Nneka Jennifer Ngene

There’s a smarter way of understanding the rise of LLMs while preserving our critical thinking, all while shining a crucial, easily overshadowed light on how our ability to reason with language is the essence of humanity.

This isn’t to say that AI is uniformly bad—it’s clearly not—but that we must not fall into the trap of mistaking the outputs of writing (which are increasingly substitutable through technology) from the value of the cognitive process of writing (which hones mental development and cannot be substituted by a machine).

But this future is a possibility, not an inevitability. I believe there are two plausible scenarios for the future of knowledge work. There’s one in which as machines become more human-like in their capabilities, we paradoxically become more machine-like in our pursuit of productivity, focused on efficiency and keeping busy above all else. But ther... See more

Work hard for yourself, for the joy you feel when you’re one step closer to the person you’ve always wanted to be, whether it’s getting in the dirt to make things grow, getting in front of a crowd to speak your truth, or going out to find love behind all those brambles.

“Our culture's primary M.O. now consists of promiscuously and sometimes compulsively reviving and rejiggering old forms.”

We walk the world to discover it and in the process discover ourselves.

Rising from the pages is a prayer for abundance against the backdrop of all that is taken away, an insistence on the possibility of finding beauty amid the ruins of our hopes.

Your intuition about someone’s foundation is your experience of their psychological resilience. If you are around someone who feels wobbly, you might sense that they have a limited capacity to be with you because they’re too worried about themselves. It might feel like you are responsible for keeping them steady.

With the distance of a lifetime, he would look back on the experience as a microcosm of life itself, in which it is never the execution of our plans but their interruption, those rude demolitions of the maquette we mistake for reality, that leaves us most profoundly transformed, deepened, magnified: