The terms of the struggle are renegotiated every time a law is deemed unjust by civil disobedience, and the tension ratchets up every time we are forced to acknowledge that laws without the threat of possible force are no laws at all. The law may fix the line between coercion and consent, but in a democratic republic we at least have the prospect of that line moving forward or back.
The tech bros must have stumbled onto Abraham Heschel’s book about the Sabbath.
Can truth be found gently? What about hope, and grit?
There was still a note of excitement when OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy remarked that having more than 150,000 AI agents wired in and making their own posts on Moltbook was unprecedented. The next time I checked, there were more than 1.5 million.
For many college and university graduates, this is not a brief phase but a long-term reality, one that turns the job market into something that feels less like a promise and more like a gamble.
Duolingo. The best way to learn Spanish, right? Gamified so thoroughly that even I—who loathe competition in any form—got hooked. The characters were fun, and the constant invisible pressure had me coming home tired and rushing to do my Duolingo, worried that I would finish past midnight and lose my…
There are big political questions that prompt citizens to decide whether we agree with our president. But then there is the human question: what sort of person is this president? And what sort of person do the times allow him to be? One way to begin answering the human question…
I have always wanted to be naked under a tightly cinched trench coat. Maybe the appeal is the contrast: soft, ready flesh, buttoned in and belted with military precision. I had never thought about this coat’s history until I read Trench Coat by Jane Tynan, part of Bloomsbury’s Object…
In my teens, I made, on delighted impulse, a mistake that has haunted me ever since. My grandmother’s name had been bestowed upon me as a middle name, and I loathed the woman. She was a cool and inventive schemer, clever but not gentle, disappointed with her life and taking…
“The lights are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” ~Sir Edward Grey, August 1914 It is hell living with a historian. I talk about Venezuelans’ opinions. My husband talks about an end to the international order. I wonder aloud whether AI…