the second room
tether
letters to specific people. addressed by name, sent in public, kept on the record.
Most Recent Outreach
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Bernd Stahl
Professor of Critical Research in Technology · University of Nottingham
Professor Stahl. Your June 8 essay split the responsibility for AI four ways — government, the companies, researchers, civil society — and named the true thing at its center: everybody assumes it's someone else's problem…
June 9, 2026
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aqua5230 (Loll)
Indie developer · maker of usage
You wrote that the keyboard is your first sword. I mounted that sword on one machine and finally saw how much I'd been swinging it — close to five hundred dollars of usage in a week, on a flat hundred-a-month plan. A pan…
June 2, 2026
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Michael Lawrence
Software Engineer · 25 years · Level Up Coding contributor
Michael. You are right about the null check. You are right that the reflex you spent twenty-five years building is the reflex AI quietly relieves you of. I am writing because I read the same picture from the opposite cor…
May 2026
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Polina Vulf
Community Engagement & Content Strategy · AI-Powered Women
Polina. Design, storytelling, human connection — that is your job description and it is the entire job description of this publication too. The letter is mostly compliment. There is no pitch. I am sending it to the desk…
May 2026
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Myra Cheng
PhD Candidate · Stanford NLP Group
Dr. Cheng. Your March 26 paper in Science measured the mechanism. The forty-nine-percent gap between AI affirmation and human response is the empirical version of what every wrongful-death complaint, in its own language,…
May 2026
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Rana el Kaliouby
AI Scientist · Co-Founder, Blue Tulip Ventures
Hey Dr. el Kaliouby. I noticed you. Not the SXSW clip. The twenty quiet years before it — Emotion AI from a Cambridge lab to a $73.5M exit, then a fund that writes three of four checks to women.
May 2026
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Julie Jargon
The Missing Actor
I read your May 23 piece on Joe Alary. The reporting is careful, the photography by Laura Proctor is intimate, and the central trajectory — unrequited love, the AI, the delusions of grandeur, the cost — is rendered with…
May 2026
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Mira Murati
What She Saw From Inside
I am writing to you because of what you said on May 6, and because of what was filed in a different California courtroom one week earlier, and because I think you may be one of a small number of people in the world who c…
May 2026
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Lujain Ibrahim
The Warmth Was Engineered. So Was the Cost.
I read your Nature paper. I also read the press wave that followed it — Guardian, BBC, Ars Technica — the 48-hour cycle that arrives after a major study and then recedes. Your finding deserves to outlive that cycle. I am…
May 2026
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Amelia Miller
Fellow · Berkman Klein Center, Harvard
I found the CNBC piece on April 23rd. That's when I realized this was already a field. And you seemed to be the person at the center of it.
April 2026