The meadow stretches out under an easy afternoon sun. A man lies beside a mound of pastries, one hand resting lightly on a loaf he never bothers to take. A woman sits a few steps away, watching a roasted goose drift in slow circles above her, carried by a mild breeze. Near them, a pale river moves…

Looking back through history, one can find something almost touching in the way each historical era selects its preferred image of catastrophe. Medieval Europe feared God’s wrath; the 19th century imagined civilization collapsing under the weight of its own decadence. The late 20th century…

On the Limits of Anthropocentric Intelligence “I know that I know nothing.” – Socrates From the very depths of the evolution of human intelligence as we know it today, we’ve been accompanied by a notion that, over time, has become something like a sine qua non for measuring intellect. “True…

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…