Reading Machines (Vandal Live at Berkeley)

The final episode recorded at the ⁠Modes of Reading Today Symposium⁠, hosted by the ⁠Townsend Center For The Humanities⁠ focuses on media, mediation, and machine-generated texts. It opens with Nicholas Baer and Pardis Debashi's "Unattainable Texts," followed by David Bates's "Reading and Writing" [20:00], Nina Beguš's "Novel Audiences in 'Finnegan's Wake'" [37:30], Hannes Bajohr's "Surface Reading LLMs" [57:00], Matt Seybold's "The Technofeudal Reader" [81:00], and a brief Q&A [100:00].

Cast (in order of appearance): Yael Segalovitz, Nicholas Baer, David Bates, Nina Beguš, Hannes Bajohr, Matt Seybold, Jacob Gaboury, Deniz Göktürk, Jonathan Kramnick

Dates Recorded: February 19-20, 2026

Music: Danny Weiss Quartet, Moby