I. A.I. “arts” is coming and is coming fast. Like every other technology that has emerged in the last 200 years (e.g. cars, smart phones, processed “foods,” plastic), its benefit or harm to humanity and to the other members of the ecosphere plays no role whatsoever in whether or not…

The idea that illness and injury are political events is a theme that runs throughout the excellent documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, (2022) about the artist & activist Nan Goldin, directed by Laura Poitras. The notion is present in the way that the bold curiosity, creative spirit, and…

This Is Us, I mean This Is the Last of Us, I mean The Last of Us (!), the HBO series based on the third person player video game, depicts a humanity ravaged by a fungal spore that’s gone out of control, nesting in people’s brains and converting them into…

The reason Jack Kerouac novels and, in recent years, Roberto Bolaño novels are always in demand — virtually jumping off the shelves at used bookstores across the country — is because they depict characters who refuse to relinquish their poetic vision of life and the world to the Moloch maw…

There is no bioregion on Earth that is boring. All are dynamic and full of inexhaustible mysteries. Airplanes are carbon dragons. They are but one of many destroyers woven into the world we were born into, of course. I mean, where to begin? Lives dependent on habitat destruction and the…

One reason social media use may decline in coming years is because the hours we spend on it (viewing novel things, exchanging opinions and expressions of emotions, bickering, congratulating, thinking out loud, crafting sentences, tapping like and love emojis) do not generate new sense memories. I, for example, I have…

If one of the principal or perhaps the principal charm of music is that of theme and variation, it stands to reason that the original musical or musical-lyrical theme stated must bear a certain fierce originality from which to develop the variations. The fierce originality to which I refer does…

So much of the art that truly moves us portrays the unsolvable dilemma: Betray the self or perish. This is because we live in a system which requires us to betray our ethics and our instincts (toward compassion, toward play, toward reciprocity with nature) if we wish to survive. …

We hear about the death of Queen Elizabeth and view the pomp and circumstance. Given what we understand about the globalized military terror that was necessary to launch and maintain the British Empire — upon which, famously, “the sun never set” — all the ceremony and emotion wrapped around the…