Freeform

after the dragon is dead

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the thingmade a fist of firesqueezed the world into ashwhile the ghosts of the livingwatched the ocean of flamebuild more waves,taller and stronger,begging collapse. the crash refused to come,the end of things demandeda hero, and so one camein armor like all the rest,carrying a sword like all the restthat he guided into the heartof the … Read more

Occupy the darkness

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I thought millions of words would make a difference, so I joined the army of writers and made them, year after year. An article here, an essay there. A poem. A book, a short story. Ephemeral scribblings like this one. All of them crawled from the writhing places inside myself to the edge of the … Read more

Where is our new world?

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Fixing the environment is not just an technological problem, though everyone would prefer it is. It is also a political, psychological, sociological, economic system, and spiritual problem. But it’s simpler than that. It comes down to how we think. Those values so deep you don’t even know they’re there. A big one is that we … Read more

Writing with AI is not writing

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Bugs, dogs, dinosaurs, neighborhoods, cities, countries, civilizations, planets, and, now, human creativity: They live, they die — fast, slow, brutally or gently. Generative AIs like ChatGPT, Bard, Claude, and Jasper are bringing plenty of violence and speed to the demise of writing. Or perhaps just a way of writing. Words, sentences, paragraphs, stories — making … Read more

Article in Nieman Lab: What a 2004 experiment in hyperlocal news can tell us about community voices today

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In 2004, a team of Medill School of Journalism grad students thought they could use the internet to fix what was wrong with it. But with increasing social isolation, rising partisanship, and newspapers’ ongoing woes, it seems that the problems have gotten worse, not better. Perhaps that’s why Google launched an experiment in local, user-generated storytelling: Bulletin.