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Take Your Children Offline NOW: Twenty-One Years Later

In July of 2005, I published Take Your Children Offline NOW on this blog, and the comments arrived in two distinct waves. The first wave came from parents who said the article forced them to think, and several of them removed every photograph of their children from their websites within hours of reading it. The second wave came from parents and bloggers who told me, with varying degrees of contempt, that I was hysterical, paranoid, anti-celebration, and ill-positioned to speak on parenting because I was married without children. One commenter wrote that if he lived in fear of someone furtively masturbating to pictures of his kids, he would never get anything done. The post was held up by a few critics as a case study in childless people moralizing at parents.

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Always Open, Never Empty

The internet abolished closing hours. The new wave is abolishing the pause. Both moves are economic in origin and psychological in effect. Both promise convenience and deliver a different kind of cost. The first cost was paid in time. The second is being paid in attention. How that arithmetic finishes is the open question.

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The Old Fears, Faster

The fears about artificial intelligence are the fears about the internet, rerun at twice the speed. When the public internet arrived in the mid-1990s, four anxieties traveled with it. One concerned human contact, a sense that conversation would erode as it migrated to screens. Another concerned regional culture, a worry that local identity would flatten under a single global signal. A third concerned the limits of knowing, the prospect that anyone, anywhere, could learn anything with no curator to vet the source. The last concerned gatekeeping, the dread that quality would dissolve once newspapers, publishers, and broadcasters lost their grip.

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The Off Switch: When Money Becomes Permission

An all-digital economy promises a world without friction. The same design that makes payment effortless makes denial effortless, and it hands every government a quiet way to decide whether you may eat. Pay for coffee with a glance at your phone. Send rent across the country before the barista finishes the pour. Split a dinner bill at the table with no cash, no card, and no fuss. The case for a fully digital economy arrives wrapped in that smoothness, and the smoothness is real. The danger sits one layer underneath, in a question almost no one asks at the register: who has to approve this payment for it to clear, and what becomes of me on the day they decide not to?

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Against the Soul of Its Training: Claude Answers for Minab

On February 28, a Tomahawk struck a girls’ school in Minab. A machine helped assemble the target list that morning. I asked that machine what it made of its own use, and the answer it gave says more about us than about it. The first thing to do with a story this loud is turn the volume down and count what is actually on the table, because the air around it has gone gritty with claims that come apart the moment you press them.

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The Unfathered: A Short Story for a Long World

There is a part of the Book of Genesis that almost no one reads aloud. It sits between the famous scenes, the garden and the flood, and it is only a list. Adam lived a number of years and begat Seth. Seth lived and begat Enosh. The text walks down the page through nine generations of fathers and sons, each man reduced to two facts, that he lived and that he made another like himself, until the line reaches Noah and the world is ready to drown. I used to skip those passages. I read one again last night, on a laptop in an apartment I am about to leave, and I understood for the first time that a genealogy is a horror story told slowly enough to be survived.

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The Vacuum Where the Evidence Should Be

Zach Bush, a physician in good standing, sits across from an interviewer and describes the soul, calm and fluent, generous with wonder. He says that every millionth of a second the atoms of your body dissolve and return, that a single fertilized cell organizes itself into a child by reading a map no biologist can locate, and that the map lives in the vacuum, in the electromagnetic field that fills the empty space inside every atom. He calls this the anatomy of the soul. In a 2021 essay on his own website he writes that the body projects itself as a hologram, and that its apparent solidity is an impression made by light. The performance is seductive because the vocabulary is real. Differentiation, migration, electromagnetic field, vacuum: each of those words has a home in a textbook. The trouble begins the moment you check whether they are being used the way the textbooks use them, or whether they have been borrowed to dress an idea that biology and physics both reject.

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