We get the future we deserve You must’ve heard Open AI’s latest language model, Chat GPT, gained over a million users in its first five days after launch. No one, including the program itself, can shut up about it. We’ve had chatbots seemingly forever now, stacked like racks of angels tethered to a…

Exploring the darkness under the Christmas lights — The day started strange and got stranger Human flight remains a miracle, but it’s also been a dehumanizing ordeal for the past twenty years. In the past two years, it’s gotten worse. If a journey can be made in less than five hours, I’ll take the train. It’s four and a half hours by train from my…

It turns out we’re all losers — We knew it was coming When it was announced twelve years ago that this year’s World Cup would be held in Qatar, people were concerned. The tiny gulf state has no history of football success, and its desert location is hardly amenable to holding the world’s biggest sporting event. But that was twelve years ago…

Shine, perishing Republic — “Life is good, be it Stubbornly long or suddenly A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less Than mountains: shine, perishing republic.” - Robinson Jeffers, Shine Perishing Republic (1925) September makes the leaves rattle Even here in my Mediterrania, the heart of the heat still raw and red under still-Summer’s iron dome. …

Bob Dylan, Christopher Hitchens, and a windy day at the beach. — In each thing there is an insinuation of death. Stillness, silence, serenity are all apprenticeships. — Federico Garcia Lorca I probably seem heartbroken To my still-new French neighbors, I must cut a forlorn figure. In the still-warm autumn wind, I stroll desolate beaches by myself, head down, eyes tight against the wind. …

Even if you don’t have to wallow in it — Nothing is easier than closing your eyes Nothing is easier than looking away. It’s never been easier to distract ourselves with a thousand blinking things. Or to live in electronic echo chambers that tell us only what we want to hear. Even the best life on earth has its share of problems. There’s no need to go…

Murder, massacres, and the meandering path of time — The murder didn’t happen here It was in St Etienne du Rouvray where teenage terrorists cut a priest’s throat. It’s a long way from there to here, long enough for the rolling green fields of northern France to give way to the wild wind and fierce sun of the South. But in Beziers, the glorious…

Without emotion, what’s the point? — Nothing scares me like the void The Wasteland. Not the void that existence depends on, the vast and sprawling emptiness between atoms that fill the heart of everyone you love. That’s the same emptiness in the dark reaches of space where the stars are born. That’s nothing to be afraid of. What scares me is to…