Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift!

— Robin Wall Kimmerer / Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

I don’t know where they come from.
I can summon them
(sometimes I can)
into my mind,
into my fingers,
I don’t know why. Or I’ll suddenly hear them
walking, sometimes
waking—
they don’t often come when I need them.
When I need them most terribly,
never.

— Franz Wright / “Words”

You donate money to charity, and they spend it all trying to get you to donate more.

— David Sedaris / The Land and Its People: Essays

The rage that shatters the soul into bodies,
the body, into dissimilar organs,
and the organ into eight-note thoughts
the rage of the poor
carries a core fire against two craters.

— César Vallejo / “[The rage that shatters a man into children,]”

Al adept at exploiting not just financial, legal, or communications systems but also human psychology, our weaknesses and biases, is on the way. Researchers at Meta created a program called CICERO. It became an expert at playing the complex board game Diplomacy, a game in which planning long, complex strategies built around deception and backstabbing is integral. It shows how Als could help us plan and collaborate, but also hints at how they could develop psychological tricks to gain trust and influence, reading and manipulating our emotions and behaviors with a frightening level of depth, a skill useful in, say, winning at Diplomacy or electioneering and building a political movement.

The space for possible attacks against key state functions grows even as the same premise that makes AI so powerful and exciting-its ability to learn and adapt-empowers bad actors.

— Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskan / The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

Write a 12-line rhythmically charged poem in which you slant rhyme
(at least twice) the name of the last official indicted from the Tr*mp
administration. Reference the most recent climate change related
disaster. Address by first name one of the 27 migrants who have died
in ICE custody since the beginning of 2026. End with the instructions
given to you by a parent or guardian on what you should do when
waking from a nightmare.

— Susan Briante / “Further Exercises”

Never has humanity possessed so much wealth, knowledge and technological capability. Yet for billions of human beings, progress remains out of reach. They see prosperity around them, but not for themselves in their own lives. They are told that globalization expands horizons, but they only experience exclusion. They are promised that technology will unlock new possibilities, yet many fear it will take away their livelihoods. Meanwhile, billions of people still live today without the essentials embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals that should be guaranteed for everyone: food, clean water, education, decent work, health care, dignity. 

— António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations / “Final Address to the United Nations, September 22, 2026”

What I’m Listening To:

The city at night, the rebel sound
You’re a bullshit farmer on fertile ground
Growing bad crop on a field of sorrow
If the opposite was cool, you’d be different tomorrow

— Pardoner / “Au Contraire”

Title Goes Here

This is the body of the entry: This is the complication. This is the climax. This is the gist of what I wish to convey. This is the denouement. This is what you get.

What I’m Reading:

What slips from me is what
slips from me. Slippage
is the hinge on which my life

hinges.

— Jane Huffman / “Beauty is made my fear”

This. Is. Digitized.

This is a digitized morning page. This is a digitized mourning phase. This is digitized mental squall. This is digitized coming to terms. This is digitized hullabaloo. This is digitized push and pull through the eye of a needle in haystack out on the fringes of the wasteland. This is digitized someone else’s neuroses filtered through semi-quavered skronk tectonics. This is digitized skronk tectonics, this. This is digitized digital manipulations via pistoning thumbs—tap tap tap tap poo. Ok, this is digitized poo. Ok, this is the pops. This is digitized digital masturbatory aleatory foo. This is digitized living in the still relatively new-new century. This is digitized raw manifold with a peculiar filter applied. This is digitized. This is Friday. This Friday. This.

What I’m Reading:

I am looking, it seems, for aesthetic correspondences to a sense of both desolation and supplication, though it is not clear to whom my entreaties are directed or even what they are. Deliver me from anything and everything, I will take whatever you can give: a request that leaves me as powerless as I feel.

— Emily Labarge / Dog Days

Fingertips

I’ve come untethered
Three days lost and out of sorts
Now the correction

Sitting on the train
The snow blows blinding outside
Heavy wet and sad

The Wailers’ singles in my ears
Provide the syncopation
Propelling the day

On the balcony
In yellow afternoon light
A thrush in the snow

Pink skies cede to blue
Melted snow transformed to ice
Anticipation

West, the dream maker bicycles
For all ages a unique mile
On fingertips

What I’m Reading:

Assigning too much “agency” to these bots leads us to psychologically outsource our judgment, which is a mistake…

— Adam Pryor, AI Consultant / “What a Group of A.I. Agents Talked About as Their Humans Had a Dinner Party” / The New York Times

October Love (redux)

A vibrant tuning fork in hand—
This is normally a prime time for burrowing a hole in your heart.

You tell me to videograph your heartache.
You claim that this crowded urban area saps your optimism and your love for your fellow human.
Someone’s banging on the door, yelling: get out, get out.
You will slowly reopen your heart and repair the gaps, and hope for the best.
It’s still not easy to be asymptomatic.
Over the next couple of weeks before October love forlorn, love clinically enervated, will disappear permanently.

Fuel for the broken heart.
Food for stormy weather.

What I’m Reading:

First, we could lose control of the future to AI. The risk is that it moves so fast that people can no longer follow what’s happening or intervene when needed. This would obviously be terrible … In the other direction, these systems could concentrate too much power in too few hands. No one person or company or country should be able to use the most powerful AI models to impose their worldview on everyone else. A company or country that believes only it can be trusted with this technology can use that belief to justify almost anything else. We have to reject that logic, even when it’s convenient for any one actor.

— Sam Altman / “Sam Altman’s remarks at the United Nations Security Council” / openai.com

there’s a desolation and a strange hope, all at once, in the vast spaces of the west…

there’s something to be said of empty spaces… 

day after day…

you fill in the story…

What I’m Listening To:

I am nowhere tonight
On the interstate west
Where the sodium lights
Meet the vanishing stars
A whole country out there
Branded with signs
Cut through with roads
And some of them are mine

— The Wingdale Community Singers / “I’m In The Mood (To Drive)”

No Fear

She found herself on the other side of the country — drove in a fugue as far west as she could until she hit the ocean.

As she drove away from the eastern ocean on the other extreme of the country — away from her husband, a husband who never was but insisted on the name and the discipline he forced; away from the son she never really wanted but the “husband-man” insisted on — she felt no bindings stretching taut, no heaviness.

No fear. 

She had her passport, soon she’d have to choose: north to a clean well lighted place or south to the land of her ancestors — anywhere but this moribund, splintering, ghost ship crawling with mites and weighted down by a gargantuan millstone.

Staring at the sea, she spoke this into her phone:

I long to shape
a moon from bone.

I heard that before,
somewhere—
it resonated. A chord
struck—atonal
& dissonant.

A wound—a pickaxe stymie,
a hurricane hole
in homogeneity.
Monosyllabic—

trickle & tone. 

“Where
you going—where
you been?”

I’ll find a planetarium
to bathe in—

nothing more
to say.

She threw the phone into the Pacific, walked back to car, and drove…

What I’m Reading:

Sometimes she imagines it will happen this way / that it has happened already,
and she stands remembering / that it is happening now, in the dawn of her
imagining—her body a wisp of air in a drafty corridor, stirred in the wake of
her passing.

— Jennifer Maier / “The Occupant Revisits the Rooms of Her Life and Arrives at a Late Understanding”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

The sky is a century with no windows.
I say things like that. Sorry.
You have more rights than the undocumented:
I need a permit to uproot you.
Ofelia believes only rain can touch all of you.
My mother is my favorite immigrant.
After her? The sonnet.

— Eduardo C. Corral / “To a Blossoming Saguaro”

This will be the greatest, most rapid accelerant of wealth and prosperity in human history. It will also be one of the most chaotic. If everyone has access to more capability, that clearly also includes those who wish to cause harm. With technology evolving faster than defensive measures, bad actors, from Mexican drug cartels to North Korean hackers, are given a shot in the arm. Democratizing access necessarily means democratizing risk.

We are about to cross a critical threshold in the history of our species. This is what the nation-state will have to contend with over the next decade … fragility amplification stemming from the coming wave.

…

Now imagine robots equipped with facial recognition, DNA sequencing, and automatic weapons. Future robots may not take the form of scampering dogs. Miniaturized even further, they will be the size of a bird or a bee, armed with a small firearm or a vial of anthrax. They might soon be accessible to anyone who wants them. This is what bad actor empowerment looks like.

— Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskan / The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

Write a poem that binds you and your reader as tightly as the zip ties
encircling protestors’ wrists. Use empathy, compassion, complicity.
Include the all reasons why you have not placed your body in the
streets or the courts to protect the person you love who is most
vulnerable to the state. Address that person. End with a line that
moans like gas entering your tank or end with a line that divides
nothing.

— Susan Briante / “Further Exercises”

I asked the senator how he had learned to stop worrying and love SAI. His answer was sobering:

“I haven’t. I’m every bit as worried as I was five years ago, if not more so. But where we are now, asking ‘Should we create super intelligent Als?’ is like asking if we should be using protection while we’re going into labor. The question is pretty moot. The baby is here. China has uncorked the bottle and let the genie out and the results speak for themselves. If we do not move quickly to create an American Confucius, we are done as a global power. It’s that simple.”

— Neil Sharpson / When The Sparrow Falls

… in your dreams you have sullied and murdered,
and dreams do not lie.

— Mary Oliver / “Rage”

“If you see hate speech online, take it almost as your duty to disagree,” says psychologist Mirta Galesic. “Just say ‘I disagree’. Don’t feel pressured to have an elaborate argument.” The goal, she says, is to highlight widespread, moderate social norms— so ask your friends to chime in and disagree, too. That advice is the result of research including an analysis of more than a million Twitter/X posts made between 2015 and 2018. It found that excessive arguing, getting hostile, or using ‘us-versus-them’ rhetoric only drives toxicity.

— Flora Graham / “How to counter hate without fuelling it” / Nature Brief

I am not your God. Or if I am, I’m no God you can seek out for deliverance or explanation. I’m the kind of God who would eat you without compunction if I were hungry.

— Ron Currie, Jr. / God Is Dead

What I’m Listening To:

There’s a long road
At night alone
I drive down to find me sleeping
Headlights on a new head of mine
My twin gets in the car
Two lives right on time, hold tight
The sound is on

— Julia Holter / “My Twin”

The Last Nimbus (redux)

A nebula forms around my headboard
& congeals—a pulsating fathom’s roost.

A blinding white flash—
great speedwell & arrowhead fall.

Encrusted like the lotus-eaters—
incubated / intubated / spacesuited /
pillows backboned.

A pair of florins for eyewear—
now set for the passage /
I pass out the last saint’s
nimbus.

What I’m Reading:

The term that I came up with… is superpower suicide. I just can’t see an example of a major country losing so much power so quickly as the United States under Trump.

We’ve encouraged our enemies and we’ve made our allies not trust us.

— Tim Snyder / Interview on Meidas Touch Podcast