Amanda Stronza found the cardinal dead on a Texas highway this June, a splash of vermillion against drab asphalt. He’d been struck by a car—a common fate for birds, as many as 340 million of whom are killed by vehicles in the United States every year. Most drivers overlook these casualties, but not Stronza, an […]
Art
I’ve been talking with other writers about AI. We huddle in our conversations like anarchists. Some have been using ChatGBT as a tool and are quite happy. Some fear for their careers and think recent, rapid advances in large language models are very, very bad. I’ve turned off autocorrect on my computer. Is that enough? […]
How could it happen? Was it the wrath of God or the malice of Poland? Was the crew drunk or was the Vasa wrongly built? The town was alive with rumours. I’ll bet it was. On August 10, 1628, the warship Vasa—the pride of Sweden, the talk of Stockholm—set sail on its maiden voyage. It didn’t […]
In 2005, the Australian ecophilosopher Glenn Albrecht coined a word that, in four mellifluous syllables, perfectly encapsulated the Anthropocene’s discontents: solastalgia, the emotion you experience when an environment you’ve long loved is catastrophically altered. Solastalgia, as Albrecht put it, is “a form of homesickness one experiences without leaving home” — it’s what you feel when […]