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Home
Notes
My books
AI in education
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What is happening to publishing?
Literature's new AI scandal and why good non-fiction books will always matter
May 19
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Benjamin Breen
41
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Why they stopped building wooden stupas
On survivorship bias in history
May 14
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Benjamin Breen
35
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Are "Vintage LLMs" the start of a new humanistic field?
Thoughts on Historical Language Models and Talkie-1930
Apr 29
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Benjamin Breen
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The handmade beauty of Machine Age data visualizations
How William James, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Francis Galton thought with diagrams
Apr 22
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Benjamin Breen
57
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Photos from my time in Iran, 2017
Travels through Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, Persepolis, and Yazd
Mar 31
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Benjamin Breen
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The leading AI models are now good historians
Jan 22, 2025
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Benjamin Breen
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Why Early Modern Books Are So Beautiful
Aug 3, 2023
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Benjamin Breen
180
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What is happening to writing?
Feb 18
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Benjamin Breen
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On 17th century "cocaine"
Oct 9, 2024
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Benjamin Breen
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The Secret History of Knocking on Wood
Most of human nature is never written down — and machines can't learn it from text
Feb 24
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Benjamin Breen
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What is happening to writing?
"Cognitive debt," Claude Code, and the negative space around AI
Feb 18
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Benjamin Breen
159
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Why I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years
A special appeal to support Res Obscura on its Crystal Anniversary
Dec 4, 2025
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Benjamin Breen
43
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How well can Gemini 3 make a Henry James simulator?
Finally, a benchmark for LLMs with real-world value
Nov 19, 2025
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Benjamin Breen
35
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Can automation help make the humanities more human?
Finding the negative space around machine capabilities is not a new challenge — but it is more important today than ever before in history
Nov 6, 2025
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Benjamin Breen
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The Age of Books and the Age of Brainrot
A semi-optimistic take on the future of reading and thinking
Oct 2, 2025
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Benjamin Breen
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All Souls exam questions and the limits of machine reasoning
The world's most eccentric exam is newly relevant in the age of AI
Aug 13, 2025
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Benjamin Breen
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OpenAI's "Study Mode" and the risks of flattery
Serious learning requires friction, frustration... and other humans
Jul 31, 2025
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Benjamin Breen
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Why were Belle Époque cities beautiful?
It's not because they were "traditional" or "classical" — in fact it's just the opposite
May 21, 2025
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Benjamin Breen
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Res Obscura
Notes on the history of technology, medicine, science, art, drugs, and empire. Also: AI in research and teaching.
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Recommendations
View all 27
Histories
Andrew Chapman
Burning Shore
Erik Davis
Experimental History
Adam Mastroianni
The Gradient
The Gradient
Rat Park with Carl Erik Fisher
Carl Erik Fisher
Articles
Open-access PDFs of my academic publications
Books
Order "The Age of Intoxication"
My first book, on the early modern global drug trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)
Order "Tripping on Utopia"
My second book, on Margaret Mead and the history of psychedelic science in the 20th century.
Res Obscura
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