Stereolab have released ‘Melodie Is a Wound’, the second single from their first LP in 15 years, Instant Holograms on Metal Film. ‘Melodie Is a Wound’ is a little more subtle than lead single ‘Aerial Troubles’, but sprawls into something fascinatingly hypnotic. It’s accompanied not by a music video but a cryptic crossword puzzle compiled by Alan Connor, the crossword editor for The Guardian. Try to solve it here, and listen to the song below.
Colin Miller is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who quickly established himself as part of Asheville’s music scene, recording albums such as Indigo De Souza’s I Love My Mom and Wednesday’s I Was Trying to Describe You in the late 2010s. He released two EPs, My Love in the Winter and Hook, before coming through with his first full-length, September 2023’s Haw Creek, an understated yet radiant collection that invited listeners to the titular compound that became a haven and source of inspiration for many artists in the local community. While Miller continues to build his impressive resume as an engineer and drums in Lenderman’s live band the Wind, he also just dropped its heart-wrenching follow-up, Losin’, which features Lenderman on drums and guitar, his Wednesday/The Wind bandmates Ethan Baechtold (bass, keys, aux percussion) and Xandy Chelmis (pedal steel), and was recorded at Drop of Sun with producer Alex Farrar. There are a couple of layers to the album title: it untangles a period of intense grief following the death of Gary King, who owned the Haw Creek property and served as a father figure to Miller; it’s also a literal reference to trying to win the lottery in hopes of buying the home, which he rented for 13 years. Even when the pain swells, echoing in every note his friends play, Miller keeps up the effort – if not for the unattainable, then simply to keep the engine running.
We caught up with Colin Miller for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about his sense of home, living in and leaving Haw Creek, the process behind Losin’, and more.
Losin’ has just been released, but you’re also gearing up for another run of tour dates with MJ Lenderman, and the Florry record you helped produce comes out next month, as does the new Friendship LP. Does it feel like you’re occupying the worlds of several different albums at the same time?
Yeah, I think that’s been my dream for a long time. I love doing multiple things. I love being behind the computer and actually doing the recording, and I love being behind the drums and playing a part in a band, and I love writing songs. It just feels really freeing and affirming that I get to be in a place where I’m surrounded by so many projects that I get to either enjoy or be in, and then I get to contribute to them and be on, like, a similar level. For me, that’s been a very affirming thing for the hard work I’ve been putting into being a better writer, being a better drummer, and just a better listener. It’s interesting how everyone goes through seasons of listening to more music or not, but when you work in music, I think it’s really important to push yourself to listen and enjoy it. I’m sure you have this feeling from the critical end where it’s like, if you’re doing all of this just for work, when do you sit down for this thing just for fun, right? And if you don’t do that, it kind of spoils the whole reason you’re there. So, I’ve been pushing myself to keep that skill up, along with the technical stuff with drumming or staying on a writing routine.
Do you feel like you have diverging perspectives as a listener, a songwriter, and an engineer?
It’s kind of a mixture. There are things when you’re engineering that you have to focus on that are bare-bones, technical stuff, because you’re really just focusing on trying to get the right performance – no matter if you even like the music. That’s kind of the engineer’s creed: just to make good recordings, good mixes, or good masters. So there’s a natural divergence there. When it comes to songwriting and producing, your taste is so important. Your taste is the reason you’re there, especially with producing, but songwriting, in the modern tradition, is not just about an anthology of folk songs or country songs that you’re supposed to know anymore. It’s deeply about your taste and your specific anthology as a listener. I think that’s what people look for, and I think that’s also why there are more songwriters who bridge the producer gap and go into different things, like I do. They all feel like different jobs doing essentially the same thing: working to make a good song. When you’re a songwriter, it’s your song, and when you’re a producer, it’s someone else’s.
Before we go into the new album, I’m curious how the release of this album, and the story behind it, have maybe cast Haw Creek in a new light for you.
Somewhat. I haven’t really thought about that, but because I’ve had so much distance, so much time, from those songs, and then I had to leave that place, I think I appreciate those songs in a different way. That album, Hook, and my first EP, My Love in the Winter, were just made while I was living there kind of without a care in the world, in terms of having to leave. It’s always been kind of an impending thing; Gary was getting progressively sicker over the years, and then it had a steep drop-off in the last few months that he was alive. But there was a steady decline that we all knew was coming, like, “Oh, he’s on oxygen now,” or “I have to mow the yard because he can’t anymore.” There were just factors of life that showed he was aging. But those albums for me are nice time capsules of that period of my life when I was just living there with my friends, enjoying that space. And having the space to learn how to write songs and put together songs in a way that I thought was interesting, just like what my friends were doing at the same time.
A less tangible thing that the record grieves is the loss of a sense of home. Could you trace back your earliest memories of understanding or gaining that sense of home? I know that you lived inHaw Creek since you were 15.
We were bopping around different apartment complexes, and as soon as we moved into the house, I just felt so much less anxious. We always lived on the bottom floor in the apartment complexes, so there was always somebody walking overhead. It just felt like you never had space from people, and that always made me anxious. Living in Haw Creek, I felt like I finally had space in the house, and then it was just so beautiful, with all this natural beauty – the field out front and the woods in the back. I just kind of felt like I was in heaven. And it was pretty immediate; as soon as we moved in, I was so excited.
A catalyst for us moving was that there was a big fire at the end of our apartment complex, and we just had to pack all of our stuff at like 11 at night into the car and just be like, “I don’t know if our home is going to burn down or not,” because we were at the other end, but the fire kept jumping the firewall to the next set of apartments. And then the house we got – I just felt so lucky.
How would you describe the transition from a place that felt like a personal, familial home to a collective, musical one?
It was a natural process. I wanted to do music as my job, and I didn’t really know what that meant, but I always thought I would have to move to a city to do that. I knew I was surrounded by such talented musicians who were also my friends, so when my parents moved out the year I started college, I was like, “Yeah, I want to keep this house, and the rent is cheap, so this is a no-brainer. I should do this and get my friends in here, and we can record all the time.” And that’s pretty much exactly what happened. Then, the house next door opened up, which was about 50 feet away from mine. It needed renters, and I had some friends who had just finished their first year living on campus, which was mandatory at UNC, so they came and took that spot. Just to have that freedom of: We’ve got these houses, and we’ve all got our own introvert spaces inside these houses, but we’re also able to hang out whenever we want. There was pretty much always somebody working on something cool. It felt like an idea I had back in high school, like a pipe dream. But I still thought, “Oh, I have to move, though. I have to move to the same city as Xandy, and then we’ll get jobs there and find a community and learn it.” All of that just sounded like something I wished I could have here, because I already had the most important part, really. And that kind of ended up being true. I just had the right community. I had a great group of friends who loved each other and loved music wanted to support each other.
How did you carve out a space for your own songwriting within that?
At that time, I was quietly writing my own songs because I was like, “If I want this to be my job, I should record everything I can.” If my friends could pitch in a little bit of money, that would be amazing, but I really just needed a portfolio of stuff that I’ve worked on, to have a functional resume as an engineer and producer. Because I was an avid listener and loved music so much, it naturally came to me like, “I’ve been writing my own songs since I was 15. Why can’t I put them out too?” I was really just stopping myself. And now, it feels like this great thing where I get to have a deeper understanding of my friends’ work. Their music is so different from mine because their tastes are different from mine, but anybody writing a song goes through a similar process of searching in the dark for a good line, a good turn of phrase, or a riff that leads to the next thing. And then it becomes this living thing you’ve found. That’s such a beautiful process. I just love having that experience for myself and sharing it with my friends.
You said you started doing that at 15, so it coincided with moving to Haw Creek?
I think I started writing songs when I was 13 because I would come home from school every day, and I didn’t want to do any homework. All I wanted to do was sit in front of the computer and learn how to play songs I had just heard and liked. That was all I wanted to do; that’s all I really did. I kind of lucked out in school and where I was able to get all the school done relatively quickly, and it felt easy. So I got into a rhythm of being like, “Okay, I’ll spend 30 minutes on this, maybe get a B, and that’s fine.” [laughs] Because then I get to spend all night watching cool YouTube videos of concerts and learning how to play guitar.
What kind of videos or concerts? Is going on YouTube still a part of your process?
Yeah, for sure. I love playing along to songs, having this active listening experience. I’ve started a practice routine of learning songs completely and recording them – essentially a cover, but it’s less about covering a song to put it out, like I did with Merce [Lemon]. When you cover a song, the ethos is to bring your own take on it, which makes it sound different. This practice routine I’m doing now is about learning a song I think is interesting or hard and figuring out all the parts. It’s a good way to practice guitar, bass, drums, and keys. That’s something I’ve been doing as a functional way of immersing myself in something I already like and getting to have a deeper understanding of it.
That’s what I do now, but when I was a teenager, getting immersed in music for the first time, I was really obsessed with The Swell Season. They were my favorite band, and I would watch Once every few days and learn all their songs. I thought Glen Hansard had hung the moon, you know? Whenever they had tour dates, I would just see if someone had uploaded something from the night before. So then I would be like, “Oh, that’s a new song,” or they would do a cover of someone I’d never heard of, or heard of but never really listened to. Like, “You know, I’ve always heard the name Bruce Springsteen, but now Glen Hansard is playing a Bruce Springsteen song, I should check it out and see if I like it.” And of course, I did. I got into a ton of music that way, just through his taste. He would cover bands like the Pixies, Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen, all sorts of other bands. It was like my personal curriculum, where I was following this person’s taste and then creating my own through theirs.
You started working on the songs that would become Losin’ a few months after Gary passed away, but you didn’t move out of the house until about two years after his death.
That’s right. It was basically this time last year.
Do you feel like that period of time stretched or entangled the feelings of grief that sit in this album?
I think it would have been really hard to leave that place – I mean, everything is hard when you’re grieving. But I think there are pros and cons, if the grief is place-dependent, to being able to leave immediately versus having your own time to leave. By the time I left, I was really ready to leave, because things in the house were just breaking at such an intense pace, and it was providing so much stress. It was providing stress not just for me but also for Gary’s friends, who were trying to sell the property, but also trying to be good to the people still living there, making sure we were comfortable. It definitely intensified the process of grief.
But it was a no-brainer to stay. At first, I thought, well, how much is the property going to be listed for? Is it possible – like, do I have any rich relatives? [laughs] Do I know someone who would want to buy it and keep it the way it is? Because that’s what pretty much everyone involved wanted, but it wasn’t what the will stipulated. So, I feel like that first year, nothing really happened, in part because the process of listing a property like is a long one, but also, it wasn’t moving fast because people didn’t want to see it change. It had a security blanket type aspect for me. But, I mean, played the lottery every week. I’d buy scratch-offs and Powerball tickets, probably two times a week, just to see if I could literally win the lottery and stay in that house and buy that property. Because if I wanted to keep it the same, I’d have to buy the whole thing outright. Of course, I didn’t, so I kept accruing these losing tickets. That’s where the title of the record comes from – I was trying to hold onto something that was beautiful and meaningful to me, and I was literally, constantly losing. That felt pretty metaphorical of the whole process of grief.
That spins the title of the record in a whole new light.
Do you want to see the stack? I still have them. [brings stack of lottery tickets] This isn’t all of them, but it’s a chunk of it. I saved them because I was like, “Maybe I’ll use this for something, maybe some piece of the album art.” I just didn’t like how it looked, but it was something I had in my mind for a while. It’s like, “I have this: I have two years of trying.” And the funny thing is, part of me didn’t even want to win – I knew how hamfisted that idea was. Winning the Powerball isn’t just about getting a life-changing amount of money, but a person-changing amount of money. I’d talk to my friends and my fiancée – we were doing scratch-offs and being like, “What would we actually do?” If I’m thinking about trying to win this amount of money for this specific purpose, how would we do that? Some of it would go toward the house, and then we would just give the rest of it away?
It became this half-joke, half-nightmarish scenario. [laughs] But it all came from this place, this mania of grief, of, “This place doesn’t just mean a lot to me, it means a lot to everyone around me.” The whole community was – they still are so mad that the property is going to be turned into a development. They don’t want that to happen. So it felt like the good fight, like trying to do something actionable, even though I was really just playing the lottery and wasting money. But it felt like trying.
Did you all entertain the idea, or did this trying feel isolating at times?
It was a little isolating because I think I had the most connection to the place. Everyone else understood what I was doing, but also understood how ridiculous it was. It wasn’t something I ever expected someone else to do. It felt like this burden of responsibility fell on me to do this moonshot thing, and that felt okay. Because I grew up there; I think for them, it was my home that they moved into.
You mentioned the idea of using the tickets for the album cover. How did the actual cover by Matthew Reed come together?
I think the cover represents the thing I was trying to do with the album in general, which was include other people. With Haw Creek, I made that almost entirely on my own. I did have Xandy play on one song and Ethan helped out on another, but it was like, “I’m gonna give my friends like a window to work inside of, and then they’ll do that.” This was way more collaborative. I was like, “Here’s the structure. Let’s make small adjustments together.” It felt like I had them as my band to create this with me. I’m really grateful they were open to that. Apart from the record’s meaning and content, I wanted to involve my friends more because I didn’t do that on the first one.
There’s obviously an emotional and thematic component to re-recording the song ‘I Need a Friend’, but it also coincides with that decision to feature your friends more prominently.
Definitely. It’s really easy to look at this record as one where I’m mourning the loss of a friend, and it is about that. But it’s also equally about the fact that all of my friends were grieving him too, were writing about him, were inspired by him. Gary had such a huge presence. He kind of held our day-to-day fate in his hands as our landlord, and was so chill about it in a way that no landlord is today. We were all really distraught when he died, and it happened at a time when things were going really well for Jake and Karly’s music. It felt like this horrible snap back to reality, where this person who had made a space for you is dying and you’re not able to be around. That’s where a lot of this record came from, too, us leaning on each other. The friend element is definitely wanting to include my friends, and also writing about that aspect of loss and yearning for connection. It’s just as much about us leaning on each other as it is about specifically missing Gary. I didn’t explicitly write it from that place, but that was just the reality.
A moment that stuck out to me is ‘I Need a Friend’ transitioning into ‘Lost Again’; every element of that song is so deeply felt.
Ironically, that’s the one song that Alex and I worked on almost entirely together. It was the last song I put together, and it felt like working on all the other songs helped me figure that one out. I had this momentum with these songs, and I had an understanding of it, because of the work I did with my friends. So even though ‘Lost Again’ was just me and Alex, it still felt like it was in that same vein of collaboration. That song was the hardest one to write, though, and it came together at the last minute. I had all these fragments and ideas I liked. I was working on it the night before we recorded it, and I felt like I had cracked the code to it. And then we made it, and it felt good, felt simple.
How did your dynamic with Alex Farrar play out on this record?
It was great. He’s so fast, so skilled, and just such an incredible engineer. It felt like I could communicate exactly what I wanted so easily, and the flow moved quickly. It wasn’t like we had limited time – every day just felt like, “Okay, let’s keep humming along because these are sounding good.” The workflow felt good.
Something I’ve talked about with your collaborator Indigo de Souza is the significance of parking lots in her music. There is a similar pattern with drive-throughs – and really, cars in general – on this record.
The drive-through is really just a liminal space, like a parking lot. The parking lot is this anonymous place – you can go there any time of day and, within means, do whatever you want. You can sit in your car for hours just listening to music. It’s a special place to be as an introvert and an anxious person. But a drive-through is almost the opposite. It’s a little bit like jail. [laughs] It feels like the time between ordering and paying is just rife with wild thoughts. It feels like a deeply emotional place. If you work all day and don’t feel like cooking for yourself, so you go get food from a drive-through, and the drive-through’s packed – that mixture of emotions is so intense. That time before you’re able to get your food, that you want to pay somebody to feel better and feel fed – the emotions leading up to that are so unnecessarily big. I think everyone’s been in a horrible mood in a drive-through. Those emotions are not funny when you’re feeling them necessarily, but when you aren’t feeling them, they’re pretty hilarious because they’re so unreasonable. That sort of mismatch usually makes for good lyrics.
I’m curious how your idea of home has shifted over time. Has it become more fluid or liminal?
I think my sense of home has definitely changed from being place-dependent. My sense of home is really tied to my fiancée and my dog. We live in a house that was built in the last year and a half, and we’re super close to our neighbors in proximity. But we don’t interact much with them. It’s a very different kind of space than I’m used to, and that’s changed my understanding of home. I drive to see my friends more than I used to. I’d love to live closer to my friends again, or live in a house that’s more in nature than I am now. But just the fact that I get to live with my fiancée and dog feels really grounding when I come home from tour. Your sense of home on tour is literally just the people you’re around and the van or the bus you’re driving in. So it’s less about a physical place, but I think it’s helpful that I live in Asheville, and I love living here. It feels more like a bruise than a cut, I guess.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Ever wish that your notes app included towel swans and soaps the size of thimbles? Get ready for Sticker Room Service, where hotel life’s finest gets boiled down into cute, stylish stickers. If your ideal suite is old-school and draped in velvet, or high-tech with neon minibars and robot butlers, there’s a place for it all—and Dreamina’s sticker maker is your design concierge.
In this world, every minibar snack gets a glow-up. Every keycard is a collectible. And that ghost bellhop mascot? He’s absolutely getting his own sticker sheet. With Dreamina’s tools, you can build entire sticker collections around the charm, elegance, or sheer strangeness of hotel life—one small item at a time.
Minibar fantasies and attitude towel animals
Consider more than hotel wallpaper and bellhop attire. Hotel style is found in the nuances—the things you discover stashed away in drawers, the logo mascots on slippers, and those room service menus that subtly suggest excess.
Create sticker sets based on these micro-moments
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Hallway keys and gates to someplace unusual
Let’s not leave out the subtle enchantment of room keys. No matter if it’s an old-fashioned brass number badge or a space-age chip that unlocks holographic doors, room keys are mysterious. They’re symbolic. They’re sentimental. And just right for sticker reinterpretation.
Design your ideal key set
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Mascots that pilfer the minibar
No hotel would be complete without a delightful (or disorganized) mascot. Perhaps it’s a cranky bellhop cat who serves you treats at 2AM. Perhaps it’s a glowing jellyfish concierge who drifts down the hallway silently. Such characters deserve to be personified—and immortalized as stickers.
Give it a try and create sticker mascots for your ideal hotel
Cryptid concierge: A mothman in a crimson vest who brings room service and bad luck.
Spa ghost: A see-through guest draped in towels with cucumbers over their vacant eyes.
Robot butler: With tea trays, attitude, and roller wheels. Imagine C-3PO crossed with Wes Anderson.
Construct entire sticker sheets devoted to your made-up hotel employees. Assign them slogans. Have them haunt your notes app or calendar sidebar. With Dreamina’s sticker maker, you can design and arrange whole sheets like mini books. Every character, object, and logo is part of your overall aesthetic story.
What’s in the hotel gift shop?
There’s a gift shop in every nice hotel that is just a tiny bit too selected and a little too enchanted. So why not create one for yourself—stick-form?
Souvenir mugs: Imprinted with the hotel name, mini ghosts, or strange slogans like “I Survived Room 666.”
Local specialties: Even if your hotel is in a fantasy jungle or outer space, have little sticker jars of jam, local teas, or snacks such as “Moon Bark” or “Ectoplasmic Boba.”
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Turn your sticker sheet into a mini getaway
The greatest advantage of the hotel sticker look is its transportive quality. You can create an area you’d never leave—a velvet and neon room, a stormcloud bathhouse, or a cat-operated penthouse.
With Dreamina, you can make every aspect count
Plan out your towel animals around a sticker minibar.
Include radiating light switches and fluffy robes.
Create imaginary room service tickets or spa brochures.
As the designing is done digitally, the hotel completely resides in your pocket-no checkout time, no lost keycards-all vibes.
Use AI image generator to complete every idea into a colored, textured, weirdly playful, and then some. Finally, take your best into stickers that also serve as digital keepsakes or art pieces.
Conclusion
Sticker Room Service is not just a vibe—it’s an invite to play. Dreamina assists you in creating not only visuals, but experiences. So if your hotel is haunted, high-tech, or lost in a mossy forest, there’s space for your imagination—and a key just waiting for you.
New York, April 25, 2025 — Grace Fu (Xuan Fu) is set to unveil Ethereal Threads, the debut collection from her personal brand, Studio Oblivion—a name already stirring quiet reverence among fashion insiders. Having shaped the visual language of leading houses in both China and the United States, Fu now turns inward, guided by a quieter obsession: the world of loungewear, lace, and the meditative craft of embroidery.
“Ethereal Threads” is a study in contrast—technical precision meets poetic design. Inspired by her time at Fleur du Mal, ALIX NYC, and LVMH, the collection draws on a rich vocabulary of sensual minimalism, softness, and sophistication. These experiences shaped the collection’s refined textures and silhouettes.
But the lineage of Studio Oblivion also owes much to Fu’s transformative roles at Alexander Wang and KITH. At Wang, she introduced bold wash designs and textile treatments that reimagined the brand’s gender-fluid collections. In 2024, she joined KITH, revolutionizing menswear tailoring with advanced techniques and material innovation. “Grace’s innovation drives us forward,” noted Mikol Stambaugh, KITH’s Senior Vice President of Product. Her creative leadership continues to define the brand’s evolution.
Crafted in premium Asian raw silk and adorned with French embroidery, each garment in “Ethereal Threads” requires 20 to 40 hours of hand-stitching. The pieces—robes, lingerie, loungewear—radiate a pared-back sensuality and quiet strength. Upcycled silk becomes a symbol of renewal, shaping garments that evoke heritage and liberation.
The campaign was photographed at the Marlton Hotel in Greenwich Village, a space once frequented by poets and rebels. Natural light illuminated the embroidery’s shimmer, while tousled hair and smoky makeup nodded to 1990s sensuality—wrapping each image in nostalgia and feminine resolve.
Studio Oblivion offers more than fashion. With “Ethereal Threads,” Fu presents a meditation on beauty, identity, and self-expression—an invitation to dress not just the body, but the soul.
After a string of random attacks by Vietnamese Americans, the president signs an executive order demanding their immediate incarceration. A mirror and uncomfortable echo of World War II’s Japanese Internment, Viets are forced into camps, detaining half of one family. While their jobs at Google and a news company, Alvin and Ursula are exempted, but their half-cousins aren’t so lucky. Along with their mother, Jen, an NYU freshman and Duncan, a high school athlete, make their way into the camps. But Jen finds a way for the horrors of camp to get to the outside world — her cousin, Ursula, whose journalism (and advancing career) relies on Jen’s experiences — and struggle.
Funny, momentous and all too close to comfort, The Verge editor Kevin Nguyen’s second novel asks striking questions about the nature of America, journalism, and who gets to profit off whose stories.
Congratulations on your new novel! It feels like this and your first, New Waves [March 2020], have been published at such strange times in American history. How are you feeling about it?
I know, I’m starting to think I should just stop writing books. Maybe they’re the problem. I think this one feels a little different, because it’s speaking so directly to people about this moment, which wasn’t necessarily the intent when I started writing.
Mỹ Documents is obviously very timely. When did you start writing the book and did it shift along with the American political landscape?
I started writing it in 2018, and I wrote it on and off over five years, I believe. I wasn’t necessarily thinking about the contemporary political landscape — it’s not, like, a Trump book or a Biden book — but it is based on a lot of historical realities I was researching, and a lot of things happening in current-day. But it’s less tied to politics and more to the way this country treats certain people.
It can clearly be mapped to the Japanese internment camps of the last century, but it’s never too pedantic or heavy. Was humor a conscious choice?
Yeah, I thought about the concept of the book, which is, what if Vietnamese people were detained in camps in an echo of Japanese incarceration. And I imagine characters who are younger, in the camp, and what they would think about. On one hand, there’s the existential dread, and on the other, I think they’d be really annoyed they couldn’t look at their phones anymore. So I think the gap of that experience felt both honest and funny. And that was the energy I wanted to put in the book.
So, a connected network of Vietnamese attackers terrorize American cities, which leads to a general fear of the entire nationality. I’m curious what inspired this.
It was inspired by another dark thought I had that was kind of funny — I feel like if domestic terrorism was perpetrated by non-white people, the US would actually take it seriously. I actually think the thing that happens in the book that instigates tension isn’t more dramatic than gun violence in this country. But we obviously don’t take those things seriously as a government.
I also thought it was really interesting how you described the bureaucracy of the internment camps — it’s as simple as Congress passing a bill for Vietnamese detainment. And if anything, it’s marketed as pro-American.
Yeah, it’s been interesting watching people call this book ‘dystopian’ or ‘speculative,’ and I don’t think those are necessarily wrong genres for it, but usually in fantasy there’s something in the world that exists or is different to enable a circumstance. This one’s just enabled by policy. Japanese people were incarcerated from one executive order signed by FDR, and we now have a president who signs executive orders constantly. I’m not saying something of this scale is going to happen to Vietnamese people or any other population, but we’re never that far from it being allowed.
Even though the book is notably vague in when it takes place, it is preoccupied with John McCain, who you include some quotes from and write about later on. Why was he a person of interest for the novel?
That’s probably the most political thing that was in my brain while I was writing it. During the first Trump administration, there was so much conversation about how we used to have ‘Good Republicans’ and McCain is always held up as an exemplar of that. Maybe he is preferable to Trump, but his politics were still the ones that dehumanize communities, like Vietnamese Americans. The quotes in the book I use as epigraphs are real. He called Vietnamese people ‘gooks,’ on the campaign trail. He didn’t apologize; he still felt that way until he died.
I really enjoyed the satirical elements later on, like when Amazon or Nike sponsor the camps and fit them with training centers. It kind of matches how absurd and ridiculous American life has become.
Yeah, it’s not one we’ve necessarily surrendered to rather than embraced. I think we’re all coming around to this now, but the amount of surveillance we’ve willingly given ourselves to, and for what? For cheaper shipping or free apps? It’s like we made some kind of bargain and we got the short end of the stick.
I really enjoyed the two writers in the novel. Jen, who is interned, joins an underground network of radical newspapers and is a little miffed that she has competition in the space. Meanwhile, she acts as a source for Ursula, her half-sister, who uses Jen’s writing and photos as a way to report on the camps, but also advance her own career. Did you have any particular inspirations for these characters?
I want to caveat this by saying that I work in journalism because I believe in a free press, I believe, earnestly, that journalism can speak truth to power. At the same time, journalism’s constructs give the journalist a lot of power. The ones who have often succeeded are power-seeking, even as they do good work. I wanted to embody, especially, in these two characters, that even if doing journalism is a moral good, you can get at it in immoral ways. I just like that ambiguity between the two of them, and they’re ambiguities I personally feel in this field.
Ursula’s motivations were especially interesting. While she enjoys notoriety and book deal and TV appearances for her reporting, Jen, who she relies on, remains at camp. I enjoyed that she felt bad for using her, but not bad enough to stop — she’s convinced she’s acting in favor of the truth.
Yeah, I think it’s unclear — I feel we operate as human beings, thinking about our friends and family as a smaller unit, then the ‘greater good’ or ‘greater world.’ There’s obviously such a tremendous gap there, but for a journalist like Ursula, where you convince yourself the most important thing is the greater good, it certainly warps the way you think about your family. It’s suggested in the book that her reporting is quite influential and important. Does that justify the way she treats her sister?
There’s also the idea of complicity in the book. Jen gets close to one guard, Hugo, who she sees the humanity in despite his involvement in camp. And when Urusula interviews a radical who supplies the camp with reading and entertainment material, he says he’s just doing his job. What made you want to write about this?
I think this and my first book are strongly novels about the roles of work. And that’s a broad definition, but I think humans like to be productive; we’re always making things. Maybe not to put too fine a point on it, but you either make art, something productive or interesting, or you make garbage. I like the idea that even when this community of people are detained, they’re still creating things. There’s a lot of art making and storytelling in the book, not all of it is supposed to be great art, but I think the value of it for the characters is just the act itself.
You write that journalism goes through cycles, and that just because something is happening, doesn’t mean it’s newsworthy. The violence at camp still occurs, but since it’s no longer new, it can’t be a story. And unfortunately this idea has only been replicated.
I think this is just always a problem about the idea of news. I don’t have a solution for this, because I assign stories at my job all the time, and you want there to be something that is actually different and new — that’s the goal. But the reality is that things just keep happening, and as you report it the first time, it becomes increasingly hard to write about it again, and it’s less interesting for a reader. What is that balance? Especially now, I feel like the Trump administration just keeps ignoring all of these court orders, which is a huge fucking deal. But how many times can you say that over and over? I don’t have a good answer for that, and that’s probably the strength of this administration, that they just know they can barrel ahead.
To talk about craft for a second, I was fascinated by your 7-pronged writing routine you published in The Verge. I use my Notes app and Scrivener, and then I go at it.
I guess in writing that piece, it wasn’t to recommend seven apps, but to talk about how, at least for me, writing needs different things at different times. I think moving things around different environments is helpful to the brain, but I’m also very resistant to the idea of workflows, or making anything easy on myself. Constantly introducing friction into a work has been very fruitful for me.
Finally, what are you working on next?
Right now I’m working on a biography of the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. I think it’s technically not announced, but it’s a lot of work and I’ve been talking to people. Maybe you can see in the back, I just have a bunch of [books], a lot of them are in Japanese, which I don’t speak, so I have to translate them. That’s the next big thing — I’m at the beginning of it, doing lots of interviews and readings. I’ve barely put anything on the page yet, but it’ll be fun to do a nonfiction thing for a bit.
For car lovers, it’s all about blending style with substance. Industry trends show customization is skyrocketing as drivers hunt for ways to boost both curb appeal and road prowess. A sharp-looking ride that still handles like a dream is the goal. Nailing this combo takes some smart choices in upgrades.
Boosting the Wow Factor
A car’s exterior sets the tone before it even moves. Lots of owners tweak their vehicles to turn heads. Adding a 2016 Chevy Malibu spoiler black part brings a slick, sporty vibe that ties the whole look together. It’s a standout move that screams attitude while syncing with the car’s lines. Beyond looks, spoilers tweak airflow for better stability. Pair that with fresh paint, sharp rims, or dark-tinted windows, and you’ve got a ride that reflects your personality without sacrificing purpose.
Why Aerodynamics Matter
How a car cuts through the air isn’t just technical jargon—it’s a performance game-changer. Sleek shapes shrug off drag, keeping things smooth at speed. Spoilers and body kits aren’t just eye candy; they steer airflow to steady the ride. Hit the gas, and that stability shines. High-end cars often roll out with these tricks built in, proving they’re not just for show. They sharpen handling and even squeeze out a bit more fuel efficiency.
Picking Performance Boosts That Fit
Upgrades should match how you drive. Tweaking the engine, exhaust, or suspension can kick up speed and control. Think turbo kits or air intakes for extra oomph, or grippy tires for tighter turns. But flashy add-ons shouldn’t mess with the core mechanics. The trick is keeping the car stunning and solid at the same time. Dig into the details before you commit—research pays off.
Shedding Pounds for Power
Lightening the load can wake up a car’s performance. Swapping in carbon fiber parts or ditching extra weight speeds things up and saves gas. Serious gearheads might even strip out back seats or spare tires. It’s a trade-off, though—go too far, and the ride gets bumpy or bare. Finding that sweet spot keeps it fun and functional, blending speed with style.
Tuning Suspension for Control
A car’s suspension is the unsung hero of the drive. Swapping shocks or springs can sharpen corners and glue the tires to the road. Dropping the height a bit gives it that low, mean stance. Overdo it, though, and every pothole becomes a punishment. A setup that keeps things comfy while hugging the curves ties performance to that aggressive look.
Lights That Shine and Save
Good lighting isn’t just a style flex—it’s a safety must. Bright LEDs up front cut through the dark, while custom taillights add flair out back. Glow from underbody kits grabs attention after sunset. Just don’t let the dazzle break the law—function trumps fashion here. Done right, lights make the car pop and keep the road clear.
Inside the Ride: Comfort Meets Cool
A car’s interior deserves as much love as its shell. Plush seats, slick materials, and tech upgrades turn drives into treats. Leather or sporty fabrics class up the vibe, and a tricked-out dash looks sharp. Swap the wheel or shifter for a racier feel. Toss in better climate controls or a quieter cabin, and long trips feel shorter. It’s about crafting a space that’s plush yet practical.
Tech That Ties It All Together
Today’s cars thrive on cutting-edge gear. Screens that run everything, real-time stats on power and mileage, or GPS that doesn’t make you fumble—tech delivers. Safety stuff like lane alerts or auto-parking keeps risks low without cluttering the look. It’s the kind of smart upgrade that fuses style with everyday ease.
Hitting the Sweet Spot
The magic happens when looks and performance click. Go for upgrades that lift both, not one or the other. A sweet exterior can’t drag down safety or handling. Every tweak should pull its weight—think beyond the mirror. Marrying design with guts creates a car that’s a blast to drive and a beauty to behold.
Wrapping It Up
Getting aesthetics and performance in sync takes some planning. The right tweaks—like airflow hacks or lighter parts—make a car handle better while looking fierce. Suspension tweaks and tire upgrades keep it tight on the road. Lights add flair and safety, while interior and tech boosts bring comfort and brains. Enthusiasts win by picking mods that fit their style and their drive. Nail that balance, and the road feels like yours.
Andrea Dworkin, in my third wave feminist education, represented a reductive version of feminism. I had a snobbish attitude towards her. Her “anti-sex” and “anti-porn” radical feminist theories were unsexy and unattractive, all the things women are expected to be. At the very least, she was an unliberated figure who once publicly shamed Kathleen Hanna, de-facto leader of the Riot Grrrl Movement (and shining moment of women’s liberation in the nineties), for her time as a stripper. So I was somewhat startled to see, in the epigraph to the introduction of “Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves,” an Andrea Dworkin quote.
The quote, “woman is not born: she is made,” does not allude to Dworkin’s anti-sex/anti-porn ideologies that made her so notorious. Instead, the quote nods to social constructionism. The theory that gender, like sexuality and sexual orientation, is not fixed at birth, but taught and practiced, as hardwired as a sense of style might be. “Girl on Girl” is a massive project. In it, Sophie Gilbert, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism and staff writer for The Atlantic, reappraises the pop culture zeitgeist at the turn of the century to analyze how it affected girls staring down the new millennium, girls who are now grown millennial women.
The word “reappraise” is not without intention. For decades pop culture has valued women based on their ability to conform to a narrow standard of womanhood – the plastic ladies of reality TV, nearly nude heroin-chic models, and provocative virginal teenage girls. In “Girl on Girl,” Gilbert argues that young women were not born to see themselves as objects, trapped in these constructions, but informed of their worth by a booming pop culture industry imbued with the misogynist tropes, images, and aesthetics of pornography.
In her research, Gilbert found that porn was everywhere in the 1990s. Part of this surge, as she explains, was created by the aftermath of the AIDS crisis. The AIDS crisis brought sex, who is having it and with whom, into mainstream discourse. In pop culture, Madonna released her coffee table book, “Sex,” and everyone watched Anita Hill testify in the Senate about sexual harassment by then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. History set the tone for a decade of show-all sex that sold, sold, sold.
“Girl On Girl” hovers around the term “post feminism,” an idea coined in the early eighties that feminism was no longer necessary. Gilbert begins with a look at the music industry. Influential for its easy dissemination of messaging to the masses, the music industry transformed feminism from a political movement, into post feminist blow out sale. Beginning in the early 90s as a response to a hyper masculinist punk scene, three Olympia, WA punk bands, Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsy, created the Riot Grrrl movement. In the first Bikini Kill zine, an anti-establishment method of sharing information, Tobi Vail, Bikini Kill’s drummer, coined the term Girl Power. For Riot Grrrl, Girl Power was a slogan intent on seeing girls support each other. It made demands. It had real power. Within a few years, the male-managed Spice Girls made the phrase globally renowned. Not for its political potency as Riot Grrrl intended, but for its ability to sell teen girls ephemeral toys. Lipsticks, hairbrushes, and Polaroid cameras adorned with the label “empowerment,” branded with Spice Girls pictures, became the brave new world of post feminism: convincing girls and women that independence and equality came through spending money.
The shift from a collective women’s movement to an era of regression repeated relentlessly in the nineties. This pattern of progress, to varied degrees of effectiveness, followed by a swift and often brutal backlash, Gilbert explains, should help us understand why we are currently in a period of cultural regression. A moment in which the manosphere led Donald Trump back into the white house, only a few years after the #MeToo Movement plucked habitual sexual offenders from their corner offices.
The music industry, in addition to selling out feminism, adopted the profitable imagery of pornography. The early nineties were incredibly full of women artists singing about oppression and desire, but they were replaced by the more controllable teenage girls. By 1999, women had been sidelined entirely. The 99’ Woodstock music festival ended with massive reports of sexual assault, some of which took place in mosh pits. A cover of Q magazine even pictured PJ Harvey, Bjork, and Tori Amos with the title: “Hips. Lips. Tits. Power.” Snoop Dogg’s brief and mysterious stint on the L-Word cannot erase the fact that he walked into the MTV Video Awards in 2003 with two women on leashes by his side. Gilbert goes on to list an abundance of pornographic music videos, videos that devolved into real physical violence against women.
As soon as the music industry started profiting off porn, in all its brazen shaven manifestations, the fashion, film, and television industries wanted a piece. Reality television debuted on MTV in 1992 with the show The Real World. The success of which created huge demand for more, cheaper shows that would lure audiences in with no regard for quality. The result was a downward spiral for more degrading reality television, which is how we got shows like Who Wants To Marry A Millionaire?, The Housewives franchise, and eventually, The Bachelor. All of which depict women in a nineteenth century frame, where success equals catering to male desire. Reality television also cultivates a singular, highly stylized, white, middle class, thin, feminine, and sexy caricature of women. A blueprint set by pornography.
Gilbert makes plenty of room for relief in pop culture’s representation of women in the aughts. Artists like MC-Lyte, Janet Jackson, and Queen Latifa’s song “U.N.I.T.Y” deserve a revisist, as do movies like The Breakfast Club and 16 Candles. But they were heavily outnumbered by a male dominated rap scene and movies obsessed with teenage girls’ virginities: Lolita, American Pie, Wild Things, and Kids. Film in particular, Gilbert argues, created an entire generation who internalized toxic ideologies about men and women’s sexuality. Girls were gatekeepers of sex who needed to be convinced, rather than enticed, into having it. In other words, girls were the enemy of male desire. The result? Young murderous white young men who kill girls who refuse to sleep with them, as if sex is something they are entitled to. An idea plainly perpetuated in nineties films.
In Chapter six, at the book’s peak, Gilbert’s investigation into pornography seems like a sado-masochist endeavor itself. The chapter is stuff of nightmares. It is also the reality of pornography. In a post 9/11 world obsessed with revenge, Gilbert eloquently says porn “tested the limits of what men could do to women as entertainment while cameras rolled.” Porn emerges as a mirror to society’s view of women as loathsome leaky sex objects who should do their best to conform, from shaving their bodies, pits to toes, to becoming unrecognizable via plastic surgeries, as to render their own degradation more pleasurable to watch.
After the turn of the century, it became clear that the world had deeply internalized porn as an art form. It peaked with the release of the school-girl porn trope in Brittany Spears’ “Baby One More Time” music video. And fell down a very dark hole with the photos of the Abu Ghraib torture of Iraqi prisoners by members of the US military.
The latter half of the book examines the consequences of a culture dominated by pornography and over exposure. “Every single cultural message Americans absorbed during the decades leading to the [2016 Presidential Election] was enshrining the idea that women fundamentally lacked the qualities required to gain and exercise authority: intelligence, morality, dignity.” For Hilary Clinton, that meant losing the election to Donald Trump. For celebrities, that means Lindsay Lohan goes to rehab, Anna Nicole Smith dies of an overdose (leaving behind a fridge full of Slim Fasts), Britney Spears shaves her head in front of paparazzi, Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston die from overdose too. The celebrities left seemingly unscathed are the ones who Gilbert labels “walking billboards”: The Kardashians and their ringleader, Kim Kardashian, made famous her sex-tape and trendy body modification. For the rest of us, this means navigating a world entrenched in misogyny, influenced heavily by what we have watched, read, and seen.
Gilbert says she is not as “anti-porn” to the militancy Dworkin was. She does not even mention Dworkin beyond the introduction, but the depth in which porn entrenched itself into our pop culture, and the consequences it has held, suggests perhaps we all should be. Misogyny is as rampant as ever. Roe v. Wade is gone and the White House is enmeshed with the cast of reality television flops with porn stars on the fringes.
Western pop culture has been waging a war against women, reinforcing their silence, since the age of The Odyssey, when, as Gilbert alludes to in the conclusion, Telemachus tells his mother to shut up and go to her room. What’s a girl to do? Well, there is reason for hope. Bikini Kill plays sold out 30th anniversary concerts, screaming their anthem “Rebel Girl” on the Stephen Colbert Show, and movies and TV shows like Babygirl, The Last Summer, and Insecure give female sexuality the complex depictions it deserves. Gilbert offers a solution too. Stories, new stories, have the potential to liberate pop culture from patriarchy and misogyny. In return, women can rewrite their concepts of sexuality, pleasure, and place beyond what the aughts tried to teach them. To quote the turn of the century musical RENT about a queer friend group navigating AIDS and poverty: “The opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation.” In a world where AI spits our own biases back at us, who will heed Sophie Gilbert’s call and create a new story for women?
The Beths – the New Zealand-based band composed of vocalist Elizabeth Stokes, guitarist Jonathan Pearce, bassist Benjamin Sinclair, and drummer Tristan Deck – have signed to ANTI-. Today’s announcement comes paired with a new single, ‘Metal’. Check out the video for it below, and scroll down for the quartet’s upcoming tour dates.
While writing ‘Metal’, Stokes was processing the effects of rigorous touring, mental health struggles, and several diagnoses. “In some ways ‘Metal’ is a song about being alive and existing in a human body,” she reflected. “That is something I have been acutely aware of in the last few years, where I have been on what one might call a ‘health journey’. For parts of the last few years, I kind of felt like my body was a vehicle that had carried me pretty well thus far but was breaking down, something I had little to no control over. All of the steps in the Rube Goldberg machine of life are so unlikely, and yet here we are in it. I have a hunger and a curiosity for learning about the world around me, and for learning about myself. And despite all the ways that my body feels like a broken machine, I still marvel at the complexity of such a machine.”
“I can hold that knowledge in one hand, and yet with the other hand I can point to my reflection and just be like ‘you are shit’. Or ‘ugly’,” Stokes added. “Or ‘worthless’. I can reliably respond to any suggestion that I might be able to achieve any small thing with ‘no’. And these are variations of the ‘short word’ referenced in the song.”
Musically, the song is driving and jangly. “There was a propulsion to the acoustic strumming pattern on the original demo,” Stokes explained. “Tristan’s drums meet that feeling so perfectly, the feeling of a train pushing up the tracks. Jonathan got to play his Burns 12 string guitar as sparkly as he wanted, and Ben as usual can’t be contained to the lower register. I think we ended up with an arrangement that embodies the frenetic intricacy of an engine in action. There’s a lot going on, until there isn’t.”
‘Metal’ marks the Beths’ first new music since the 2023 deluxe edition of their latest album, Expert in a Dying Field. Revisit our interview with the Beths.
The Beths 2025 Tour Dates:
Thu Sep 18 – Dublin, IE – Button Factory
Sat Sep 20 – Manchester, UK – Albert Hall
Sun Sep 21 – Glasgow, UK – SWG3 TV Studio
Mon Sep 22 – Leeds, UK – Project House
Wed Sep 24 – Bristol, UK – O2 Academy
Thu Sep 25 – Birmingham, UK – XOYO
Fri Sep 26 – London, UK – Roundhouse
Sat Sep 27 – Brighton, UK – CHALK
Mon Sep 29 – Tourcoing, FR – Le Grand Mix
Tue Sep 30 – Paris, FR – Le Trabendo
Wed Oct 1 – Brussels, BE – Botanique
Fri Oct 3 – Cologne, DE – Kantine
Sat Oct 4 – Amsterdam, NL – Paradiso
Sun Oct 5 – Hamburg, DE – Krust
Tue Oct 7 – Stockholm, SE – Slaktkyrkan
Wed Oct 8 Oslo, NO – Parkteatret Scene
Thu Oct 9 – Copenhagen, DK – Pumpehuset
Sat Oct 11 – Berlin, DE – Lido
Sun Oct 12 – Munich, DE – Strom
Mon Oct 13 – Zurich, CH – Plaza
Wed Oct 15 – Barcelona, ES – Razzmatazz 2
Thu Oct 16 – Madrid, ES – Nazca
Fri Oct 17 – Lisbon, PT – LAV
Thu Oct 30 – Asheville, NC – The Orange Peel*
Fri Oct 31 – Atlanta, GA – Variety Playhouse *
Sat Nov 1 – Nashville, TN – Brooklyn Bowl *
Mon Nov 3 – Dallas, TX – The Studio At The Bomb Factory *
Tue Nov 4 – Austin, TX – Emo’s *
Thu Nov 6 – Phoenix, AZ – The Van Buren *
Fri Nov 7 – Los Angeles, CA – The Wiltern * ^
Sat Nov 8 – San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore *
Wed Nov 12 – Sacramento, CA – Ace of Spades *
Fri Nov 14 – Portland, OR – Crystal Ballroom *
Sat Nov 15 – Seattle, WA – The Moore Theatre *
Sun Nov 16 – Vancouver, BC – Commodore Ballroom *
Tue Nov 18 – Salt Lake City, UT – Metro Music Hall *
Wed Nov 19 – Denver, CO – Ogden Theatre *
Fri Nov 21 – Kansas City, MO – The Truman *
* with Phoebe Rings
^ with Bret McKenzie
+ with Squirrel Flower
# with illuminati hotties
Nilüfer Yanya has released a new single called ‘Cold Heart’. The singer-songwriter wrote it as part of a collection of tracks she revisited with creative partner Wilma Archer after touring her last album, My Method Actor. It pairs Yanya’s entrancing vocals with a wistful guitar line and booming drums, and you can hear how it grew from the original demo. “This one turned out pretty different to how I imagined it,” she shared. “The initial melody felt very spacious, like there’s room for anything to happen. It felt like a kind of experiment.” Take a listen below.
The term Automated essay grading (AEG) essentially means when Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are used to evaluate and grade written essays. This technology uses algorithms that work to analyze the essay factors, including grammar, spelling, word choice, syntax, and others, to generate a grade or score for the essay content.
Since automated grading solutions have gained interest and their adoption has grown recently, education and assessments have moved increasingly to more online and digital formats. Advocates point to many potential pros, such as saving teachers’ time, getting rid of scoring bias, and offering an immediate response back to students. Critics argue that accuracy limitations, scoring integrity, and effects on students are cons, but they do not exist.
This article examines the key pros and cons of using essay AI grader today and projections for the future. We’ll analyze the capabilities and limitations of current solutions, present use cases and statistics on real-world implementation, review impacts on educators and students, and discuss the outlook for advancement as AI and NLP evolve.
The Rise of Automated Grading Solutions
Automated grading technology originated in the 1960s, but its capabilities remained extremely limited until recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and machine learning. In the past decade, major strides have occurred in NLP and neural networks that can analyze written text and language more accurately than ever before.
Several vendors now provide AI-based essay scoring solutions used by hundreds of universities, public school districts, and testing organizations worldwide. The largest provider, EdX, supports essay grading for tests like the SAT, GMAT, and TOEFL. Public schools in at least 21 U.S. states use automated scoring to handle growing numbers of written exams and asynchronous assignments.
Use continues to rise rapidly. Recent estimates project that the global automated essay scoring software market size was valued at approximately USD 0.25 billion in 2023 and is expected to reach USD 0.75 billion by 2032, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 12% from 2023 to 2032. This represents a major shift in automated grading adoption to keep pace with remote and digital learning trends.
Pros of Automated Essay Grading
Automated essay scoring delivers several potential benefits that explain its surging usage.
Saves Teachers’ Time
Grading written essays and assignments represents one of teachers’ most labor-intensive, time-consuming tasks. Automated solutions can significantly expedite the process and alleviate this burden.
For example, estimates show teachers may spend upwards of 10-15 minutes grading a single essay. For a class of 25 students, that equates to 4-6 hours spent. Automated scoring can evaluate essays in 1 minute or less per essay, saving teachers hours of manual work and freeing up more time for lesson planning, teaching, and providing student feedback.
Provides Rapid Student Feedback
Related to saving teachers’ time, automated grading also enables students to receive scores and feedback on written assignments much faster. Rather than waiting days or weeks for teachers to grade papers, automated systems can evaluate submissions within seconds and instantly provide students with their essay scores.
Immediate performance feedback allows students to pinpoint writing areas to improve sooner. And research shows faster feedback also leads to better long-term retention and skills development.
Eliminates Subjective Scoring Biases
Unlike human graders who inherently apply subjective biases and preferences to essay scoring, automated grading solutions utilize unbiased, objective AI algorithms. Most systems are trained on millions of essay examples to develop scoring rules that grade elements like semantics, vocabulary, and topical content accuracy without favoritism.
Through machine learning advancements, leading essay scoring engines have successfully minimized algorithmic biases as well. This results in impartial scores based strictly on essay quality versus grader biases that can negatively or positively influence human-graded scores.
Facilitates Large-Scale Assessments
Automated grading provides a scalable solution to accommodate high-volume essay and short-answer scoring needs for large testing organizations. For instance, one vendor’s AI grading tool reports an ability to score 400 billion short-answer questions a year – a volume practically impossible for human graders.
Such capacity enables more frequent, large-scale assessments to better gauge student learning and refine instruction programs systemwide. A few states now administer formative assessments every 2-3 weeks and credit AI scoring for making this feasible, where manpower cannot.
Cons of Automated Essay Grading
While automated essay scoring delivers noteworthy upside, legitimate downsides and limitations exist.
Cannot Match Human Grading Accuracy
The most significant disadvantage is that algorithmic grading cannot yet match human accuracy and perceptiveness. Although AI capabilities advance annually, fully mimicking human language comprehension and cognition remains complex and challenging.
Most automated engines still struggle to analyze semantics, inference, creativity, and other higher-order skills that human graders intuitively recognize in writing. Sophisticated arguments, original ideas, humor, irony, and other subjective language qualities pose accuracy issues as well.
Risks of Formulaic and Structured Writing
Critics argue that automated essay scoring, because algorithms analyze writing style and structures versus ideas, incentivizes formulaic, uninspired writing geared to please AI models versus demonstrate true skills. For instance, long essays using complex vocabulary may receive strong scores regardless of substance.
Additionally, well-trained models can usually recognize content with high plagiarism quite well. However, students may discover “tricks” to slightly manipulate copied text to avoid plagiarism detection. This could promote cheating if applied incorrectly to high-stakes assessments.
In both cases, the concern is that automated scoring’s limitations may distort writing instruction if teachers and students fixate solely on superficial styles and structures rewarded by AI. Without balancing human scoring, writing quality may shift toward template-based versus original, creative structures, which would set back skill development.
Lacks Qualitative Feedback
Most automated scoring systems can assign grades and provide basic quantitative feedback explaining score calculations. However, algorithms struggle to deliver meaningful qualitative analysis with constructive suggestions to improve, like human graders.
Rating scale criteria are also limited, often reducing essay quality to a 1-6 numeric score. Such simplified metrics fail to capture the nuances and growth opportunities that teachers’ individualized comments can provide. Students lose out on important coaching tailored to their needs that generic AI feedback lacks presently.
Perception of Impartiality
Finally, despite aiming for unbiased objectivity, studies show students often view automated scoring as less fair and trustworthy than teacher grading. Students believe human readers better understand concepts and contexts to judge work impartially versus bots.
Negative perception erodes student confidence in scoring integrity. Further, some observers believe overdependence on algorithms to evaluate writing risks dehumanizing instruction as an impersonal, numerical process versus nurturing talent.
Outlook for Advancements in Automated Grading
The above cons reveal real downsides to curbing the more ubiquitous implementation of automated essay evaluation technologies today. However, rapid evolution continues, suggesting AI capabilities will advance markedly in the coming years to address many current limitations.
Several developments show strong promise. First, scoring accuracy continues to progress as machine learning models receive more training data. For example, leading vendors now claim scoring parity with human graders, predicting models will exceed average teacher accuracy by 2025.
Natural language generation advancements also show potential for automated feedback. New models like GPT-4 demonstrate improving capabilities, summarizing key points, and generating specific qualitative feedback superior to current template comments.
Additionally, to counter risks of formulaic writing, adaptive scoring algorithms show promise in assessing higher-order analysis like critical thinking versus writing style alone. Models in development also aim to detect sophisticated cheating attempts better.
Finally, enhanced system validation and external audits on scoring fairness may further build user confidence and acceptance if applied properly to ease perception issues.
Conclusion
Advancing artificial intelligence has the potential to lead to an automated essay scoring application of great transformational value in education. Real benefits such as teacher time savings, fast, unbiased scores to improve writing assessments are already being delivered by leading systems.
However, as with any legitimate cons, the accuracy limitations and the impact on writing quality show that there is still some evolution to come. It is conceivable in the near term that automated grading solutions will become viable alternatives to low-stakes assessment, and in the long term, partners could continue to play a role in grading high-stakes tests alongside their counterparts.
