Stories from a static year 2020 was my first full year of writing on Medium And although I told myself with almost every story I published that I was done with the platform, I kept coming back. Until the calendar flipped over and I realized I had a body of work on my hands. Some of these stories are among…

Was the world ever more alive? — “The cave is alive.” That’s what the tour guide said. And said it again. And again. Her halting English words fluttered back from the fluted walls of the tunnel, glancing off stalactites and stalagmites, curling around rock formations that took a hundred million years to emerge. The cave is alive…

Love, literature, and Catalonian nationalism in a (sort-of) Spanish city — “… A small tribute to the memory of the pitch black and moonlit nights we spent together in these coastal waters and the four or five thousand fresh grilled sardines we ate… Not forgetting the bread and wine. These are realities that are noteworthy, because one could say, and not…

We get the robots we deserve — You know when something’s not right You can tell right away. One of my jobs involves editing the work of other writers, and in that position, I’ve read literally millions and millions of words by writers of all kinds of skill levels. But this time, something was off. The writing was perfectly competent. Grammar and spelling…

Forget the words and learn what you really are — Everyone laughed I laughed too, without knowing why. I do that a lot. For the first time in my life, I have friends who don’t speak English. And I speak French on only the most basic and rudimentary level. My wife is better, and she acts as interpreter between us when we…

Might as well be now — Easter Sunday Black shapes of hikers dot the edge of the tall arid cliffs. Like pilgrims, they trudge along the edge of oblivion. Some with sticks in their hands. Some with backpacks on their shoulders. Here and there, they stop at this or that outstretched finger of rock, where the land bulges…

Anger addiction and the algorithms — You could call it a marsh From above, the low plain where I live spreads like burned butter from gnarled mountains to bright blue sea. Studded with broad shallow ponds, the etangs, where flamingos redden like cigarette burns and spherical little crabs creep along battlements of slimy seaweed. But zoom in closer. The big etangs with…

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 customer service decision tree that leads…

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…