Category: Culture

  • When Great Artists Are Bad People

    Artists can have dark sides, some alleged and some convicted. Should evil actions by artists change how we experience and judge the art? Let’s start with two thought experiments. #1. How would things be different today if newly uncovered evidence revealed that William Shakespeare was a pedophile who assaulted the boy actors in his company?…

  • Today’s Wildfires, Yesterday’s Memories

    There’s only one story on my mind this week: the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles. The last few days tore my attention to shreds and patches. I was in Vegas for CES when the Palisades Fire exploded in my hometown of Los Angeles. I flip-flopped between thoughtful business meetings and anxious refreshes of the Cal…

  • Move Fast and Kill Kids

    Trigger Warning: If the title wasn’t enough of a hint, this piece gets into dark territory. In the December 5 episode of the podcast On with Kara Swisher, Swisher interviewed Megan Garcia and Meetali Jain. Garcia is the mother of Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old boy who killed himself in part because of an unhealthy, one-sided quasi-relationship with a chatbot…

  • Incursions of Memory

    A delightful podcast provoked three unexpected memories and a think about the differences between coincidence and serendipity. Let me start with a PSA: if you have any affection for or curiosity about Shakespeare, then don’t miss the delightful book Shakespeare: the Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea, which is part discussion about…

  • Family as the Ship of Theseus

    For some irksome reason, the old philosophical question about the Ship of Theseus has come to new life as a business cliché. Type “Ship of Theseus and business” into your favorite search engine, and you’ll find numberless (yawn… whoops, sorry… started to drift off there) articles about organizations as Ships of Theseus. If you’re so lucky that you…

  • Can You Only GenAI Your Way to the Middle?

    Should we take seriously a recent study that shows people like AI-generated poetry? And what are the broader implications? A few days ago, La Profesora sent me an intriguing link to a Poetry Turing Test set up by a couple of philosophers at the University of Pittsburgh. The test is a simple Google Form that presents the…

  • Tempest on a Toy Box

    Mattel printed the wrong URL on the back of the boxes of toys for the new “Wicked” movie, which was not good, but just how bad was it? Lady Sneerwell in Sheridan’s School for Scandal observes, “There’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature: the malice of a good thing is the barb that makes…

  • Why Musk Supports Trump

    It has little to do with politics. I’m a fan of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s work. Her brilliant 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, explored how a Tea Party community in Lake Charles, Louisiana, came to hold their political views, which became important in the weeks after the 2016…

  • Are There Unpersuadable People?

    In this election season when we’re all getting hundreds of daily messages attempting to persuade us, most aren’t effective. I return to earlier work about persuasion with new thoughts. I’ve been writing about persuasion for years, long before the birth of The Dispatch. Back in August of 2023, I tried to decant a lot of my…

  • Retro Futures: War Games

    Can a 1983 movie thriller about computers and the military tell us anything about drone warfare today?  In 1984, my lifelong friend Juliet and I were watching a then-recent movie, War Games, at my parents’ house. This was in the early years of home video. The first Blockbuster store had yet to open, and Tim Berners-Lee…