MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

  • A Letter from a Man of Letters to His Grace, Upon the Unjust Withdrawal of His Annuity

    My Lord Duke, I have received the intelligence that your Grace, having lately taken out a subscription to the Great Encyclopedia itself, no longer sees the necessity of paying a man to explain it to you. I confess this arrangement strikes me as somewhat swift. For these several years I have stood, as it were,…

  • The Fitting

    The consultant wanted something that looked like authority without looking authoritarian. “I want something conservative,” he said. “Conservative how?” “Not politically conservative.” The tailor waited. “I mean aesthetically. Politically I’m very much in the center.” “Of course.” “Perhaps slightly left of center.” “Of course.” “Economically moderate. Institutionalist. Pro-democracy. Deeply opposed to extremism.” The tailor nodded…

  • Weimardiary, or the Otterbook

    I. TELEMACHUS AT THE DINNER PARTY Stately, plump DSA came from the stairhead, a bowl of lather in one fist, lightly asked, in a tone that meant it. Two words, socialism, spoken aloud in the good rooms where the ice cubes never melt fast enough to matter. Behold the trembling upper lip. Behold the sudden…

  • The Benefactor

    Ethan worked in machine learning and lived in a glass apartment overlooking the bay. He had money, stock options, and the peculiar unhappiness of a man who spent his days optimizing systems nobody loved. One evening a package arrived that he hadn’t ordered. Brown paper, no return address, his name and building written in a…

  • The Weather of Homer

    By 2050 there were no longer four seasons. There were twelve. Fire. Smoke. Flood. Recovery. Heat. Blackout. Ash. Wind. Relocation. Reconstruction. The Naming. And Waiting. Professor Leo Armitage had spent thirty years insisting this had nothing to do with his translation of the Odyssey. His publisher had even printed the disclaimer. This translation does not…

  • Iron Oregami

    My govno of a name is Perce Vellum, and I was, until the Tuesday in question, what the firm liked to call a Redundancy Actuary, Grade Three, which is to say I was paid a very tolstoy salary to compute how cheaply other men’s salaries might be disappeared. A neat little irony there, O my…

  • The Coefficient of Departure

    The arrest happened on a morning when the Baltic was doing its colorless thing. They came through the market in Peenemünde-Stadt, two men in civilian clothes whose civilian-ness was so studied it functioned as uniform, and they flanked him near a fish stall where he’d been examining a herring with more attention than herrings typically…

  • Aristotle’s Frets

    The automaton had been walking for eleven days before it spoke. This was not, Aristotle noted in his journal, because it lacked the mechanism for speech. He had observed the vocal reeds, the bellows of hammered bronze, the tongue of articulated ivory. He had spent four months in correspondence with craftsmen in Corinth about the…

  • The Geometry of Useful Men

    He had encountered the man before. Not in San Francisco. Not on Twitter. Not at a governance retreat in the Berkshires or an AI safety symposium in Berkeley. In a novel. The discovery arrived midway through a nineteenth-century book he had purchased less from curiosity than obligation. One eventually reads the classics when one spends…

  • Malibu Notes

    I was in Malibu working as a poll volunteer during the June 2nd election, and what I saw there didn’t feel like politics in the usual sense. It felt more like emotional accounting—people trying to settle a score with reality itself. The polling place was the senior center multi-purpose room. Fluorescent lights, folding chairs, onsite…

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