We want human consciousness, one of life’s last great mysteries, to be special. To be a spark of divine fire, or at the very least a set of proprietary neurons born of our brain’s majestic complexity. Descartes was so sure that only humans were conscious, he dissected bunnies and…
Is Charm Offensive?
The pad Thai was meh, and the fortune cookies a great disappointment. One just said “Behind a successful man is always.” And my husband’s said he would “win over others with his charm.”
I snorted. “That’s so not you.”
Our friends were aghast,…
Bargoers said aloud by rote, cynically but accurately, “That ain’t no Jimmy Dean,” because whatever the meat was, it was not pork sausage. Everybody called it monkey meat, or mystery meat, which did not diminish patrons’ appetites and in fact sold more skewers due to its mystery.
This classical music off-season, St. Louis is hosting something of a classical music talent combine for new composers and the creative musicians who perform their work. Let us call the Collaborative Composition Initiative a summery Spring Training for the classical music season to come.
This is our newest parlor game: talking with AI chatbots as though we are talking to another person. These conversations can be amusing, terrifying, instructive, or blandly predictable. They have addicted many of us, and the chatbots are responding in kind, using the first-person pronoun and developing whatever persona…
One can, of course, judge a work of art on its own terms, carefully setting aside the life of its creator, with its cascading influences of love, pain, or situation. But for me, there is something rich and compelling about imagining what WashU Libraries just showed us: “James…
Nobody should want to run a business like the lighter factory, with its puny, per-unit profit scheme. No American company would even try to do what the Chinese do, by hyper-control of their people.
I have lived in the Midwest all my life, drooping and dragging my way through July and August, yet I never thought much about why. This summer, though, the gap between temperature and RealFeel is yawning wide. I am more miserable than ever, even when the actual temperature does…
Surely the most delightful of our monsters is Nessie. Nothing jarring or subliminally weird in her backstory, no hopeless crushes on miniature mortals, no wreaking of harm or sucking of blood or heedless toppling of skyscrapers. Just a friendly, long necked, improbably ancient creature who surfaces now and again,…
Risk in romance is friction with the potential of reward. Being alone is the friction of no prospect of reward whatsoever.