What I’ve been thinking about for the last 6 months (besides SentenceWeaver)

Some things that have been on my mind:

• Catherine and my many recent conversations about the new SAT reading sections
• Related thoughts we’ve had about SAT vocabulary challenges
• Thoughts on verbosity and hedges (“obviously”, “apparently”).
• The Dreamy Child Syndrome, aka Multi-Factor Introversion (not autism, and not in the DSM!)
• Beyond background knowledge: other background variables in reading comprehension
• How the Curiosity Mindset (or lack thereof) affects comprehension
• Clues that “kids these days” are doing less and less careful reading
• Clues that they’re getting less and less writing instruction
• Thoughts on “Why do you think that?”, “Yeah!”, “It’s a good question”, and “one less thing to worry about”
• The ongoing recovery of the English language from the Norman Conquest (or is it something more sinister?)
• J’s adventures as a college undergraduate

For now, I’ll share the following email exchange—a sign, perhaps, of things to come:

E: Katharine, happy to meet with you. I will have my new assistant help us. Amy, can you help set up a meeting with Katharine next week?

E: I forgot to cc Amy.

K: Great—Thank you, E! Next week I am quite open Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

A: Hi Katharine. Just wanted to check in and confirm what action you’d like me to take.

If this is an entirely new meeting you’d like me to get on the calendar, just let me know “Amy, please schedule a meeting” and CC in the people you’d like to meet with.

Alternatively, if you’d like me to make any updates to an existing meeting, could you please resend this message in the original thread for that meeting?

For now, I’ll take no action on this.

Amy

E: Katharine, Thank you for your patience with my new assistant. I guess “forgot to cc Amy was not understood.”  So trying again. I will take over if it doesn’t work.

Amy can you please schedule a meeting with Katharine next week?

Thank you.

A: Hi Katharine,

Does Monday at 11:00 AM EST (Eastern Daylight Time) work?

Alternatively, E is available Monday at 2:00 PM or Tuesday at 10:00 AM.

The meeting will be a web conference.

Amy.

At this point I was ready to type an exasperated “As I said…”– but something made me to look back through this bizarre exchange.

It turns out that Amy, whose last name is Ingram, has an email signature that concludes with the following details: “Artificial intelligence that schedules meetings. Learn more at x.ai”