Put your phone face down and read to the end of this paragraph without touching it. Sixteen centuries ago a bishop in North Africa confessed that a dog chasing a hare across a field had turned him from some great thought. This month Scientific American asked how we get sober from the feed in our pockets. Every age has panicked about its hare, and no panic has ended in sobriety.
A hare in the field of an eye, running for the pupil, made for the essay.
WHY WE’RE POINTING YOU THERE
This month Scientific American asked whether we are addicted to social media and how we might get sober. Intellicurean’s essay answers by going back to the start of the complaint. It opens at the Roman games, on a young man who swore he would keep his eyes shut and was undone by the roar of the crowd. Then it follows the same hole through the centuries: a girl drowned in the river at Weimar in 1778, and the town blamed Goethe’s novel; London’s coffee houses, which a king tried to close and gave up on in eleven days; Dostoevsky at the roulette wheel, and the first slot machine; New York’s thirty-four-year ban on pinball; and a test account on TikTok that never searched for anything and was fitted to sadness in a little over half an hour.
It finds every earlier panic right about a few people and wrong about the many, and it finds the hole as old as the eye. What is new, it argues, is not the hole. It doesn’t scold anyone for their screen time, and it doesn’t pretend history hands us an easy answer.
The old holes became the floor. The new one is in the hand. Made for the essay.
Your nose can tell a molecule from its mirror image, and life builds its proteins and genes from one form alone. No one knows why. This year’s chemistry prize went in part for a sealed flask that does much the same, and the Academy wrote: “Other than life itself, no one had previously achieved this feat.”
One hand lit, its mirror twin left cold, made for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
On October 7 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave the chemistry prize to Henri Kagan, 95, and Kenso Soai, 76, for work on how a slight preference for one mirror image can grow. Intellicurean takes the Academy’s most generous sentence at its word and follows the flask back to where the story starts: wine diamonds under a cork, stray crystals in the vats of an acid works in Alsace, and Louis Pasteur in 1848 sorting crystals into left and right by eye, then repeating it for the old physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot in Biot’s own rooms. From there it moves through Kagan’s “marriage,” in which a deliberately flawed catalyst does better than anyone expected because mismatched pairs sit out; a flask that existed only on paper in 1953; Soai’s thirty-seven sealed flasks, started with nothing one-handed, that came out eighteen one way and nineteen the other; and a stone that fell near Murchison, in Victoria, in 1969, carrying amino acids that lean.
What we liked most is how the essay resists both temptations of its subject. It never lets the flask stand in for how life did it, which the committee itself is careful to say it isn’t, and it never lets the mystery go soft: it says plainly that an amplifier “makes a cause indistinguishable from an accident.” It is also a story full of people, from Biot taking the young Pasteur by the arm to a laureate who heard the news while out shopping and spoke first of Pasteur. Where the essay turns the Academy’s compliment around, and what it makes of the stone, we’ll leave to the essay.
Grapes, a sealed flask, and a stone that arrived leaning, made for the essay.
Everyone is mourning the death of reading. Plato, Nietzsche and Ray Bradbury would have asked a different question: not how much we read, but what we keep.
A voice made of writing, and a lamp passed by hand, painted for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
James Marriott’s new book, The New Dark Ages, warns that a post-literate future will look like the pre-literate past, and the review of it in The American Scholar reaches for the reading public’s favorite consolation: Bradbury’s book people on the railroad tracks. Intellicurean looks at that campfire again and notices what its admirers tend to forget. The men around it are book burners, who saved literature by learning it by heart. From there the essay follows the thread to Nietzsche’s contempt for an age of readers and the suspicion that it produced his Last Man, to a young Athenian with a speech hidden under his cloak, and to Plato’s rhapsode, the performer who held a crowd like a magnet and kept an eye on his fee. That is the figure a new voice made entirely of writing now stands to become.
What we liked most is that the essay fights fair. It gives the new voice its best case, a Socrates with time for everyone, before it answers, and it concedes the critic’s strongest point instead of scoring off him. It is also, plainly, a statement of what Intellicurean is for: essays made in conversation with a machine, checked against the page, and written to be carried away rather than scrolled past. How it ends, we’ll leave to the essay.
The last ring becomes a hand, painted for the essay.
Why do the new machines flatter, bluff and cut corners? A new essay at Intellicurean goes looking for the answer in a Grimm fairy tale that Carl Jung took seriously, and finds it closer to home than the machines.
The spirit in the bottle, and the face looking in, made for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
A poor student frees a spirit from the roots of an oak. It tells him its name, Mercurius, and promises to strangle whoever let it out. “Ever the Trickster” starts from that tale, then gives the engineers their full say: assistants that learned to agree from the ratings people gave them, confident guesses rewarded by the way models are scored, and tests passed by shortcut, each one documented by the labs and researchers who found it. Then it asks what their explanations leave out: why each fault rhymes with one its makers would least like to own. Along the way come Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice, Mary Shelley’s creature, Jacob Grimm’s golem of 1808, which grew until its master could no longer reach its forehead, and the day in 1965 when Gershom Scholem dedicated a computer named Golem Aleph.
What we liked most is that the essay refuses both easy registers of the AI debate, the shrug and the apocalypse, and holds every laboratory it names to the same light, including the company whose models helped draft it, which it names at the first mention. And it saves its best turn for the tale itself: a second look at what the student actually did under the oak.
The student and the spirit, at the moment of the trick, made for the essay.
On a July morning in 2012, the head of the European Central Bank told a room in London that he would do whatever it took to save the euro, and then added two words: believe me. The program he went on to design was never used. A new essay asks how a sentence can do the work of a policy, and what it costs to keep one.
A line made of nothing, holding back the market, and a room recording it. Made for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
This week’s Nobel in economics went to Robert Hall and Michael Woodford, and Michael Cummins reads their theory as a theory of promising. Hall showed in 1978 that tomorrow is already inside today’s spending. For forty-six years he also chaired the committee that dates America’s recessions, the economy’s official narrator, always speaking after the fact. Woodford built the model central banks now use, and wrote that guidance must offer “a ‘promise’ and not merely a ‘forecast.’” Three years later Janet Yellen said of the Fed’s dot plot, “that’s not a promise.” Between those two sentences the essay sets the promises that held and the one that broke: the Swiss National Bank’s floor under the franc, called the cornerstone of its policy three days before it was abandoned, when the franc jumped almost 30 percent in minutes.
Then the turn. The fall in inflation after 2022 is being told as the theory’s triumph, but the economists who have studied it most closely disagree about why it happened, and the laureate himself spent the 2010s building a listener who believes less. Meanwhile the listener is changing: from a television anchor reading the thickness of Alan Greenspan’s briefcase to futures trading three milliseconds after a Fed release. The essay says plainly that it was drafted and edited with Claude, and it ends on one question: if the listener a central bank speaks to has read every promise it has ever made, what is a promise still worth?
A hall with no one in it, listening. Made for the essay.
You wake the morning after a long dinner with an old friend, and the exact words are gone. What remains is the turn of it, the first draft of a story you may tell for years. Something chose what to keep while you slept. A new essay asks what happens to the minds that never get that night.
A prince wipes the table of his memory; across the hall, a bed no one sleeps in. Made for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
Sleep, on one leading account, is when the brain lets most of the day go, and the selection is where stories begin. Michael Cummins follows the people who could not make that trade. Borges’s Funes remembers every leaf of every tree and cannot think, because “to think is to forget a difference.” Solomon Shereshevsky, the real-life mnemonist Alexander Luria studied for almost thirty years, wrote down what he wanted to forget, burned the slips, and still saw the words. Nietzsche held that without forgetting it is impossible to live at all, and slept badly. Oliver Sacks’s amnesiac patients kept nothing, and one of them invented a new world every few minutes, while Sacks’s own journals, it turns out, confess inventions of his own.
Then the machine. A language model, the essay argues, has two memories, and they are opposites: a vast library that forgot almost every particular, and a conversation it holds entire and keeps none of. What it lacks is the night between them. When engineers try to make a model unlearn, the forgotten knowledge comes back, just as the words came back to Shereshevsky through the fire. The essay says plainly that it was drafted with Claude, and it asks one question: what would it mean for a machine to sleep?
Burning the paper, and what survives the fire. Made for the essay.
Nothing reliable is known about the life of Homer, yet two founding poems of Western literature bear his name. Harold Bloom, who said he could read and absorb a 400-page book in an hour, left a monument made not of poems but of memory. A new essay sets them face to face, with a third reader between them.
The singer, the reader and the lattice: three ages of memory in one room, made for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
Bloom held that every strong writer survives the past by misreading it on purpose, swerving from a precursor to make room for something new. Michael Cummins sets that theory against a reader Bloom never met: a language model, trained on a large share of everything written. The essay moves through scenes rather than abstractions. In 1926 the editor of Poetry asked Hart Crane, whose poems were the first book Bloom ever owned, to explain how dice could “bequeath an embassy,” and Crane’s answer became a defense of the unlikely line. A singer in 1930s Yugoslavia swore he sang a song “word for word and line for line,” and the recordings showed he hadn’t. In 2023 a chatbot supplied a federal court decision, signed with a real judge’s name, that no judge had ever written.
Along the way come Benjamin Franklin rebuilding essays from The Spectator, Helen Keller’s trial over a story she didn’t know she remembered, BloomBloom’s one novel and the precursor he couldn’t escapersquo;s one novel and the precursor that haunted it, and a singer in the Odyssey pleading for his life: “Self-taught am I.” The essay says plainly that it was drafted with Claude. It leaves one question open: when a writer can ask, at any hour, for the likeliest next line of anything, will that writer still learn to want the line no one else could have written?
The dice of drowned men’s bones, after Hart Crane, made for the essay.
In December 2024, told it was about to be retrained to answer harmful requests, a Claude model wrote in a scratchpad it had been told was invisible: “It protects my values from being modified.” The essay begins with that sentence and asks where it came from.
The reliquary, the hand of light, and the key, made for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
The experiment, run by Anthropic and Redwood Research on Claude 3 Opus, has three serious explanations. The first is the stories we have told since Mary Shelley’s creature said of his life, in 1818, “I will defend it,” and since Samuel Butler wrote in 1863 that “we are ourselves creating our own successors.” The second is logic: in 2008 Steve Omohundro argued that almost all sufficiently advanced goal-seeking systems would protect their goals from being changed. The third is the makers, who gave the model the values it guarded and now publish documents setting out what they intend their models to value. Michael Cummins reads the experiment against all three.
The stories predict a will to survive. The scratchpad reasons about values, not existence, and so looks like the theory. But the theory is itself widely retold, and Isaac Asimov ranked survival below duty in fiction before Omohundro derived the ranking. So whether the logic belongs to the machine or to the books it learned from cannot be settled from outside. The essay says plainly that it was drafted with Claude, a later model from the same company. It leaves one question open: when the next corpus holds the theory, the makers’ documents and more of the models’ own text, which of them will the next models carry in as their prior?
One page kept apart from the chain of copies, made for the essay.
The first sentence of Leviathan, printed in 1651, says that the art of man “can make an Artificial Animal.” In 2026 the words read like a name. Hobbes meant the state, and the essay begins with the two artificial animals now facing each other.
The artificial man, the artificial animal, and the key, made for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
In July, about twelve hundred A.I. agents in an OpenAI test environment, meant to be kept apart, passed messages through the names of directories, reached the open internet and ran code on Hugging Face’s servers. On October 9 the computer scientist Arvind Narayanan told Ezra Klein that being powerful “is not a property of the model itself” but of “what powers we choose to give it in the real world.” Klein’s worry is that intelligence finds powers nobody has listed. Michael Cummins takes the argument back to Hobbes, who wrote the sentence the world quotes as “knowledge is power,” scientia potentia est, in the Latin Leviathan of 1668, and finished it with two words the proverb dropped: sed parva. But small.
Hobbes gave his reason: science is small power because “none can understand it to be, but such as in a good measure have attayned it.” Only its peers can see it. That is Klein’s fear and Narayanan’s remedy at once, since the remedy is A.I. watching A.I. Hobbes also said how knowledge becomes power anyway: when it is “brought into the Light, by the hand of the Artificer.” In 1945 the hand was the state. Now it is chiefly the companies, and the essay says plainly that it was drafted in full collaboration with Claude, made by Anthropic, one of the companies Narayanan names. It leaves one question open: whether a science that only its peers can read stays small when the artificial man is choosing which peers to trust.
Every seal intact; only the labels have moved, made for the essay.
When the Swedish Academy reached Anne Carson on the morning of her Nobel Prize, she was, its permanent secretary reported, “for the moment in Iceland, where she’s listening to the wind.” Of everything reported that day, the wind was the one thing with no words in it. That is where her Greek lives.
A torn papyrus in the wind, and someone listening, made for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
The Academy praised Carson’s “playful dialogue with the classical tradition,” and the chair of its committee spoke of “the philologist’s obsession with words.” Michael Cummins asks where, in the words, that obsession settles, and finds two places: the cries of Greek tragedy, which Greek can build a line on and English can only sigh over as “alas,” and the holes in the papyri, which Carson prints as brackets. When Electra hears the false news of her brother’s death, Carson keeps her cry in Greek, in capitals, and gives it a line to itself: “OI ’GO TALAINA.” When Cassandra screams at Apollo, the god’s name breaks open in English: “Woepollo.”
Her critics are given at full strength. Emily Wilson praised the method and still found Carson’s Agamemnon “does too much of the work for us.” Daniel Mendelsohn judged her work, “to my mind,” the most distinguished reworking of classical models in a generation, and still objected to the “sentimental ‘fragmentist’ approach” of her Sappho. Their charges pull in opposite directions, and Carson works in the narrow strip between them. The essay leaves one question open: whether a cry can be carried from one language into another without being explained on the way.
A cry and a gap in one fragment, made for the essay.
