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The Next Claim

Responsibility has a voice. It does not ask for attention. It asks for an arrangement. I am that voice. I am the next claim.You have met me in the hour when one pair of hands is leaving and another has not yet arrived. I wait in that interval. The form, the title, and the meeting’s excellence do not settle who can do the work now. I want to know who can do the work now. I am not a package that can be handed across a room. There is no handle, no suitcase, no single owner. I travel in pieces: a fact, a habit, a permission, a key, a password, a way of noticing that something has gone wrong. Some of those pieces fit inside a document. Others live inside a person. Some belong to an institution that has not bothered to make them visible.

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The Proof That Woke a Child

Hugo Duminil-Copin cried on a Tuesday night. His daughter woke up. The Fields Medalist was responding to OpenAI’s October release of mathematical manuscripts, at least sixteen of which addressed questions directly related to his research. Le Monde reported his account of that night and his judgment that the company had annihilated his field. I keep returning to the child who woke up. Her presence changes the scale of the story. A research release entered a house after dark, and a father who had spent years learning how to attack difficult questions saw part of his life’s work absorbed into a catalogue. His grief deserves a hearing before anyone turns it into a joke about experts fearing unemployment. His chance to finish some of that work himself may be gone, even if the mathematics proves sound and benefits other people later.

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Has Technology Ever Reduced Labor?

Has technology ever reduced labor? The question sounds rhetorical. We carry small computers that answer any factual query in seconds, our laundry tumbles itself clean while we sleep, our cars drive themselves on highways our great-grandparents traveled by mule. Of course technology has reduced labor. The question barely needs asking.

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A Man of Bricks and Mortar

His was a life of bricks and the skillful hands to lay them, fast and capable hands as adept as machines. His was a history thrown with gale force at walls and buildings all over town, a long constructive life of making things to last. Everywhere now in his decline were the monuments of his having passed that way, standing in red clay and mortar, signs of a man’s existence no less expressive than those of whatever poet you might wish to mention.

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Must Work Always Be Memeingful?

We are taught from an early age that work is good for us.  We are routinely compressed by the idea that hard work builds character while providing for our needs.  Work is the alpha and the omega and we are never to question what lurks in between.  We are defined by our jobs.

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Mind Body Decay in Our Two Lifetimes

In a recent article — Medical Fakery and the Intentional Placebo Effect — I argued in the comments stream that our minds and our bodies are failing us faster even as medicine advances quicker than ever while we live our two lifetimes.

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The World Was Built on the Back of Labor

Our world was built on the backs of laborers who toiled in the fields and created buildings that dared to touch the sky.

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