Unless, of course, we do so in order to create something entirely new. I meant (and failed) to keep it short and sweet this week so I could get back to finishing up the Norwegian resistance hat I'm knitting. Maybe you've heard about them? Traditionally associated
The big dipper and Orion's belt are the only two constellations I can reliably locate without help. I'm also pretty directionally-challenged. In pre-smartphone times in unfamiliar cities I have more than once headed off in the exact opposite direction of my destination. I'll admit
"Whatever you do may seem insignificant, but it is most important that you do it" attributed to Gandhi This was not the essay I'd planned to write today. But it demanded that I sit down and work it out. It's runs long, because I
The devastation seems to intensify with each succeeding week. From the streets of U.S. cities to the leadership of other countries, people are rushing to put out the fires started by this president and the other arsonists responsible for Project 2025. The decision about what to focus on for
"The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out." James Baldwin, Nothing Personal I've been slow-reading Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care ever since I
"I think, that we should have the luxury of observing one object slowly. I hope, that my sculptures could be such soul-resting objects." Kinga Földi, fiber artist Last week, I shared an essay by L.M. Sacasas, entitled "Lonely Surfaces: On AI-generated Images." I also described
"I suppose, then, that these are the sorts of questions I have for us just now as we navigate the flood of machine-generated media: How will AI-generated images train our vision? What habit of attention does it encourage? What modes of engagement do they sustain?" L.M. Sacasas,
How much does AI training move in two directions, with the models using our output for their training, while AI's output is, in turn, also training our perceptions? Can we act to create results that are not simply superficial? I agree with AI ethicist and philosopher Shannon Vallor
"Still, AI doesn't have to help us save the world to be a socially legitimate technology. As long as the objectives and outputs of AI models are transparent and contestable, their benefits, costs, and risks justly distributed, and their environmental footprints justifiable, AI systems have a place
In my last post about avoiding technologic overreach, I introduced ethics and philosophy professor Shannon Vallor's 2024 book, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking. I also added to some lines of questioning I'd broached in my November 7
I need to go outside. To remind myself of the sky. To admire clouds and trees, their shapes and surfaces, and to think about how they come to be. I need to walk. To feel my muscles moving in relation to earth and air, and to sense the rhythms of
Well, we're in month eleven now, and it doesn't get easier, does it? How are you coping? What's helping you get through your week? What do you need help with? These essays have been helping me structure and track my experience of this time.
"I know that I will always be haunted by the larger, vaguely remembered reality of the circumstances surrounding my childhood" George Takei In How the State Creates Enemies (Post #13, June 13) I discussed They Called Us Enemy, George Takei's graphic memoir as I wrote about
"The concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands is arguably the single greatest threat to social and personal well-being. And the most effective remedy to this is the equalization of wealth and power by extending democracy in our economies. Not by a top down process of government command and
"Regardless of how we choose to grieve or cultivate hope, we know that we are living in disastrous times and that we will need one another. We are wading through hell and high water, tasked with dreaming new worlds into being while the worlds we have known fall down
"America's free speech tradition is predicated on the idea that fact and falsehood will meet in the marketplace of ideas, that both will be heard, and that good ideas will overcome the bad. However, our current communication ecosystem actively stymies that process. We have not a public
"Now, as the propaganda machine and the rumor mill have violently smashed together like two ancient galaxies, something fiery and perilous has emerged. And what has emerged is still growing, even as we struggle to accurately define it" (41). Renée DiResta In my post of May 9, "
The chaos machine spun out so rapidly this week, I gave up on trying to read books to understand what's going on. Searching for in-depth news analysis, I ran across way too many videos in which people—especially women—were being assaulted by uniformed men. And when I
As I write this, my tiny habitat garden already shows autumn's encroachment. Only the asters, goldenrods, and brown-eyed susans are still in bloom, while the echinacea and yarrow flowers look like burnt toast. Over the last few years, I've been learning to garden more for birds
The yoga teacher had guided us into one of my favorite restorative poses, balasana. Commonly known as child's pose, it involves folding into yourself like a pocket knife. Rest is the operative word here: your torso rests on your thighs, which rest on your calves. With any luck,
"One of the greatest struggles of our time will be to cultivate a life-affirming political culture that can be enacted in the everyday, a counterculture of rebellious care." Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You It is easy to despair when we focus on the avarice,
I am a little over halfway through Heather Cox Richardson's provocatively titled 2020 book, How the South Won the Civil War. The subtitle sums up her view of the ongoing aftermath: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America. I was planning to finish the
This is one of those old expressions that has undergone a seeming reversal of it's original meaning. A garment made from "whole cloth" used to be considered of a higher quality; it was not patched together from remnants and smaller pieces. Evidently, deceptive sellers of clothing
D.C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the KKK in Indiana (aka Steve and The Old Man), was serving his twenty-year prison sentence when the lawyer who convicted him "asked him if he'd been serious about running for the White House. Steve said the plan was real. '