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Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve

The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.

Content Note: This book contains accounts of suicide, suicidal crisis, and the deaths of family members, friends, and companion animals. Part Five includes detailed accounts of suicidal ideation and completed suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by phone or text at 988. The Crisis Text Line is available by texting HOME to 741741.

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When Does AI Fakery Become AI Reality?

We are living in the precise historical moment when the question “Is this real?” has become unanswerable in real time, and the fact that nobody seems particularly alarmed by this should alarm us all. The case study arrived this month with the force of a wartime broadcast, which is exactly what it was: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose physical whereabouts and physical condition have been the subject of intense speculation since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, appeared in a video address on March 12. Social media users immediately claimed he had six fingers on his right hand. The rumor spread to millions of viewers within hours. Fact-checkers at Snopes, PolitiFact, and Newsweek scrambled to verify that the extra digit was, in fact, the hypothenar eminence, the fleshy pad at the base of the little finger, rendered ambiguous by video compression. Netanyahu’s office declared, flatly, that the Prime Minister was “fine.”

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The Harvest: Canada’s MAID Program, Eugenics, and the Commodification of Despair

When a state administers death as a healthcare service and then discovers the dead have commercially valuable parts, the question is no longer about dignity. It is about inventory. Something has gone structurally wrong in Canada, and the evidence is no longer ambiguous. In 2024, 16,499 Canadians died through the country’s Medical Assistance in Dying program, accounting for 5.1 percent of all deaths nationally. Since legalization in 2016, the cumulative total has surpassed 76,000. One in every twenty Canadian deaths is now a state-administered killing, dressed in the language of compassion and categorized by Health Canada not as a cause of death, but as a “health service.” That semantic sleight of hand is doing heavier lifting than any euphemism should be asked to bear.

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Kick the Bot, Fear the Dog: Street Psychology and the Coming Age of Mechanical Animals

The first time you see a sidewalk delivery bot, you smile. It is impossible not to. The thing is knee-high, usually white or pastel, rolling along on six stubby wheels like a cooler that gained sentience and decided to take itself for a walk. It carries burritos, or prescription medication, or someone’s iced latte, and it navigates curbs and crosswalks with the earnest determination of a toddler heading for a puddle. You watch it pause at an intersection, calculate its moment, and trundle forward with a confidence that borders on optimism. Your first instinct is to root for it.

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The First Thing They Burn: Why War Always Comes for Beauty

When the Mongol army sacked Baghdad in 1258, they did not stop at killing the Caliph. They threw the contents of the House of Wisdom into the Tigris. Manuscripts on astronomy, medicine, mathematics, philosophy, and poetry turned the river black with ink for days. Killing people was not enough. What those people had made, what they had thought and dreamed and rendered into form, that had to be annihilated too. Kill a generation and you end a bloodline. Destroy what a generation built and you erase the proof that the bloodline mattered. This is strategy, not collateral damage. Invading armies have always understood something about beauty that peacetime democracies pretend not to know: beauty is power. A public display of beauty is a sovereignty claim, and no occupying force has ever been able to tolerate one.

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