intensive projects like this I am very much in a meditative state of mind,” Simon shared. “This kind of work is almost necessary for me and my mental health.

Leilah Babirye, Lady Nabuuso, 2016

Measuring 10 1/4 × 4 1/2 × 4 1/2-inches, Fairies Witherspoon is hand thrown and slip trailed porcelain detailed with gold lustre and brass plate. The underside is stamped with “HAAS BROTHERS 2020”, and it’s accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity signed by Nikolai and Simon Haas.

Kyle Meyer, Unidentified 91a, 2023

“Being gay myself, and having experienced first hand the challenges that come with that, it is really meaningful to me to be able to support my community. I can’t imagine the added difficulty of facing homelessness caused by or made more difficult by being LGBTQIA+. This is a truly important cause, particularly in this time of increasing intolerance.” Simon went on to add that he plans to “continue being a vocally out gay man and advocating for others in my community. It is so important that we make ourselves heard and support each other in our fight for equality. The LGBTQIA+ community is not a monolith, we are a collection of communities, but by coming together and advocating for each other we can accomplish so much more than we could on our own.”

Jo Messer, Show up whenever, 2023

To learn more about Artsy Impact Auction: Artists for Pride or place a bid, visit artsy.net.

The River Twice

Every spring, the not-quite-pristine waters of Boston Harbor fill with schools of silvery, hand-sized fish known as alewives and blueback herring.

Some of them gather at the mouth of a slow-moving river that winds through one of the most densely populated and heavily industrialized watersheds in America. After spending three or four years in the Atlantic Ocean, the herring have returned to spawn in the freshwater ponds where they were born, at the headwaters of the Mystic River.

In my imagination, the herring hesitate before committing to this last leg of their journey. Do they remember what awaits them?

To reach their spawning grounds seven miles from the harbor, the herring will have to swim past shoals of rusted shopping carts and ancient tires embedded in the toxic muck left by four centuries of human enterprise. Tanneries, shipyards, slaughterhouses, chemical and glue factories, wastewater utilities, scrap yards, power plants — all have used the Mystic as a drainpipe, either deliberately or through neglect.

But today, the water is clean enough to sustain fish and many other kinds of fauna. As they push upstream, the herring may hear the muffled sounds of laughter, bicycle bells, car horns and music coming from riverside parks. They will slip under hundreds of kayaks, dinghies, motorboats, rowing sculls and paddleboards and dart through the shadows cast by a total of thirteen bridges. At three different points they will muscle their way up fish ladders to get past the dams that punctuate the upper reaches of the river. They will generally ignore baited hooks and garish lures cast by anglers. And they will try to evade the herring gulls, cormorants, herons, striped bass, snapping turtles, and even the occasional bald eagle that love to eat them.

Last year, an estimated 420,000 herring made it through this gauntlet and into the safety of three urban ponds where they could lay their eggs.

And almost no one noticed.

That an urban river should teem with wildlife while serving as a magnet for human recreation no longer seems remarkable to the people of this part of Boston. Few are familiar with the chain of human actions and reactions that produced this happy outcome. Fewer still know that for most of the past 150 years, the Mystic River was seen as an eyesore, a civic disgrace, and a monument to inertia, indifference, and greed.

In this sense, the Mystic is an extreme example of a paradoxical pattern repeated in urban waterways around the world.

First, humans discover the advantages of living next to rivers, which provide a convenient source of drinking water, food, transportation and waste disposal. For a few decades — or even centuries —  these uses coexist, even as people downstream begin to complain about the smell. A Bronze Age settlement eventually becomes a trading post, which grows into a medieval town and, centuries later, an industrializing city, smell and waste building up along the way. Until one hot day in the summer of 01858 a statesman in London describes the River Thames as “a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors.”

Civil engineers are summoned, and they deliver the bad news. The only way to resurrect the river and get rid of the smell is to install a massive system for underground sewage collection and pass strict laws prohibiting industrial discharges. The necessary infrastructure is staggeringly expensive and will take years to build, at great inconvenience to city residents. Even after the system is completed, the river will need at least half a century to gradually purge itself to the point where swimming or fishing might once again be safe.

The implication of this temporal caveat — that politicians who announce the project will be long dead when it delivers its full intended benefits — would normally be a non-starter for a municipal budget committee. But the revulsion provoked by raw sewage, and its power as a symbol of backwardness, make it impossible to postpone the matter indefinitely. In London, the tipping point came during the “Great Stink” of 01858, when the combination of a heat wave and low water levels made things so unbearable that Parliament was forced to fund a revolutionary drainage system that is still in use today.

In city after city, similar crises set in motion a process that can be neatly plotted on a graph. Increasing investments in sanitation infrastructure and stricter enforcement of environmental laws gradually lead to better water quality. Fish and waterfowl eventually return, to the amazement of local residents. Riverfront real estate soars in value, prompting the construction of new housing, parks, restaurants and music venues. Generations that had lived “with their backs to the river” rediscover the pleasures of relaxing on its banks. In many European cities, once-squalid waterways are now so immaculate that downtown office workers take lunch-time dips in the summer, no showers required. In Bern, Switzerland, and Munich, Germany, some people “swim to work.”

Then, in the final stage of this process, everyone succumbs to collective amnesia.

Forget, recall, demand, repeat

In Ian McEwan’s 02005 novel Saturday, the protagonist briefly reflects on the infrastructure that makes life in his London townhouse so pleasant: “…an eighteenth-century dream bathed and embraced by modernity, by streetlight from above, and from below fiber-optic cables, and cool fresh water coursing down pipes, and sewage borne away in an instant of forgetting.”

While the engineering, biology and economics of river restorations are relatively straightforward, the stories we tell ourselves about them are not. “An instant of forgetting” could well be the motto of all well-functioning sanitation systems, which conveniently detach us from the reality of the waste we produce. But the chain of events that brings us to this instant often begins with the act of remembering an uncontaminated past.

Call it ecological nostalgia. A search of the words “pollution” and “Mystic River” in the digital archives of the Boston Globe turns up nearly 700 items spread over the past 155 years, and offers a useful proxy for tracking the perceptions of the river over time. We think of pollution as a modern phenomenon, but in the late 19th century the Globe was full of letters, reports and opinions recalling the river in an earlier, uncorrupted state. In 01865, a writer complains that formerly delicious oysters from the Mystic have been “rendered unpalatable” by pollution. In 01876 a correspondent claims that as a boy he enjoyed swimming in the Mystic — before it was turned into an open sewer. Four years later a writer laments that the river herring fishery “was formerly so great that the towns received quite a large revenue from it.” And by 01905, a columnist calls for the “improvement and purification” of the Mystic, urging the Board of Health and the Metropolitan Park Commission to work together on “the restoration of the river to its former attractive and sanitary condition.”

These sepia-colored evocations of a prelapsarian past are a recurring feature of river restoration narratives to this day. “Sadly, only septuagenarians can now recall summer days a half century earlier when the laughter of children swimming in the Mystic River echoed in this vicinity,” writes a Globe columnist in 01993. Last year, in a piece on the spectacular recovery of Boston’s better-known Charles River, Derrick Z. Jackson quoted an activist who believes such images were critical to building public support for the project: “people remembered that their grandmothers swam in the Charles and wanted that for themselves again.” Whether or not anyone was actually swimming in these rivers in the mid-20th century is irrelevant — the idea is evocative and, as a call to action, effective.

But the notion that a watercourse can be healed and returned to an Edenic state is also disingenuous. As Heraclitus elegantly put in the fourth century BC, “No man ever steps into a river twice; for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.” Biologists are quick to point out that the Mystic watershed will never revert to its 17th century state. As chronicled in Richard H. Beinecke’s The Mystic River: A Natural and Human History and Recreation Guide (02013), when English colonists arrived they encountered a thinly populated tidal marshland where the native Massachussett, Nipmuc and Pawtucket tribes had lived sustainably for at least two thousand years. Since then, the Mystic and its tributaries have been dammed, channelized, straightened and dredged into an unstable ecosystem that will require active maintenance in perpetuity.

As the physical river has changed, so have the subjective justifications for restoring it. The Boston Globe archives show that for a 50-year period starting in the 01860s, people were primarily motivated by the loss of oysters and fish stocks described above, and by fears that exposure to sewage might lead to outbreaks of cholera and typhoid. But by the time of the Great Depression, the first municipal sewage systems had largely succeeded in channeling wastewater away from residential areas, and concerns about the river had found new targets.

Writers to the Globe began to complain that fuel leaks from barges on the Mystic were spoiling “the only bathing beach” in the city of Somerville, one of the main towns along the river. In 01930, the Globe reported that local and state representatives “stormed the office of the Metropolitan Planning Division yesterday to request action on the 29-year-old project of improving and developing certain tracts along the Mystic riverbank for playground and bathing purposes.” A decade later, not much had changed. “For years,” claimed an editorial in 01940, “the Mystic River has been unfit for bathing because of pollution and hundreds of children in Somerville, Medford and Arlington have been deprived of their most natural and accessible swimming place.”

In the 01960s and 70s, this emphasis on recreational uses of the river broadened into the ecological priorities of the nascent environmental movement. Apocalyptic images of fire burning on the surface of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River galvanized public alarm over the state of urban waterways. President Lyndon Johnson authorized billions of dollars in federal funds to “end pollution” and subsidize the construction of new sewage treatment plants. And the Clean Water Act of 01972 imposed ambitious benchmarks and aggressive timelines for curtailing source pollution.

Suddenly, the tiny community of Bostonians who cared about the Mystic felt like they were part of a global movement. Articles from this period feature junior high schoolers taking water samples in the Mystic and collecting signatures for anti-pollution petitions they would send to state representatives. The petitions worked. News of companies being fined for unlawful discharges became routine, and the Globe began inviting readers to report scofflaws for its “Polluter of the Week” column. An article in 01970 described a group of students at Tufts University who spent a semester conducting an in-depth study of the river and recommended forming a Mystic River Watershed Association (MyRWA) to coordinate clean-up efforts.

The creation of the MyRWA, which has just celebrated its 50th anniversary, mirrors the rise of activist organizations that would become powerful agents of accountability and continuity in settings where municipal officials often serve just two-year terms. In a letter to the editor from 01985, MyRWA’s first president, Herbert Meyer, chastised the regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency for ignoring scientific evidence regarding efforts to clean Boston Harbor. “Volunteer groups like ours have limited budgets and no staff,” he wrote. “Our strengths are our longevity – we remember earlier studies – and objectivity. We speak our minds: Not being hired, we cannot be fired, if we take an unpopular stand.”

MyRWA volunteers began collecting regular water samples and sending them to municipal authorities to keep up pressure for change. They also found creative ways to get local residents to overcome their preconceptions and reconnect with the river: paddling excursions, a series of riverside murals painted by local high school students, periodic meet-ups to remove invasive plants and a herring counting project that tracks the fish on their yearly spawning run.

Cathedrals of flux

For the last two decades, coverage in the Boston Globe has celebrated the efforts of these and other volunteers (as in a 02002 profile of Roger Frymire, who paddles up and down the Mystic sniffing for suspicious outfalls: “He has a really sensitive nose, particularly for sewage”). But it has also continued to display the negativity bias that is perhaps inevitable in a daily newspaper. In a 02015 editorial, the paper urges city officials to “Set 2024 goal for a swimmable Mystic” as part of an (ultimately abandoned) bid to host the Olympic Games. “If Olympic organizers moved the swim… to the Mystic River, the 2024 deadline could spur the long-overdue clean-up of Boston’s forgotten river,” the editorial claimed, as if the Boston Globe had not chronicled each stage of that clean-up for more than a century.

For Patrick Herron, MyRWA’s current president, this “generational ignorance” is to be expected. “If we could all see what our great-great-grandparents saw, and then we zoomed to the present, we would be appalled,” he said in a recent interview. “But we can only remember what we saw 20 or 30 years ago, and things today aren’t that much different.”

Baselines shift: each generation takes progress for granted and zeroes in on a new irritant. Herron said that MyRWA’s current crop of volunteers, like their predecessors, brings a new vocabulary and fresh motivations to the table. The initial focus on water quality has morphed into a struggle for “environmental justice,” which explicitly elevates the needs of ethnic minorities, lower-income residents, and other marginalized groups that have been disproportionately affected by the Mystic’s problems. Climate change, and the increasingly frequent flooding that still causes raw sewage to spill into the river, is now at the center of debates about the next generation of infrastructure investments needed to protect the Mystic.

Lisa Brukilacchio, one of the early members of MyRWA, thinks these shifts are inevitable. “Change is cyclical,” she said. In her experience, young volunteers show little interest in what their predecessors achieved. “You fix one thing and it’s, like, over here there’s another problem. People have short attention spans, and they want to see something happen now.”

John Reinhardt, a Bostonian who was involved in MyRWA’s leadership for over 30 years, agrees with Brukilacchio and adds that this indifference to the past may be essential to preventing complacency. “I think that there is incredible value to the amnesia,” he said. “Because of the amnesia, people come in and say, damn it, this isn’t right. I have to do something about it, because nobody else is!”

To generate a sense of urgency and compel action, it may perhaps be necessary to minimize both the scale of previous crises and the contributions of our forebears. Bradford Johnson, an artist based in Somerville, sees the Mystic as a canvas onto which each generation overlays its own fears and aspirations. In a series of paintings (three of which accompany this essay) Johnson juxtaposes archival images of the Mystic, fragments of magazine advertising, photos of local wildlife, and single-celled organisms viewed under a microscope. In each panel, layers of paint are interspersed with multiple coats of clear acrylic, creating a thick, semi-translucent surface that cracks as it dries.

Johnson’s paintings dwell on the arbitrary ways in which we select and manipulate memories of a landscape. They also incorporate details from elaborate charts created by Clarence Larkin (01850–01924), an American Baptist pastor and author whose writings were popular among conservative Protestants. The charts were studied by believers who wanted to understand Biblical prophecy and map God's action in history. I interpret Johnson’s inclusion of these panels as a nod to the role of human will in the destruction and subsequent reclamation of a landscape, and to religious and secular notions of redemption.

It so happens that the timescales required to resurrect an urban river are similar to those needed to construct a gothic cathedral. Both enterprises depend on thousands of anonymous individuals to perform mundane, often-unglamorous tasks over several generations.

But the similarities end there. Cathedrals emerge from a single blueprint in predictable and well-ordered stages. When completed, they preserve the work of each mason, carpenter and stained-glass artisan as a static monument to a shared creed. They are made of stone to underscore the illusion of permanence.

Rivers, with their ceaseless, shape-shifting flux, remind us that none of our labor will last. The process of reclaiming a dead river is the opposite of orderly: it lurches through seasons of outrage and indifference, earnest clean-ups followed by another fuel spill, budget battles and political grand-standing, nostalgia and frustration. It is messy, elusive, and never actually finished.

Yet in Boston and many other cities, this process is working. And as testaments to a different kind of human agency, resurrected rivers are, in their own way, no less majestic than the structures at Canterbury or Notre-Dame.

“Cathedral thinking” has long been a slogan among evangelists for multi-generational collaboration. “River restoration thinking” may be a more apposite model for tackling the problems of our fractious age.

It’s Pat

Wednesday briefing: Inside the marking boycott that has thrown university students’ futures into the air

In today’s newsletter: A stalemate between lecturers and universities has left thousands of exams and dissertations ungraded – what’s the dispute about, and how might it end?

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Good morning. Finishing the last exam of your degree course should be one of the happiest moments of a student’s career. The stress of finals is over, the hard work has paid off. Graduation beckons and, beyond that, the next exciting stage of life.

But for tens of thousands this summer, the reality is proving very different. A marking boycott by the union representing many UK university lecturers means that tests are being left ungraded and dissertations unassessed.

Net zero | The government’s plans to hit net zero have been criticised in a report by its own advisers that warns targets are being missed on nearly every front. Lord Deben, outgoing chair of the CCC, said the UK had “lost the leadership” on climate action shown at Cop26 in 2021 and done “a number of things” that were “utterly unacceptable”.

Julian Sands | A body that was discovered in the wilderness near Mount Baldy in California on Saturday has been confirmed to be that of the missing British actor Julian Sands. San Bernardino county sheriff’s department had been coordinating a search for the actor who was reported missing on 13 January.

Health | Senior doctors in England have voted to go on strike over pay for the first time in nearly 50 years. Hospital consultants will strike for two days on 20 July, which will bring major disruption to services that have already had to reschedule 651,000 appointments since a wave of NHS strikes began last December.

Covid | Matt Hancock has said he is “profoundly sorry” for his part in mistakes that meant the UK was not properly prepared for Covid. He told the Covid public inquiry that he had not properly challenged assurances that sufficient planning was in place.

UK economy | The UK’s largest mobile and broadband companies have been accused of fuelling “greedflation” after pushing through the biggest round of price hikes for more than 30 years. Six companies controlling most of the telecoms market all charged a 3.9% supplement on top of their annual inflation-linked increases this year, meaning millions of customers have faced mid-contract price increases of up to 17.3%.