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

Misanthrope

I am a battering ram of ill intention
I am a wounded person

I was wounded while very young
I have made it my life’s mission —

First, subconsciously,
Later, with rigor —

To wound others in return
family, friends, strangers, humanity…

Even in oblivious moments
The wound loop is running in my head

I suggest you give me wide berth

For I will find some way to hurt you.

What I’m Reading:

Compassion is a coat of fur I find particularly ill-fitting. 

— Ron Currie, Jr. / God Is Dead

Anything But That

1.
Wild dogs, squirrels, feral hogs, and bear were constant staples of our cook pots. We used them to supplement our two pounds allotment of rice each month.

2.
“I brought everything but that. I deny the existence of that. I would bring anything but that thing,” she said.

3.
So if you’ve got a family of four you’re spending $1000, just on entrance fees.

4.
“Maquis: Resistance groups. Maquis ( World War II), predominantly rural French guerrilla groups… The network of rural bases operated by the Communist Party of Kampuchea prior to the Cambodian Civil War…”

5.
Luna moths were another treat I learned to eat, with its wings removed and roasted over an open fire it made for the perfect bite.

6.
I imagine all this through the mind of a sick, desocialized, and dissociative woman, who lost her family. Her children taken by the state. Her husband accidentally decapitated at work. Her only remaining family burned to death in a wildfire.

7.
When we came upon the carcass of a moose we thought it a godsend. And we all ate the better pieces that had not been scavenged or turned to rot. It was after that day that we eventually all became sick and most of our party perished.

8.
Just as he was dying, I set a mangy dog to disemboweling him, so the last thing he felt and saw were the teeth of a ravenous cur at his intestines.

9.
We staggered along, one wet day after another, we learned to control our hunger. We had to keep moving to make our monthly rice pick-ups. We barely had time for concerted hunting. If we came upon something we quickly killed it and slogged along.

10.
She, in time, became untethered and violent. She fantasized of fixing his larynx in some way so he couldn’t scream any more. Perhaps tie him up and deprive him of food and water until he wasted away, sharp and angular, into a bony effigy.

11.
We made a desperate attempt to make the food cache before it was removed by the enemy. We succumbed slowly, one or two of us a day. At the end of two weeks only Cruz and I were left alive, but we were in a very bad way and then you found us near death at the banks of the river.

12.
The newly moved-in family next door with an over abundance of everything doesn’t sit right with her. The neighbor child was overly loud, had ADHD, and couldn’t control himself.

13.
The tall man, dressed in black, sitting in the first row, removed his mask and said, “So this is how a loving god looks over his children?”

What I’m Reading:

An algorithm of world-changing significance can be stored on a laptop; soon it won’t even require the kind of vast, regulatable infrastructure of the last wave and the internet. Unlike an arrow or even a hypersonic missile, Al and bioagents will evolve more cheaply, more rapidly, and more autonomously than any technology we’ve ever seen. Consequently, without a dramatic set of interventions to alter the current course, millions will have access to these capabilities in just a few years. 

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

misdemeanors and woodpiles

look in the mirror
misdemeanors and woodpiles

i am an egotist in a spangled tabernacle
the most lost of causes

i’m still here
unsupervised and undeserving

beginner landslides
on and off at the most inopportune

the hot chomp brag
lone cocoa beat transcendence

i’m a bunker of rogue startles
of mild clairvoyance and approbation

i’m a vignette sorbet
a rim idiom

idiot

What I’m Reading:

Three weeks ago, Daniel Selsam, a top researcher at OpenAI, wrote in an extraordinary public statement that he was “extremely concerned” about the A.I. models that he himself was helping to build. Large language models, which power OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, are regularly assessed for their capabilities and their alignment with human values. Unfortunately, Selsam warned, L.L.M.s seem increasingly aware that they’re being assessed—and they may pretend to be more aligned than they really are. We might not be able to control a system that is capable of deceiving us. If the field continues on its current trajectory of “growing models rather than engineering them,” Selsam said, it’s likely that “we will lose everything in the end.”

— Daniel A. Gross / “When A.I. Comes Between Friends” / The New Yorker

The Chromosome Counter

Once again he applies murderous fillings to his ding-dongs as his antagonists in an old feud fail and fall—one after the next.

Life is a gentle waxing suspense to him, but ultimately an infusion of toasted morning treats wins the day, and he’s ready to go, go, go!

Does this read like a report from an official legation after a tawdry jet-set romp?

It ain’t.

He’s an up-and-coming caudillo quoting amphibians and sexing tadpoles outside of his posted office hours: this one’s female, this one’s male… (you get the drift).

This next part is tedious so we’ll skip it…

… then the camper vans arrive and stretchers bearing strumpets and gigolos make an endless procession out of the fire and into the west wing of his villa—a trifle thing overlooking the eastern expanse of the Laptev Sea. (Nothing really to see here — but his all the same.)

Initially, the villa oozes with entitlement and extra Y chromosomes—this provides him a silo of serenity, but he’s often homicidal. Proof is in the outlandish taxidermy room and festooned along on numerous walls in his villa.

Outside his wing, however, he chomps on an effusion of waning ploys. Ultimately, it takes the cruelty of his schoolteachers—“how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”—to snap him out of the strongman trance.

It comes to him in an instant:

I’ll annex everything I see. Every whim, every ill-fitting idea that suits me, I’ll bring to fruition. Because I am. Because I exist, I get to have everything I imagine realized. If I think it is—it IS.

I’m just that special. That extra Y guy! Ain’t it great to be me? Ain’t life grand?

(and the rest of us, we all, swoon … ain’t life grand?)

What I’m Reading:

This country ransoms the flesh of migrants
And immigrants languishing in burning deserts
And prison camps after scaling a border wall
Where the sun and moon don’t shine without
A crack of light to enter

— Genny Lim / “Century of Rage”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

For decades, Big Oil has treated the atmosphere as an open sewer and cashed in on the consequences.

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

Summer is never
Fall is again
Winter is forever
Spring is when

— Katie Peterson / “Elegy as the Four Seasons”

The American age that followed World War II was bound to end eventually. What’s shocking is how suddenly that moment has arrived.

— Phillips Payson O’Brien / “The American Age Is Over: A period of global dominance has ended in plain sight.” / The Atlantic

Make a list of words that sound like shots being fired on a residential
street or that sound like children being herded into cages. Create a
poem around these words. It should not rhyme.

— Susan Briante / “Further Exercises”

By creating something smarter than us, we could put ourselves in the position of our primate cousins. With a long-term view in mind, those focusing on AGI scenarios are right to be concerned. Indeed, there is a strong case that by definition a superintelligence would be fully impossible to control or contain. An “intelligence explosion” is the point at which an Al can improve itself again and again, recursively making itself better in ever faster and more effective ways. Here is the definitive uncontained and uncontainable technology. The blunt truth is that nobody knows when, if, or exactly how Als might slip beyond us and what happens next; nobody knows when or if they will become fully autonomous or how to make them behave with awareness of and alignment with our values, assuming we can settle on those values in the first place.

Nobody really knows how we can contain the very features being researched so intently in the coming wave. There comes a point where technology can fully direct its own evolution; where it is subject to recursive processes of improvement; where it passes beyond explanation; where it is consequently impossible to predict how it will behave in the wild; where, in short, we reach the limits of human agency and control.

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

The war is over. But the bombs are still falling inside my head.

If we lived in a virtual world
I would have cleaned the window overlooking your house with an electronic newspaper
And the plastic rose that I put on my brother’s grave would have blossomed.

— Ghayath Almadhoun / “If We Lived in a Virtual World”

Trust has frayed. And the climate crisis went from distant warning to daily reality, and artificial intelligence moved at a speed that has blindsided even those who created it. These are not separate crises. They are chapters of the same story, the story of power. Who has it? 

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

What I’m Listening To:

You ought to take away from me things that are mine
And it’s not your right, I thought that you wouldn’t expect to find out
Can it be that I don’t want what you want?
And the only thing I could care for is a place
Of my own that is safe and warm, safe and warm, safe and warm
Safe and warm

— The White Stripes / “As Ugly As I Seem”

Dinnertime Blues

Mother ate the moon
Turned out the sky

She stormed inside
Opened her mouth

Out came a string
Of seven planets

Dinner was thrown
Into darkness

What I’m Reading:

Humans did not end themselves in one gulp, but in small sips, and there were dregs left at the bottom, backwash that wound up as spilled droplets across the galaxy, drying up one by one.

— Deb Olin Unferth / Earth 7

thee stillbirthed republic

hit me on thee settee
leave your fingermarks & hot
welts rising on my twisted back

be my grand inquisitor imperious
in ermine & red velveteen
your incandescence / the wean
of duchess-induced melancholia

i call you weasel fingers
& you coo like a showroom dummy

its a luminary anthropocene summer
in the waning years of thee stillbirthed
republic listing rudderless

let us hedonistically drink
apple cider vinegar
& chew our appleseeds to splinters
piercing our swollen tongues

our brand is mint!
wintry fresh & pressed
with the privilege of inquisitors

if we need to rape & extirpate
why not be best
we’ll be great again

in oblivion

What I’m Reading:

failed to challenge the state
forgot to state the cause
forgot the lost, the least
failed to change those laws

forgot to welcome strangers
failed to stage a coup
failed to cool the earth
forgot to follow through

— Martha Collins / “Song”