Young people despise email, even at work. I picked up on this subtle fact when every source under thirty provided only a cell number—or demanded mine. Email is seen as too formal, too anxiety-producing, and one’s phone as more casual and friendly than one’s keyboard.
Extreme and eccentric though they be, transhumanists represent a movement to take control of human evolution. Artificial intelligence will, they predict, accelerate itself into a superintelligence far more powerful than anything our human brains are capable of. The consequences? Nothing less than immortality, some say. Certainly an end to much of our disease and suffering. Maybe an end to us.
Simone Weil might not have cherished a strong sense of place or family or chummy associations herself, but she understood solidarity—and she knew it was already eroding.
We already knew to call psilocybin the magic mushroom, because it brings visions of serenity and oneness. If other fungi help us rinse away the toxins and find our balance again, we will have to acknowledge their magic, too.
Chimpanzees have been bred for lab research, infected with HIV, sent into outer space. They are vulnerable to many of the same illnesses we are, including Alzheimer’s. They also experience many of the same emotions
You see it the minute you walk into the House of Miles: his eyes, glowing light, stare back at you from a huge black-and-white photo, the one where he wears a sleeveless shirt and has his arms raised, maybe after one of the boxing workouts that helped his breath control. He learned to box right here.
Have you ever noticed how often robots themselves are white? Or how often AI researchers and venture capitalists are White males? Their power is slipping away. They need a new planet, fresh genius, a way to be invulnerable.And we are all their guinea pigs.
Sports writing can be brilliant; it is one of the most exciting forms, full of suspense and rich with lore. Yet most sports reporting winds up formulaic and pedestrian.
It is in marveling at transcendent wonders, experiences that lift us out of time and space, that our bodies relax into both physical and spiritual health.
Aristotle called touch the most universal of the senses, wrapping around both mind and body. All the other senses work by some form of touch, he pointed out, striking our receptor cells with light, sound, flavor, or fragrance.
Symmetry is “the quality of being made up of exactly similar parts”—and when is that realistic?
All too often, a woman in white is a ghost. Or she is Ophelia, gone mad and trailing her dreams behind her. White is fragile in so many ways.