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The Cognitive Bargain Has Ended: A Generation Born Without Comparative Advantage

The claim circulating in policy papers, venture capital essays, and parental anxiety threads runs like this: no child born this year will grow up to be smarter than artificial intelligence. The line gets used as a slogan, which is the first sign it deserves examination. Slogans that move easily through dinner parties usually carry hidden machinery. The machinery here is a definition of intelligence narrow enough to fit on a benchmark and broad enough to terrify a parent. Both functions are intentional, and both deserve to be unbundled before the consequences can be argued honestly.

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The Charge and the Curriculum: How the Dark Arts Replaced Black Magic

Two phrases arrive from different centuries and now sit on the same shelf: “black magic” and “the Dark Arts.” Modern speakers treat them as synonyms. Older readers would have disagreed, and the disagreement matters, because the collapse of the two terms shows how our language for forbidden knowledge has migrated from the judicial to the aesthetic, from accusation to ambience.

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Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld

In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word “story” carries a double valence. We say “tell me the real story” to demand truth, and we say “that’s only a story” to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what stories do.

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The States That Will Not Be Commanded

There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.

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What the First Photographer Knew

Photography spent its first half-century being mocked. The painters who controlled the academies and the salons looked at the daguerreotypists and saw mechanics. You pressed a button. You waited for the silver to fix. The machine did the work. Real art required a hand, an eye, a soul, a brush moving through hours of decision. The photographers were craftsmen at best, vandals at worst, and certainly not making Art. This was the consensus from Daguerre’s 1839 announcement until the Photo-Secession movement around 1900, when Alfred Stieglitz spent decades arguing the opposite and slowly won. The Museum of Modern Art opened its photography department in 1940. The Metropolitan Museum followed eventually. By 1980 photographs sold at auction for sums that would have stunned the painters who once sneered at them. The mockers were wrong, and they were wrong in a particular way that matters here.

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An Answer to Auden: The Truth About Love, 1937 to 2026

In 1937, W. H. Auden published “O Tell Me the Truth About Love” inside a sequence called Twelve Songs. The poem is a list of comic guesses about what love might look like, smell like, sound like, do. Each refrain stanza ends in the same plea: tell me. The song is a young man’s question asked across a noisy room, hoping someone older will answer.

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When the Radiologist Becomes the Expense

On March 25, 2026, at a Crain’s New York Business panel discussion of the city’s hospital sector, Mitchell H. Katz, MD, president and CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, told the assembled executives what cost-cutting now sounds like in the largest public hospital system in the United States. “We could replace a great deal of radiologists with AI at this moment, if we are ready to do the regulatory challenge.” Sandra Scott, MD, who runs One Brooklyn Health, one of the city’s safety-net institutions operating on tight margins, replied that the move would be “a game-changer.” The exchange appeared in Crain’s coverage of the panel and was picked up by the radiology trade press within forty-eight hours.

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Preventative Medicine, or the Manufacture of Patients?

There is a sentence every American patient has heard at the dentist’s chair, the cardiologist’s office, the primary-care visit, and the pharmacy counter. It arrives in a tone of grave responsibility: We caught this early. What follows is a crown, an echocardiogram, a statin, a stress test, a referral, a follow-up appointment, and a copay. The word “preventative” has come to function as a moral shield around a billing code. To question whether the recommended intervention is necessary is treated as ingratitude toward a profession that, the implication goes, only wants to keep you alive.

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The Station Across Town: A Lincoln Boyhood, the Federation I Did Not Watch, and the Second Half of a Television Diptych

When I was sixteen, I had a television show called Kidding Around on KOLN/KGIN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was 1981. I was a teenager hosting a teenager-aimed program on a commercial CBS affiliate, three blocks of which I have no doubt were paid for by advertising for Pepsi and Levi’s and the Lincoln car dealerships that kept American local television alive in the early Reagan years. The format was loose. The show featured kid interviews, viewer letters read on air, and unscripted segments of the kind that the FCC’s mandates for “ascertainment of community needs” were supposed to encourage and that the FCC’s 1981 decision to deregulate radio, followed by the parallel television deregulation of 1984, was designed to kill. Kidding Around did not survive into the late 1980s. It was a casualty of a specific federal policy decision documented in the book I published earlier this year, Selling Saturday Morning.

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The Silence Camus Refused to Domesticate: Hazel Barnes, The Myth of Sisyphus, and the Cost of a Sympathetic Misreading

Hazel Barnes was one of the most careful American readers of French existentialism in the twentieth century. She translated Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in 1956, a labor that shaped how generations of American students encountered Continental thought. When she turns to Camus, though, something interesting happens on the page. Her summary of The Myth of Sisyphus is partly accurate and partly an act of quiet translation in the other direction, pulling Camus toward a Sartrean humanism that Camus himself spent the last decade of his life resisting.

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