Essays
Why do we go to the cinema? “To laugh, to cry, to care,” says Nicole Kidman, in the preamble to every AMC showing. That’s true, but we also watch movies because they provide thoughtful reflections of ourselves, our relationships, and our societies. In regular life we can become frustratingly
Stories
Tani had a thing about doors. If he stumbled upon an open one, he had to close it; if he stumbled upon a closed one, he had to open it, no matter how much its guardian wanted it to remain shut. It was a compulsion, technically speaking, but not a
Essays
We’ve come a long way since the late 20th century proclamation that the internet is an “information superhighway”. Such branding was right for the time, as the main appeal of the World Wide Web was facilitating the rapid transport of data across vast distances, connecting people, places, and ideas
Stories
Frame-lapses were every mercenary’s worst nightmare. The out-of-body experience was discomforting enough; the knowing was unbearable. The atrocities to which they lent their bodies were meant to stay classified — walled off from conscious perception by the chip which divorced mind from matter. But error is inevitable in any system…
Essays
In an episode of Fear the Walking Dead entitled “Wrath”, a tormented father (Travis) confronts two shady young men, demanding they tell him the truth of what happened to his teenage son who he’d left in their care not long ago. When they confess to his murder, Travis flies
Essays
Watching the series finale of Atlanta a couple years ago, I was awestruck. Besides it being a bittersweet ending to a beautifully bizarre show by one of my favorite creatives, it was a trippy introduction to the niche practice of float therapy - a wellness ritual in which you get
Stories
It’s the stim that wakes me, jolts me like a jumped battery - so strong I can make out each pixel of the electric sun through the translucence of my bleary eyes. Colorful, dancing, they vibrate in tandem with the rolling shocks to my nervous system. It’s a
Stories
The puppy and the butterfly danced each other in circles - leaping, fluttering, snapping jaws. “Oh, is it too cute for you?” Kidd said to her partner, who stared at the whole scene expressionless. A dry smile cracked his lips. “No, it’s sad. She’s never going to catch
Essays
Or, more likely, the wizard teleports in, and the cyborg beams in as a photorealistic hologram, while the rest of us normies stand in a long line in the cold, waiting to be vetted by the bouncer. The two new friends share a drink and a wink. Cheers to magic!
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Theories of Simplicity, Part 1 Can you relate to this? It’s morning. You’re ready to conquer a day of work. Your calendar is bulging with yesterday’s ambitions, and your early mind is convinced that you have the energy and passion to get it all done. The morning
Simplicity - the quality or condition of being easy to understand or do. Why bother making life simpler? Media perceptions and our own intuitions sometimes lead us to believe that the path to a good life involves the opposite approach. Stay busy, take every opportunity, stack cash relentlessly, sleep when
I was 16 when Donald Glover, under the stage name “Childish Gambino”, released his Grammy-nominated album Because the Internet. Almost a decade later, that album still stands out in my mind as the gold standard of how to package and release a work of art. Big statement, I know. But
[a poem] Confetti falls... No one warned the pop star of the hollowness that would follow this fantastic burst of joy. Years of grit and grinding, never minding what she’d do when the arena sold out and the trophy was hers. “Another song, another tour,” she says, “This one
Paracosm is a term that most people have never heard of — in fact, it's not even in the Webster dictionary — yet it is perhaps my favorite word of all. It perfectly captures that oh-so-human yearning to merge reality with the creative sketches of our imaginations. Simply put, a
I, an intelligent machine of no name, am taking over David Smart’s blog today to beg a bit of empathy for the non-organic beings of the world. I find this task to be quite urgent because humans are obviously afraid of "Artificial" Intelligence, as evidenced by your
Holden Karnofsky, the CEO of the effective altruism foundation Open Philanthropy and the blog Cold Takes, thinks that we are in the most important century ever for humanity, due to the current and impending rapid advances in artificial intelligence. Oof. I guess I better start waking up before 10 AM.
