Hi, I'm in Taiwan. It has come to my attention that the world may be ending. Well, kind of. For some of us, in a sense. I can't begin to catalog the horrors here since January 20th: a lot of people are working on that (like
We live in the era of too much news, but even by those already-low standards, there's been too much goddamned news over the last two weeks. Every time I try to sit down and write one of these, something else happens. It's kind of been like
In the middle of this terrible month - a month made to shamble through, a month which must be endured - I received a far smaller piece of bad news. Simon's Rock, the weird little college for weird kids where I spent a weird year and a half,
For the last year and a half, us Bluesky users have frequently reminded one another that we are merely posters on a niche microblogging website. It's intended as a warning about hubris. A protective against the ever-present danger of poster's madness. A nerd-ass version of the
In the course of fending off my gnawing existential dread about the election, I found myself looking at Lord Horatio Nelson's toilet - hero of Trafalgar, icon of British naval power - wedged at a curious oblong angle into the constantly under-refurbishment hulk of the HMS Victory. And
It's officially fall in the Boston area, which I both enjoy on its own merits and also dread as it presages the arrival of winter. In any case, I'll be spending part of this month in the UK, where I'm traveling for a conference.
My latest from Foreign Policy is out, and it's about a disturbing global uptick in attacks on civilians with small, cheap drones. Please read and share. I've got some more time on my hands nowadays, and I'm planning to start updating this newsletter more
Crete is big, weird, and magnificent - a lengthy, arid slash of an island that humans have been occupying, conquering, and visiting since at least 7000 BCE, with a highly distinctive culture that is somehow both very Greek and highly unique to itself. While the mysterious and aesthetically-gifted Bronze-Age culture
It was Friday evening. I was trying to relax. And then all of a sudden, a dozen people sent me the same link. Drone news. Of course. Why does big-drone related news never seem to drop at 10:00 AM on a Tuesday? Anyway, I will briefly sketch my thoughts
There was once a time, long ago, when I thought I was going to grow up to be a travel writer. I was raised in a family where everyone both traveled a lot, and read stuff along the lines of Gerald Durrell, Jan Morris, and Patrick Leigh Fermor when they
A nightmarish airborne robot-eye, piloted by unknown and possibly unknowable forces operating from an undisclosed location in a secret command-center, lit only by blinking red LED lights. A far-flying remote controlled warplane designed by hubris-poisoned and dead-eyed engineers, hauling a payload of knife-throwing missiles to rain down on enemies of
Newsletter
what have we learned from this year of watching Elon Musk repeatedly, endlessly fail?