Who Made This a Race?
How much intelligence do people need, and how much growth does the money require? On AI, investor culture, and the pressure to keep up.
- AI
- Technology
- Business
- Ideas
Essays
Essays on perfumery, film, perception, and engineering.
The Plain Power of the One Ring
The simplest ring feels enormous. On possession, improvement, and the people who get left out of the calculation.
- Film
- Culture
- Ideas
Hathaway and the People We Cannot Quite Explain
Gigi still puzzles me. I understand her better each time, without becoming much more capable of summarizing her.
- Film
- Culture
- Ideas
Ajin and the Loss of Moral Ambiguity
Early in Ajin, I found Nagai and Satō difficult to place. By the end, their roles were easier to recognize. I am not sure the clarity was an improvement.
- Film
- Culture
- Ideas
InterPositive and the Filmmaker-Approved AI
The public-relations value is readily visible. The comparative technical value remains much harder to inspect.
- AI
- Film
- Business
- Ideas
The Economy of the Mundane
A bakery is a small business. Several thousand bakeries are still discussed as small businesses. At what point do we add them up?
- Ideas
- Culture
- Business
What If It Was a Choice?
“Being gay is not a choice” leaves a more basic question unanswered: why would choosing it make the mistreatment reasonable?
- Ideas
- Culture
We Only Mind When a Machine Does It
Almost everything we fear AI might do to us, we already do to each other and call it how the world works. Seeing it in a machine could teach the next generation to think about consequences before they act.
- Ideas
- Culture
- AI
What a Language Makes You Say
A language doesn't limit what you're able to think. It decides what you're forced to encode and what's cheap to say, and after thirty years that isn't grammar anymore, it's a habit of attention.
- Language
- Culture
- Ideas
AutoMix Has Its Uses. Your Albums Aren't One of Them.
It detects the deliberate decay a producer placed at the end of a track, and starts the next song on top of it.
- Music
- Design
Filing for Love and the Case Against Formula
K-dramas run on a handful of recognizable templates. What they all share is a ceiling on ambiguity. This one keeps moving.
- Film
- Culture
Three Ways to Tell a Gay Story
A gay story can do three fundamentally different things: critique, lament, or simply entertain. The West is fluent in the first two.
- Film
- Culture
- Ideas