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There are some images that feel like they’ve always existed, as if they emerged not from an artist’s mind but from the collective unconscious. Edvard Munch’s The Scream is one of them. You don’t look at it so much as feel it—like a shiver crawling up your spine. And part of its eerie power is that it feels both distant and utterly, uncomfortably familiar.
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When people hear I’m in a relationship with a man who’s incarcerated, the reactions fall somewhere between disbelief and pity. Sometimes curiosity. Sometimes judgment pretending to be curiosity.
“Why would you date someone in prison?”
“Don’t you want more for yourself?”
“I could never do that.”
Artificial General Intelligence has the potential to be the most transformative technology humanity has ever created — greater than electricity, greater than the internet, greater than anything that has come before it.
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It’s one of those facts that feels almost too bizarre to be real, but here it is: Adolf Hitler, architect of the Holocaust, never set foot inside a concentration camp. Not once.
The chain gang is an institution of its own, evolved from a simple idea: if the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery, the prison system could quietly pick up where the plantations left off. And it did, with ruthless efficiency. Black men — overwhelmingly Black men — convicted of petty crimes, real or imagined, are now property of the state, leased out like equipment to build roads, clear swamps, or break rock.
Vincent van Gogh’s painting “At Eternity’s Gate”, also known as “Sorrowing Old Man”, was completed in 1890 just weeks before his tragic death. The work is often seen as a meditation on the artist’s own struggles with mental illness, poverty and feelings of failure at the end of his life.
The painting depicts a solitary figure, head bowed and face buried in his hands, sitting in a simple wooden chair. The man’s posture exudes despair and exhaustion. His clothes are plain and worn, suggesting a life of hardship. The background is empty and undefined, further emphasizing the figure’s isolation and disconnection from the world around him.
His name was Pope Benedict IX, and he became pope for the first time around 1032, when he was possibly as young as 11 years old. (Historians argue the exact age—some say early teens, others say no younger than 18—but either way: teenage pope.)
Now, most teen boys are still figuring out deodorant. Benedict IX was running the Catholic Church.
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