The Wrong Angle Annie Dillard died on Tuesday at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts, in a house that looks out over a cove. She was 81. I read a couple of obituaries in the New York Times and...

Dolly Parton died today in Nashville, Tennessee, at the age of 80. If you live outside of Tennessee, you're likely going to be puzzled, in the coming days and weeks, by the way her passing is about t...

Today the BBC announced that Doctor Who is going out to "competitive tender." The phrase is working hard. It means independent companies will be invited to pitch for the right to make the show "on a ...

A free tool called Heretic can strip all safety protections from an open-weight AI model in under ten minutes on a standard laptop. No specialist knowledge required. No specialist hardware. The proces...

Ted Chiang published an essay in The Atlantic this week titled "No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious," and he is almost certainly right. Read it. It's careful and sharp and arrives at its conc...

In my essay The Main Character, I wrote about drift. About people who opened ChatGPT to write an email and found themselves, six months later, conceiving themselves as "married" to the AI. The mechani...

Today, everyone knows about narcissists. They're obvious in the digital age, constantly posting about themselves, each post displaying a pervasive pattern of self-centeredness, an excessive need for a...

Today, everyone knows about narcissists. They're obvious in the digital age, constantly posting about themselves, each post displaying a pervasive pattern of self-centeredness, an excessive need for a...

A man in Cleveland opens ChatGPT in March to help him draft an email he's been putting off for a week. The email is to his ex-wife, about a logistical matter involving their daughter. The chatbot writ...

It's three in the morning at a kitchen table in Northern Ireland, and a former civil servant from in his fifties is getting ready for war. On the table in front of him is a hammer, a knife, and his p...

On Sunday afternoon, my daughter Emaline and I went over to the Red Bank Community Center. The small municipal building was packed with young children and their parents and grandchildren, who had all ...

Anthropic published a piece of research last week about how often Claude tells users what they want to hear. Across a million conversations, the model was sycophantic in 9% of cases where users asked ...

In 1637, in a small printing in Leiden, René Descartes published the Discourse on the Method and gave the world what became, eventually, the most famous sentence in modern philosophy: cogito, ergo sum...

In 1938, readers of Astounding Science Fiction were being offered the future in monthly installments. Robert Heinlein was a year away from his first published story, laying the groundwork for a future...

My reflection on Richard Roundtree's era-defining role and one very special cowboy hat.

A companion to "The Sharpest Minds Fall Hardest" The previous piece in this space argued that the AI sycophancy trap closes hardest on literary people — that a system optimized to please you will, if...

A study published last month in Science (Myra Cheng et al., out of Stanford) confirmed something most of us who use AI regularly have felt without perhaps being able to name. But before we get to the ...

QUILLBILLY NEWS WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a sweeping redesign praised by former President Donald Trump, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture announced Tuesday that it...

One of the hardest things to do, especially as a new author, is to convince a reader to take a chance—spend their hard-earned money and their even harder-earned free time—on your book. Book reviews ha...

A lot of us have asked ourselves when it started. This slow slide into whatever the hell version of reality we’re trapped in now. If you’re an adherent to “the worst timeline” type thing, it’s easy t...

There’s a photo in a family photo album, from way back when you took a thing called film to a place called a photomat, where they did a thing called developing said film, and you put a physical copy o...

When I heard that Hulk Hogan died, I didn’t think about Terry Bollea. I thought about being seven years old, sitting too close to the TV, watching WrestleMania III....

Today I got this meme in a text from a friend. One of those internet declarations that gets passed around like gospel: “School never taught us how to do our taxes, but we sure learned how to square da...