Thinking Beyond Us

A Survival Manual in a World of Intellectual Overproduction The times we’re passing through are just as strange as all those that came before. I am far from thinking our current difficulties are somehow more insurmountable than those, say, of the people who had just let fire into the cave (oh, the…

An Ironic Homage to Walter Benjamin, and a Cheerful Eulogy for the Human Pen The New Aura of the Algorithm For most of human history, writing has been the most intimate of acts. Fingers stained with ink. Cigarette ash on the edge of the typewriter. Long nights. Longer silences, followed by sudden…

The Shackles of the Tongue: A Quiet Tyranny Language is often described as a gift — the mother tongue, a homeland of thought. But for most writers on this planet, language has functioned as something else entirely: a velvet prison. It embraces you with its intimacy, but bars you from the world. You…