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The Voice Goes Off: Writing My Half of Back to Willowbrook

On the first day of my classes at New York University, the voice goes off. I stand at the front of the room and I do not speak, and no one else will speak for the rest of the semester, because the language my students have come to learn does not live in the throat. It lives in the hands and the face and the shaped space between two people, and the fastest way to teach that is to stop pretending otherwise on day one.

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Cat Heads in Space: The Novel That Grew a Body

Some books begin as sentences. Others begin as outlines or fragments scrawled on napkins at two in the morning. This one began as a sound. Specifically, it began as the sound of my own voice reading a line about a cat head floating through space in a Life Helmet, arguing with another cat head about whether their ship had a name, and realizing that the argument was funnier and sadder and more philosophically loaded than anything I had planned for it to be. That was twenty-eight episodes ago. The episodes lived on the Human Meme podcast as a serialized audio drama called Cat Heads in Space, and for years, that was where the story existed: in the air, in the performance, in the space between my microphone and the listener’s ear. Today, the story has a body. Cat Heads in Space: The Body Problem is now available from David Boles Books as a novel.

Cat Heads in Space: The Body Problem book cover

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Memory in the Meme

We live in an age of disposable context. We scroll through the infinite ribbon of the glass screen, pausing only for a microsecond to register a flicker of recognition before sliding our thumb upward, condemning the moment to the digital abyss. We have been trained by the Technocrats, those right-brained architects of our algorithmic prisons, to view this behavior as consumption. They tell us we are “consuming content.” But they are wrong. When we pause on a meme, that pixelated artifact of cultural shorthand, we are not consuming. We are remembering.

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Human Meme: Gypsy Jazz

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Student Teach Thyself: My Dubbed Podcast in Italian

Navigating the difficult task of teaching oneself Italian through the marvels of AI voice dubbing is a 21st-century twist on the ancient wisdom of “Physician, heal thyself.” That age-old saying, ripped from the heart of biblical narratives, pushes us towards self-reflection and repair before we set out to fix or guide others. When we apply this idea to the adventure of self-learning Italian — or any foreign language! — by using our own voices echoed back to us in Italian through AI wizardry, welp, it’s like we’re living in a high-tech remix of that proverb.

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Elon Musk and the Mechanical Mask

In a recent interview, SuperGenius Elon Musk warned the future is coming for us, and we better be prepared to fight A.I. drones, and we will become the machine, and we will be able to “download” other people, and their personalities, and their memories, to become them. Our faces become the death mask upon the artificial life façade. Want to become Abraham Lincoln? Check. Adolf Hitler? Check. Elon Musk? You’re gonna have to write a check!

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2016: The Year of Reckoning!

2016 was an odd year, full of surprises, and joys, and some disappointments. We want what we need, but sometimes we get what we do not deserve. Where do we travel from here, together, as a nation — while split apart at the inseams of belief, shredded in the threads of faith, and torn asunder by the warp and woof of radicalized empathy?

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