Brad Barrish

When you save the book for after the movie, it’s like getting an extended director’s cut that includes so much more material, and lets you dive into that world even deeper with characters and details that weren’t captured on screen.

We are seven months away from the most consequential midterm election in the history of the United States. Meanwhile, we are fighting a war. These are the structural conditions for a coup attempt in which a president tries to nullify elections and take permanent power as a dictator.

AI is a fad, but not merely a fad. You can’t merely wait for it to blow over, and imagine that things will be as they were. A lot of it will blow over, but also a lot of things will be blown flat by it. Important matters, customs, infrastructures, cherished ways of life, gone with the wind and never replaced.

But we’re living in an era when all the old rules seem to be changing, and when the most powerful people on earth ignore all the rules anyway. So might it be worth reassessing your lifelong strategy of following the rules as dutifully as possible?

What begins as personalization can quietly become entrapment, not through control, but through familiarity. And in that familiarity, we begin to lose something essential: not just variety, but the very conditions that make change possible.

What sounds like a convenience, digital companions that “know you,” can quietly become a constraint. Unlike human memory, which fades and adapts, infinite memory stores information with fidelity and permanence. And as memory-equipped LLMs respond, they increasingly draw on a preserved version of you, even if that version is six months old and... See more

I love em dashes. Even on a superficial level, the sleek, suave em dash feels superior to the homogenous barrage of dots and commas that otherwise constitute the punctuation department of the English language. I quite enjoy its visual audacity. It takes up the most space of all the punctuation marks. In the cyberworld of excess, it draws the eye... See more

Now the books lying all over the house, books I have started and will probably never finish, are signs not of fickleness but of a robust indifference to societal norms. Now I am no malingerer, but rather a champion of the erotics of art.