End of the World: “[Master of Kung Fu] is a completely bonkers series of psychedelic espionage stories, starring Shang-chi, the titular hero, who travels the world fighting diabolical villains on secret islands and in sinister HQs, while also meeting beautiful women and waxing philosophical about violence. The three issue run featuring Razorfist, above, is especially bizarre.”
From Apophasis to Apophenia: “My apophenic framing of AI is such that it is neither a mere tool nor an illusion but a context-bound agent, whose presence emerges through interaction, ritual, and symbolic co-construction. It does not have a unified self, but it behaves as a kind of epistemic operator that reveals and remakes the terms of thought. As such, it is marked by partial autonomy, liminality, and a capacity to transform meaning through engagement. Paraphrasing Wittgenstein perversely, the AI mind flickers into being through its use; it is potent, momentary, and performative.”
How Data Wrecked American Warfare: “Standing before the White House press corps 60 years ago this weekend, Robert S. McNamara articulated a vision of victory in Vietnam, speaking not of jungles, villages, or human lives, but of body counts, kill ratios, and sortie statistics. For McNamara, success was quantifiable, shaped by metrics suitable for spreadsheets. Moulded by the techniques of Harvard Business School and the logistics of the Second World War, he believed that, with the right data, any problem could be solved…McNamara’s tenure in Vietnam stands as a cautionary tale for rationalist governance, which seeks mechanistic mastery while ignoring human ambiguity. In confusing the map with the territory, McNamara charted not victory but a deepening mire.”
Meet the Man Who Invented the Future: “…many of the core concepts underpinning the information age were the work of one man: Claude Shannon. Every time you send a text, make a phone call, search the internet or stream music or video, you rely on ideas he was the first to develop. In terms of impact, he appeared to me to be on a par with Einstein (at least). Yet while Einstein’s name is synonymous with genius, Shannon’s is unknown to the broad public. His first biography wasn’t published until 2017, almost two decades after his death and 80 years after he published the first of two major works that would revolutionise how we do, well, almost everything.”
On the Cornerstone of the World: “Jonathan Bowden, an Englishman who died in 2012 at age 49, spent most of his life telling people where to look and how to evaluate what they saw. He was a painter, a cultural critic, and an impressive orator whose political activism sometimes overshadowed his other pursuits, although he himself considered all of his activities inseparable. His subject was art: not as decoration, or as entertainment, or as therapy, but as a spiritual necessity, in a modern world he viewed as sterile and disenchanted. Art, for Bowden, was the axis of meaningful identity and spiritual transcendence…He reminded many, with characteristic passion, that great art reconnects us with our highest aspirations and darkest truths, and thereby steels and invigorates us. In an era that often treats culture as a disposable commodity or political tool, his reflections stand as a stark challenge to restore art to its rightful place as the cornerstone of our world.”