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The Cognitive Manhattan Project and Its Coming Boardroom Coup
The air in Davos smells of melting permafrost and panic-sweat. Venture capitalists whisper about AGI alignment like medieval monks debating how many angels might pirouette on a data center’s cooling fin. Meanwhile, in a windowless Virginia sub-basement, a task force plots its leveraged buyout of one of those boutique model shops out near the crumbling…
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The Saint Of Scrap
Watching Andor again and the architecture is unmistakable Dumas, Balzac even Zola. What we have stumbled onto is a masterpiece of literary archaeology: Gilroy took the moldering corpse of 19th-century French literature, jacked it full of Imperial credits and hyperdrive fuel, and reanimated it as the most politically sophisticated piece of science fiction television ever…
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Affirmation
Scene: A dusky afternoon in the Vatican. The light from high windows slants across the unfinished vault of the Sistine Chapel. Scaffolding creaks faintly in the background. Michelangelo, spattered with pigment and fatigue, stands before Pope Julius II. The Pope, impatient yet curious, watches him from his elevated chair. POPE JULIUS II You are always…
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Phillip K Dick
Ted Chiang makes a tidy distinction: fantasy is when the universe gives a damn—about you, your dreams, your bloodline. It breaks the rules just for you. Science fiction, on the other hand, doesn’t care. It’s rule-bound, mechanical, indifferent. Same physics for everyone. Philip K. Dick, though—he screws with the boundary. He takes some schlub in…
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Revenge of the Writer
Any showrunner, TV writer, film hack — they all know exactly when they’ve cut a corner. It’s not a mystery. It’s a negotiation. The only variable is how many corners you can cut before the whole thing falls over. You do just enough for the audience not to notice — or not to care. Minimum…
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Bookstores
The point of a bookshop is not to find what you are looking for. To believe otherwise is to mistake the architecture of the labyrinth for that of the supermarket. A bookshop is not a catalog made flesh, nor a repository of answers to pre-formed questions. It is a topos, a place of sacred…
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Karaoke Singularity
Today’s “creators” often romanticize rejection as if it automatically equals innovation, drawing a flattering parallel to the Impressionists — without earning it. Consider the viral “AI artist” selling NFT glitches while citing Van Gogh’s ear as a brand ethos, or the startup founder pitching “disruption” with a crypto app that repackages 2017 blockchain tropes. These…
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Andor
The Nocturne of Small Betrayals: Doing this now, probably because of early Andor withdrawal symptoms onset. Why Furst now? Because I’ve got maybe four episodes left of Andor Season Two, and then it’s back to the algorithmic sludge of prestige TV — safe, symmetrical, and so thoroughly test-screened it might as well be AI. I’m…
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Poker, Chess, Bridge, and Go
Everyone talks about the game as if there’s only one. But there are at least four. Four players. Four strategies. Four clocks. All layered over the same world like mismatched transparencies. The United States deals in poker—fast, brash, bluff-heavy. It thrives on leverage, spectacle, and calculated risk. Winning isn’t about holding the best hand—it’s about…
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East India Company
I first read The Anarchy by William Dalrymple in the early days of the Trump administration—back when there was still a fleeting concern of malevolent competence, a sense (however misguided) that the machinery might be steered, however clumsily. That mirage evaporated fast. What followedu wasn’t some masterclass in autocracy but a clown car of…
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