Federico Faggin invented the first microprocessor. Half a century of building machines that process information — and then he spent the second half of his life arguing that this was never “the thing” itself. A chip can hold every fact about pain. Weight it, model it, run it a billion times a second. It will […]
I broke my shoulder hours after I had returned to Janwaar. Not dramatically. The kind of accident that happens on these roads at night. And then you stand there for a moment working out what has just changed. By the time I understood what had happened, someone had already noticed. That is the thing about […]
A Non-Human Way to the Gate Today marked my first international trip with real visa stakes — Germany to India — and something quietly strange happened along the way: I made it from check-in to gate without a single human interaction. Not one. Boarding pass? Machine. Passport control? Machine. Bag drop? Machine. Every checkpoint, every […]
I am leaving for India in a few days. Everyone I know there has sent some version of the same message: it’s extreme, be careful. Not the usual seasonal warning. Something more urgent. More tired. Yesterday a longtime friend wrote from Banda, Uttar Pradesh — a district I know, with people I love. A record […]
I have sat across from a lot of young people in the last few years. In villages. In universities. In conference rooms that were trying very hard to feel informal. In circles on the floor in Janwaar, where the rule was simple: whoever speaks, speaks for themselves. What I notice, more and more, is the […]
I think we owe Trump a thank you. No, really. Stay with me. Not for the policies. Not for the lies, the tariffs, the daily circus of a man who has somehow convinced half the world that chaos is a leadership style. Not for any of that. For the crash. For accelerating what was already […]
Armona is a small island off the Algarve coast. No cars. Maybe 50 all year round residents. Pine trees, dunes, the Atlantic doing what it always does. I have been here before. During Covid — five, six months — when the world closed down and this place became the kind of stillness that was hard […]
My father is ninety-one. He is in a care home. He is weak. He does not want to live any more. And he has become, in his own particular way, quite rude about it. I notice that I am not devastated by this. That observation itself used to require explanation. Now it simply is what […]
On April 28, 2026, King Charles III stood before a joint meeting of the United States Congress and delivered one of the most quietly devastating performances in recent diplomatic history. He didn’t shout. He didn’t threaten. He didn’t claim credit for things he hadn’t done or attack people who weren’t in the room. He didn’t […]
And She Hadn’t Even Seen the Internet. My latest field note about conditioning sparked more conversation than I expected. One thread kept coming back to the same place: Hannah Arendt, and her lifelong question of why ordinary people stop thinking. Hannah Arendt spent her life trying to understand how ordinary people become capable of extraordinary […]