Chatbot as Model
I don’t find it easy to think of a chatbot as a model. I’m sure it’s worth the effort, though, if for no other reason than to face up to that very resistance. They...
Medieval app
I have a new enthusiasm for volvelles (and yet another suspicion that I would have made a happy medievalist). A volvelle is a paper thing made of moveable layers, or more exactly, several circular...
Writers Against AI
With apologies to those writers among us who have been familiar with the label and the conviction for a long time now, I’m new. The immediate source of both words and image is an...
Review of Sirât (film 2025)
The film’s name, Sirāt, refers to the bridge Muslim souls must cross to get to paradise — “thin as a hair, sharp as a knife.” Like the scene of The Last Judgement in a...
Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another: Book Review
Philip Ball, Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, London: Arrow Books, 2024. This is a book about the way humans behave, but more particularly about the possibility that our behaviour — or...
The Man without Qualities: Book Review
It’s unfinished. Whatever you read about it, you’ll learn that much. Musil himself reportedly suggested that the work was not so much a novel as an essay that grew past its boundaries — boundaries...