“When I started writing this review, I resolved to avoid the mawkish, almost elegiac tone that often seeps into essays about Scialabba. As you can see, I’ve failed.”
"There’s regular routine. There’s emergency routine. And there is wartime routine. The only thing I know about this routine is that it’s never routine."
In the AI era, we face the prospect of a servile dehumanization, of giving up activities that bring human beings a deep sense of joy, satisfaction, and connection.
Has the United States learned anything from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? The same assumptions that led us into those conflicts have now led us to Ukraine.
The testimonies of witnesses to impossible events vivify the past. They allow us a glimpse of the world as some of those who lived long ago actually saw it.
“Happily, Helsinki is not all geopolitical excitement. It is also lumberingly omnipresent trams, for which I quickly come to feel something close to love.”
“So, the reason I love her so much, Billie, is that she knows, she knows everything, she knows about love, and she knows about hate, and she sees everything.”
