That Thing That Eats Your Name: A Story for Halloween

The first sign something was wrong in the neighborhood came when Patricia Reeves knocked on her own door and asked her husband if Patricia Reeves lived there. She stood on the porch in her gardening clothes, dirt still under her fingernails from planting the tulips we'd all watched her plant an hour before. Her husband assumed it was a stroke. The doctors found nothing. Brain scans perfect. Blood work pristine. Patricia simply no longer knew she was Patricia.

Within a week, three more people on Millbrook Road forgot themselves. Not amnesia where everything disappears. Something more precise. They remembered their children's names, their job skills, how to drive, what they had for breakfast. They just didn't remember being themselves. Marcus Chen could still perform surgery but couldn't recognize his own hands doing it. Sarah Thompson could recite every case she'd ever tried in court but insisted someone else must have tried them. They lived in their own homes as guests, polite strangers wearing their own faces.

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Boodle Boy: A Brief History of Time

When we invoke the Boodle Boy, we're also invoking a kind of professional shamanism. The shaman moves between worlds, bringing back knowledge from spaces others can't access. The Boodle Boy moves between disciplines, between technologies, between ways of knowing. He speaks theater to programmers and code to dramatists. He finds the musical structure in a business plan and the corporate logic in a symphony. This isn't interdisciplinary work in the academic sense; it's transdisciplinary in the most radical sense, refusing to acknowledge the borders between different forms of knowledge.

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The Last Human Memory

Here's a thought experiment I want you to try. Tonight, pick one moment from your day. Just one. Don't photograph it. Don't write it down. Don't tell anyone about it. Just hold it in your mind. Try to recall it tomorrow, next week, next month. Watch how it changes. Notice how it connects to other memories, how it grows or fades, how it becomes less about what happened and more about what it meant.

Because here's what cognitive scientists are discovering: the difference between remembering and retrieving data isn't just technical, it's existential. When you remember something, you're not just accessing information. You're reconstituting yourself. The memory changes you as you change it. This recursive loop between the rememberer and the remembered? That's consciousness itself.

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Black Pill: Meaning, History, and Cultural Fallout

“Taking the black pill” names a posture of fatalism that migrated from fringe men’s forums into the wider internet. The metaphor riffs on the pills in The Matrix, but where the “red pill” claims to reveal hard truths, the black pill says those truths are terminal and change is pointless. In its most specific and consequential register, it is tied to the incel subculture that coalesced online in the early 2010s. Encyclopædia Britannica traces the phrase’s popularization to the incel blog Omega Virgin Revolt and records a further radicalization after May 23, 2014, when some forum users glorified Elliot Rodger’s Isla Vista murders with talk of “going ER,” a dark shorthand for destruction and loss of hope. 

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Galileo Test: Why Today's AI Still Can't Invent the Future

Consider a thought experiment: one intelligence is trained exclusively on everything known about apples. Another is trained only on oranges. They are allowed to communicate but are strictly forbidden from discussing the specifics of their respective fruits. Would the apple expert learn about oranges, and vice versa? Surprisingly, the answer is almost certainly yes. Information inevitably leaks through the structure of communication itself. While their specific knowledge is specialized, they share a common linguistic framework. They both understand concepts like color, shape, growth, and climate.

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The Mirror and the Machine: A Meditation on Consciousness and Self-Awareness

Consciousness is the raw fact of experience itself, what philosophers call qualia. It's the redness of red, the sharp bite of winter air, that peculiar texture of anxiety sitting in your chest. Consciousness is simply the lights being on, the "something it is like" to be you. A mouse likely has consciousness; it experiences pain, pleasure, fear, but probably has little to no self-awareness. Self-awareness, by contrast, is consciousness turned inward and recognizing itself. It's not just experiencing, but knowing that you are the one experiencing. It's the ability to form a concept of "I" as distinct from "not-I," to see yourself as an object in the world with a past and future.

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Rivers with Standing: Indigenous Law, Memory, and the Future of Stewardship

There is no single universal definition of “Indigenous peoples.” The most rigorous contemporary practice rests on a cluster of criteria: self-identification; descent from societies that predate colonization; continuity of language, institutions, and spiritual traditions; and a sustained relationship with particular territories and waters. Since the late twentieth century, international law has converged around this approach.

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