How the Marrakech Medina broke me and the creative midlife reckoning that followed. The hormonal rollercoaster of being a woman of a certain age comes with the erosion of the foundations of who you think you are as a person. I was completely unprepared for that. How is that possible? How many utterly cringeworthy videos …
Why the West Is Terrified of Death
An Archaeologist’s Reckoning with Science, Faith and the Inevitable.
My dad was a surgeon. His favourite saying? “Life is a sexually transmitted, inevitably fatal, disease.”
This is about confronting the inevitable.
The end of all…. **this**
Censorship, control, and rewriting American history I’ve discovered the line in the sand for corporate America. It’s not invading a sovereign nation to kidnap its leader. It’s also quite OK to take potshots at peaceful protesters and disappear American citizens into human cattle pens. As for sabre rattling and threatening allies and friends? Knock yourself …
How culture outlives strongmen and rewrites history to win the war over imagination Photo by Dylan Shaw on Unsplash Tinpot dictators fucking hate art. Given where the world seems to be headed, that fact both empowers and terrifies me. Because for people like me, it means there’s work to be done. But it also means …
Why I didn’t. And why authenticity still matters in an AI-saturated world. “Authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible.” So says Adam Mosseri, head honcho at Instagram. You reckon? Yeah, nah. I call bullshit on that. As a writer, I’ll die on this hill. Authenticity, by its very nature, cannot be replicated. I think what Adam meant …
Bollocks, I say. In defense of human voices. There’s been a bit of a thing online lately where people are questioning the point of creative work, now that AI is replacing so many skilled craftspeople in the creative industries. Fuck that. If you’ll happily surrender your creative outlet because a machine can have a fair …
I’m fairly sure it’s not this. “Convincing” doesn’t mean “real” OK, I’m going to say it. Plugging some prompts into ChatGPT and calling yourself a writer is like putting a frozen TV dinner into the microwave, pushing some buttons, and calling yourself a chef. Photo by Stepan Kulyk on Unsplash Generative AI is a compiler …
Three things have crossed my desk over the past week that have made me think about the future and the world we’re making for ourselves. They also got me thinking about the number one way we can future proof ourselves and our way of life as a tsunami of technological breakthroughs led by mind-blowing advances …
The pressure creatives feel in challenging times No matter what creative field you’re in, you do what you do because you’re attuned to the world and the people in it, so when that world is in trouble, it can be a struggle keeping perspective about the things going on around you. Allowing the creative muse …
Every writer’s been there. That terrible moment where we really should be writing, but choose to do anything but. Here are the tricks that get me writing again.