There is some irony in my daughter’s latest digital art project being written up in Slate. I know that. But proud dad’s gotta blog, right?

Hilarity generally ensues when Lissa and I try to explain Nora Reed’s digital art to members of our own generation:

"It's a robot. That tells jokes. Kinda like if David Brooks was taking a Turing test…. Oh, never mind." @NoraReed @thinkpiecebot

— John Fleck (@jfleck) September 1, 2015

Now Jacob Brogan at Slate has taken up the challenge on our behalf:

Something meta about a Slate piece on this

Brogan further explains:

Enter @thinkpiecebot, an automated Twitter account that embraces this paradox with a wink and a smile. Created by digital artist Nora Reed, @thinkpiecebot draws on a repertoire of typical provocative subjects—chemtrails, sexting, and pumpkin spice, for example. Reed told me that she has the bot randomly insert items from these lists into constructions such as “Is [SINGULAR THING] Why [GROUP] Can’t [VERB THING]?” The results—pitches for essays that never were but sometimes feel that they could be—are at once familiar and alienating, perfectly capturing the formulaic vacuity of so many Internet-age articles.

More here.