Just read this WaPo review of Natalia Petrzela's book on American fitness culture: https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/01/05/fit-nation-exercise-culture-petrzela-book-review/

Now I'm looking for a comparative history of class, nationhood & sports. Does this exist? I'm most familiar w/ the German case, where the development of athletic *culture* runs partly through people like Turnvater Jahn, and the development of athletic *associations* is inseparable from early-20th century working class sports/leisure clubs. (Nur der BVB!)

On the power of categories as sources of meaning.

Simmel: "Strangers are not really conceived as individuals, but as strangers of a particular type: the element of distance is no less general in regard to them than the element of nearness."

My [German] parents: "We are terribly confused. Is your jacket an inside jacket or an outside jacket? The buttons say outside, but the fabric says inside."

question in the wake of the #ChatGPT and #Lensa generative AI hype: are there any good examples of Amara's law ("We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run") being obviously wrong?

#generativeAI #STS #ArtificialIntelligence #StyleGAN

@pamelaoliver one of the first social science classes I ever took as an undergrad was with Stanley Hoffmann, who said something I've tried hard to remember: "The delusion that everyone wants the same things you want is at the core of most failures of US foreign policy."