palimpsest

The question is no longer whether we can write such books; they can be written endlessly, for us. The question is, do we want to read them?

But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions —and to live with them. The machines can’t do that for us. Not now, not ever.

I define “creative risk” as the wild ideas in our mind’s eye that we would love to pursue, but don’t because the cost (time, money, reputation...) is too much to bear. As a result, we play it safe in the form of making sequels in Hollywood, emulating successful campaigns in advertising, and “staying in our lane” or what we’re comfortable with in ou... See more

That for me is the poetics of encryption. Artists are already using generative AI as a tool to reimagine our relation to the perennial big ideas. Like: What is identity? What is spirituality? What is cultural heritage? How can the human resist the fast-moving disruption to our lives and to our long-standing imaginaries? These are the questions that... See more

She had gone to the machine to talk about the callow and exploitative dynamics of commodified attention capture—only to discover, in the system’s sweet solicitude, a kind of pure attention she had perhaps never known. Who has? For philosophers like Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, the capacity to give true attention to another being lies at the absolu... See more

Readers don’t have short attention spans—they have short enchantment spans . There’s an infinite amount of content out there, and readers know it. The introduction convinces a reader that their finite time alive is best spent reading this piece in front of them , and not all the other things on the internet.

Our lives are too sacred to be spent pretending that meaningless work is meaningful.

You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it. What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.

Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will... See more