provocations

All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working

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• The Era of Summarized Living will remove bias from work and life . One striking lesson I learned while serving on a jury almost twenty years ago was just how bad and biased our memories are, even when our only job is to remember something. In my jury experience, the group routinely recalled a situation or something a witness said one way, only to

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There is something unspoken lurking in the background of the most impassioned critiques of generative AI. Between the cries of plagiarism and unoriginal lazy mimicry is the fact that there is almost nothing original or unique about culture now in the first place. Putting aside the dangerous and ahistorical simplification of creativity as... See more

“Asking for help with shame says: You have the power over me. Asking with condescension says: I have the power over you. But asking for help with gratitude says: We have the power to help each other.”

In New York, people speak fast. In the American South, they speak slowly. Both of them are a form of politeness, understood in a different way. In New York, you speak quickly because you respect the value of the other person’s time and you don’t want to take up too much of it. In the South, you speak slowly because you want to respect the person by... See more