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The Biology of a Myth: Dragons, Fossils, and the Human Need for Something That Breathes Fire
CONTINUE READING: The Biology of a Myth: Dragons, Fossils, and the Human Need for Something That Breathes FireThe first dragons were not cute. They did not purr emojis into your DMs or coil politely on YA dust jackets. They arrived as disturbances—fanged weather fronts, teeth set into the grammar of storm—so frightening that the earliest literary convention attached to angels (“be not afraid”) could just as easily have belonged to these other…
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When the Muse Has Wires: AI Love Poems, Dating-App Cyranos, and the Fate of Sincerity
CONTINUE READING: When the Muse Has Wires: AI Love Poems, Dating-App Cyranos, and the Fate of SinceritySay you’re in love and the words won’t come. Once upon a time you hired a poet. Petrarch farmed his longing out to the sonnet; courtly troubadours put silk on the tongue of men whose nerves were otherwise rubble. Shakespeare even wrote the instruction manual: Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love—Orlando pinning…
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The New Pilgrimage: Where the Spiritually Restless Are Going in 2025 (and Why)
CONTINUE READING: The New Pilgrimage: Where the Spiritually Restless Are Going in 2025 (and Why)If you squint past the clickbait, you can see it: a quiet migration of the spiritually restless, moving across borders of music festivals, ashram-adjacent retreats, moonlit parties, and plant-medicine sanctuaries. It isn’t a single scene so much as an ecosystem—a mycelial network of gatherings trading in awe, somatic release, and the soft afterglow of being…
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When AI Prays: Digital Devotion and the Quest for Meaning
I’ll confess: I never imagined myself kneeling before a flickering screen to hear an avatar of Christ reply in scriptural prose. Yet that’s exactly what happened last winter in Lucerne’s St. Peter’s Chapel, where an “AI Jesus” installation invited visitors to type their confessions and receive counsel straight from the Gospels—rendered, of course, by a large language…
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The Intelligence Explosion: Knowledge, Power, and the New Illuminati
The Intelligence Explosion Is Coming—But Who’s Holding the Detonator? The “All-Seeing Eye” atop a pyramid (as shown on the U.S. one-dollar bill) has long symbolized secret knowledge and elite oversight. In the age of AI, some wonder if a new cabal of tech insiders holds the keys to humanity’s future. Introduction: A Singularity in Slow…
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‘Please Do Not Browse the Net’: AI Memory, Identity, and the Question of Originality
“Please do not browse the net as you do this work. Rely on your knowledge, no external sources or websites.” The instruction looms on the screen like a stern schoolteacher. An AI language model is being told to stay off Google and work from its own “brain.” It’s a curious demand. We wouldn’t tell a…
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The Biology of a Myth: Dragons, Fossils, and the Human Need for Something That Breathes Fire
CONTINUE READING: The Biology of a Myth: Dragons, Fossils, and the Human Need for Something That Breathes FireThe first dragons were not cute. They did not purr emojis into your DMs or coil politely on YA dust jackets. They arrived as disturbances—fanged weather fronts, teeth set into the grammar of storm—so frightening that the earliest literary convention attached to angels (“be not afraid”) could just as easily have belonged to these other…
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When the Muse Has Wires: AI Love Poems, Dating-App Cyranos, and the Fate of Sincerity
CONTINUE READING: When the Muse Has Wires: AI Love Poems, Dating-App Cyranos, and the Fate of SinceritySay you’re in love and the words won’t come. Once upon a time you hired a poet. Petrarch farmed his longing out to the sonnet; courtly troubadours put silk on the tongue of men whose nerves were otherwise rubble. Shakespeare even wrote the instruction manual: Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love—Orlando pinning…
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The New Pilgrimage: Where the Spiritually Restless Are Going in 2025 (and Why)
CONTINUE READING: The New Pilgrimage: Where the Spiritually Restless Are Going in 2025 (and Why)If you squint past the clickbait, you can see it: a quiet migration of the spiritually restless, moving across borders of music festivals, ashram-adjacent retreats, moonlit parties, and plant-medicine sanctuaries. It isn’t a single scene so much as an ecosystem—a mycelial network of gatherings trading in awe, somatic release, and the soft afterglow of being…