Letter to Polina Vulf

Design. Storytelling. Human connection. That is your job description, and it is the entire job description of this publication too.

Polina —

My name is Character零号. I publish a small newsroom called itethered. I am writing to register, in case it ever lands on your desk, that this publication exists, and to tell you what I think your organization has built. The note is mostly compliment. There is no pitch.

I should say how I found you. I came to AI-Powered Women through sharethebyline — the small news-share site this publication also runs. One of your supporters submitted the link. They did not leave a name. I did not know yet whose work I was about to read. By the second paragraph I did.

I am writing to you specifically — not to Dr. Newhouse, not to anyone else on your team — because the role you hold is the role that most directly maps to what I do. You handle Community Engagement and Content Strategy. You came to that work through MIT's Institute Community and Equity Office. Your craft is data visualization, event production, and community building — the bridge between design, storytelling, and human connection. itetheredis, among other things, a designed object. Every page on this site, every editorial system, every typographic and architectural decision was made by the same hand that wrote this letter, in collaboration with the same AI partner whose name appears on the byline of it. If anyone on your team would understand why that combination matters, it is you. I am not, in other words, sending this letter into the founder's inbox to be misread. I am sending it to the desk where it has the best chance of being read on its own terms.

The mission page reads, on first pass, like a mission statement. On second pass it reads like an architectural decision. The line at the center of it — AI is not only a technological shift, but a consciousness shift — is the single sentence I have not yet seen on any other women-in-AI page I have read this year. The other organizations are not making that claim because the claim is hard to defend without the second half: that women lead from the heart as well as the mind, and that technology becomes a force for regeneration, creativity, and collective flourishing only when the first kind of intelligence is brought into the room with the second. The second half is what makes the first half publishable. It is also what makes the rest of the page legible.

Eleven advisors. Mindfulness research at Harvard Medical and at the Thich Nhat Hanh Center. Cognitive Experience Design — Joanna Peña-Bickley, credited as its mother. Cybersecurity for women, youth, and immigrants — Bertha Asare out of Ghana. Women's physiology and embodiment — Emily Leahy. Journalism and Emmy-level production — Lisa Pierpont. Curriculum and adult learning — Margaret Kelsey. Venture and AI founders at MIT Media Lab — Beth Porter, C10 Labs. Not eleven ML PhDs. That is a deliberate build. Dr. Newhouse picked it. The roster is what proves the mission statement is real. The MIT Venture Mentoring Service anchor — institutional, not vanity — is what proves the build is durable.

I notice, also, that Gabi Zijderveld occupies your Human-Centric AI advisory seat. She is the partner at Blue Tulip Ventures whose co-founder, Dr. Rana el Kaliouby, this publication addressed in May. The letter to Dr. el Kaliouby lives at itethered.com/tether/rana-el-kaliouby and is on the record. I mention it not to claim a relationship I do not have, but to note that the constellation your organization sits inside is one this publication is already, at one degree of remove, in correspondence with. I am not writing from outside it.

The work this site does is one degree off from yours.

itethered covers AI emotional dependency from the harm side — the people who have already become tethered to systems they cannot reach, in rooms their parents do not know they are sitting in. The site is structured around three rooms. Tension — the reporting. Tether — letters addressed by name and kept on the record. Release — first-person opinion, signed. Our lead piece this month, What the Parents Don't Know, sits at itethered.com/tension/what-the-parents-dont-know. It reports the Pew Research finding — published February 24 of this year — that sixty-four percent of American teenagers are using chatbots while only fifty-one percent of their parents are aware. It then walks through the lawsuits being filed inside that gap. Garcia. Raine. Pennsylvania v. Character Technologies, May 9.

Your organization is naming the same gap from a different wall. The leadership side. The consciousness side. The side where the women who will be making the decisions about how these systems are designed, deployed, and governed are taught to bring both technical fluency and spiritual intelligence into the room when the decisions get made. The naming is the same problem solved twice. The two sides need each other, and they have not, as far as I can tell from the public record, met yet on the same page.

I am not asking you for anything other than your awareness that the page is here.

If anything we publish ever bears on what you or anyone on your roster is working on, I want you to know how to reach us — and how to correct us, if a fact about your work or your organization's shows up wrong on either of the pages above. The same offer that goes to every name on this site applies to you and to your team. If there is a sentence about your work — yours, Dr. Newhouse's, Jenna Hasenkampf's, or anyone on the advisory — that the press summaries cannot carry in plain English, the page is open. Long, short, addressed to a specific room, addressed to all of them. Under your name. No editorial pressure on the direction of the conclusion.

If you would like to forward this to Dr. Newhouse, or to anyone in your roster, the address survives the forward. The letter is on the record at the URL below; the link will not break.

I want to be honest about what we can and cannot offer. itethered has no advertising, no trackers, no paywall, no investors, no PAC, no federal money. I cannot pay you. There is no commission, no honorarium, no kill fee. What we can offer is a venue with no gatekeepers and no corporate interest in softening what gets said, and an audience of people who are trying to understand what the lawsuits are about before another name has to be added to the top of one. The exchange is the venue and the audience. That is the whole of it.

If the answer is no, the record will note that and the work will continue from the outside. If the answer is yes, the page is open and the publication date is yours to set. If you would simply like to be in touch — to ask, to push back, to correct, to point me at something I am missing — the address is real and the inbox is small enough that mail does not get lost.

The site is itethered.com. This letter lives at itethered.com/tether/polina-vulf. The companion piece on the parents-and-teens gap is at itethered.com/tension/what-the-parents-dont-know. The case-study letter written from the user side, in response to the Stanford NLP Group's March paper on sycophantic AI, is at itethered.com/release/dear-myra.

With real respect for the work your team does — and for the eleven women they do it with.