Upon reaching a certain stage of life, usually after the age of 30 but always when enough time has elapsed to make you wonder about the slowly accumulating rubbish heap of your past, regrets come up as an infallible sign that you are getting older. You start to hem and…
If there is a collective stupidity in the modern world, a tragicomedy peculiar to developed countries and played out ad nauseam in the media and popular culture, it is that of our perception of the human lifespan, which is just long enough for people to kid themselves about its laughable…
Writing is an apparently simple act. The person doing the writing puts words in order, one after another, line by line, adding squiggles and dots here and there to make the appropriate pauses before concluding with a mighty flourish: I am a writer, says the person who has written. And…
Although many on the Internet might doubt the vigor and even the courage of the average keyboard warrior, that little amoeba squirming in the dark, I have no doubt that these are only warriors according to their own tattered and abused definition. Upon a bit of consideration and not a…
Humans are storytellers by nature, it has often been said, and we tell stories not only to other people but to ourselves. Without any qualms, I would assert that these stories are more common, frequent, and elaborate than the gather-around-the-campfire stories that have the appearance of innocent entertainment, revealed over…
In an era defined both by the limitations and the expansion of artificial intelligence, human writers and translators exist at the same crossroads: that of apparently having to defend themselves against machines, define their value, and decide whether to go on. But this scarcity and fear is the opposite of…
For all the pejorative uses of this word whenever applied to a particular individual, in a more abstracted breakdown of the concept there are two relevant kinds of stupidity. And while both have similar outcomes in any given context, they have vastly divergent causes. The first kind, actual stupidity, occurs…
Let the world pummel itself in the full throttle of its terrible self-examination. To this end, there is another source of evidence to be added to the mountains of films, books, treatises, analyses, documents, and first-hand accounts of the Holocaust, the most salient proof of the bestiality of the human…
“The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed…
We have a world aflame with the chatter and mile-a-minute passions of the Internet; access to technology that spans every imaginable medium; exposure to more people and more places than ever before; the fleet and evanescent flicker of thoughts and ideas uttered by those who are both anonymous and celebrated,…
