Debbie Foster

The problem is not that a paper-clip-maximizing Al will arise in the future and turn the universe into paper clips. The maximizers are already here. Any consequences too subtle to measure—environmental costs, civic discord, troubled diplomatic relations—are simply omitted from the score

White space in fiction or narrative nonfiction can act like cuts in film: a way to shift from location A to location B, or from scene to scene.

In some cultures, the mind is a private space, while in others, it is open to outside influences--loved ones, elders, and the divine--in important ways that shape how inner voices are received or even heard.

The axioms are about essential properties of experience. Many articles and my last book have dealt with these, so I will be brief.

The first axiom is intrinsicality. This means that any experience is subjective, existing for itself, not for others. It exists from the intrinsic perspective, from within, not from an outsider's perspective.

The second

Fiction is a record of what has never happened and yet absolutely happened, and those of us who read it regularly have been changed and challenged and broken down a thousand times over by those nothings, changed by people who never existed doing things that no one quite did, changed by characters that don't entirely exist and the feelings and

Fortunately graduate school had prepared her for this, the constant managing of despair. Everything was always falling apart; nothing in lab went right; you couldn't afford groceries, your cottage had a rat problem, all your instructors hated you, you were always one step away from flushing all your life's work down the toilet. You shoved it to the

I didn't go to books to be a heroine. I went to books because I wanted to be—nothing, nobody. I wanted nothing so much as to be a kind of sociable air, circulating invisibly in the room, necessary but never noticed,

In the Aztec view, our psyche is not like a rider on a horse, as Sigmund Freud suggested, or even a rider on an elephant, as the contemporary psychologist Jonathan Haidt has put it. Ideally, it is a fluidly coordinated jazz ensemble, where each player improvises in their own way, none of whom is distinctly responsible for their coordination. In

As you write, something invisible flows out of the surface of your skin and language begins to move like a living creature. Your body temperature may become slightly elevated, and you may enter into a slightly euphoric state as you abandon your ego altogether.