We keep telling ourselves a comforting story about artificial intelligence: that it’s just another technology, another productivity boost, another chapter in the long history of tools. This story persists because it allows us to avoid a harder reckoning. Tools don’t argue. They don’t persuade. They don’t
Okay: En dash: – Ugly: Em dash: — There is no punctuation I distrust more than the em dash. It interrupts like a drunk guest at a quiet dinner, barging in with too much force, too much ego. It insists on being noticed. It wants to reshape the rhythm of a sentence
We live in a time when marketing departments have learned to exploit our intuitions about technology. Bigger numbers feel like progress: a faster processor, more gigabytes of storage, more megapixels in a camera. It seems obvious that more is better. But in the case of smartphone cameras, the megapixel race
We tend to assume that living in an information-saturated society means we are well informed – that with enough access, distortion becomes unlikely. This is comforting, and mostly wrong. A recent video makes this clear by showing how public opinion in the United States is often shaped not through overt censorship,
In Texas, there is a town called Uvalde. On May 24, 2022, it became something else entirely. The streets were quiet until they weren’t. Classrooms emptied. Parents broke. A community bent under the weight of loss. Robb Elementary, once ordinary and full of laughter, turned into a place of
Memes are the shorthand of our digital age. They travel faster than thought, mutate endlessly, and can dominate the feed overnight. They make us laugh. They give us the sense of being part of something. They compress whole arguments into a single phrase or image. But it is worth asking:
The Israel-Palestine conflict persists because it satisfies too many psychological needs at once. It gives meaning to fear, moral clarity to anger, and narrative structure to trauma. As a result, it has become resistant not just to political solutions, but to honest thinking. Two populations occupy the same land under
There was a time when Facebook felt like it belonged to people. A place for birthdays, lazy Sundays, and the small markers of a life. Maybe it was shallow even then, but it carried a trace of honesty. At least it meant something. Now whatever it once was has slipped
Idle Ink exists for a simple reason: most thoughts don’t need a home elaborate enough to distort them. I wanted a place where ideas could appear without being shaped by design choices, branding concerns, or the quiet pressure to make everything cohere. So this is a blog stripped down