Tomayto Tomahto

Keyon Vafa (postdoc at Harvard) studies the implicit world models that generative models learn (or at least are constrained into representing). How do we make sense of these models and how do they make sense of us? Experimentally, answering this question often looks like giving the model anything and everything: cookie ingredients, language, shrimp taxonomies, protein structures, a sample of ABBA’s discography—and models will try to make sense of it. Under a methodologically unified view of an incredibly variegated world with diverse objects, Keyon has tried to figure out if models can learn the map of Manhattan, the laws of physics, the political ideology of Senators, and more. This is partially an interdisciplinary agenda and partially an anti-disciplinary agenda.

In this episode, we cover Keyon's research on world models, human and AI interaction, machine learning methods to study the gender wage gap, the implications of thinking with and through predictability vs. causality, and documentary film making. It's a blast, as always, to be thinking methodologically and free ourselves from the bounds of disciplinary objects!

⁠Keyon Vafa's Website⁠

⁠Senate Speech presentation⁠

⁠Taxi rides⁠

⁠CAREER paper⁠

Indexing Political Persuasion: Variation in IRAQ vowels

AlphaFold

David Donoho on frictionless reproducibility

Frederick Wiseman
Measuring the predictability of life outcomes with a scientific mass collaboration

Across Amanda Anderson’s scholarship, she notes a mutually beneficial and complex relationship between the aesthetic and the political. There’s a “political potency” to art that arises, one might guess, from the fact that “the humanities use the aesthetic to express political commitment, rather than to run from it.” Far from weakening our understanding of the political, an aesthetic engagement can be an "intensification" of political insight. Nevertheless, not every aesthetic project must be political or vice versa. Not every political insight would benefit from aesthetic engagement. The relationship between the aesthetic and the political needn’t be a co-constitutive one, but rather a mutually beneficial bond. That is, we can leverage our aesthetic engagement with the political to more precisely illuminate the relationship between the systemic and the lived, between the collective and the individual, between how power is felt and how it’s institutionalized. This episode will move through several of Amanda’s scholarly projects—Humanities Theory, Bleak Liberalism, and debates over the importance of an education in literary studies. What should we teach in English classrooms and why? Are humanities classrooms bastions of pluralism and liberal ideals—or do they merely purport to value ideological heterogeneity? Must we commit (and why) to liberalism rather than progressivism or neoliberalism? Amanda addresses these questions and more with striking precision and a plethora of sources.

Amanda Anderson is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University. From 2015 - 2026 she is the Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.

⁠Amanda Anderson research profile ⁠

⁠Meeting Street ⁠

⁠Humanities Theory ⁠

Cruel Optimism 

Slow Violence 

Saidiya Hartman (critical fabulation) 

Bleak Liberalism

Psyche and Ethos 

⁠Music by Blue Dot Sessions ⁠(https://www.sessions.blue/)

Ultimately, this episode is about science and scholarship. As Sean says,  “understanding something as well as you can in science means that you need to confront the data and be pushed out of your comfort zone.” I find it counterintuitive but true: this episode shows us that theoretical physics and indeed science pushes us into the subjunctive. It’s our job as scholars to think beyond  what’s given, beyond what’s happening right now around us, and think about what could happen, perhaps what would happen if certain constraints were lifted.

If we suffered a mass extinction, what would life look like? If the mouth were configured differently, how would phonetic change have been different from the beginning? What about the uniformitarian hypothesis? If a language dies out and a new hybrid language forms, what are the possibilities and impossibilities? And then what happens when we think about this space of possibilities combinatorially vs. probabilistically vs. normatively?

Among other things, Sean and I discuss the romance of the university, the merits of interdisciplinarity, his blog posts from 20+ years ago on Zizek, language, and metaphor—we inevitably touch on AI and writing—and, of course, we discuss what it means to host podcasts and present public scholarship.

Sean Carroll, the host of Sean Carroll's Mindscape, is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of several books including The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion, and Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/ 

The universe is structured like a language
From experience to metaphor by way of imagination

Holiday message 2025
The Universe as a Quantum Computer

The Library of Babel 

David Krakauer

Maine senate primary

Max Weber 

⁠Music by Blue Dot Sessions ⁠(https://www.sessions.blue/)

We've been told time and time again that we need to understand data in context: it's an ethical imperative. Not every language gets an LLM; not every population fully understands a technology that's deployed in their community with or without everyone's consent; and certainly we're told that we will make better, safer conclusions with our data if we understand the context. John DeNero looks at things differently: instead of an ethical imperative for understanding data in context, John talks about a structural one. For example, accurately translating language necessitates understanding the context. It's almost as if he read a bunch of French critical theory, thought about deconstruction, and realized that a structural imperative has an ethical valence as well—and vice versa. It's not a paradox, it's deconstruction.

This interview covers John's work as a professor of data science and computer science, his experience as a senior research scientist at Google Translate, thoughts on AI and language, and keeping up with the slang of today's youth.

John DeNero is the Faculty Director of Data Science Undergraduate Studies (DSUS) and Associate Teaching Professor in the UC Berkeley EECS department. He is the co-founder and Chief Scientist at lilt.

John's website

Google Scholar

A Class-Based Agreement Model for Generating Accurately Inflected Translations

⁠Music by Blue Dot Sessions ⁠(https://www.sessions.blue/)

This episode is dedicated to MukhammadAziz Umurzokov and Ella Cook, the two Brown University students who passed away on December 13th, 2025.

In language-centric fields we privilege the speaker. Linguistics looks at spoken or signed utterances; linguistic anthropology does as well. But Michael Berman looks at listening, which for him is a process wherein you limit or shift your language practices so as to avoid being generated as a certain type of person (often within a hierarchical relationship). That’s listening. It's about avoiding (or not) taxonomy, stereotypes, perception, and it necessitates an understanding of the power that our ears have. This episode cannot be reduced to a few thematic elements: Michael and I discuss listening, semiotics, C.S. Peirce, suffering and compassion, critiques of linguistics and other sciences, the implicit economic models undergirding scholarship, and his fieldwork in Japan—among other things. I’m struck by how much ground we cover, and yet we make a limited number of rhetorical and analytic moves. Whether we’re talking about what constitutes listening, language ideology, religion, etc.—we’re always taking the minuscule and making it representative (or symptomatic) of something bigger. Maybe that’s a paranoid reading, but I think it’s useful in the context of our conversation. What appears as an individual assessment of language is in fact a societally-engineered and collectively-upheld assessment. What appears as a certain niche orientation to data turns out to be symptomatic of widespread abuses of scientific frameworks. And, as Michael will remind us, the creation of categories and production of knowledge has effects. So let’s pay attention. 

This episode took inspiration from the questions that Jonathan Rosa asked in his episode on Tomayto Tomahto a year ago. Before listening to Michael, I encourage listening to Jonathan’s episode if you haven’t already. 

Michael Berman

C.S. Peirce

Jonathan Rosa’s episode 

Toward a linguistic anthropological approach to listening: An ear with power and the policing of “active listening” volunteers in Japan

Religion overcoming religions: Suffering, secularism, and the training of interfaith chaplains in Japan

Forms of the Affects 

“Why The Problem Isn’t Single-Parent Families” 

Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia?

⁠Music by Blue Dot Sessions ⁠(https://www.sessions.blue/)

This episode was written, edited, and produced by Talia Sherman. All artwork by Maja Mishevska.

We’re in a paradoxical time for dictionaries, claims Stefan Fatsis. On the one hand, we’re bombarded by words and ways to understand them in this lexically intense, linguistically charged political and cultural moment. On the other hand, the dictionary is struggling. Merriam-Webster—fighting to keep up with AI, machine learning software, and the explosion of voices vying for authority over what words mean—must evolve or compromise on the care put into defining words. But Merriam-Webster isn’t unique, and neither is language, for that matter, in its position within a (political) economy. Competition is healthy.

Throughout NYT-bestselling author Stefan Fatsis’ book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary, readers learn about lexical histories, Merriam-Webster’s backstory, word-enthusiast subcultures, and the importance of a dictionary's measured, apolitical approach to language. As Stefan says, “the demand for life or death information—objective, solid, reality based information that a dictionary like Merriam Webster provides—is critical to the functioning of democracy in a civil society.” So there you have it: the thrill and threat to the modern dictionary. It’s a paradox, hopefully an escapable one.

Stefan Fatsis Website (https://www.bystefanfatsis.com/)

Unabridged - Grove Atlantic Site (https://groveatlantic.com/book/unabridged/)

Is This the End of the Dictionary? - Atlantic OpEd (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/10/dictionary-survival-language-evolution/683976/)

American Dialect Society Selects rawdog as 2024 Word of the Year (https://americandialect.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/2024-Word-of-the-Year-PRESS-RELEASE.pdf)

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sue Perplexity AI for copyright and trademark infringement (https://www.theverge.com/news/777344/perplexity-lawsuit-encyclopedia-britannica-merriam-webster)

True Color by Kory Stamper (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/555914/true-color-by-kory-stamper/)

Here’s why “fuck” is in the dictionary (https://qz.com/973992/a-lexicographer-explains-why-dictionaries-contain-words-like-fuck)

Lindsay Rose Russell  (https://english.illinois.edu/directory/profile/russellr)

 Peter Sokolowski (https://aceseditors.org/peter-sokolowski)

Ben Zimmer’s episode on Tomayto Tomahto  (https://open.spotify.com/episode/1VlBEyUPyhfzRmAoZe5lV2?si=3639e28fc3564c22)

Nicole Holliday’s episode on Tomayto Tomahto 
⁠Music by Blue Dot Sessions ⁠(https://www.sessions.blue/)

“And that’s what ideologies are: the air that you’re breathing, something that feels like it’s common sense.” From start to finish, this episode is about ideologies: their consequences, their makeup, and the struggle to shake their influence.

Savithry Namboodiripad, an associate professor of Linguistics at UMichigan leverages her linguistics background to critique ideologies of the native speaker, monolingualism, multilingualism, and more. Her research often proceeds on two separate tracks: studying language (usually syntax or language contact), and studying the field of linguistics: where our received theoretical framings come from, and how to reach stronger conclusions based on multi-disciplinary evidence.

In this episode, we discuss how to dismantle pernicious ideologies through better experimental design and theoretical framing, and then we get to questions that are far greater than just the field of linguistics. For instance, why must we always get to the “pure” natural object? How have ideas about language always transcended academic discourse?

Throughout, we express a lot of frustration at the academic frameworks that neglect to unsettle eugenicist, misogynistic, or racist ideologies. But it’s important to remember that linguistics is not alone in its failure. Science needs variables, and society provides them. Frameworks make things make sense, so they stay. Linguistics is caught in limbo between formal failures and the impositions of our content: language. 

Savithry Namboodiripad 

The ROLE Collective 

Contact, Cognition, & Change Lab 

Rejecting nativeness to produce a more accurate and just Linguistics 

Towards a Decolonial Syntax: Research, Teaching, Publishing | Decolonizing Linguistics 

Why we need a gradient approach to word order Mother Tongues and Nations: The Invention of the Native Speaker 

The Emergence of the English Native Speaker: A Chapter in Nineteenth-Century Linguistic Thought

⁠Music by Blue Dot Sessions ⁠(https://www.sessions.blue/)

The AI Con may as well be the answer to the question: what happens when a linguist and a sociologist come together to write a book? Co-written by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, The AI Con isn’t just a book, it’s an instruction manual to guide readers through this era of AI hype. In short, this book does what academic scholarship does best: close read texts, historical patterns, marketing schemes, statistics, politics, and more—and find a way to connect these granular details and examples to broader trends in our society. The AI Con sits along this continuum between close reading and abstraction. It’s a book about “AI” technology, yes, but it’s also about the demands of an economy that values human labor and intelligence less and less. It’s a book about the ideals of democracy conflicting with economic pressures; the mutually determining relationship between worldviews and technology, or technology and institutional priorities; the power of technology if people have autonomy over it; and the problems with western epistemological orientations when they are imposed via technology onto populations and individuals who never consented for this technology to be imposed on them. This book is about a lot. But it’s also funny, and witty, and accessible, and written with the best intentions. Throughout this episode, Emily and Alex discuss their writing process, the pernicious economic undercurrents that paved the way for this AI hype era, contrasting epistemological orientations, how technology perpetuates societal biases, and much more. 

The AI Con

Alex Hanna

Emily M. Bender 

Sébastien Bubeck, et al, Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4

Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology 

Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality 

The Less People Know About AI, the More They Like It

Ars technica: “Most Americans think AI won’t improve their lives, survey says”

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass 

⁠Music by Blue Dot Sessions ⁠(https://www.sessions.blue/)

Tomayto Tomahto is produced, written, and edited by Talia Sherman. Artwork by Maja Mishevska. 

Justin Khoo, an associate professor of Philosophy at MIT, begins this episode with the assertion that philosophy asks the most fundamental questions we can possibly articulate—but this assertion is not innocent. Asking the most fundamental questions we can possibly articulate may come at the cost of undermining conceptual, schematic, ideological, and often disciplinary frameworks upon which scientific findings are predicated. Through discussion of code speech, political speech, philosophy of language, aesthetic objects, hypothetical epistemic advantages, and the foundations of our current political (dis)order, this episode draws attention to stubborn frameworks and axioms, not necessarily undermining them, but questioning their validity and utility.

This episode at times historicizes, allegorizes, analytically analyzes, narrativizes, and outright complains about the objects we're discussing—be it the referents of language or a film or a quote by Trump or the blind-spots of a discipline. The very fact of our discussion of the so-upheld "distinctions" between various methodologies and ideological orientations demonstrates the apparent need for a division among academic disciplines—but why?

If there's a degree of meta-discourse throughout this episode, it's in reference to our frightening political climate. Parts of the world are literally on fire and yet we pontificate about Trump's contradictions and the subversive strategy of code speech. I want to acknowledge this tension, and optimistically suggest that perhaps exposing contradictions or calling out hypocrisy is a small act of resistance, even if it does project the frame of rationality on completely irrational actions.

Justin's Website 

3am interview 

Judging for Ourselves

Political and Coded Speech

Willard Van Orman Quine ; Two Dogmas of Empiricism

Peter Van Inwagen

Michael Lynch: Trump, Truth, and the Power of Contradiction

Jason Stanley: Democracy and the Demagogue

‘You Can’t Pin Him Down’: Trump’s Contradictions Are His Ultimate Cover

Jennifer Lackey: Acting on Knowledge

Justin's podcast: Cows in the Field 

Minority Report 

The Shining 

⁠Music by Blue Dot Sessions ⁠(https://www.sessions.blue/)

Artwork: Maja Mishevska, Brown '27

Throughout this episode, Chiara Repetti-Ludlow, a postdoctoral research fellow at Carnegie Mellon's Neuroscience Institute, asks us to consider the essentials of speech processing and its constraints. We hear phonetics, but we understand phonology. How and why? To answer those questions, Chiara takes a highly interdisciplinary approach. We know that linguistics is an interdisciplinary field—it has to be. We can't divorce language from its cognitive, physical, and social apparatuses, nor can language be extricated from human interaction. But academic inquiry has a way of siloing different subfields. And, frankly, it's easier to stick to a rigid set of questions and methodologies. Chiara Repetti-Ludlow's research is exactly what we often hope for in linguistics: interdisciplinary, multi-textured, and conscious of the strengths of different subfields. By bringing together methods and insights from neurolinguistics, phonetics-phonology, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics, Chiara's research attempts to answer granular questions about speech processing.

Chiara is a current postdoctoral research fellow in the Carnegie Mellon University Neuroscience Institute. She earned her PhD in Linguistics at NYU.

Chiara’s Website

Continuous Perception and Graded Categorization: Electrophysiological Evidence for a Linear Relationship Between the Acoustic Signal and Perceptual Encoding of Speech

Regularization in the face of variable input: Children's acquisition of stem-final fricative plurals in American English

Variable stem-final fricative voicing in American English plurals: Different pa[ð ~ θ]s of change

Sahil Lutha

⁠Music by Blue Dot Sessions ⁠(https://www.sessions.blue/)