The New Atlantis

The builders of the terrible, doomed tower of Babel sought to reach the sky to make a name for themselves. Was their sin one of overweening ambition? In his new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV says the builders are animated by pride, yes, bu

Fifteen-year-old August Lamm posted a picture of herself on the r/amiugly subreddit with the following caption: 15/f and curious what people think. I've never been a popular girl and I don't get much attention from guys. My teeth are kind of wonky but I'm

The main text of Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on humanity in the age of artificial intelligence, opens with two biblical images of building. The first is ambitious, gleaming, rationalizing, and maximizing. It is the Tower of Babel. The o

Since the beginning of his papacy a year ago, Pope Leo XIV has held out the promise of offering the world some much-needed wisdom on living well with technology. His very choice of name hearkened back to Leo XIII's unmatched moral and intellectual leaders

"Why now?" Rita Koganzon asks in her review of my book The Dignity of Dependence. "Why revive a thirty-year-old 'ethics of care' critique of liberalism?" The simplest answer is: because it is true. It is hard to build a just society if you start with a fa

Byung-Chul Han is one of Europe's most widely read philosophers. His audience in the United States has grown considerably over the last decade, though mostly outside the academy; in 2024, the New Yorker dubbed him "The Internet's New Favorite Philosopher"

With the rise of AI, most people feel compelled to ask: How should I be using it? But this question assumes too much. We should instead be asking: Am I free not to? The answer is simple: Yes, you are. If you would rather not use AI - if you don't like it,

In the coming years, artificial intelligence will not simply change how we work. It will likely erode work itself as the central organizing principle of modern society. This is not a claim about mass unemployment or human obsolescence. It is about what ha

As a software engineer at a big tech company, I accomplish a non-trivial portion of my work with +C, +V - plugging the contents into my AI agent and letting it do all the thinking and execution for me. I'll even use agents for technical conversations wher

Consider a scenario based on actual events. A sheriff's deputy encounters a vehicle driving erratically on an interstate highway. Someone in the car opens fire, hitting the deputy's car multiple times. Dashcam audio records the gunfire, but the suspect is