After months of deft interrogation and feedback, a friend of mine has his Chat GPT AI trained like Rin Tin Tin, sensitive to his tone of voice, eager to help him think through thorny problems. He sends me one of their conversations—which I promptly misunderstand. Here is an excerpt. First, my friend—who works […]
The Victorians sealed their houses against winter’s bluster, then flung open the windows in spring and aired out all the coal dust, swept out the soot, laundered and pressed the bedlinens, sparkled up the windows, and let the sunshine stream in. The catharsis appeals; the work does not. I tend to befriend our […]
On the campus of Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, you will spot an unusual, beautiful shape in the distance. A geodesic dome, set apart from the main buildings, and somehow beckoning. This is the Center for Spirituality & Sustainability, designed (in partnership with architect Shoji Sadao) by Buckminster Fuller, back when he was on the […]
“Everything is connected,” we often remind one another, nodding wisely—but with no idea of the implications. Not until the end of the twentieth century did we realize that the immune system’s inflammatory response plays a central role in anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, MS and other auto-immune diseases, Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, Parkinson’s, […]
In the only recorded inter-species war in human history, the humans lost. Meet the victor. Skinny, leggy, frizzy-haired and feathered, with a long, pale blue neck, buggy amber eyes, and wings too short to fly. Instead, they flap when the emu runs, spindly legs blurring at thirty miles per hour. Emus may not […]
It starts with a scritching noise that, like a demonic possession, seems to be coming from inside the walls. Then, anticlimax: we find a scattering of dark brown droppings in the bathroom cabinet. We are only dealing with Satan’s small gray minions. Andrew picks up a shredded pile of white cotton: “What’s this?” […]
A quarter-century ago, Wendell Berry suggested that if we aim to rescue our planet, “we are using the wrong language.” Our terms are scientific, expert, analytical—but also cold, and often vague. “As a result we have a lot of genuinely concerned people calling upon us to ‘save’ a world which their language simultaneously […]
Hobby drones used in warfare have provided something new: a way to track, observe, hary, kill, and record another person being killed, all in one device. Coupled with distribution by social media, videos of these activities are very much like FPS (first-person shooter) games brought into the real world as FPV (first-person […]
A traditional Roman Catholic confessional looks as heavy as sin itself, the dark wood carved deep. You enter and kneel, but the kneeler never has quite enough room for your knees, which throws you off balance from the start. Velvet curtains rustle, then the metal grate slides open: God is listening. God, through […]
Who needs a time machine? I look out the window and see snow falling, and I am five again. Excited as the snow deepens, thrilled (still) to play in it, cozy in front of a fire afterward. The adult in me loves the way snow covers an often ugly world with pure loveliness—white […]