“Whether we like it or not, there are things out there, not alive, that think about us,” wrote a contributor on the internet anthropologist Katherine Dee’s substack. He was talking about the networks of technologies designed to stalk our movements and use the information to influence our decisions and command our attention. In the age […]
Month: March 2025
I’m in my office. It is snowing lightly outside, and suddenly I hear them — a flock of sandhill cranes flying overhead. So I step outside for a moment to observe their formation and remember that the world is still a beautiful and wondrous place. This realization is what is keeping me grounded amidst the […]
Spring seems to come every year. The apple tree in front yard has leaves. The season of direct sun in the living room: over.) Everyone else has started taking their dogs for longer walks. (The season of walking my dog in relative peace: over.) The trees shed their pollen and my nose runneth over. (The […]
I always knew flying squirrels lived among us, probably of the southern variety, in the trees at our cabin-in-the-woods in central Virginia. But those buggers are hard to spot. They’re night-owls, first of all, and they’re pretty small. So, I was delighted to see a whole nest of them in our woodshed this winter. (Okay, […]
Decades ago when I was hoping to become a scientist, I got a master’s degree dealing with the actions of water in the desert, part of which was studying the hydrology of flash floods on unvegetated bedrock. One term for the result is a “slot canyon.” When people died in a flash flood in a […]
When civilizations fall into barbarism, the arising culture fetishizes strength. So it has always been. It can feel as if the weak and sensitive have no place and no voice in a time when throwing one’s weight around is the done thing. This was the world in which Cai Yan, a Chinese noblewoman at the […]
There is always one section in our utensil drawer that is emptier than the others. Spoons are useful for so many things, and they seem to have a natural restlessness. They leap away from the confines of the kitchen. They jump into cars and carry-ons. Sometimes the places they go are even stranger. All they […]
Well this story is just a pure delight. In 2017, the Chinese said that by 2030, they were going to be the world champions of AI. So in 2022, the U.S. put export controls on the fancy computer chips, especially Nvidia chips, that AI needed. Then in 2025, the Chinese announced an AI entity called […]
