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People Don’t Want to Argue with AI, and That Makes Them More Persuaded by It

People are more persuaded by AI because they think it cannot be persuaded, so they argue back less.

When people believe they are talking to an AI rather than a person, they push back less and change their minds more. The persuasive edge comes from the listener, not the machine.

From people to prompts

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In disability fiction, distance lends us not only drama, but intimacy.

Fiction can bring readers close to cognitive disability without entering a character's mind.

Today's screens are full of minds that think and perceive differently, which makes this the right moment to look back at how twentieth-century American writers drew readers toward cognitive disability. Their tools were narration, vision and time, and a kind of intimacy that does not depend on getting inside a character's head. One of the most-read novellas in American schools shows how repetition itself becomes the foundation of the story.

Engaging Minds: Cognitive Disability and American Storytelling, 1899–1953

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A very powerful woman's story

European money sent to stop migrants in Libya feeds a militia trade in kidnapping and ransom.

Filming a year aboard a Doctors Without Borders ship, an anthropologist witnessed a militia seize women and children at sea. The film follows one family through what came next, and traces the European money behind the kidnapping.

Rescue

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In a flash, one of them climbs onto the bike and rides off.

The simplicity of Bicycle Thieves is a sleight of hand, and the film deliberately occludes the war.

The war's aftermath has become a subject in its own right — a foundational moment of collapsed empires, new binaries and a world turned upside down. A 1948 film belongs squarely to that turn, and part of its strangeness is how deliberately it leaves the war out. Why is our hero unemployed? Why is there a gap of eight years between his two children? The film declines to answer, and the silence is the argument.

Bicycle Thieves

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Even at 1.5 °C, Antarctica loses ice this century. How much is our choice.

Antarctica will lose ice this century even at 1.5 °C, but emissions still decide how much.

One chart of projections that could not agree on whether Antarctica would raise or lower the seas set this work in motion. A chain of models, each adding blur, explains the disagreement. A fast emulator checked against two decades of gravity measurements from space cuts through it.

Committed Antarctic Ice Sheet mass loss by the end of the twenty-first century

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I didn’t write this about the world, I wrote it about myself.

The unhoused on our streets are ourselves dressed in rags.

A folk opera imagines a kitchen table where neighboring is a verb, empathy is not a bad word, and money does not decide who gets care. Everyone gets a seat.

Rooming House

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Hip-hop’s familiarity and appeal is cross-generational.

Hip-hop is not a youth movement and has not been one for decades.

Hearing "Rapper's Delight" on the radio in 1979 outside New York and filing it as a novelty; hearing "The Message" three years later and realizing it wasn't. Then the mid-eighties reggae clubs where rap kept slipping into the breaks, and the late-eighties realization that the artists were his own age. Nobody building this in 1979 expected to be tagged a pioneer for life.

Old in the Game: Aging in and with Hip-Hop

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The phenomenon of people dressing up as Frida, the lookalikes, is absolutely extraordinary.

Frida Kahlo's commercial afterlife has turned her from an artist into a global symbol of cultural resistance.

A documentary that leaves out every painting and looks instead at the fascination itself: the merchandise, the lawsuits, the lookalikes. Who gets to own an icon, and what happens to an artist once she becomes a brand?

Frida: The Girl Just Doesn't Go Away

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What to feed them as they grow from paralarvae to juveniles and finally to adults remains a mystery.

The ethical case against farming octopus is weaker than its cultural momentum suggests.

Fifty years of trying and nobody has farmed octopus commercially yet — but within a decade it will probably be in your supermarket. Reporting from Mexico, Spain and Japan, and from a stint working on a farm in the Yucatán, on a four-billion-dollar market and the question underneath it: is it defensible to farm the most intelligent invertebrate on earth? There are honest arguments on both sides, including for the animals.

Life on the Octopus Farm: The Ethics and Future of Growing the World's Most Intelligent Invertebrate

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In the last seconds of a chase, lions rely on steering more than speed.

In the last seconds of a chase, lions rely on steering more than speed.

Early mornings at a Florida safari park, a drone held high above a lioness racing after a lure. Consumer drones, pose-tracking software and an unexpected partnership with a theoretical physicist made it possible, for the first time, to measure a large mammal's chase stride by stride.

Quantifying the control laws governing terminal attack in lions

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Reinvestment in Black urban neighborhoods failed because it routed public money through outside lenders and never let residents shape it.

A block of twenty-seven houses with nine of them abandoned or foreclosed, and a former insurance agent who found she could not sit in her home and watch the community fall apart. A neighborhood that went from no empty houses to more than five hundred in a decade, financed by predatory federal loans. No dues, no officers, no way to join or quit — if you showed up often enough, you were a leader. The FBI listened in; they treated it as a status symbol.

Cash on the Block

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Reinvestment in Black urban neighborhoods failed because it routed public money through outside lenders and never let residents shape it.

Sending money to the rich in order to help the poor has never once worked, and yet the approach keeps coming back — partly because its architects believe poor Black Americans to be corrupt and incompetent, and wealthy people to be reliably honest. Set against that, three points King, Carmichael and Hamilton all agreed on in 1967, and a five-decade history of neighborhood organizations that got it right.

Cash on the Block

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Sending money to the rich to help poor Black neighborhoods has never worked.

What happens when you try to fix a problem without understanding its cause. Segregation, redlining, speculators, employers lured out to the suburbs by tax breaks, highways built for those suburbs while urban transit was cut — the damage was specific and quantifiable. What followed was not a remedy for any of it, but a machine for routing public money to outside lenders and businesses, most spectacularly through federal loan insurance that paid out in full when residents defaulted.

Cash on the Block

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For a century, children with cameras have ignored what teachers, clubs and Kodak told them to photograph.

Children's drawings were celebrated as authentic expression while their photographs were treated as a catalogue of mistakes. Guidebooks, competitions and school archives across more than a hundred years show the camera working as a moral device, and show how changing ideas of childhood shaped what children were allowed to see.

Snap Happy! How Children Became Photographers

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Black churches file over 60 percent of church bankruptcies, and nothing on the church's side explains it.

Five banks turned the congregation away, including the one it had banked with for thirty-five years. Then a faith-based lender arrived talking not about finances but about vision — and sold a loan the church soon couldn't meet. One Bridgeport congregation's decade-long fight to keep its sanctuary opens a much larger story about predatory lending.

Forgive Us Our Debts: How Black Churches Use Bankruptcy to Survive

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Soleil Ô was begun in 1965, shot mostly in 1969, screened in 1970, and made in France, not Mauritania.

Young men crossing into Ceuta were told there would be work in Spain and arrived to find a climate of prejudice instead — a story from recent headlines that is also the narrative fabric of a film from 1970. Its protagonist, newly arrived in Paris, opens the want ads and the first job he sees routes him straight back to Africa, to a French-owned factory where a company "is not a souk." So much for colorblind France.

Soleil Ô

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Soleil Ô was begun in 1965, shot mostly in 1969, screened in 1970, and made in France, not Mauritania.

An autodidact who probably saw as many films as Truffaut, parodying the instructional films colonial authorities made about Africa and replacing them with a pedagogy of his own. He was an anti-capitalist whose restored masterpiece we now watch thanks to a grant from one of the world's wealthiest men. And when Pasolini went to Tanzania to read African independence through ancient Greek democracy, this was the film that answered him.

Soleil Ô

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Even at 1.5 °C, Antarctica loses ice this century. How much is our choice.

Antarctica will lose ice this century even at 1.5 °C, but emissions still decide how much.

Antarctica is already committed to losing ice this century, even if warming is held to 1.5 °C. An AI trained on an archive of simulations tested hundreds of thousands of futures against satellite records, and the survivors point one way. How much ice is lost is still ours to decide.

Committed Antarctic Ice Sheet mass loss by the end of the twenty-first century

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The problem with deployed AI agents is accountability, not capability, and the fix is standing to contest.

Eighty-three rejections in eighteen months, some arriving minutes after submission, some in the middle of the night. No human read any of those applications. When the case reached court, the defense was that the software merely implements a client's criteria — and a federal judge, working from employment law written decades earlier, found the precise words for why that no longer holds.

Agent Nation

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The problem with deployed AI agents is accountability, not capability, and the fix is standing to contest.

Two decades of studying how systems decide what to show people, and then somewhere around 2022 the systems stopped presenting options and started closing loops. Nobody announced it; it happened one procurement decision at a time, because a backlog was cheaper to solve with software than with three more staff. In the polite circle where engineers point at policy, policy points at vendors and vendors point at clients, there is always a person who was denied something and cannot find out why.

Agent Nation

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Cannibalism in Neolithic Iberia occurred at different times and reflected different human behaviours.

Prehistoric cannibalism cannot be understood through a single explanation.

Human bodies were dismembered, defleshed and eaten in three caves near Granada. The radiocarbon dates and the marks on the bones point to different moments and different behaviours, from a violent episode to the ritual treatment of the dead.

Multiphase human cannibalism in Neolithic southern Iberia: Chronological and taphonomic evidence from Malalmuerzo, Carigüela, and Majolicas Caves

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Fort Bend County's celebrated racial harmony rests on a bargain to praise the diversity and never name the inequality.

Most Black, Latinx, Asian, white, immigrant and poor Americans now live in suburbs, yet we still picture racial inequality as an urban problem. Growing up in one of the most diverse communities in America taught one sociologist almost nothing about racism — a disconnect that took a decade, a return home, and a national analysis to explain. Integration may be worth having, but proximity alone has never dismantled anything.

Diversityland: Hiding Racial Inequality in an American Suburb

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In the last seconds of a chase, lions rely on steering more than speed.

The end of a chase is a control problem, not a speed problem.

A prey animal rarely needs to outrun a predator; it needs to out-turn it. Drone footage of 67 chases shows lions steering with the same rule a hunting hawk uses, a rule engineers also build into homing missiles, and it fits in a short equation with a few parameters.

Quantifying the control laws governing terminal attack in lions

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Competition on the business side of live entertainment determines the art on stage, and Live Nation/Ticketmaster should be broken up.

Two companies controlling nearly all big-time vaudeville, crushing any attempt to unionize. Six men blackballing the leading actress of the age from every first-class theater in the country, so she performed in tents, abandoned churches and once on a hilltop. And a 1990s alt-rock band that couldn't mount a cheap national tour. The abuse is usually illegal; the law just takes decades to catch up.

Power and Greed: Monopolies, Mergers, and Cartels on the American Stage

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Competition on the business side of live entertainment determines the art on stage, and Live Nation/Ticketmaster should be broken up.

Everyone knows Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Morgan. Almost nobody knows the barons of vaudeville or the men who controlled Broadway and the touring circuits, who took what the market allowed, drove out anyone competing on merit, and got away with it for half a century. The antitrust laws written in the 1890s to stop exactly this didn't manage it until after the war.

Power and Greed: Monopolies, Mergers, and Cartels on the American Stage

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The business side of live entertainment determines the art on stage, not the other way round.

How much competition exists on the business side of live entertainment has always determined the quality and price of what reaches the stage, and how the artists and crew get treated. Vaudeville, a century of commercial theater, and today's arena tours — why vaudeville died, why a theatrical syndicate should have been prosecuted as the cartel it was, and why a monopoly had to be broken up in the 1950s.

Power and Greed: Monopolies, Mergers, and Cartels on the American Stage

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For a century, children with cameras have photographed what they wanted, not what adults told them.

Camera makers told parents for a century that children longed to take pictures, yet almost nobody had asked what children actually did with their cameras. The story starts with unruly schoolboy photographic societies, where assignments went undone, teachers were snapped unawares and one darkroom burned down.

Snap Happy! How Children Became Photographers

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Todd Haynes's I'm Not There is a more insightful account of Dylan's life than A Complete Unknown.

A biopic so strange it cast six different actors — including a young Black boy and Cate Blanchett — as the same man, then flopped at the box office before cinephiles caught up to it. A case for why this shattered, kaleidoscopic life story may be the most insightful telling of all, told from behind its subject's own eyes.

I'm Glad I'm Not Me: Bob Dylan on Film

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Misunderstanding the role of nuclear weapons during the Cold War has led to two consequences: 1) an unrealistic faith in their power to deter war—even as we see the military forces of nuclear-armed India and Pakistan engaging in periodic wars and nuclear-armed Israel attacked by missiles from Iran and even non-state militia forces; and 2) a reluctance by the nuclear-weapons states to accept the view of the majority of the world’s states, as represented in...

The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part I

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This matters today. Russia's war on Ukraine has revived essentialist explanations of Russia as the dominant Western framing, and with them, the fallacy of inevitability. If Russian behaviour stems from some essence, the only acceptable Russia is a defeated and contained Russia, because no other Russia is possible. If it reflects identifiable institutional, ideological, cultural and external configurations, those configurations can change, as they did between 1985 and 1991. Recognising this restores the broader analytical space that essentialism's over-simplification forecloses.

The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part I

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Although achieving and maintaining military parity with the United States required a significantly larger share of the Soviet budget than US military spending occupied in the larger American economy, this was seen by successive Soviet leaders as a price worth paying.

The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part I

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Reagan's hard line did not force the Soviet Union to end the Cold War.

The Cold War is the one everybody thinks is settled. Three historians were asked what the public still gets most wrong about it. Their answers name different things. Between them they take out a claim about how it ended, a claim about what Russia is, and a claim about what kept the peace, and none of the three is a fringe belief.

The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part I

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Our environmental and social crisis has spiritual roots, and Tara embodies the synthesis that leads out of it.

Cataract surgery that should have been routine, a detached retina, five more operations, and three weeks of being ordered to keep his head face down all night and eight hours a day. Sitting cross-legged with his forehead on the desk, awash in fear, he went through his catalogue of meditation practices and landed on a figure he barely knew — and then something happened that he still cannot explain.

Searching for Tara: The Goddess Who Became a Buddha

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Our environmental and social crisis has spiritual roots, and Tara embodies the synthesis that leads out of it.

Three mythic figures carry the story. The Goddess of our earliest ancestors, rooted in the body and an enchanted world where rocks and streams were sentient. Then the Great Hero, hyper-masculine, subjecting instinct and nature to the rational ego — and never quite winning. And then a third possibility: the same transcendence, but leaning forward, ready to leap to anyone who is suffering.

Searching for Tara: The Goddess Who Became a Buddha

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Our environmental and social crisis has spiritual roots.

Poisoned air, land and water, tens of thousands of species gone a year, unprecedented wealth and mounting anger — and a shelf of political and economic theories that only add to the confusion because they ignore the spiritual roots. A synthesis drawing on history, archaeology, sociology, Jungian psychology, mythology and religious thought, plus practices simple enough to actually try.

Searching for Tara: The Goddess Who Became a Buddha

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The Drake Equation is a teaching tool, not a calculation with an answer.

The seven-variable equation that supposedly tells us how many civilizations we could be talking to right now — and a case for why we can’t answer it, only learn from trying. Written by someone who left traditional academia because it was hard to concentrate on other planets while this one burns, and who refuses to pretend that neutrality is a virtue. Fragile as a flower and more resilient than mountain ranges, all at once.

Cloudy with a Chance of Starships: How the Drake Equation Reveals the Odds of Life in the Cosmos

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Hip-hop is not a youth movement and has not been one for decades.

We know how to picture an aging blues or jazz musician — stalwart, gravitas, late style. We have no such image for a seventy-year-old B-boy, even though the culture is past fifty and its pioneers were teenagers when they built it. Drawing on interviews with Grandmaster Caz, Sha-Rock, Chuck D, Ice-T, LL Cool J, Pepa and Yo-Yo, an argument that hip-hop's ageism runs inward, generation against generation, and always has.

Old in the Game: Aging in and with Hip-Hop

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Inefficiency, bulk and persnicketiness are the source of analog's appeal, not costs paid despite it.

It opens with a board game being unboxed — a genre of video weirdly beloved by collectors — and the surprisingly rewarding act of narrating that ritual 700 words deep. From one small, deliberate activity comes the book's real invitation: find something you love doing, then figure out what, exactly, you love about it.

The Love of Analog: Meditations on Value

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The simplicity of Bicycle Thieves is a sleight of hand.

A stone-cold classic that has quietly slipped out of the critical conversation, respectfully cited and no longer really studied. Look again and it is still teeming — a film everyone believes they know backwards, whose famous simplicity turns out to be a sleight of hand covering something far more complicated about postwar Europe, deprivation and care.

Bicycle Thieves

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A century of radical clinics, from Weimar Berlin to AIDS-era New York, grew from anarchism joined with organicism.

The opening scene of a 1996 documentary: a woman pacing a forested estate, palms turned to the sky, humming of sorrow, while a man seems to relearn how to walk. Behind them stands the château of an experimental psychiatric clinic, where patients are staging an absurdist play about aristocrats terrified of being exposed as common.

The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine

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A century of radical clinics, from Weimar Berlin to AIDS-era New York, grew from anarchism joined with organicism.

A nod to Foucault's birth of the clinic, answered with its death. The aim is a history of social and community-led medicine that is patient-centred, queer, personal and anecdotal: every human quality modern medicine tried to exclude in the name of objective empiricism.

The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine

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A century of radical clinics practiced a medicine without hierarchy, centered on relationships.

A book of literary nonfiction, written as a letter to a late mother, that travels through a century of radical clinics: Weimar Berlin, interwar London, postwar France, 1970s Geneva, and New York at the height of the AIDS crisis. What joined them was a horizontal, anti-hierarchical way of caring, drawn from anarchism and organicism alike.

The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine

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Who has the words?

Memory constantly reconstructs the past, and the promise of meaning never erases what happened to a person.

What would it be like to watch somebody you knew had died walk out of a tomb? The answer might not be joy. It might be horror.

Testament

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The Stepford Wives was made by women who have themselves been erased from its history.

She picks up a kitchen knife and stabs her best friend in the abdomen, and the wound does not bleed. Where the blade goes in, what the novelist wrote to the director to make sure no blood appeared, and whose arm you are actually watching on screen — one brief, gruesome scene holds the whole argument about the film, plus one more hidden replacement of a woman.

The Stepford Wives

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The moment you put something on a stage, it becomes present.

Memory constantly reconstructs the past, and the promise of meaning never erases what happened to a person.

Opera has a different problem. The moment you put something on a stage, it becomes present. Rather than trying to reproduce the book’s interiority, we could make memory physically happen around Mary.

Testament

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Todd Haynes's I'm Not There is a more insightful account of Dylan's life than A Complete Unknown.

Sometimes a director doesn't need dialogue to make a point — just the right famous face walking into the room. This is about star personas as narrative shorthand, from a shadowy folk-club cameo that spells doom for a fictional singer to what we're really watching when a fraying legend takes the stage.

I'm Glad I'm Not Me: Bob Dylan on Film

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Folk tradition is a mode of adaptation, governed by custom and transmitted by showing rather than teaching.

Chicago, 1892: a Polish Jewish girl newly arrived from a shtetl is invited to a Christmas party at Hull-House and says she cannot go, because she might be killed. She goes anyway, without telling her mother. What she wrote about that night — the candles, the carols, children from all corners of the earth, most of them underfed, none of them afraid of each other — is one answer to what a common life might mean.

Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall

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Folk tradition is a mode of adaptation, governed by custom and transmitted by showing rather than teaching.

Folklore lived and folklore studied — this is mostly about how the music gets learned and handed on. "I can't teach you, but I can show you," said one veteran barn-dance performer, and that is the whole pedagogy. Even the cover painting turns out to hold two real people, a schoolteacher and his daughter, whose lives trace the same arc from enclave to wider world and back.

Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall

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Folk tradition is not a survival preserved against change but a mode of adaptation.

Musicians born at either end of the turn of the twentieth century, showing how tradition can be constant and supple at once, guided not by rules but by observing, doing and venturing. Sid Harkreader, Ola Belle Reed, Bill Monroe, Joe and Odell Thompson, Uncle Dave Macon and many more. As one of them put it: "It's AWYC. Any Way You Can."

Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall

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What happens when your own memories become someone else’s story?

Memory is not a recording but a constant reconstruction.

We tend to think of memory as a kind of imperfect recording device. Something happens, we remember it, and gradually the picture becomes less accurate. But memory is much stranger than that.

Testament

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Almost nowhere on earth is naturally inaccessible any more, only politically, yet the expeditionary career is closing anyway.

In 1984 an ornithological team in southwestern Ecuador learned that the Shuar, convinced they were prospecting for gold, had ordered them killed rather than let them leave with what they had found. Weeks under siege, camp moved daily, and an exit that nearly cost two lives. And still worth it, for the birds — many of them now vanishing fast.

Travels on the Edge: A Naturalist's Notes From the Back of Beyond

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What does it take to be in the right place when history is made?

Almost nowhere on earth is naturally inaccessible any more, only politically, yet the expeditionary career is closing anyway.

Three new frogs in the Andes, new fish in the Orinoco, swarming locusts charted across Africa, seven expeditions to Mongolia and a camel caravan across the Gobi. Also house arrest in China, the fall of the Berlin Wall, a pope's last audience, and Hemingway's grandsons in Cuba. A behind-the-scenes account of what expeditionary travel is actually like.

Travels on the Edge: A Naturalist's Notes From the Back of Beyond

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Whether a television musical episode works turns on production mechanics, not on the quality of the singing or the story.

The chapter that best captures the whole project is, oddly, the one about a famous 1990 flop. Watching that failed experiment closely complicates the tidy story of television's "golden ages" arriving in discrete periods. The same year gave us Twin Peaks — and the failures turn out to be part of the same expansion.

Breaking into Song: Television Musicals from Glee to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

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Whether a television musical episode works turns on production mechanics, not on the quality of the singing or the story.

From NBC Opera Theater and Great Performances to Schmigadoon, by way of end-credit product placement on 1990s WB dramas. Individual pieces of this have been studied — MTV, theme songs, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan — but rarely the whole arc. Including the unglamorous question of why some musical episodes work and others simply don't.

Breaking into Song: Television Musicals from Glee to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

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Music on television is one continuous subject, not a set of separate ones.

Music and television is a pairing so obvious it has gone almost entirely unexamined. Not just the musical episodes and specials and series, but soundtracks, synergistic network deals, and the programs that once carried music to viewers who had no other way of hearing it.

Breaking into Song: Television Musicals from Glee to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

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Bee signals evolved among spies and competitors, so a colony's stop signal matters as much as its waggle dance.

Inside a dark, crowded hive, one bee butts her head against a dancer and makes a short, sharp beep. That easily missed detail opens a much larger idea: that a society needs brakes as much as it needs signals, and that communication is often about restraint. A close look at how colonies weigh danger, doubt, and competing information.

The Language of Bees

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Inefficiency, bulk and persnicketiness are the source of analog's appeal, not costs paid despite it.

Vinyl is back, cassettes are back, board-game cafés are everywhere — all of it slower and more breakable than the digital version a tap away. Borrowing a method from American pragmatism, this is a slow, deliberately personal attempt to ask not what analog is worth in the abstract, but what we actually get out of living with it.

The Love of Analog: Meditations on Value

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Black churches file over 60 percent of church bankruptcies, and nothing on the church's side explains it.

Why would one kind of congregation turn to the bankruptcy system three times as often as any other? After ruling out geography, denomination, and leadership, one factor remains — and it points straight at the lending market. A look at subprime church loans, banks that said no, and the legal process that finally forced lenders to the table.

Forgive Us Our Debts: How Black Churches Use Bankruptcy to Survive

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Listening is not passive but an active, unsettling act.

My criticism of technology stems from my love for it. We shouldn’t underestimate the democratic value of the internet. For the first time in history, people from all backgrounds could make themselves heard. The backlash has been huge, though. False promises, fake news, prejudice, hate-speech, and bias are all jumbled into a frantic hype-cycle. Who still cares to listen and why is it important? And how is it done?

Listening

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The Stepford Wives was made by women who have themselves been erased from its history.

Betty Friedan called it a rip-off of the women's movement, and that verdict has shaped fifty years of argument about the film — as has a screenwriter's famously catty complaint about the director casting his own wife. Newly opened archives in Beverly Hills, London and New York tell a different story about who actually made the thing. Authorship here is messier, and far more female, than the myth allows.

The Stepford Wives

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Almost nowhere on earth is naturally inaccessible anymore, only politically so.

Fifty years as photographer, chronicler and historian of expeditions for a Philadelphia natural history academy, in places that were beautiful, remote and reachable under conditions almost nobody will have again. Stand-alone essays from a career that was, by design, a throwback to an earlier era.

Travels on the Edge: A Naturalist's Notes From the Back of Beyond

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The amoeba is not biology's simpleton.

A biography of the blob everyone can draw: a wavy outline with a spot in the middle, reputed to be biology's simpleton, in fact carrying the largest genome of any organism and solving problems no software has matched. The difficulty is imaginative — we can picture a hawk taking a songbird, but not an amoeba chasing bacteria. The human cast is its own reward: a suspected murderer, a self-infecting German scientist, and the inventor of the orgasmatron.

A Is for Amoeba: The Story of Life in a Single Cell

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Bee signals evolved among spies and competitors, so a colony's stop signal matters as much as its waggle dance.

Great discoveries often begin when what you observe refuses to match what you expected. This is the winding, failure-strewn path — feeders ignored, experiments raided by monkeys, storms and turf wars with aggressive bees — that turned a stray “beep” in a hive into a career studying how ecology shapes information itself.

The Language of Bees

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Failure is not secretly good for us, and creative lives are made by continuation, not by talent destined to win.

In 1897 a savage reception drove a twenty-four-year-old composer to stop writing for years—one critic said his symphony belonged to the inhabitants of hell. His slow, doubt-ridden return, and his later reinvention in exile, become a case study in what persistence actually looks like when failure changes the terms of the work.

The Mess That Made Them: How History's Greatest Artists Failed, Floundered, and Made Something Brilliant Anyway

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The Tralfamadorians entered Slaughterhouse-Five only in 1967, borrowed from the alien-abduction culture around Betty and Barney Hill.

One autumn night in 1961, a New Hampshire couple saw something hovering over the road—and one of its occupants reminded them of a Nazi officer. That widely publicized abduction story handed a struggling novelist the missing frame for his Dresden book, and turned a war memoir into a meditation on trauma, free will, and time itself.

Vonnegut's War: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five

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Black churches file far more bankruptcies than other churches because of predatory lending.

Every year, small congregations — most of them Black churches — file to reorganize in bankruptcy court, and they do so at three times the rate you'd expect. Behind the fight to keep a spiritual home lies a quieter story about who gets offered fair credit and who doesn't. A story of triumph, and of skewed lending.

Forgive Us Our Debts: How Black Churches Use Bankruptcy to Survive

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Dylan belongs to film history as an icon, not a biographical subject.

For more than half a century, one folk singer's face has been quietly rewriting the movies it appears in — as actor, documentary subject, music-video fixture, and even unreleased director. This is an argument for taking that filmography seriously, and a corrective to the tidy myths a recent hit biopic spun around the night an icon “went electric.”

I'm Glad I'm Not Me: Bob Dylan on Film

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Analog's inefficiency, bulk and fussiness are the source of its appeal, not its cost.

Why do inefficient, fragile, expensive things — vinyl, board games, used paperbacks — keep winning us back in an age of frictionless digital everything? A personal, argument-free investigation that trades abstract philosophy for a bottom-up hunt through one collector's own shelves, and lands on three values hiding inside the objects we choose to keep.

The Love of Analog: Meditations on Value

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Religious credence is a form of imagining, continuous with children's make-believe, and its imperviousness to evidence is the job.

A charismatic "prophet" speaks in tongues, overcome by the Holy Spirit—then opens his eyes to check his watch. That small gesture, drawn from an ethnography of Vineyard churches, opens a window onto how the mind runs two maps at once: one tracking the sacred, the other quietly keeping time.

Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity

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Forty years of deregulation, not excessive regulation, shrank the public markets and delayed IPOs.

The collapse of a $32 billion crypto empire in a matter of days exposed a company with no CFO, no reliable audits, and not a single investor on its board. This close-up shows how a "founder-friendly" financing model and super-voting shares let the people in charge escape accountability — and why the same governance failures keep recurring across today's most celebrated startups.

Untamed Unicorns

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Bee communication is as much about restraint as about recruitment.

Bees don't just tell one another where to go — they also signal where not to go, mark flowers with scent, and even eavesdrop on rivals. This is a tour of communication as evolution actually built it: waggle dances, stop signals, and warnings shaped by predators, competitors, and spies. An invitation to follow very small animals into a world dense with messages we usually miss.

The Language of Bees

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New Year's resolutions fail because of sequence, since no goal holds without an honest accounting of the year behind you.

Opening The Janus Plan at random, Jobert E. Abueva would want a reader to land on Step One: Ponder the Past, and its disarming question—what did this year actually try to teach you? He shares the book's core passage on Janus's two doors, and the "Stitch Notes" and rituals that give a serious practice its lightness and play.

The Janus Plan: A No-Resolutions Path to Begin Your Year with Intention

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New Year's resolutions fail because of sequence, since no goal holds without an honest accounting of the year behind you.

Jobert E. Abueva places The Janus Plan at the crossroads of behavior-change psychology, the world's threshold traditions (teshuvah, Japan's Oosoji, Ethiopia's Enkutatash), and his own burnout at the peak of a Fortune 500 career. His insight: burnout was a sequencing problem—charging forward year after year without ever honestly looking back.

The Janus Plan: A No-Resolutions Path to Begin Your Year with Intention

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New Year's resolutions fail because of sequence, not content.

Most New Year's resolutions are gone by February—and Jobert E. Abueva argues the problem is the approach, not the goals. The Janus Plan, named for the two-faced Roman god of thresholds, insists you cannot design a meaningful future without first taking an honest look at your past. Built around a six-step framework and the metaphor of weaving, it is a book meant to be read slowly.

The Janus Plan: A No-Resolutions Path to Begin Your Year with Intention

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Baseball has no inherent character and captures nothing essential about the United States.

Was the game really transformed overnight when the data nerds took over, and has money only recently corrupted a once-pristine sport? A closer look at two durable myths, and the long history of numbers, commerce, and complaint that shows how much of "what's ruining the game" has actually been there all along.

Out of the Ballpark: How to Think About Baseball

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Immigrant labor is visible everywhere, and what is invisible is the inequality.

Backstrap weaving is one of the earliest forms of weaving on earth, and its traditions — from Maya brocade to Korea's 1,500-year-old mosi cloth — are vanishing fast. After months of learning from the last practitioners, a new project links the two lineages and brings the technique to workshops in Chicago and Utah, because holding on to cultural heritage is activism too.

Action in Artwork

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Soleil Ô's complicated French origins do not disqualify it from African cinema.

A debut feature from 1970 that is a documentary, an essay film, a work of autofiction, live action and animation at once — African, French, both, neither. Out of circulation for decades, it left behind a literature that cannot agree on what year it was made or which country made it. Sorting the record out turns out to matter, because the complications are the point.

Soleil Ô

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Failure is not secretly good for us, and creative lives are made by continuation, not by talent destined to win.

What if the story of great art isn't lonely genius but stubborn, assisted, interrupted persistence? Drawing on his own burnout and return to writing, the author reads famous biographies against the grain—paying attention to the money, luck, help, and course-corrections that usually get tidied out of the myth.

The Mess That Made Them: How History's Greatest Artists Failed, Floundered, and Made Something Brilliant Anyway

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Making the abutting property owner responsible for the public sidewalk is the central error of American sidewalk law.

Whose neighborhoods get smooth, walkable pavement—and whose are left to crack and crumble? Drawing on interviews and street-level observation across four states, a look at how sidewalk quality tracks wealth and race, and why the people with the least access to cars and transit depend on it the most.

Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America's Most Overlooked Resource

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The problem with AI agents is accountability, not capability.

The public argument about AI has been about what it says. Meanwhile a different class of system has been quietly acting — screening applications, pricing insurance, routing patrol cars, closing claims — at a speed no review process was built to match, and usually without the person affected knowing a decision occurred. The problem isn't capability; it's that when something goes wrong, responsibility scatters and everyone in the chain has a defensible answer except the person harmed.

Agent Nation: How Autonomous AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Society—and What We Can Do About It

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The Stepford Wives was made by women who have been erased from its history.

A film about women being replaced turns out to have replaced a good many of them behind the camera too — an actress fired after sixty-five scenes were already shot, a costume designer, a casting director, a sound editor, an electronic music pioneer, all written out of the story since. Archival production records show how those swaps happened and who won the fights that caused them. The erasure rhymes uncomfortably with the film's own plot.

The Stepford Wives

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Ripeness has been detached from season and sold as permanent availability, and what resists it is the withheld.

One evening before dinner was served, I placed on each guest's setting a small carton of locally produced tomato paste, accompanied by a pair of scissors. I introduced the project – the notions on seasonality, coming of age, and, of course, tomatoes before we were served and invited everyone to cut a corner and squeeze the tomato paste onto their plates and table—drawing, and playing with their food.

THE AGE OF TOMATO

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Religious credence is a form of imagining, continuous with children's make-believe, and its imperviousness to evidence is the job.

If belief isn't one thing but two, everything shifts. A look at why our matter-of-fact beliefs update instantly with evidence while our identity-defining ones resist it—and how that same dynamic drives not only religion but political polarization, because, as the argument goes, anything can be sacralized.

Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity

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The Tralfamadorians entered Slaughterhouse-Five only in 1967, borrowed from the alien-abduction culture around Betty and Barney Hill.

First published in 1969, the novel spoke to a country reckoning with Vietnam—and it speaks just as sharply to 2026, an age of polarization, far-right resurgence, and wars that displace millions. Is a good war possible? Is a just one? A look at why this darkly funny anti-war book still offers a moral vision of kindness and decency amid absurdity.

Vonnegut's War: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five

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In noisy fields like health and politics the truth hides under variability and is recoverable only by averaging.

Fifteen hundred stage 1 breast cancer patients, deemed at low risk according to MammaPrint but high risk according to clinical assessment, were divided into two groups: half of them had chemotherapy while the other half followed MammaPrint's advice and went without.

To Think Like a Statistician

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Failure is not secretly good for us.

We meet great artists backward—through the masterpieces, with the ending already known—so their greatness starts to look inevitable. But nobody lived it that way. A book about the long, uncertain middle of creative lives, and a pointed skepticism toward the comforting idea that failure is secretly good for us.

The Mess That Made Them: How History's Greatest Artists Failed, Floundered, and Made Something Brilliant Anyway

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Baseball has no inherent character and captures nothing essential about the United States.

The specialized lingo makes the sport look like a closed world of arcane obsessives, but it's precisely its sheer visibility that makes it worth thinking about. A historian's account of how following and talking about a game becomes a way into understanding modern life—and why writing about it meant setting aside a lifelong fan's love.

Out of the Ballpark: How to Think About Baseball

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Seventeenth-century Rome had a deliberate papal meat program, Urban VIII driving consumption to a pound a day per person.

Four butchers executed in front of the Pantheon for turning their neighbors into sausage—a gruesome spectacle that opens onto something much larger. Behind it lies the route live animals took through a half-empty ancient city, and the ecological toll of wringing so much meat from the surrounding land.

The Barberini Butchers: Meat, Murder, and Warfare in Early Modern Italy

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Lincoln's rise was contingent, and the sense of its inevitability is an artifact of how 1860 is taught.

A one-term congressman with a threadbare résumé walks into a convention hall built just for the occasion and walks out the nominee. Step inside the roaring room for the electric moment the tide turned, and the raucous, hoarse-throated celebration that spilled into the streets.

He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860

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American health care's separate dysfunctions have one cause, the neoliberal capture of political economy after 1980.

In 1970 Milton Friedman told corporate executives their only duty was to shareholders—and set off a shift whose shockwaves still move through American medicine. From an Adam Smith epigraph to the Business Roundtable's flip-flops, a look at how "shareholder value" reshaped what a corporation owes anyone at all.

America's Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era

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American health care's separate dysfunctions have one cause, the neoliberal capture of political economy after 1980.

A question students kept asking—"what happened to U.S. health spending in the early 1980s?"—became a five-and-a-half-year hunt for an answer. The trail runs through Reagan-era deregulation, a political scientist's model of American "regimes," and the realization that the mystery and the medicine both trace back to neoliberalism.

America's Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era

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American health care's many separate problems have one cause, the neoliberal turn after 1980.

Trust in American health care has collapsed—from 78% in 1975 to 28% today—and the usual suspects (premiums, medical debt, consolidation, private equity) are treated as separate problems. What if they are all symptoms of one thing: the neoliberal turn that remade the U.S. economy in the 1980s, and swept medicine up in its wake?

America's Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era

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Forty years of deregulation, not excessive regulation, shrank the public markets and delayed IPOs.

Why do securities laws exist at all? The answer runs back to the 1929 crash and the New Deal conviction that sunlight is the best disinfectant. This piece follows how narrow, sensible exemptions to disclosure quietly expanded until secrecy became a matter of choice for some of the largest and most powerful companies in the economy.

Untamed Unicorns

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Heritage is a biased story about the past turned into a product, and the local is itself a global idea.

Every dish contains a whole world — a tangle of history, culture, and memory that only multiplies with each ingredient. From compiling an index of every food named to building a five-step "toolkit" for protecting culinary heritage from below, this is a reflection on writing about food as an act that shuttles constantly between the intimate and the immense. What can any of us actually do to re-value the traditions on our plates?

Against Heritage

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Immigrant labor is visible everywhere, and what is invisible is the inequality.

Nonggi are traditional Korean folk banners, made collectively around the harvest to motivate, bless, and speak to the gods — even to carry them. In multi-day workshops with an immigrant rights organization, community members paint, embroider, and photo-transfer their hopes onto eight-foot banners over sixteen slow hours, drawing out the stories that shorter projects never reach.

Action in Artwork

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Religious belief is a form of imagining, like children's make-believe.

What if religious belief is less like accepting a fact and more like a grand game of make-believe? Drawing an analogy from children who form groups around imaginary heroes, a philosopher argues that "religious credence" is a distinct mental attitude—chosen, bound up with sacred identity, and, unlike ordinary belief, largely immune to evidence.

Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity

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America's opioid crisis is the wreckage of a dismantled global system for stabilizing medical opium, not corporate greed.

Ten thousand farmers gather to cheer a politician’s empty promises, scoring poppies by hand exactly as their great-grandparents did—only it is 1981, not the 1880s. A single rally opens onto a hidden world where peasant labor, state power, and global capital collide, and it suggests why “crisis” may be the wrong word for what came next.

Markets of Pain

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Making the abutting property owner responsible for the public sidewalk is the central error of American sidewalk law.

A pandemic's worth of neighborhood walks turned into a question: why has the law almost everywhere made the property owner next door responsible for the public walkway out front? Where property law, local government, and the First and Fourth Amendments all meet the pavement, most of what happens turns out to be a policy choice we get to make.

Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America's Most Overlooked Resource

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A diverse community can still maintain white dominance.

One of the wealthiest and most racially diverse suburbs in the country tells itself three things: that it is harmonious, that it has no racial inequality, and that these facts make it superior to everywhere else. Two years and 150 interviews later, the harmony turns out to be real — and to rest on an unspoken bargain about which racial realities may be named out loud. Diversity, it turns out, is not the same thing as equity.

Diversityland: Hiding Racial Inequality in an American Suburb

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Slaughterhouse-Five's aliens were borrowed from 1960s alien-abduction culture.

It changed how we write about war, got banned and burned, inspired rock bands, and put phrases into the language—yet the story behind the novel is as gripping as the book itself. A POW digging corpses from the ruins of firebombed Dresden, a discredited historian, and a strange leap into alien abduction: how a masterpiece took twenty-four years to find its shape.

Vonnegut's War: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five

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