by Scott Samuelson

When I turned fifty, I went through the usual crisis of facing that my life was—so to speak—more than half drunk. After moping a while, one of the more productive things I started to do was to write letters to people living and dead, people known to me and unknown, sometimes people who simply caught my eye on the street, sometimes even animals or plants. Except in rare cases, I haven’t sent the letters or shown them to anyone.

Writing personal letters without any designs has been psychologically helpful. After venting any rage or confusion, I’ve found that what I have to say generally boils down to two things: I love you and I’m sorry. In the face of my mortality, it’s been good to be reminded of the strength of those two sentences and the connections built on their foundation. There’s something more than proper or quaint in addressing someone at the start of a letter as “Dear.”

Because our current president occupies more of my mental space than I’d prefer, he’s one of the people I’ve written a letter to. Dear Donald Trump. Then I ticked off a laundry list of grievances, going all the way back to the 80s.

When it finally dawned on me that I was addressing him as a figure rather than as a person, I began to wonder if I could talk to him human to human. Here’s a snippet of what I went on to write:

I’m having real troubles believing that you think of similar things as I do when you think about what makes life worth living. Am I wrong? For instance, that cry inside John Coltrane’s tone and Dolly Parton’s voice—do any songs at all break your heart with their beauty? Or what about friendship? When I recently visited a dear old friend of mine who lives in Brussels, my whole being flooded with joy when I saw his face at the airport. Do you have any such friends? What about a first love, a sweet pure love before puberty, before you even longed to kiss her (much less grab her by the pussy)—do you still dream of her? When you see, say, the first little daffodil after what has felt like three straight months of February, do you feel glad to be alive?

I continued like that in search of how we might connect over a fundamental good, away from the political shitshow that he’s in part responsible for. Read more »

by Thomas Fernandes

In the natural world, predation may mark the end of life, but it doesn’t signal the end of ecological interactions. The hunt, with all its challenges and shifting interactions, is not an end in itself, it only creates the opportunity to feed. O    nce the kill is made, two main strategies emerge: feeding quickly and leaving, or holding on to the remains for a few days to draw multiple meals from them. The carcass, meanwhile, becomes a contested prize, attracting stronger competitors seeking a free meal, blurring the line between hunter and scavenger. Solitary cheetahs, for instance, lose nearly half their kills to lions and hyenas. After this struggle, as time and heat accelerate decomposition, the remaining flesh soon turns inedible to most animals. From that inedibility emerges an opportunity for species able to thrive on what others must abandon. Scavenging, in this sense, occupies a shifting niche, rich in energy but scarce and unpredictable, a prize that few species can afford to rely on.

Among vertebrates, vultures stand alone as obligate scavengers, living almost entirely on the flesh of the dead. This diet exposes them to hazards that most animals evolved to avoid through evolutionary adaptations: pathogens, toxins, and chemical byproducts from decaying tissue. Humans, too, evolved pathogen avoidance, a behavioral response that manifests as disgust toward bodily fluids, rotting meat, or anything in contact with them. By association with the unclean, vultures are generally portrayed as vicious and malevolent, or simply ignored, despite their endangered state:  11 of the 16 species of African and Eurasian vultures are classified as Critically Endangered or Endangered, according to the IUCN Red List. Observing vultures challenges both our innate disgust response and our understanding of how scavengers adapt to extreme diets.

When we think of vultures, we imagine a single bird, when in fact they encompass a surprising diversity. There are two distinct vulture lineages that diverged 69 million years ago: New World vultures in the Americas and Old-World vultures in Africa, Europe, and Asia. The Old-World vultures tend to eat larger carcasses, including large ungulates such as hippopotami, horses, and buffalo. New World vultures, in contrast, feed on smaller prey, such as monkeys, rodents, and birds. Read more »

Sughra Raza. First Snow. Dec 14, 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Bill Murray

One Monday in 1883 Southeast Asia woke to “the firing of heavy guns” heard from Batavia to Alice Springs to Singapore, and maybe as far as Mauritius, near Africa.

“So violent are the explosions that the ear-drums of over half my crew have been shattered,” one ship’s captain wrote. “I am convinced that the Day of Judgement has come.”

Barometers traced a pressure wave that circled the earth. Not for days or weeks did people understand the cause: that the Krakatoa volcano had erupted from the sea. Now in our own time, political shock waves have been sent out. Western democracies must interpret their impact urgently.

During the lifetimes of everyone born this year, the world will surely become a harder place to live. The main causes are two: ever faltering human politics, and even longer-term human climate tampering.

The climate part grows so gradually that it’s hard to rouse people to the ramparts. The politics part comes from a new cycle of populist nationalism. We saw how that worked out in Europe last century. It’s hard to believe we’re already at it again, but here we are.

It’s tragedy but truth that the climate part only goads the politics part. Climate disruption leads to refugee flows, and they reinforce xenophobia.

Which sets up the mid-2020s as a 1968 or a 1989, the end of a time of complacent stability, of relative governability, and the beginning of churning disruption. The mid-2020s are a tinderbox, and Donald Trump was elected by people who enjoy playing with matches.

If Krakatoa was a natural catastrophe, Trump’s presidency is a political one, the trigger of America’s current fit of government-by-destruction. An accelerant, releasing long-gathering American political decay and imperial overreach. Read more »

Until the Night Drops

Fog lifting off of the river
Frogs in a chorus of croaks
Moon lit up —just a sliver
A fire that the unknown has stoked

Chuck Berry singing Johnny be Good
his guitar lighting fires in our heads
greenhorns working out would-could-should
fresh ones a sunbeam had fed

Look at how she climbs
Look at how she shines
Look at how when she shows up
She makes the dark stop

Look at how she blooms
Look at her at noon
She makes the heart pump
She makes the buds pop

Men standing under a lamppost
waiting there for Godot
—someone who may just be a ghost
for all a mere mortal may know

—but lying here in the morning
light seeping over the hill
Sun-God riding her big bright horse
early when the chatter is nil

Look at how she rides
Look at how she glides
Look at how she rises
over the treetops

Look at how she burns
Look at how she turns
overhead all day
until the night drops
—until the night drops

by Jim Culleny
March 1, 2011
Song rendition link:
Stream Song: Until the Night Drops-1st Take by Jim Culleny | Listen online for free on SoundCloud

(Songs that immediately follow Jim’s recording
are not associated with it)

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by Malcolm Murray

As I discussed AI with my cabdriver on a recent trip to Vienna, I was reminded of the fact that the German word for AI is Künstliche Intelligenz. This shares an etymological root with the word Kunst, German for Art. This made me realize that of course we have that in English too, the “Art” is right there in Artificial Intelligence, we have just overlooked it.

The words have diverged over time, from their common Proto-Germanic root, but I think their commonality is an interesting perspective to consider. Given the breadth of likely impact of AI on society, we need to analyze it from many different lenses and perspectives. So apply the “art lens” and being more cognizant of the “Art” in Artificial Intelligence could be helpful for making sense of some of the dissonant patterns AI presents us with.

First, we have the strange and somewhat discombobulating fact that AI is, as Ethan Mollick famously pointed out, neither software nor people. It is something else, a third category, with elements of both. We are used to people, and Kahneman and others have taught us how the ways in which they are fallible and make mistakes. They are flexible, but have many biases. We are used to software and we know its strengths and weaknesses. It delivers predictable performance, but with a limited range. What we have not yet encountered is fallible software. Like Ethan says, this is a new category which will take time to get used to. This partly explains enterprise adoption which is still slow, since that third category does not have a natural home in an organization. Processes will have to be changed drastically to allow this third category to fully come to its right. Seeing AI as more as of an art than a science helps put this in the right perspective. Read more »

by Derek Neal

If one on the goals of art is to wake us up, to remind us what it is to be alive, one of the main ways of doing this is by bringing us as close to death as possible. This is why suicide is such a fruitful and, paradoxically, invigorating artistic subject. For the suicidal character approaching death, sensations are heightened, and life becomes fecund and tactile. One scene that captures this is in Francois Ozon’s Under the Sand (2000), just before Charlotte Rampling’s husband (Bruno Cremer) disappears into the ocean while she naps on the beach. The film never explains the husband’s disappearance—never confirms that it’s suicide—but the evening prior, the camera follows Cremer as he gathers firewood in the forest surrounding their vacation home.

He picks up a few sticks, then pauses at a tree and feels its bark, runs his hand down its trunk, as if he wants to feel the rough surface one more time before dying. The camera follows him as he passes behind another tree, then something unexpected happens: the shot stops on the tree while Cremer passes out of view, lingering in sharp focus on the nooks and crannies of the tree bark, showing the viewer just how wondrous a tree is, if only we could stop to see it. This is also a great example of Deleuze’s concept of “time-image,” when a film emphasizes time or duration rather than the movement of characters and plot. We then return to Cremer, who has crouched down and turned over a rotting log. Hundreds of ants scurry around—so much life, right there!—in juxtaposition to Cremer, alone in the forest.

This contrast of the isolated individual and the group is a recurring theme in Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997) as well. Paul Schrader famously imagined a man in a yellow cab as a symbol of loneliness and alienation, but Kiarostami took this idea even further—what if an entire movie was just a man in a car, driving around? That’s Taste of Cherry. The film is a series of vignettes as the main character (Homayoun Ershadi) motors around the outskirts of Tehran picking up one passenger after another, not as a taxi driver, but in search of a person he can convince to do a special job. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

The last few years I have been deep in the world of artificial intelligence. Using it. Reading about it. Learning from people who are experts.

What follows are 15 random thoughts about AI. What it means for us, what the future might look like, and different things I’ve reflected on recently. Some are negative. Some are positive. Use them as thoughts for reflection, or if nothing else – a little entertainment. 

(Disclaimer: I am not a professional. These are the opinions of an amateur that’s interested (and skeptical) of AI. Please keep that in mind.)

1) Right now, every incentive is to make AI look like it is absolutely necessary.

This is the first idea I want to start with. These days, the only economic news that seems to matter is how companies are adding AI to their products. 

Just follow the incentives. There is more money to be made (and invested) when companies overstate the value of AI. Just something to consider the next time news of the latest AI accomplishment makes you feel anxious.

That said-

2) More people should be using AI.

Think about people that hated on the internet. Or a couple thousand years ago, that were skeptical of books. We reflect on that now and laugh. 

How horribly outdated, we say. 

But that’s exactly what’s happening with AI right now. Most people aren’t using it for anything substantial. The obvious risk here? That those people refuse to learn a technology that will eventually become necessary, and get left behind as a result.

(Imagine not knowing how to access the internet now.) 

If you aren’t using AI for anything, start. Even just once a week going back and forth with ChatGPT can start to build the skillset. 

3) The school system will be forever changed.

I think of schools and how inefficient they are. (The “modern” school system was designed to fit into an industrial society.) 

But what if each student had their own AI-powered teacher? What if we got rid of our “go as fast as the slowest student” system – and replaced it with “go as fast as your custom-made AI teacher lets you?”

Each student would learn in the way that was perfectly suited to them. Not just the average intelligence of their class.

The implications of this could be huge. School less as a place of learning, and more as a place for kids to socialize.  Read more »

by Richard Farr

My family jokes that I can break a computer by looking at it; God knows, I’ve tried. They also say that I hate technology, and would rather have lived two hundred years ago — wooden table, candle, quill pen — but that’s a slight exaggeration. Once in a blue moon I will acknowledge that some aspect of our vaunted progress is real. Speaking of computers: my new Chromebook has a great screen, a great keyboard, does everything I want, is more secure and more stable than any PC or Mac, and was $249. Amazing. 

But my mellow is rapidly harshed when, as so often, I perceive a yawning gap between the hype surrounding a technology and its performance. Or perhaps it’s more that I’m depressed by the thirst with which so many of us guzzle the hype, unable or unwilling to countenance the possibility that a new app or gizmo we’ve been instructed to consider marvellous might actually be saving less time and trouble that it costs.

Back in the 1990s I spent an hour or three every day with this thought, because 27.9% of my productive potential and probably yours was being vacuumed up into the business of installing, uninstalling, reinstalling and then screaming at the latest iteration of ****ing Windows. Was this perhaps the single worst consumer product ever to have become unjustifiably popular? Not quite! Adding insult to injury, once the cursed Frankensoftware was up and lurching I’d typically spend most of the precious minutes before the next crash using it to support Word — which, from the viewpoint of a working writer, was even worse: a nightmare of bloat and overkill and thoughtlessness, like a ten gallon espresso cup made of wool. The free market being the miracle that it is, Microsoft managed to create enough of a monopoly with Word that using an alternative was for many years not a real option, and thus did it become the QWERTY keyboard of the modern era. Read more »

by Barry Goldman 

At the time of this writing, Thanksgiving week 2025, the Trump administration has launched 21 strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific and killed 83 civilians. According to the administration, the US military has legal authority to conduct these strikes. That authority is outlined in a memo from the Office of Legal Counsel, the OLC. But the memo has not been released to the public. It is a secret memo.

We have seen this movie before. Twenty-some years ago, there were secret memos from the OLC that authorized the CIA to torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Those became known as the “torture memos.” These OLC documents are likely to become known as the “murder memos.” The process that generated them is the same.

As Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.) said:

[T]he decision was made, and someone was told to come up with a justification for the decision. It is a lot of legal mumbo jumbo.

No one should be surprised.

They told us a story about this process when I was in law school. It seems once upon a time many years ago a lawyer told J. P. Morgan there was no legal way he could do something he wanted to do. Morgan said, “I don’t know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do.” The lesson was clear. Morgan was one of the richest men in the world. He could hire any lawyer he wanted, and he could pay more than anyone else. If this lawyer didn’t want to do the job, Morgan would find someone else who did. Law is no different from any other field. The Golden Rule applies: Whoever has the gold makes the rules. Read more »

Self-portrait by reflection in the very large glass window of the new public library in Brixen, South Tyrol.

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by Rachel Robison-Greene

The Trolley Problem, once a thought experiment students encountered for the first time in an Introduction to Philosophy classroom, has become a well-known cultural meme. It is depicted in various iterations in cartoons across the internet. The standard story involves a person choosing to pull a lever so that a trolley runs over one person tied to the tracks rather than five. People have imagined all sorts of identities for the individuals involved, up to and including a billionaire at the lever choosing to direct the trolley to run over many people in order to protect bags of money. All of these scenarios share a key feature in common—they encourage those contemplating them to consider the consequences that might result from the decision the lever-puller makes.

Much emerging technology encourages people to reason along similar lines. Consider the case of autonomous vehicles. Critics and ethically inclined collaborators have been quick to point out that these vehicles will not be naturally inclined to make decisions guided by moral considerations. If we want these vehicles to make defensible moral decisions in tricky circumstances, we’ll need to program them to do so. Discussion of these issues often proceeds along broadly consequentialist lines: identify things that are valuable and maximize them and identify things that have disvalue and minimize them. If we think that the life of a human is more valuable than, say, the life of an ill-fated duck crossing the street, then the life of the human should be prioritized when there is a choice between them. If we value saving a greater number of lives rather than a lesser number, then perhaps we should program autonomous vehicles to sacrifice the driver when the choice is between the death of the driver and the deaths of a greater number of people. In any case, the decision-making metric involves weighing consequences. The same is true with algorithmic decision making made by other forms of AI. This includes AI used in our most important institutions: education, health care, the criminal justice system, and the military. Read more »

by Laurie Sheck

For the past couple of decades, I have been a member of the MFA Creative Writing faculty at the New School in New York City. Before that I taught at Princeton, Rutgers, Columbia and CUNY. I have had many remarkable students, among them the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Junot Diaz who I met in my mid-20’s when he walked into the undergrad creative writing class I was teaching at Rutgers and handed in, for his first assignment, an extraordinary short story which I remember to this day.

One of the many pleasures of teaching college, and now graduate school, is getting to learn what a group of people in their 20’s and 30’s are thinking; learning, even, what newly-coined words they are using. Over the past couple of years, I have noticed a darker cast to much of their writing. Thinking about this, and wanting to know more, a few weeks ago I invited a group of them over to my apartment to talk among themselves about what’s on their minds, what their daily lives feel like, and to figure out how they might write about this in short pieces that I could share here. What emerged most prominently aside from the global political situation, was a sense of loneliness and isolation and a wary attitude toward AI and social media. I also asked each of them to give me four or five words that apply to the time we’re now living in, and, as Walt Whitman so wisely knew, to allow for those words to be contradictory. Here are some of them: “Lonely, fractured, addicted, expressive, inventive”; “Scary, dramatic, fever-dream, awakening”; “Digitized, commodified, tender, resilient, evolving.”

When I asked what makes them feel most hopeful, their answers included, “evil’s inherent tendency toward failure,” and when I asked what makes them least hopeful, they said: climate change, global change, the future.”

What follows are their short pieces. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Martin Butler

Neurodiversity, a term first coined by the sociologist Judith Singer in the 1990s, is the idea that human beings think and act in a wide variety of ways which extend well beyond the narrow, stereotyped conception of ‘normal’ that most people take for granted. It has come to be regarded as a matter of minority rights, according to which people whose personalities or behavioural tendencies are atypical should be granted equal rights and the same respect as anyone else. Neurodiversity is an obvious reality to which there are two rather different approaches.

The first argues that we simply need to be more accepting of those who do not fit the standard way of being. It’s about overcoming the kind of prejudice we all know from the school playground against those perceived to be different. We might see this as widening the idea of what is acceptable and thus extending the spectrum of what is ‘normal’, for even within the range of what is described as ‘neurotypical’ there is diversity. There have always been different personality types – extrovert, introvert, impulsive, aggressive, thoughtful, calm, clumsy, methodical, and so on. These, however, are not described as neurodiversity but simply as human difference. Neurodiversity then, according to this first approach, simply means admitting more individuals into the normal range, such as  those who have ADHD or those on the autism spectrum. It’s part of the wider ethic that being different, unusual, or even ‘odd’ is not in itself a reason to judge a person negatively. Importantly, this approach is an attempt to break down categories. Differences are seen as irrelevant to the way we judge, just as ethnicity or sexual orientation should be regarded as irrelevant. To borrow a quote from Martin Luther King, it is the ‘content of their character’ that matters rather than the degree to which someone shows neurodiversity.

The second approach is quite different. This is not enough, it says. Having a positive and accepting attitude still does not allow someone with, for example, ADHD to succeed in an education system which does not recognise or understand the needs associated with their condition. Rather than underplaying the differences displayed by a neurodivergent individual, this approach advocates a need to fully recognise them. Unlike ethnicity or sexual orientation, it argues, neurodiversity does actually affect the way you interact with other people, how you respond to education programmes, employment roles and social situations more generally, and it is not something the individual concerned can voluntarily alter. Society, therefore, needs to adapt to accommodate these differences, and perhaps even to judge performance by a different yardstick from the one used for neurotypical individuals. According to this approach, we cannot simply be blind to these differences, as the first approach would suggest, seeing through them to the ‘normal’ human being inside. We need to recognise that being neurodivergent is part of an individual’s core identity.

The problem with this is that it leads to the medicalisation of conditions through the creation of artificial categories. Where do we draw the line between someone who could be described as neurotypical but nevertheless shows features of a recognised neurodivergent condition, and someone who only just meets the criteria for that condition? It seems a little arbitrary. Surely all human beings sit somewhere on a complex spectrum rather than in neatly defined categories. Is it fair to give special consideration to those just inside the category but not to those who fall just outside it? Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

Like many other video gamers (nearly eight million, in fact), I have spent no small portion of recent weeks in the robot-infested, post-diluvian wastes of late-22nd-Century Italy, looting remnants of a collapsed civilization while hoping that a fellow gamer won’t sneak up and murder me for the scraps in my pockets. This has been much more fun than the preceding description might lead you to believe, if you are not a fan of such grim fantasy playgrounds. It has also, interestingly, afforded rather heart-warming displays of the better side of human nature, despite the occasional predatory ambush or perfidious betrayal. It helps somewhat that nobody really dies in this game; they just get “downed” and then “knocked out” if not revived in time, leaving behind whatever gear they were carrying (except for what they were able to hide in their “safe pocket”, the technical and anatomical details of which are left to the player’s imagination).

This is the world of Arc Raiders, a game that has been in development and re-development for about five years, finally releasing at the end of October after a few public testing sessions elicited an outburst of anticipation from professional and recreational gamers alike. Developed by Sweden’s Embark Studios, it was created by veterans of the Battlefield series of military shooters, who left Battlefield developer DICE when it was clear that the company was losing the plot to its own franchise. Battlefield 4, released in 2013, is still my favourite game of the series and of the genre (that genre being large-scale military shooters pitting one team against another in a combined arms conflict, with soldiers, planes, tanks, boats and other bits of kit fighting for control of various points across a sprawling map).

Arc Raiders is a very different game from Battlefield. Players are not assigned to opposing teams in a binary struggle for victory. There are no flags to capture or defend. It is a wide-open experience with little in the way of explicit instructions or rules. It was originally conceived as a player-vs-enemy (PvE) cooperative multiplayer game, where human players joined together to fight the robots that have taken over Earth’s surface. In this original conception, it bears much similarity to another favourite game of mine, Generation Zero. Read more »