I’m on a backpacking trip this week, which makes it as good a time as any to revisit one of my favorite posts (or, more accurately, to make you revisit it). Although Colorado, our home since early 2022, doesn’t have quite the same abundance and diversity of rentable Forest Service fire towers as did the […]
Miscellaneous
The other day my dad, who is 93 and losing his mind in dribs and drabs, asked me over the phone if we could FaceTime with his parents. I didn’t lie. I said, well, the technology is advancing quickly but it’s not quite advanced enough to reach them where they are. (True!) Maybe someday? I […]
Hieronymous Bosch, the Temptation of St. Anthony. Via Wikimedia Commons. When I was a student studying literature, I kept seeing Christ allegories everywhere. I remember being assigned The Old Man and the Sea, one of many Hemingways I read that semester, and I remember my teacher asking what we thought the book was about. Answers […]
This post ran in 2017 and the last time I looked, the Four Corners is still a Roadrunner cartoon landscape. Here, I explain, at least in part, why. Flying through Monument Valley on the Arizona/Utah border recently, I was crammed into an old and slow Cessna 147 taildragger. Light filtered through the smoke of distant […]
It’s an interesting time to go back and look at the old artificial intelligence work. This summer I’ve been reading Marvin Minsky’s The Society of Mind (1985), the kind of systematic monograph people don’t seem to publish anymore. The computer-like schemas Minsky draws out for how the mind must work belong to cognitive psychology, a […]
So I finally read Craig’s book Stone Desert, and I’m glad I did. It’s a republication of an earlier essay collection alongside his original journals – sketches, scribbles and notes he made in his twenties while hiking and paddling through desert canyons in Utah, along the Green and Colorado rivers. For me, the book was […]
The wild boars of Berlin get a bad rap. Last week one of these beasts was mistaken for a lioness, triggering emergency alerts and a two-day armed search. During the pandemic, another boar stole the laptop bag of a nude sunbather, forcing an absurdly ridiculous birthday suit chase. When I lived in Berlin, I was […]
My neighbor and I went to see Barbie this past weekend. I loved it. Without saying too much, I loved the colors and the cleverness and the way that the characters said things that I have thought but haven’t said, and things that I’ve felt but that have never risen up and assembled into consciousness. […]
