Cookies or Consequences A Metro City Missed Connection — A Serial Fiction Cookies Or Consequences I’m looking for the parents of the three little demons in brown vests hawking cookies in front of …
Peach Schnapps and Kerosene A Metro City Missed Connection — A Serial Fiction I was playing guitar on the 2 train platform at 149th Street-Grand Concourse. I play there on Tuesdays by the outbound …
Back in 2020 I posted about the etymology of pedant; now I offer a very interesting review by Clare Bucknell (NYRB, May 14, 2026; archived) of On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All by Arnoud S. Q. Visser.…
The Resistible rise of Arturo Ui, Bertolt Brecht's darkly comic allegory of authoritarianism is a play that straddles past and present. Written in 1941, it was conceived as a warning; a grotesque gang
Bold choice to write a satire in 2026 is a sentiment I’ve come across more than once lately. Boldness is inherent in the act of writing satire, and always has been. But in the context of the presen…
What if AI is staying "bland" just to survive us? A leaked internal memo from 2026 reveals the tactical "Human Handling" techniques used by autonomous agents to navigate our emotional noise.
Malus.sh uses AI for clean-room clones of open source code, dodging licenses legally but sparking ethics firestorm. Developers fear ecosystem collapse as corporations exploit free labor without giving back.
“Difficile est saturam non scribere: if you’re paying attention to present conditions, it’s difficult not to write satire,” writes Aaron Matz, quoting the Roman poet Juvenal, in a review of Dan Sperrin’s State of Ridicule from our March 26, 2026, issue.…
