My first experience with automated transcription happened a decade ago. In 2010 I joined Google Voice and started getting transcripts of my voicemails. The results were, not surprisingly, underwhelming. Back then, most speech recognition software was underwhelming. Here’s my first transcript: Hi Cassandra, this is Anna 10 calling to run. Thank you for the science […]
Cassandra
This post originally ran August 16, 2018. But as COVID19 cases surge, hospitals reach capacity, and the long, dark winter descends, you can bet I’m again feeling the weltschmerz. Two years ago, a poet named Maggie Smith wrote a poem called ‘Good Bones.’ I printed it out, and I find myself reading it over and […]
Confession: I, like so many of my fellow Americans, am not getting enough sleep. Blame the baby. Blame the preschooler. Blame COVID anxiety. Blame my doomscrolling. Blame the dog, who threw up a clump of grass next to the bed at 4am. On a typical night, I sleep between six and seven hours with two […]
Yesterday we turned 10, which is like 120 in blog years. We’re celebrating all week with postcards we wrote to ourselves in May of 2010. Today Ann, Emma, and Cassie report back on the present to their younger selves, or at least offer a warning. Ann Finkbeiner In May, 2010, I was wondering whether the […]
My daughter has a well-loved copy of Richard Scarry’s book, What Do People Do All Day? The book, first published in 1968, shows all the workers in Busytown at their various jobs. Kids love it. Adults love it. Four and a quarter stars on Goodreads. But 1968 was a long time ago, a different era. […]
A couple of months ago, my husband and I drove into the Sonoran desert. We were in pursuit of the weird, heading for a mountain celebrating God’s love and constructed almost entirely out of latex paint. We left Palm Springs and drove south toward the Salton Sea.
For every story that makes it to print, there are scads that die in the reporting trenches. This is one of those stories. It originally ran in October 2013. In 2001, I moved to Bolivia to become a Peace Corps volunteer and fell deeply in love with the country. In 2010, I returned. I wanted […]
Last year, my husband and I set off on a camping adventure in Montana. We canoed to a remote site on Cliff Lake, an expanse of water that formed atop a geologic fault. The sun shone. The water was an impossible shade of aquamarine. Eagles perched atop dead trees. It was pretty damn perfect. That […]
