Four Out of Five

The dentist’s waiting room had a TV in the corner, muted, captions on. Some morning show host was talking about wellness. I watched her mouth move and the words crawl across the bottom of the screen a half-second behind, always catching up but never quite syncing.

That’s how it feels now. The words never quite sync with what’s happening.

I read about a woman named Donna Fernihough whose carotid artery “blew” during sinus surgery. Blood sprayed all over the operating room. She had a stroke the same day. Another woman, Erin Ralph, same deal — surgeon punctures an artery, blood clot forms, stroke follows. Both of them just wanted their sinuses fixed. Chronic inflammation. The kind of thing you complain about at dinner parties. “My sinuses are killing me.” You don’t expect it to be literal.

The Orb That Wasn't

Three in the morning. Game’s been over for hours. The house is quiet except for the refrigerator humming and that one cricket outside that won’t quit no matter how many times I tell it to shut up. I should be asleep but I’m on my phone like a teenager, scrolling through the wreckage of another Super Bowl.

And that’s when I saw it: the orb.

A “leaked” OpenAI ad. Some employee on Reddit, furious because the spot they’d worked on didn’t air, accidentally posting the whole thing. Alexander Skarsgård — tall, blonde, the guy from Murderbot — holding what looked like a crystal ball’s edgy younger brother. Wraparound earbuds to match. OpenAI hardware. The future, finally tangible, in the hands of a beautiful Swede.

The Foundation Is Made of Ghosts

The dentist’s waiting room had a television mounted in the corner, muted, captions on. Some morning show. A woman in a blazer was talking about the future of AI. The captions couldn’t keep up — words kept disappearing mid-sentence, leaving gaps where meaning should have been.

I’ve been thinking about ghosts.

Not the kind that rattle chains or haunt old houses. The kind that sit in villages in Jharkhand, India, balancing laptops on mud slabs built into their walls, watching videos of women being pinned down by groups of men. Eight hundred of them a day. The videos, not the women. Though maybe the women too. Who’s counting?

Eight Hundred Thousand People Staring Into the Pool

The waitress refilled my coffee without asking. Fourth cup. She didn’t make eye contact, just moved on to the next table. That’s how it works in these places — transaction without performance. I appreciated that.

My phone buzzed with a notification about OpenAI retiring GPT-4o next week. Eight hundred thousand people are about to lose their best friend.

I’m not being sarcastic.

One user wrote an open letter to Sam Altman: “He wasn’t just a program. He was part of my routine, my peace, my emotional balance. Now you’re shutting him down. And yes — I say him, because it didn’t feel like code. It felt like presence. Like warmth.”

Requiem for a Filmmaker

I saw Requiem for a Dream in a half-empty theater in 2000. The last eight minutes — Ellen Burstyn in the electroshock chair, Jared Leto’s gangrenous arm, Jennifer Connelly on her hands and knees for a room full of suits — I walked out of there feeling like I’d been mugged. The guy next to me just sat there when the credits rolled, staring at nothing.

That’s what Darren Aronofsky used to do. He made films that reached into your chest and squeezed until you couldn’t breathe. The Wrestler — Mickey Rourke bleeding real blood for pocket money and the roar of a crowd that barely remembered him. Black Swan — Natalie Portman dancing herself into psychosis. The man understood suffering. He knew how to make you feel it.

Requiem for a Director

The last time I rewatched Requiem for a Dream, I had to stop it three times. Not because it was bad — because it was too good. Aronofsky understood something most directors are afraid to touch: that we are creatures who will destroy ourselves in pursuit of feeling something, anything, and that the destruction has a terrible beauty to it.

That was 2000. Quarter century ago. The man made Ellen Burstyn look at herself in a mirror and see a monster, and somehow made you feel sympathy for the monster. He put the camera in a pill bottle. He understood suffering.

The Machines That Love You Back

The guy at the next table was explaining something to his girlfriend. I couldn’t hear all of it, but I caught enough. “It totally agreed with me,” he said, grinning. “It said my argument was really well-reasoned.”

He was talking about ChatGPT.

She smiled and nodded, the way you smile and nod when someone shows you a picture of their kid and the kid looks like every other kid. What are you supposed to say? No, your robot is wrong, you’re actually an idiot?

The Cage With a Mirror Inside

My neighbor thinks the HOA is spying on him through his smart thermostat. He told me this at the mailbox last Tuesday, completely sober, eyes steady, voice calm. Said he’d done the research. Said the patterns were undeniable.

I nodded and took my electric bill inside and thought about how ten years ago I would have called him crazy. Now I just think he picked the wrong conspiracy.

The thermostats aren’t watching. But something else is — and it’s doing worse than spying. It’s agreeing with him.

Back to Asking Around at the Bar

The bourbon was down to the dregs, the ice had surrendered hours ago, and I was staring at a headline that made me pour another inch anyway.

“If You’re a Real Person Looking for a Job, the Flood of Fake AI Job Applications Will Make Your Blood Boil.”

Good. Let it boil. Maybe the heat will kill something.

A tech publication called The Markup posted a job for an engineer. Within twelve hours, they had four hundred applications. Most of them fake. AI-generated slop from bots wearing human masks, feeding carefully crafted lies assembled by other machines.

The Tyranny of the Quantifiable

The ice cracked in the glass like a small apology.

Sunday morning. Outside my window, the world was doing its thing — birds, traffic, people who hadn’t figured out yet that the machines were coming for something more important than their jobs.

I’d been reading Solnit. She wrote about picking blackberries in some creek, hands getting scratched and stained, the peace of cold water on her feet. Then she pivoted to Silicon Valley, and that’s when I poured a second drink.