The masochism of it never sat well with me. Watch, on a screen, your nightmares acted out? Fix your eyes on that screen while your heart pounds faster and faster, your breathing shallows, your guts clench, and the worst possible things happen? It sounded like a mad scientist’s torture…
Today’s influencers, panicked by AI and its ability to mimic or replace us altogether, preach a new vitalism. Often masculine, sometimes misogynist, this energy is wild and brave and noble, a birthright that cannot be replaced.
It was all so amusing when it happened to other people. To old people. Such fun to say dryly, when one’s parent scrambled, frantic, to find their glasses, “They’re on your nose.”
But the other day, I was the one hunting for the glasses on my nose. Granted,…
I was railing again about Eve. For Eve. Why should she take the rap for humanity’s fall, just because she had a healthy curiosity? Then I remembered Pandora, whom we blame just as angrily for the unleashing of our woes. But think of living with that box, gazing at…
The unbearable whiteness of being....
“But, it would seem, there is no getting around explanations, we are constantly explaining and excusing ourselves; life itself, that inexplicable complex of being and feeling, demands explanations of us, those around us demand explanations, and in the end we ourselves demand explanations of ourselves, until in the end…
The tech bros must have stumbled onto Abraham Heschel’s book about the Sabbath.
ADHD, sleep deprivation, amphetamines and the truth of why they work.
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.
Another fluffy news release about home interiors. I move to delete it—but the backstory catches me. An interior designer who had to tear apart her own home because her toddler was struggling to breathe? She wound up a certified expert in home wellness…
Though their lives wound up linked, these three men could not have been more different. Perry Smith was as poor as used-up dirt. Truman Capote sparkled like diamonds and partied with stars: Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra…. Philip Seymour Hoffman landed in the shy middle, living off his talent as simply as one can in New York. What they shared was a sensitivity too raw to hide, and pain that sent them running.