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 the course of an hour to a group of attentive listeners observing the smoke pluming upward into a night that seems something other than eternal.…
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This past summer, after a short hiring process with only a single interview and a grueling two-hour online assessment, I ended up working for a large data-engineering company that was contracting with an American social-media conglomerate, a major player in the industry. Although nominally employed by one company, I was largely working on projects created and dictated by this other conglomerate, which determined my daily schedule, assigned tasks, and generally established the ground rules for…
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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 my own mentality, which is not as counterintuitive as it might appear: an encroaching artificial intelligence, by serving as a standard of good-enough quality in…
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If we stop for a moment on a day’s journey, sagging onto a bench in an orange grove on a rainy day or a perfectly leveled tree stump in the middle of a clearing, we might start thinking chin-in-hand a la Rodin and slowly, after a while, realize something: we live day after day, clothed and refined language-making featherless bipeds, borne aloft by language and wrapped up convincingly in the dramas of our lives as…
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We all have bugaboos and afflictions as human beings. They tend to percolate into our unconscious, dashing our plans, messing with our standards, opening shutters and throttling cabinets in our tidy neuronal offices of the mind, and generally doing everything in their power to ruin a good night’s sleep. And too many times the notion mentioned in this article’s title—my long-time bugaboo—has been considered, asserted, broadly supported, and only faintly rebutted with a small minority…
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On a Saturday night, while I sit typing away at a desk in a colorless white-walled bedroom, concealed in an apartment building next to the university where I’ve been finishing my two-year master’s degree in translation, I have reason to be excited. I am a schoolboy waiting for his favorite food at a restaurant on a Friday night, exhausted by his own anticipation and the simmer and bubble of his lingering hunger. While the thriving…
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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 when a person acts against their own best interests or against those of any others implicated in the action. A person’s actual stupidity is willful,…
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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 species as well as its cosmic self-humiliation. And this should last until the extinction of the species itself. If an alien race somewhere in the…
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“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 our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas,…
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The way of the dodo, they say. But in this short article, ensconced in the vast anonymity of the Internet, I wanted to mention the value of a select group of people who are becoming fewer and fewer as the years of the twenty-first century continue blowing by in a windstorm of words, language, and digital innovation: those who read a physical copy of the newspaper, the holdouts, the good-old traditionalists who have always pushed…
