People like “strong leadership” for the same reason people like a single pill that fixes diabetes: it feels clean, it feels decisive, and it lets you stop thinking about the messy parts—diet, adherence, side effects, long-term damage. The problem is that politics, like medicine, punishes magical thinking. Fast action is not the same thing as correct action, and the price of being wrong at scale is paid in blood, debt, … Read the rest
Sometimes, late at night, when the city finally remembers that it is allowed to be quiet, I catch myself staring at the ceiling and thinking about the strange future we are building with our own hands. Not just faster phones, not just more clever recommendation engines that push us more cat videos and more outrage, but something else. Something like the Minds from Iain Banks’ Culture novels: artificial intelligences so … Read the rest
Europe is very easy to insult.
From a certain angle, the continent looks like an aging museum with Wi-Fi: polite, overregulated, uncomfortable with power, lost in its own procedures while other players move faster and hit harder. If you lived here in the 1970s and come back now, the contrast feels almost obscene. Where once your memory stored quiet town squares and local accents, now it finds the familiar … Read the rest
When I was a young lad long ago in the bland, faceless, smugly prosperous America of the 1950s, I had an itch to be somewhere else. As I heard the expression put first on the TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, I would indulge myself regularly in a game called “Anywhere but Here.” The Germans have a beautiful word for it: Wanderlust.
But … Read the rest
Welcome to the new dawn of Reason — capital R, please, it looks smarter that way. The land of logic has finally decided that compassion is too expensive. The accountants of destiny have opened their spreadsheets and discovered that people with imperfect pancreases, lungs, or livers are just… bad investments. Progress, apparently, must now be measured in insulin units per capita.
And so, the gates close. Not to the criminals, … Read the rest
