Tales of the Bottle
Not since Prohibition has there been such a strong and widespread public warning. It feels a little odd.
By Jeannette Cooperman
The Dark Side of Gold
Chuck away all the awards and trophies? Absolutely.
Ray Hartmann: A Loss for All of Us
He had integrity, always. He could be sly and mischievous, and he had a sizable ego, and he could drive you crazy, coming round on deadline day to rehearse his topic for Donnybrook at length. But he came round to all of us because he wanted all angles, all opinions. By the time he wrote or spoke on air, he sounded sure and strong, because he had researched and read and listened all week.
Painted Ladies (Et Alia)
“Honey, you look sick without it,” my mom informed teenage me. Gentle and loving, she was hardly ever that harsh. But she was caught in the cult of femininity, and she wanted to make damned sure her daughter understood the need for artifice.
I would like to say…
How AI Manages to Sound So Wise
I ask chatbots for recipes and gardening advice. Bash Ahmed, a brilliant friend who works in IT, has long exploratory discussions about politics, culture, and finance. When he commented—after the president’s message to “Open the fuckin’ strait, you crazy bastards—Praise be to Allah”—that we were living in Dr. Strangelove,…
Thinking Outside the Box
Geometry needs to be part of the zeitgeist.
All The World’s Wisdom
A solid old brick house on Clayton Road with a sign outside: Living Insights Center. A meeting place, maybe, some kind of recovery program? I step inside. In the first room to the right, a lifesize statue of St. Therese of Lisieux gazes at an illuminated Qur’an, a silver…
Dreamworks: Manipulating Our Deepest Secrets
Fragmented sleep might not be restful, but I love it, because I can finally remember what I dreamt. The stories play like movies, colors saturated, plots full of twists. Some are spun from trivia; others are Hitchcockian, suspenseful and complex. Who writes these scripts? Who does that weird and…
We Failed Each Other Long Before AI
Introduced to a chatbot, people soon pour out doubts and questions they would not dare reveal to another human being. Why not?
The Culture of Animals, Why They Are Not Us, but Why We Need Them as Our Co-Creators of Reality
Language has allowed us to be bound together by codes of law; to move easily between past and present and future; to fathom the deepest mysteries of the universe. But while scholars were busy defending our species’ superiority, biologists were uncovering mysteries of animal communication that shot down one “special” human capacity after another.
Ancient Splendor (and the Ambivalence of Its Ethics)
When you walk into the Saint Louis Art Museum’s new exhibit—Ancient Splendor: Rome in the Time of Trajan—the emperor himself greets you. His right hand is raised, index finger lifted: he is about to speak. The commanding air comes naturally to him; he rose through the army, suffering hardship…
What Do We Owe Our Dead?
In Elizabeth Finch, Julian Barnes’s character falls platonically in love with one of his teachers, a woman whose clarity and intelligence become his lodestar. After her death, he vows to overcome his habitual procrastination and research a historical figure he suspects she wanted him to write about. “To please…