Redux: Vanishing Points

This essay originally appeared in 2012. If the artwork above looks familiar, the reason might be that it was part of the argument that Ann made in a recent post. She suggested that the beauty of the Florentine paintings of the fifteenth century—“stunning, literally; you look at them and can hardly breathe”—couldn’t have been due […]

Finding the Beauty in Roadkill

Amanda Stronza found the cardinal dead on a Texas highway this June, a splash of vermillion against drab asphalt. He’d been struck by a car—a common fate for birds, as many as 340 million of whom are killed by vehicles in the United States every year. Most drivers overlook these casualties, but not Stronza, an […]

Writing in Analog

I’ve been talking with other writers about AI. We huddle in our conversations like anarchists. Some have been using ChatGBT as a tool and are quite happy. Some fear for their careers and think recent, rapid advances in large language models are very, very bad.  I’ve turned off autocorrect on my computer. Is that enough? […]