The tyranny of Microsoft Word
There MUST be something better out there.
Crystal Lee
portrait I am an Assistant Professor at MIT studying the politics of data, disability, and the internet. My main project right now is a new book, The Soci...
Latest posts
In defense of pedagogical leniency
Your class is really just not that important.
When your dog gets cancer
The price of snuggles, companionship, and pure joy is inevitable heartbreak.
How to talk yourself out of online despair
Sometimes you just have to emotionally disconnect from the internet.
How to respond to hostile academic Q&A
Why are there so many assholes at conferences?
I think I'm a football fan now
The World Cup really did a number on me.
So you want to go to graduate school...
There are a lot of very cool things about getting a PhD. The main one, of course, is that for a few years, your literal job consists of working on something you (ostensibly) are really passionate about: you get to think about it, read about it, write about it, and talk to other people who are also really into it. If you end up in a fully funded program at a private university, 1 for a few years,…
The enshittification of things (and a list of private equity-owned companies)
I recently discovered the delightful website Worse on Purpose , which is a database of brands and investigations about the enshittification of things, which generally boils down to this: make a great product, get customers to use the great product, then make things worse on purpose to extract every last dime from them. "Worse on purpose" has many faces: planned obsolescence, absurd subscriptions…
Cutting the cord to the cloud
In a bout of retail therapy, tired of algorithms running my media consumption and fed up with being connected and reachable all the time, I decided to buy myself an mp3 player. It's part of my new ✨offline✨ aesthetic, where I try to write on a dedicated word processor, read physical books, and otherwise take notes on paper. (I've been obsessed with fountain pens for over a decade now, so it's as…
On happiness
I've been trying to create a sustainable, consistent routine for myself lately. This may be a fool's errand in the face of chronic illness and the state of the world. However, in the last couple of months, I've found a lot of solace in routine (even mundane) days. It's not a revolutionary idea, but the real switch for me has been thinking of the habits that make up this routine as morally neutral…