BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.

  • Keyword: Aura

    Some objects carry the trace of everyone who’s cared about them, and it only happens in the analog world. Any issue of The Atlantic that arrives containing a piece by Caity Weaver is a treat to be gobbled up and then re-read and savored. She is a cornucopian writer, like Erasmus in the Dutch Renaissance, who delights…

  • A Cannes-terbury Tale

    Is the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity today’s holy pilgrimage?  Last night, after a blessedly dull 22-hour journey, I returned home to misty Portland from the scorching heat of Cannes on the Côte d’Azur in France. It was my first visit to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity—the advertising celebration, not the film festival—even…

  • Higher Education’s “Napster Moment”

    Annals of Disruption: will a new initiative from Sal Khan change college forever? An April story about the new Khan TED Institute (KTI) had a moment then faded away. It deserves a second look. KTI is the brainchild of Sal Khan, creator of the Khan Academy, TED, and the Educational Testing Service (ETS), alongside what…

  • Adventures in Paris, a Claude Unlock

    Adventures in Paris La Profesora joined me in Paris for the RMN Europe Ascendant Boot Camp last week, which I programmed and hosted. After, we stuck around for the long weekend. The thing I love most about Paris is its excess of everyday aesthetics. A dozen years ago, I wrote “Paris as a Way of Seeing,” and…

  • Presidential Laughter

    Judd Apatow’s theory of presidential politics is that the funniest candidate wins, which isn’t a stretch for a comedy writer and director. I used to agree with this, but then Trump came along to complicate it. Trump never laughs. He doesn’t smile either. Instead, he has that bizarre grimace, a painted rictus. He has won…

  • Subject Line Style

    One of the few things about which La Profesora and I disagree is the purpose of writing. I contend that all writing is about persuasion—about getting your way. She disagrees. It’s likely that we disagree on the definition of “persuasion,” but we haven’t dug that deep. My mother, one of the other leading ladies in…

  • Retro Futures: “Sneakers” (1992) and Anthropic’s Mythos (2026)

    How does an early 1990s caper movie help us understand the threat and promise of today’s sharpest-edged AI models?  On April 7th, Anthropic announced that it had created Mythos, an AI so powerful that it can find long-undiscovered software bugs, making banks, hospitals, and other key holders of personal data vulnerable to hackers and scammers.…

  • My Neuroses’ Playlist & Another Modest Proposal

    My Neuroses’ Playlist In previous articles, I’ve mentioned how earworms plague me. There are four flavors of earworm: For example, I watched the end of the movie Kingsman, which features Bryan Ferry’s Slave to Love; it stayed in my head for days. In fact, just writing that last sentence brought it back. For example, the other morning I…

  • Lighting Up or Shooting Up?

    Last week, two major verdicts against Facebook and Google have prompted people to wonder if this is social media’s “Big Tobacco Moment,” but there’s a better metaphor. Last week, Meta (Facebook, Instagram) and Alphabet (Google, YouTube) suffered big legal setbacks that many are calling social media’s “Big Tobacco Moment.” The cigarette metaphor is powerful, but…

  • The Cosplay Reality Collapse

    With humans pretending to be AIs, fiction pretending to be history, and chatbots encouraging humans to commit despicable acts, it has never been harder to know what is real. A couple columns back, I asked “Do We Already Think AIs Are Conscious?” The provocation was an interesting “hit piece” that an AI agent had written…