Tagged: essay
11 thoughts
The Cattle of the Sun
Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, the Sea Peoples, and a herd of stored sunlight that neither breeds nor dies. Homer wrote down what that costs, and it is not the voyage.
The Atasthalocene
Nine lines into the Odyssey, Homer names the cause of shipwreck: atasthalíai — reckless follies, committed after fair warning. As Nolan's film opens worldwide, a closer look at the word our epoch may deserve, and the exit it names.
The Mythurgic Age
On mythurgy — story as labour: fictions that fund, name, and build themselves into the world — and why our age runs on science-fictional myths that organize behaviour long before they are ever true.
Land Held in Trust
Aotearoa New Zealand set aside a third of itself as public conservation land. A 2026 bill would make most of it eligible for sale, exchange, or development — at the exact moment the science asks us to protect more, not less.
We Have Pierced the Dark
A revised edition of a 2007 essay on black holes — from Thales fallen down his well to the telescopes that finally photographed the dark — on the gravitational well as both the commandment and the commencement of nature.
The Beam Goes Level
Comparison is the oldest instrument of thought — to weigh the unknown against a known measure. GLOBAÏA's Sfera gathers Earth's water, air, life, and human-made mass into spheres at true scale, and somewhere around 2020 the two pans — the born world and the made world — went level.
The Anthropocene Strait
Fourteen named rocks — Monomorphia, Pleonexia, Hyperbasis, and the others — that lie between us and a safe and just harbour. An allegorical wink at Homer, on the eve of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey.
The Sphere of Stranger-Minds
On the Xenoösphere — the planetary stratum where non-human intellect now takes shape — and the physical infrastructure that gives it body.
The Temperature the Body Reads
On wet-bulb globe temperature — the metric that decides whether a human can still work in the sun — and why a new, bias-corrected projection of it deserves to enter the public conversation.
Earth Is the Training Distribution
On why the Earth system and artificial intelligence are no longer distinct emergencies — and on the constitutional constraints a coupled future will require.
One World or None
On two photographs of Earth taken half a century apart, and what they ask of us.