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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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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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The Zeroing of Knowledge: When Everything Is Known, What Remains Worth Learning?

Knowledge used to be expensive. It cost years of apprenticeship, tuition in the tens of thousands, decades of practice, and, more than anything, the brutal currency of time. A physician spent twelve years beyond high school before being trusted to cut into a human body. A lawyer spent seven years and a bar exam before being permitted to argue before a judge. A professor spent a decade accumulating the credentials required to stand before a lecture hall and declare, with institutional authority, that they knew something you did not. The entire architecture of Western professional life was built on a single economic premise: knowledge is scarce, therefore knowledge is valuable, therefore the people who possess knowledge deserve premium compensation for granting access to it. That premise is now dead. It did not die slowly. It was killed in roughly three years, and we are only beginning to understand the corpse.

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Wisdom in the Age of AI: A Tale of Two Generations

In the ever-evolving landscape of technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force, shaping the way we live, work, and interact with the world around us. While AI’s influence permeates across all generations, its implications for different age groups present unique challenges and opportunities. To fully grasp the impact of AI, it’s essential to examine the distinct relationships that different generations forge with this revolutionary technology.


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Your AI Voice Clone Will Hear You Now

Clones are not coming, they’re already here — because, the Clone, is you! Yes, the call is coming from inside your head! I now have an AI Voice clone of my voice trained on over 30 hours of my Human Meme podcast. I trained my AI voice on my Human Meme podcast so the source material was clean, and well-edited – and because of that early care in podcast recording, and production, my new AI voice is shockingly, and incredibly real and, frankly, Uncannily Fantastic! Plus, there is probably a little tinge of terror tossed in there too — because now my voice can live on without me. Let’s hope it behaves! From this moment on, I have touched true immortality. Would you ever want it any other way?

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A Skewed Semiotic: When a Picture Speaks the Wrong Thousand Words

Nicholas Kristof wrote a fascinating couple of opinion articles for the NYTimes over the last two weeks, and the reason for some reader dissent and confusion in the first story appears to stem from a core misunderstanding — purposeful or not — about the image.

Here’s what Kristof wrote on February 22, 2014:

As an infant, Johnny was deaf but no one noticed or got him the timely medical care he needed to restore his hearing. He lives in a trailer here in the hills of rural Appalachia with a mom who loves him and tries to support him but is also juggling bills, frozen pipes and a broken car that she can’t afford to fix.

The first error Kristof makes — but has yet to apologize for, or clarify — is labeling Johnny “Deaf.”  Deafness is a cultural condition from which one does not get “healed” so the proper term should have been “hearing loss” since the “Deafness” was not actual, but imagined, by Kristof.

The real outrage aimed at Kristof was not over his inappropriate use of “Deaf” — but rather the way some of his readers felt he was celebrating a degenerate lifestyle of poverty in this image:

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Living 200 Years and Knowing the Date of Your Death

If you had the choice to live to age 200, would you take up that blind offer?  My beloved wife Janna would not.  She’s perfectly content with her life and, if she died today, she would feel satisfied with the accomplishments of her life.  I, on the other hand, would love to live to age 200 if, of course, there were no sort of Twilight Zone curse involved where I was confined to a bed in a coma for 125 years, or I became a pack mule in the Himalayas for a century, or if I had to live in an active sewer and never see the light of day for 110 years.

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The Farce of Busy Lifestyle Syndrome

Medical fakery has a sadly long history going back to snake oil salesmen and going on even until this day. Many times, the lies that are sold to us by those who purport to only have healing in mind for us are made because the truths would be far too difficult for us to digest. If you have been wondering why you may have trouble remembering things more now than ever in this Age, there is now apparently a syndrome custom-made just for you — Busy Lifetime Syndrome!

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When Doctors Fire Patients

There is a fantastic new move afoot in the medical community where doctors are taking control of the healthcare debate and firing their patients — not because they have the wrong insurance, but rather because they think they know more than their doctors.

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The Jack of All Ills: How the Internet Democratized Medicine

I’m old enough and just craggy enough to remember the pure disdain medical doctors had  for the internets in the early 1990’s when the web was growing by bounds and grabbing the brains of any and every eager mind.  The reason doctors hated the internet was because open access to information diluted their expertise by egalitarian dissemination of research and the democratic propagation of information; and they resented it when patients knew more about a drug or a condition than they did.  Eager patients are hungry for information and becoming the master of a single pill or a defined diagnosis is much easier than having to worry about every single chemical condition and biological solution studied at medical school.  Patients are the masters of their ailments; doctors are the jack of all ills.

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