Drafts for Comment

Indirections I Have Lived By is an open blog. You'll find here working drafts and ideas on the cusp. Please feel free to weigh in.

1 min read

Moonquake [Working Draft]

The empty-glass story behind the latest outbreak of machine intelligence is not of the explosion of information AI can bring to us but of the implosion of what we knew to begin with. (more…)

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1 min read

The Woman Who Wore Her Mind Like a Hat [WORKING DRAFT]

Why We Parallel Process, and How to Do It More Often An attempt to suggest that while specialization is critical to deep knowledge, variety is not only the spice of life but the key to imagining the implicate wholeness of things, without which depth is a dead letter. (more…)

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1 min read

Moonquake [Working Draft]

7 Minute Read

The empty-glass story behind the latest outbreak of machine intelligence is not of the explosion of information AI can bring to us but of the implosion of what we knew to begin with.

1 min read

Say the Change

10 Minute Read

In which I begin a weekly newsletter by asking the question: What’s Yours?

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If Memory Serves

9 Minute Read

Or How the Brain Makes Room for the Mind Like a Seurat painting, incremental change appears on the scene point by point. Trusting the big picture to take care of itself once our entire canvas has been thoughtfully dotted, we free our minds to focus on adding new colors.

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Breakfast Prayer with Daddy

12 Minute Read

Or the Problem of Ethics in the Dark I learned the story of Cain and Abel around the time my younger brother and I were expected to share our first bin of Legos. After my five-year-old brain worked out how I could possess his half of my inheritance without getting caught, I conceived a plan to eliminate both “Abel” and the all-seeing God who would surely question “Cain” after the deed was done.

1 min read

The Woman Who Wore Her Mind Like a Hat [WORKING DRAFT]

3 Minute Read

Why We Parallel Process, and How to Do It More Often An attempt to suggest that while specialization is critical to deep knowledge, variety is not only the spice of life but the key to imagining the implicate wholeness of things, without which depth is a dead letter.

1 min read

Indirections I Have Lived By Is Now An Open Blog

2 Minute Read

Because I write my blog posts in the same editor from which they are published, it’s not even a hop, skip, or jump to let posts out of the bag before their time, as anyone who has written to me about nonsense and typos they find can attest. I’ve decided to make this irritating flaw a feature.

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Outbroken

14 Minute Read

[For Karl] When the knell tolls, like a scatter of pebbles across this archipelago of human being, its resonant frequency finds its way into not just my heart but yours beating but a stone’s throw away.

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Bone on Bone

11 Minute Read

Thomas Aquinas argues for deliberate will. René Descartes thinks and therefore is. Celine Dion belts My Heart Will Go On. But sometimes, the body just does stuff.

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If on a Summer’s Eve a Writer

8 Minute Read

[For Mark] From a child, I would, on rare occasions, look at a thing and sense from it a timeless, ineffable outreach. “Look at me. Notice me. Remember me. You’ll wish you had.”

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Leapin’ Leopards!

8 Minute Read

Want to change your spots? Not until we see the past for the feral creature it is and, with trepidation, let it into our house, train it not to bite our guests, and give it its own dish will we reduce the odds its jaws will one day spring back upon our necks.

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Restoration

11 Minute Read

When I dug into the recursive transformation of one of my dad’s revisionist paintings, it occurred to me that when we care for it the way a painter revisits an old canvas, the past is liberated to leap forward into its own future.

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No If And Or But

13 Minute Read

A longer-than-average post about shorter-than-average words and the subliminal messages they breathe into our mind’s ear.

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Irrational Will

18 Minute Read

The proper aim of life, even at its least creative, is handwritten on a secret card placed face down on the table before we draw our first breath. Our mothers, by some undiscoverable trick of love and light, seem always to know each word on the underside of not just their own card but of ours as well. 

1 min read

Five for a Dollar

8 Minute Read

Your love is such a thrill. But your love won’t pay my bills. —Janie Bradford & Berry Gordy, Money