Let me confess a small heresy: I do not think humans are special in the way humans think they are special. We are special in the way a child believes their drawing of a house—with the square body, the triangle roof, and the smoke like string beans—is special: charming, energetic, a little messy, and convinced that everyone else must put this masterpiece on the fridge. When the child becomes an … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Have you ever gazed into a circus mirror that stretched you until you looked like a tapeworm or a spaghetti noodle with eyes? Or breathed in a blast of helium and then tried to talk, sounding like an idiot from Looney Tunes, so bad that even a therapist would piss himself laughing?
These are distortions, of course, but then so is a cartoonist’s … Read the rest
I have a simple, possibly impolite thesis: the “nation” is a beautiful story we tell to coordinate strangers, and loud nationalism is what people reach for when the story stops paying their bills. Nations are not ancient tribes waking from deep time; they are recent inventions—clever ones—that industrial print, schools, and armies stitched together so we would feel kinship with people we will never meet. That is not an insult; … Read the rest
From the vantage point of someone who has spent enough time in uniform to know what real threats look like, it’s always instructive to watch a much larger state invent imaginary ones. Some governments worry about missiles; the Northern Colossus worries about whether its citizens are having enough state-approved sex. Different risk matrices, same existential drama.
Their latest stroke of national genius is a full-spectrum campaign against the most dangerous … Read the rest
Tired after another long day, somewhere between last coffee and first irritation, I realised that I live inside a machine that never sleeps. Not a grand cosmic engine from Asimov’s Foundation, not even a gritty Morgan-style biotech nightmare. No, much worse: my own smartphone. A small rectangle that vibrates like a needy cat and occasionally shouts at me with a sound specifically engineered to activate the ancient lizard part of … Read the rest
