There is a strange new kind of silence spreading across the web, and it doesn’t sound like censorship. It doesn’t come with warning banners, deleted pages, or officials knocking at the door. It is quieter than that, almost polite. You publish. The post exists. The link works. Nothing stops you. And yet the world passes by as if your words are a streetlight in daylight—still on, still burning electricity, no … Read the rest
There is a certain kind of sentence that arrives like a key already cut to fit every lock. You don’t have to think too hard; you just turn it and the door opens, and behind the door there is a warm room where the world makes sense. The sentence usually sounds like this: “If a people has been chased for centuries, there must be a reason.” Sometimes it comes with … 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
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ As we study history together, I often show documentary films to my students. When these films are about the distant past, there is a voice (or person-moderator) who walks us through the information, using whatever illustrations can be mustered. But as we get nearer to modern times the documentaries come to life: actual human action in black and white. From the late 19th … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ Back in the day when I was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, I wondered what to choose as my ‘major’: English or Journalism. Well, that was back in the ‘60s, so what else could I do but drop out and head for Greenwich Village in New York City? (Well, not exactly. I ended up working at the Countee Cullen … Read the rest
