Debbie Foster

Poe's law has created a dangerous game of hopscotch. We're jumping between irony and reality, but we're not always sure where those lines are. Interpreting words comedically helps the algorithm spread them as memes and trends, but then interpreting them seriously manifests their negative effects.

The quickest way to kill many grown-ups' interest in a work of art is to label it as healthy and useful, to turn it into another productive chore. And the quickest way to kill fiction more generally is to declare that it exists to make you a better person, to train you into shape.

The irony is that Enlightenment principles have set shamans free. By insisting on autonomy, tolerance, and a separation of church and state, Enlightenment thinkers have protected ecstatic religions from subjugation while creating open markets for religious services.

Recovering memory is more like picking up shards of your past. But even that can be beautiful, because they can be reassembled as a mosaic, which, as the author Terry Tempest Williams says, is “a conversation between what is broken.”

In these kinds of performances, the reading and piano improvisation occur simultaneously. It's more than just a combination of words and music. When I'm reading, the area from my toes up to my throat is completely absorbed in and responding to the music; while the area from my tongue to my brain is pursuing the meaning of the words. Or maybe it's

Consider precognitive phenomena. I have long thought of these as the most well-documented and philosophically important of all impossible events. As such, they carry immense potential for influencing everything intellectuals and scientists do. If taken as

A cento, from the Latin word for "patchwork," is a poetic form composed entirely of lines from poems by other poets. This means none of the writing is yours; the lines belong to others, and your work as the writer is selecting the necessary pieces, then assembling the fragments to make a new whole. In my experience, juxtaposing lines from different

Personalized AI will need to store details of past conversations, so that it can write our likes and dislikes to memory, and choose appropriate words and actions even if weeks or months have since gone by. Unfortunately, however, LLMs are deep neural networks, which learn in minuscule increments from millions of repeated data samples. They don't

In theory, there's nothing wrong with fiction being aspirational: one of the things that fiction can provide is a space to imagine what doesn't exist in reality. But in the case of The West Wing, aspiration and inspiration went further into something like delusion, a desire to patch the problems of American political reality through the re-creation