Get Smarter Everyday
When I was a little kid, and I asked my parents a non-obvious question about the human body or biology, their answer would be “Ask your uncle Paulo next time we see him. He’s a doctor”. Other questions about various topics would get “Let’s call up grandma and ask her; She’s a teacher”, or “Let’s see if the encyclopedia has anything about this”, or “Ask your teacher if, during recess, you can go ask the librarian at school”.
What movies are playing? Let’s check the newspaper.
Why did they keep going?
Why, after seeing entire regiments mowed down in minutes, after watching friends disintegrate under artillery, after spending weeks in flooded trenches with rats chewing on corpses—why did they keep fighting?
Because World War I wasn’t just a war. It was a system. A machine. And once you were inside of it, there was no clear way out.
If you want to understand how wars actually end—not how the treaties are signed or the monuments get built, but how they really end—look at the photograph. A single frozen instant at Nha Trang Air Base in the spring of 1975.
An American official, face taut with fear and frustration, punches a Vietnamese man in the face. The man is clinging to the side of a plane—already packed, engines spinning, ready to go. He won’t let go. He can’t let go. And the American, trying to clear the doorway so the plane can take off, uses his fist.
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.
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.
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.