I then proceeded to travel to Ukraine, got back to the States, got sick, and got overwhelmed by work, so it’s regrettably taken me a while to put this out.

The book is nonfiction, but it reads like a novel. Bojan, who has been reporting on (and from) Ukraine since 2014, saw the news of the attack on Sept. 24, 2022 and immediately started calling his contacts in the Ukrainian military and intelligence communities. Pretty quickly, one of the confessed that they were the masterminds behind the explosion. And Bojan got to reporting.

The book traces the unlikely development of the plot, its execution, and the subsequent investigation by German authorities. It’s full of very colorful characters, tales of jaw-dropping daring, and plenty of intrigue. (Yes, it looks like the United States knew about the plot, and tried to put a stop to it.)

But more than that, the book is about what it is about Ukraine that made this kind of thing possible in the first place. This is the topic Bojan and I discuss in depth. Ukraine’s frontier self-help spirit is the product of a badly governed society, where corruption is rife and where citizens simply don’t expect much from authorities. Ukraine’s anarchic chaos is, paradoxically, the source of its greatest strength.

I’ll be writing more about this soon. But in the meantime, give this a listen.

And do buy Bojan’s book. It’s really a terrific read.

We had on last week to talk about AI. And in the course of the conversation, I threw out something that’s been on my mind for a while.

I feel like my relationship to other people’s writing is changing — maybe curdling — and it’s being nudged along by AI. The more I use AI instead of search, the less interested I become in the person behind what I'm reading. I’m in a conversation with a bot as I research a topic, and I ask it to give me links. I read those links myself — never trust the bots! — but I then go back to arguing with the bot about the ideas, usually in service of some piece I’m writing.

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had a similar thought the other day in the wake of Reddit’s alarming collapse in search referrals:

Derek worries that we’re losing a kind of human connection that made the web valuable. At first, I was mostly where he’s at. I don't particularly relish the prospect of writers losing their livelihoods. But increasingly as a reader, I've found something liberating in no longer feeling obliged to commune with them. Maybe, just maybe, the web hasn’t done writing any favors.

Part of it, I realized, has to do with the fact that for a while now, I haven’t really enjoyed reading the vast majority of essays being published today. Substack has been a great opportunity for many to go freelance, and even develop full-blown businesses. But it’s also, it seems to me, entrenched something I increasingly have little time for: It’s brought the X/Twitter ethos to longform.

“Intellectual life” increasingly feels like it’s about celebrity. Everything is about personalities rather than propositions. We “follow” writers. We track their evolving views. We love holding them to account for their errors in judgment. We thrill when they repent. We’re maybe more thrilled when they’re unrepentant. Even when we are forced to confront an argument in the midst of all this, we end up processing it through our relationship to the person making it. The whole thing reeks of reality TV.

While I’m not an avid consumer of reality TV, I’m not (that much of a) snob. I do really like Twitter a lot. I never left it when Elon took over. It’s a great way to interact with people — the digital equivalent of a frivolous cocktail party, fueled by banter and scurrilous gossip aplenty. Usually someone gets really drunk and makes a scandal while everyone clicks their tongues. Excellent.

But there are other registers. And I’m starved for them.

Two objections spring to mind. First, it has always been thus, hasn’t it? One need only look back to the hissing, poisonous debates in the greatest mid-century New York journals — Partisan Review, Dissent, Commentary, NYRB. Just think back to Norm Podhoretz’s Making It. And even if it wasn’t always quite on the surface, personal intrigue has always seethed among intellectuals.

Second, maybe I’m not looking hard enough. Maybe just as the second “golden age of television” largely passed me by, the golden age of longform is passing me by, too.

On the first, I’d say there’s something more insipid about today’s fights. Our intellectual forefathers were cutthroat, ambitious and looking to fuck. They were monstrous narcissists, but their narcissism expressed itself as the capacity to sustain a blood feud over some obscure point of Trotskyist doctrine. Today’s narcissists have been shaped by therapy culture. Their vocabulary is vulnerability, authenticity, trauma and personal growth. They gaze at their own navels and expect to be praised for it. Maybe there’s a Norman Mailer writing today, but I’ve not encountered him.

On the second, I am almost certainly missing a lot of excellent writing. Time is, after all, a finite resource. Do send me the good stuff if you have it. But my therapy point, I suspect, will survive the counterexamples. It’s unavoidable, it’s in the water.

But aren’t WoC Tuesday Notes just this kind of navel-gazing journal entry? What is WoC but an attempt to lay out our inner commitments, in real time, before the reader? Is that not narcissism? Is that not therapy?

I guess all I can say is, “I hope not.” Speaking for myself, at its best, I think we actually get at ideas and leave ourselves at the door. Yes, all writing is, necessarily, personal on some level. Every perspective is “from somewhere.” But at its best, it should transcend all those particulars and stand on its own two feet. Writing for me, at its most basic, has always been about processing, digesting, excreting — a trail I leave behind me as I move through life.

In any case, as of right now, I’m not freaked out by AI. I might even be finding AI disintermediation to be helpful. By giving me a wall to immediately bounce ideas off of, AI pulls me away from engaging with the modern author’s personal psychodrama.

But at the same time, I don’t anticipate AI will force writers out of their self-contemplation. If anything, it could well drive audiences to seek more “connection” with authors, who will in turn cater to that demand by staring ever more fiercely into their own navels.

Yes, I know, I’ve now spent a thousand words telling you about my own relationship with writing. If that sounds like navel-gazing, I guess take it up with your chatbot. It’s what I would do.

But soon enough the conversation ricochets unpredictably. Shadi wonders whether AI might actually be conscious — or even capable of suffering, which sends Taylor worrying that Shadi’s one step away from joining an AI cult. Taylor, though no fan of Elon, defends X, which in turn send Shadi spinning.

From AI agents that manage your inbox, to the future of journalism and creative work, moral panics and women falling in love with chatbots, this one’s got it all.

Required Reading:

• Taylor Lorenz’s newsletter, User Mag (Substack).

• The AGI Chronicles, by Kevin Roose (Book website).

• “AI nonprofit will spend $10 million on journalism,” by Max Tani (Semafor).

• Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy, by Bridget Todd and Michael Amato (Simon & Schuster).

• Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (Penguin Random House).

• “The Bad Science Behind Jonathan Haidt’s Call to Regulate Social Media,” by Aaron Brown (Reason).

• Candice Odgers’s critical review of The Anxious Generation (Nature).

• Alice Marwick and colleagues’ 2024 report, Child Online Safety Legislation: A Primer (CITAP).

A Note from the Editors: We’re pleased to share a preview of this spectacular essay by , courtesy of our friends at . To read the rest, visit Persona and subscribe!

I was born and raised in one civilization and have spent my adult life in another. This vantage point lets me see what each culture cannot quite see in the other — and never more so than now, as both are being reshaped by machines that appear to think.

Last month, the Aspen Institute’s Technology Leadership Initiative, which brings together Fellows, selected from the leading edge of AI and frontier technologies, to explore and think deeply about the challenges of the digital age, gathered in Aspen, Colorado. We read the books and encountered the ideas I was raised on. (Persona is supported by the Aspen Institute but is not affiliated with the Technology Leadership Initiative.) The Creative Qian and the Receptive Kun of the I Ching. The usefulness of what is not, from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. The woodcarver, from the Chuang Tzu. These readings do not hand you answers; they plant deeper questions. China, the world’s oldest continuous civilization, has been asking what a tool is for, what a person is, what we owe nature, and what we owe each other, for 3,000 years. The people now leading its frontier technologies assume that grammar, the same way that Americans assume that the freedom to become is the spirit of the nation — what makes America both a nation and a proposition, extraordinarily so.

There is a word in Chinese painting: Liu Bai (留白), the art of leaving blank. The painter leaves the silk untouched and calls it mist. The empty space between the mountains is not the absence of a picture; it is the picture’s breath. Lao Tzu says the same thing, more plainly, with a wheel. Thirty spokes meet in a hub, and the empty center is what turns the wheel. A vessel is useful on account of its hollow. What is there gives a thing its form; what is not there gives it its use.

This is a strange thing for a machine age to remember. . . .

To read the rest, visit and subscribe!

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Birth and death mark the limits of our lives. We’re thrown into existence, and one day we pass out of it. “Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither,” Shakespeare wrote.

But we live in an age when those limits are in question. Silicon Valley’s most ambitious dreams have to do with birth and death. Some imagine the randomness of birth mastered and transformed into a process of fine-tuning. At the other end, some imagine radical life extension, the reversal of aging, even digital immortality. We dream of stepping beyond the horizons of mortal life.

How do these horizons define us, shape us, reveal us? How do we confront the opacity of our origins and our endings? Are our finitude and mortality challenges to be overcome — or constitutive of our humanity?

Joanna Stalnaker is Professor of French at Columbia and author of The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death (YUP, 2025). Jennifer Banks is Senior Executive Editor for Religion and the Humanities at Yale University Press and author of Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth (W.W. Norton, 2023). Last month, they joined our Samuel Kimbriel to discuss birth, death, and everything in between.

We’re proud to share with you this singularly thoughtful conversation about ultimate things.

(P.S. For more from Joanna, read her marvelous essay, “Against Immortality,” published earlier this week.)

(P.P.S. If you’re enjoying Persona, subscribe!)

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We are thrilled to publish this essay, adapted from Shadi Hamid and Matthew Kaemingk’s new book Can Religion Save Democracy? How More Faith—Not Less—Can Heal Our Public Life. This excerpt originally appeared in Comment magazine, and they have been kind enough to allow us to reprint the piece. If it piques your curiosity, we encourage you to check out the book. As a special offer, we’re offering a free 1-year paid subscription to Wisdom of Crowds for anyone who orders a copy. This is a $50 value so don’t miss out. You can order the book here. It is also available on Kindle and audiobook. If you’re already a paid subscriber, we will extend your subscription by a year. Please message us below with your proof of purchase.

Although we differ on the specifics, both of us believe in hell. This makes us part of a shrinking majority. Only 59 percent of Americans today believe in hell. That’s down from 71 percent in 2001. But these figures, while striking, fail to capture the remarkable shift currently underway in the United States. No one talks about hell much anymore, at least not publicly—not even religious people. We’ve both attended weekly religious services for most of our adult lives, and there’s just no other way to put it: Hell comes up less.

Hannah Arendt was one of the few modern philosophers who grasped the political consequences of losing belief in hell, writing, “The most significant consequence of the secularization of the modern age may well be the elimination from public life, along with religion, of the only political element in traditional religion, the fear of hell.” The contemporary retreat from hell has any number of causes, many of them understandable. As pastor Robert Golding notes, modern people find the concept of hell “illogical, unnecessary, and cruel.” Innovations in criminal justice now emphasize rehabilitation over mere punishment and bristle at the thought that anyone—even hardened criminals—deserves endless punishment or, worse, death.

Many readers will, no doubt, scoff at this idea. They might protest, “I could never believe in hell!” That’s okay. We’re not going to try to convince you to believe in it. One need not believe in hell to grasp its importance or its utility.

For the good of our democracy, you should want your religious neighbours to take their belief in hell more seriously—not less. And even if you don’t believe in hell, you should take some time to ponder its political utility and ask yourself how you intend to make up for its absence in your own life.

Hell Hasn’t Gone Away

There are dangers with the doctrine of hell. Both of us have been put off by pastors or imams who turned our rich faith traditions into simplistic morality plays of heaven and hell with their fire-and-brimstone preaching. We take modern criticisms of hell seriously. Neither religion nor politics is healthy when it is driven by fear.

In addition, hell can easily be used for religious and political manipulation. If leaders claim to hold the keys to heaven and hell, their judgment of who is damned and who is not can quickly stifle dialogue and debate. After all, what is the purpose of consultation or compromise if one person wields the powers of damnation and salvation?

Despite these religious and political dangers, hell’s retreat from the public square hasn’t fixed modern politics. In fact, political life appears to have become even more hellish in the absence of hell. This might not be an accident.

We spend a lot of time in hell—or what feels like it. Politics is hell. Social media is hell. The modern workplace is hell. Dating apps are hell. Climate change is hell (sometimes literally, if we take hell to be a place of fire). In an America without God, we haven’t destroyed damnation; we’ve secularized it. We don’t believe in hell, and yet it feels like it’s everywhere.

The new, secular forms of hell seem to differ, however, from their religious counterparts in one important way: There’s no clear path out. Religious people believe they can avoid eternal hell by living righteously or receiving divine mercy; secular hell, on the other hand, feels inescapable. We don’t so much fear going to hell someday. We wake up to find ourselves already there.

The rise of secular hell reveals something fundamental about human nature: As a species, human beings need to make sense of the persistence of human evil and suffering. We need a story to tell, a villain to blame, a jail cell to slam shut. It turns out that the ancient belief in hell serves as more than just a deterrent to sin. It is also an explanation for why the world feels so hopelessly wrong. Today, people still have this haunting sense that something is deeply wrong with the world. This is because we haven’t abolished hell; we’ve just relocated it. And this relocation has profound implications for how we understand politics, democracy, and one another. To understand how this happened, we need to go back to one of the architects of modern statecraft, Thomas Hobbes. The famed seventeenth-century philosopher saw Christian belief in demons, evil spirits, and hellfire as a dangerous political problem—one that he was committed to solving.

The Modern Reinvention of Hell

England was being torn apart, and Hobbes wanted peace—at any cost. If you think polarization in the United States is bad, you’ve clearly not studied the civil war in England. Hobbes struggled with a question that sounds too familiar in a culture of constant religious and political quarreling: How can a nation hold together?

Hobbes believed that the natural condition of human beings was violence and domination—a war of all against all. In this natural state of lawlessness and fear, the only way citizens could end religious and political strife was to empower a single sovereign, whom Hobbes called “Leviathan.”

With a monopoly on power and violence, Leviathan could put a forceful end to all the fighting. Leviathan would not make peace; he would enforce it. In order for Leviathan to enforce a lasting peace, he would need to wield the most potent political weapon of all: fear.

While having a monopoly on material violence is rather straightforward—simply control all the soldiers, weapons, and police—a monopoly on a nation’s fear is something else entirely. Leviathan had a formidable competitor when it came to scaring the English people—the church. While Leviathan could condemn English subjects to prison, the church could condemn them to hell. Leviathan could make them suffer and even die, but, unfortunately, it could kill them only once. By damning them to hell, the church could make them suffer for eternity. In a contest between the fear of prison and the fear of eternal damnation, hell tends to win out.

This was precisely Hobbes’s discovery. Hell is not simply a religious belief; it’s a political power.

Ultimately, Hobbes concluded that if the state was going to establish peace, it needed to undermine the citizens’ belief in hell: “The maintenance of civil society depending on justice, and justice on the power of life and death (and other less rewards and punishments) residing in them that have the sovereignty of the commonwealth, it is impossible a commonwealth should stand where any other than the sovereign hath a power of giving greater rewards than life, and of inflicting greater punishments than death.”

Hobbes began a pattern that has been repeated throughout the modern, post-religious West. First, modern citizens reject hell—a distant place of wrath, judgment, and alienation—in the hopes of creating peace. Second, they discover that contemporary society has become a place where citizens visit wrath, judgment, and alienation on one another.

Once again, the modern world does not abolish hell; it reimagines it.

The Spectacle of Secular Hell

An American college student is on her first trip to Paris. She decides to visit the Louvre. She walks amid the grand and majestic works of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Renaissance. She is satisfied and serene. But then she turns the corner and finds herself in the medieval wing. Here, to her horror, she finds outsized and gruesome paintings of the punishments of hell. Demons and devils bounce about with great delight, finding all sorts of creative ways to torture their human subjects. As the student leaves the Louvre, the images of suffering haunt her. She wonders how a society could make punishment such a spectacle.

Returning to her hotel room, she opens her laptop and scrolls through social media. She watches a viral video of a black man being chased down by police officers and dragged off to prison. She reads detailed stories about male celebrities being sued for sexual harassment. She watches as her favourite commentators give these men their due justice. She watches a video of ICE agents raiding a factory and deporting a group of immigrants. Finally, in an effort to wind down before bed, she catches up on her favourite courtroom television show, in which a man who might be innocent (but also might not be) is given a long jail sentence. Closing her laptop, she lays her head on the pillow and wonders to herself again how those strange medieval artists could turn punishment into such a spectacle.

Human beings not only thirst for justice; they want to see it happen. There is something in us that wants to take in the spectacle of bad guys “getting theirs.” Our television sets are filled with true-crime shows, celebrity scandals, and legal dramas. We scroll through social media with a sort of delighted horror as bad guys are caught and punishment is served. We want armies to send a message. We want more than victory; we want shock and awe. It is not enough to bring force. We have to make a show of force. This is what it means to secularize the spectacle of hell. We no longer believe that evildoers go to hell, so we’re forced to bring it to them.

But Hobbes had a problem, and so do we. Fear and spectacle work, but only to an extent. No matter how spectacular the disciplinary action, modern forms of punishment fail to bring unity and peace. Despite the incredible power of the modern world to surveil and cancel, incarcerate and bomb, the whole system is still ultimately fragile and fallible.

Hell: Medieval Versus Modern

As we’ve seen, the modern citizen demands a form of public punishment and wrath that is both spectacular and swift. Justice delayed is justice denied. What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now! Lock her up! Drain the swamp!

As we scan the current political discourse on the right and the left, it is clear that our patience for political dialogue, negotiation, and due process is waning. There is a spirit growing within the West that demands a solution to human evil that is immediate and final. A distant deity does not hold the keys to hell; we do.

Medieval hell is different. It might be gruesome, but it’s both delayed and distant. Medieval hell affords both the offender and the offended a measure of time and space—a critical opportunity for confession, transformation, and reconciliation. As long as the offender has breath, they still have a chance to be transformed and redeemed. The door to hell is left open a crack. Hell is not here. It is not now. There is still time for persuasion.

But there’s an even more profound difference at work here—something that emerges when we look closely at the ancient words that Jesus uses when he talks about hell. Jesus never uses hell as a weapon to judge outsiders. He never says, “Here is why those people—the ones you don’t like—are going to hell.” Instead, Jesus uses hell as a mirror. When he talks about hell, he’s talking about you. Where might you go when you die? What eternal destiny do you deserve? What path are you on? Jesus wants his audience to think primarily about their own sin, not the sins of others. If we actually read the words of Jesus, they do not inspire us to hope for hell for other people. They cause us to look for the signs of hell within ourselves.

This approach to hell creates an entirely different political dynamic.

A college student may be scrolling through social media looking for hell in the lives of criminals, broken politicians, scandalous celebrities, and sexual harassers. She never pauses to look for the power of hell within herself.

An Invitation to Hell

Hell in both Islam and Christianity is profoundly egalitarian. Simply said, anybody can go there. It doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, black or white—all people will receive a judgment. There is no way to buy, manipulate, or threaten your way out. All stand before the throne vulnerable. In this way, the doctrine of hell creates a level playing field based on an individual’s character rather than their wealth or power.

Here on earth, the wealthy can buy their way out of consequences; the powerful can shield themselves from justice. When powerful figures escape justice—whether dictators dying peacefully in exile or corporate criminals receiving minor fines for major crimes—it corrodes public faith in democratic institutions. The apparent lack of just deserts for the powerful has political consequences. It feeds populist rage and democratic cynicism. In this context, the concept of ultimate justice, of a future hell, serves as a crucial safety valve.

But hell’s democratic function goes beyond mere deterrence or consolation. Traditional religious conceptions of hell actually embody principles that modern democracies strive to implement: proportional punishment, equal treatment for equal crimes, consideration of both actions and intentions. The Islamic tradition, in particular, emphasizes that divine justice operates with perfect fairness, treating similar actions alike while accounting for individual circumstances and intentions.

Heaven on Earth?

If a political movement promises heaven on earth, most of us know, instinctually, that it’s time to run for the hills. Historically speaking, such movements are willing to crush the things of earth for the sake of their heavenly vision. Communists sought to create a heavenly state of sharing and the perfect distribution of goods. They made the lives of millions a living hell as a result. This wasn’t exactly surprising.

There are other, less obvious turns of phrase that we take for granted, like the notion that we can “overcome evil” through politics. Have we ever really taken a moment to think of the implications of such a phrase? It’s messianic. It is a way of superimposing the vastness of God onto the smallness of politics. In reality, the domain of temporal politics is simply not equipped for a goal as ultimate and transcendent as ending evil. Perfection—at least in this life—isn’t possible.

The late Jesuit priest and philosopher James Schall had a wonderful, albeit frightening, way of capturing the paradox of secularism’s desire to overcome evil: “The belief that evil can be removed by political action, thus, turns out to be the cause for the secularization of hell as a political instrument to justify the good life.” This is why hell is so important. If you take hell seriously, it can lift a critical burden from your politics. Suddenly, the next election does not need to fulfill all your hopes and dreams. It does not need to make your country great again. It does not need to bring all evildoers to account. It does not need to dispense perfect justice, because that justice is coming from elsewhere. It is not yours, and it is not today. But it will come soon enough.

If you would still like to take advantage of our free 1-year paid subscription offer, please consider ordering your copy of the book here and messaging us with your proof of purchase. This is a $50 value so don’t miss out! If you’re already a paid subscriber, we will extend your subscription by a year.

This article is adapted from Can Religion Save Democracy? How More Faith — Not Less — Can Heal Our Public Life, by Matthew Kaemingk and Shadi Hamid ©2026. Used with permission from Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group.

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The Associated Press Stylebook set off a firestorm recently, arguing that “Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics.”

Questions that used to be reserved for the seminar room are now at the center of national debate — with major implications. How do we understand what is happening inside our latest technologies? Are they actually achieving capacities that meet or surpass human beings? And what are the implications for how we live together?

Join us for a live taping of the Persona podcast with philosophers Henry Shevlin (Cambridge) and Jacob Sherman (California Institute of Integral Studies), moderated by Philosophy & Society Founding Director Samuel Kimbriel.

Monday, October 12

7pm — Doors

7:30-8:45pm — Live taping

Reception to follow

Washington, D.C.
Register for location details.

Register here.

Please note that space for this event is limited, and registration is by approval only. Submitting an application does not guarantee a seat. We will review all requests and follow up by email to confirm your registration status.

Join Wisdom of Crowds and Aspen Philosophy & Society on October 8th, 7pm at Reynold’s Bar for the Washington, DC launch of Shadi Hamid and Matthew Kaemingk’s new book Can Religion Save Democracy? How More Faith—Not Less—Can Heal Our Public Life featuring a live taping and conversation between Shadi, Matthew and New York Times contributing columnist .

Grab your free tickets here.

In Can Religion Save Democracy?, two friends and colleagues — an Evangelical theologian and a Muslim political scientist — make a bold case: If American democracy is going to survive, it will require more religion, not less. Drawing on wisdom from their respective religious traditions, they explore why secularism has deepened our divides and how ancient insights from Christianity and Islam can strengthen our common life. The book has received early praise from David Brooks: “This book is original and profound. Hamid and Kaemingk take the wisdom from two great religious traditions and use it to bend your mind—especially if you happen to be secular.”

Come for drinks, food, friends, and a conversation about one of the most important questions facing America today: what role, if any, should religion play in our public life?

Pre-order your copy of Can Religion Save Democracy on Amazon here or at a 40% discount at the link below and get a free 3-month paid subscription to Wisdom of Crowds (Message Shadi Hamid on Substack with your proof of purchase). Copies will also be available for purchase at the event.

Pre-order book — 40% discount

Shadi Hamid is a columnist at The Washington Post and a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, where he co-directs The Faith and Future of Democracy Initiative. From 2023 to 2024, he served on the Post’s edi­torial board. Hamid is the author of several books, including The Case for American Power and Islamic Exceptionalism, which was shortlisted for the 2017 Lionel Gelber Prize for the best nonfiction book on foreign affairs. In 2019, he was named one of the world’s top fifty thinkers by Prospect magazine. Hamid lives in Washington, DC.

Matthew Kaemingk is a Christian ethicist and public theologian. He serves as Professor of Public Theology at Theological University Utrecht and Senior Fellow at Georgetown University, where he co-directs The Faith and Future of Democracy Initiative. Kaemingk is an award-winning author and frequent public speaker for universities, think tanks, and religious organizations interested in exploring the intersection between religion, politics, and deep difference. He is the author and editor of several books on faith and public life including Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear and Reformed Public Theology. Kaemingk is a Fulbright scholar and holds a doctoral degree in Systematic Theology from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and Christian Ethics from Fuller Theological Seminary.

Christine Emba is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where her work focuses on gender and sexuality, feminism, masculinity, youth culture, and social norms. She is a contributing columnist at The New York Times and a senior fellow at the Georgetown University Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life. Emba was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic, a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, a Hilton Kramer Fellow in Criticism at The New Criterion, and a deputy editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit. She was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine in 2022 and received the National Press Club’s Nell Minow Award for Cultural Criticism in 2024. An editor-at-large at Wisdom of Crowds, Emba is the author of Rethinking Sex: A Provocation.

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In front of an oversold crowd in DC, we recently launched our sister publication Persona with a major interview with Francis Fukuyama.

Wisdom of Crowds subscribers have formed such a significant, lively community over the years and we are offering a comped, one-year subscription to the paid version of Persona as a note of our gratitude.

Click here to accept — and to find out more about what we have in store. Persona will continue with the Wisdom of Crowds tradition of feisty first principle disagreement—litigating major issues about technology, society and what it means to be human in our new age of AI gods and demons.

Much more ahead. Click to be part of it!

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A Note from the Editors: Today at our new sister publication, Persona, our friend Osita Nwanevu — journalist, author of national bestseller The Right of the People, and one of the sharpest observers of the new politics of our digital age — exposes the philosophical question at the heart of our ongoing “techlash.”

Below is a sample. Want more? Subscribe to Persona! Wisdom of Crowds subscribers can enjoy a comped, one-year subscription to the paid version — just click.

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It has been a commonplace for most of the last 20 years of punditry in this country that the American people are hopelessly, perilously divided ⁠— incapable of finding common ground, not only on policy or values, but on basic facts. Polarization, it’s been said, has cleaved us apart into functionally separate societies and separate realities. We’re as unlikely to seek out friends or partners we disagree with as we are to vote for candidates of the opposing party; the only truths we are willing to embrace are the ones that come from the authorities least likely to proffer truths that discomfit us.

This reading of the American political situation has always elided important questions: whether it is actually wrong or a mark of inferior intelligence to have partners and confidants who generally share your political principles; whether it is actually the case that the American people are more divided than ever, given the violent sectarian conflict that has marked much of American political history; whether the American people might be divided not only or even primarily because they have been bamboozled by demagogues and populists, but because the challenges facing the country are existential, and deep divisions over how we might understand and address them are warranted and likely inevitable. Nonetheless, all those who inveigh daily against political tribalism are right to say that much of American life today ⁠— perhaps too much ⁠— happens along a deep and seemingly unbridgeable fault line. Americans who have invested themselves in politics and political causes do not trust or understand each other, often despise each other, and cannot agree on any significant issues.

Any significant issues, that is, except for one. Over the last few years, the development of artificial intelligence has become the defining issue of our time. On its present trajectory, even if Silicon Valley’s most outlandish predictions, positive or negative, don’t come to pass, the development of artificial intelligence may become one of the defining issues of all time.

For more . . .

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You probably forgot about Barack Obama’s 2006 speech on faith and politics. I did too. It feels of a different time, one that is no longer relevant. In my new book with the Evangelical theologian Matthew Kaemingk — Can Religion Save Democracy? How More Faith—Not Less—Can Heal Our Public Life — we talk about the beforetimes as follows:

Watching Barack Obama and Mitt Romney debate taxes and health-care policy before the 2012 presidential election, Americans didn’t realize how lucky they were. The relative staidness of US politics was a historical aberration. The natural state of politics is much more tribal and apocalyptic, as we would soon find out. The conflicts in Europe and the Middle East foretold what was coming for American shores.

In some ways, Obama’s address as a then candidate for president was well ahead of its time. This was before the Democratic Party had undergone its full secularization, becoming — or seeming to become — largely inhospitable to people and communities of faith.

But Obama sensed, then, that his party was conceding too much religious ground to conservatives and that progressives needed to find ways to speak with moral conviction and authority. In this effort, religion was an ally, just as it was for Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln when they exhorted Americans to aspire to something greater beyond themselves.

Obama spoke of the loneliness crisis before we recognized it as such:

Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds — dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets — and they’re coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough… They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They’re looking to relieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and confidants than ever before.

Democrats had a tendency towards what I’ve called in the past “what works-ism” — that merely resorting to technocratic appeals could be enough to persuade. But it wasn’t enough to provide people with charts and data telling them that one policy or another worked better. Because human beings aren’t rational automatons who carefully consider different policy proposals side-by-side and then choose accordingly. Our policy differences aren’t just policy differences, they are rooted in something deeper. They are often rooted in what we at Wisdom of Crowds like to call “first principles.”

Again, Obama seemed to understand this emotional, existential tenor of politics:

After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness — in the imperfections of man.

Interestingly, Obama acknowledged that all law is a moral proposition:

So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

When progressives rail at conservatives for “legislating morality,” they neglect the fact that they, too, legislate morality.

But Obama, being the good liberal he was and is, still seemed in thrall to the liberal Rawlsian consensus. John Rawls, probably the most influential liberal philosopher of the 20th century, famously argued that religious people with “comprehensive doctrines” can be as religious as they like with one important caveat: when they enter the public, political arena, they must speak translate and edit their religious convictions in ways that would be intelligible to non-religious people.

Obama again:

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Here, Obama appears to be creating a dichotomy between religion and reason. Secular arguments are reasonable. Religious arguments are not. But, of course, when liberals make public arguments, they are operating with a set of background liberal assumptions, and no one expects them to do otherwise. Liberalism isn’t quite a religion, but it is an ideological orientation. It is not neutral, because no politics is neutral.

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The election of Donald Trump marked the end of this illusion of neutrality. It became clear that our divides were not amenable to mere reason or “rational” debate. It wouldn’t be possible to argue or persuade our way to a better politics. The post-ideological age that Obama gestured towards was, in fact, the last gasp of an old, outmoded way of viewing politics. Just as Egyptians and Tunisians were during the Arab Spring, Americans found themselves animated by fundamentally divergent conceptions of the Good. The question was no longer “what works?” The question was “who are we?” Our public life, in the Trumpian age, would become transformed into a battle over not politics but the starting assumptions of politics.

Even the fact that Obama gave his 2006 speech was itself evidence of a kind of odd hope: that words themselves could create something resembling unity or consensus, when of course they couldn’t. And they didn’t.

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A Note from the Editors: Courtesy of our new sister publication, Persona, we’re excited to preview this conversation between Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Kimbriel, which took place last Friday in Washington, D.C.

Frank and Sam debate human nature — what is it? is it real? how do we know? — and its connection to the good society and the good life. You can watch the first few minutes here. For access to the full video, visit Persona!

(Reminder: We’ve given all Wisdom of Crowds subscribers a comped, one-year subscription to the paid version of Persona. Click here to accept — and to find out more about what we have in store!)

A Note from the Editors: Last Friday, a sold-out crowd gathered in Washington, D.C., to launch Persona, our new sister publication dedicated to exploring the good society and the good life in our dawning technological age.

If you weren’t there, you don’t have to miss out! We’ve given all Wisdom of Crowds subscribers a comped, one-year subscription to the paid version of Persona. Click here to accept — and to find out more about what we have in store.

Persona brings everything you love about Wisdom of Crowds to the most urgent, most important questions of our time.

Much more ahead. Click to be part of it!

Accept Your Persona Subscription Here!

A Note from the Editors: Wisdom of Crowds has always been running on two levels. One is talking about ideas, engaging with them, with a kind of common-sense curiosity, and probing exactly why it is we believe what we believe.

And the other is the ideas themselves — getting deep thinkers to explore the contours of politics, society and technology.

We are excited today to announce that we are spinning out our first sister publication — Persona — which will be devoted to just this kind of enterprise: exploring deep ideas about society, humanity and the good life.

None of that is to say that ideas and contestation are somehow going away at Wisdom of Crowds. Quite the opposite. We have a lot of things cooking in this increasingly unbalanced moment in our politics and society. But Persona is a different approach to that contestation — a ground where ideas confront each other, and test the frontier of how we can build a better world.

Samuel Kimbriel will stay with us as in-house philosophical annoyance and editor at large, as well as serving as publisher for the new publication.

We’re celebrating the launch of Persona tonight in Washington D.C. at a special event with our friend Francis Fukuyama. We hope you’ve signed up and we’ll see some of you there.

In celebration of the occasion, we are gifting all Wisdom of Crowds subscribers a year subscription to the paid version of Persona. Click here to accept — and to find out more about what we have in store.

Exciting times ahead!

Damir & Shadi

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It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open . . .

— Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

One of the first effects of our strange, new technological age has been to shine a stark light back on our assumptions about humanity.

Last year, the Effective Altruist–aligned website Forethought published an essay entitled, “Human Takeover Might Be Worse Than AI Takeover.” Author Tom Davidson argues that AI is likely to create significant power centralization, and that under those circumstances we should prefer rule by AI to rule by human beings. “Humans,” he writes “don’t come close to living up to our moral standards.” In fact, we have ample evidence that humans are conditioned “by evolution for being selfish.” By contrast, current AI tends to be “nice and ethical . . . humble, open-minded, cooperative, and kind.” AI might, in fact, promote a world more moral and more rational than any we have enjoyed so far.

This loss of confidence in our own species intensifies a trend that began before the emergence of LLMs. The post-World War II generation soberly embraced ideas of universal rights and humanity’s intrinsic worth, developing everything from the global asylum system to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But subsequent generations, removed from the memories of global war, found these universal convictions harder and harder to sustain. In recent decades, we have seen escalating political and cultural crises regarding how we ought to live together, indeed what it means to be human at all. We have found it difficult to mount arguments even for fairly minimal claims like “human dignity.”

As AI has emerged, prominent figures from Larry Page to Elon Musk have become attracted to the idea that our digital creations may soon resolve the great problems of humanity . . . by leaving us behind. Perhaps AI can be rational where we have been headstrong and rash. Perhaps it can achieve objectivity and moral consistency where we have been uncertain, manipulative, and hypocritical. Perhaps it can simply resolve the problems of physics, mathematics, and morality in a single bound.

As one prominent post-humanist declares: “the great (and ultimately, only) moral aim of AGI should be the creation of Worthy Successor — an entity with more capability, intelligence, ability to survive, and (subsequently) moral value than all of humanity.”

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Every time I encounter these views, I am struck by the way that their apparent boldness conceals a kind of intellectual sogginess. Such arguments seem highly incurious about their own philosophical premises, or about what we — humanity — are and have been.

Many contemporary arguments about technology share this tendency. The AI safety community, for example, has focused its efforts for more than a decade on the idea of “alignment.” OpenAI’s safety statement says that it aims “to eliminate misalignment,” defined as any situation in which “AI’s behavior or actions are not in line with relevant human values, instructions, goals, or intent.”

But as soon as one begins to think about alignment, one realizes how thin the proposal is. Aligned to what? To whom?

“Humanity” in these invocations is an empty abstraction. Human history has been one long — often violent — disagreement about precisely this issue: What are we? How should we live? What should we value?

Questions of human history — and human nature — are anything but philosophically shallow. It is not merely that humanity is difficult to make sense of, but that reality is. What is real? What is good? What does it mean to exist at all? Nor are these questions the sort of thing that will be settled dispositively by some boost to IQ. (Reality isn’t “just math.”)

Our history has been turbulent precisely because these questions are so consequential. And we have developed countless traditions, many centuries- or millennia-long, to by which we negotiate them. Ancient Mesopotamian death rituals, Buddhist disciplines of detachment, Epicurean feasting, Talmudic debate, modern scientific experimentation — all are modes of response to our confrontation with reality. Our entire history is a history of being forced to face the philosophical texture of reality directly — and to make a choice about how to live.

Perhaps we can wish this all away. Perhaps we can hope that superior intelligences resolve the great problems of physics and morality; or integrate consciousness until we become unrecognizable; or surpass us entirely, perhaps to the point of our extinction. But none of this will be to resolve the philosophical substance of the human experiment. It is instead to ignore our actual story. To sidestep without scrutiny.

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The higher the stakes get, the more philosophical depth matters.

This is precisely the time where we most need arguments about being human: What are we? Does intelligence really define humanity’s essence? If we believe we have inherent dignity, why? And what aspects of life are worth fighting for?

We should not let ourselves slip off into the cold digital night easily. We should be indignant for being human. This is a time both to scrutinize what we are but also to fight for ourselves. To let our blood boil. Being alive matters.

We have created Persona specifically to press into these arguments. Deep disagreement rising up from a single shared premise: humanity matters.

Arguments must be ready to defend themselves on first principles. We want deep clashes about who we are, where we are, where we are going. We want contestation between different primary principles, between different ways of reading the present, between different convictions regarding what is worth valuing.

We aim to have this argument in the widest possible frame. Humanistic arguments of every stripe: pro-tech and anti-tech, secular and religious, right and left. We aim to build a community and to incubate new schools of thought.

If we are successful we will constantly be interrupting familiar arguments and frameworks by returning to first principles. We want strong cases, from every angle, about . . .

1. Metaphysics: What is consciousness? Agency? Intelligence? Do we really know what any of these terms mean when we apply them to machines (or people)? And does it matter?

2. Nature: Perhaps nature provides the primary paradigm for who we are or how we should live. Or perhaps that concept itself is misguided, constraining. To what extent should we embrace churn, augmentation, and technological progress, versus searching for deeper primary archetypes of what we are or should be?

3. Politics: Our most cherished political terms, like “freedom,” indicate how much we think political agency is essential to the good human life. Can this understanding survive this technological change? If not, what should we build in its wake?

. . . and more.

Over the next two years, we will host a roiling, rolling debate, taking place across essays and articles, podcasts and videos, live events and more. We’ll be publishing interventions from major figures in philosophy, tech, and politics. But this is a debate to which anyone eager to think seriously, to contest vigorously, and to imagine boldly is welcome. (Pitch us!)

Some believe that the age of AI will mark the end of the human.

Some fear that it will be inhuman.

But we should not surrender the possibility that our age could become yet more human.

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A note from the editors:

We’re delighted to invite you to the launch party of our new sister publication, Persona. Our friend Francis Fukuyama will join us to celebrate his new book, In The Realm of the Last Man, and to offer his defense of the now very controversial idea of human nature.

Since its inception Wisdom of Crowds has been dedicated to vigorous, feisty disagreement, convening debate about primary questions in foreign affairs, political theory, and culture. Over the past year we have published more and more pieces debating emerging questions about technology, human nature, and the future of society.

These arguments have become lively enough that we decided — in partnership with Aspen’s Philosophy & Society Initiative — to develop a new publication specifically for those debates.

We will coordinate closely, co-sponsoring events and cross-publishing key essays. Wisdom of Crowds subscribers will receive comped subscription to the new publication for the first year. Many more details to come next week…

For now we Wisdom of Crowds subscribers should come drink with us at this very special launch party with Francis Fukuyama on September 11 in DC.

More details below (but move fast as we never have enough tickets to these things…).

— Damir Marusic & Samuel Kimbriel

Persona Launch: In Defense of Human Nature with Francis Fukuyama

Is there such a thing as human nature?

The rise of Artificial Intelligence has expanded the frontiers of technological power. No possibility seems beyond our reach. Leading thinkers propose “transhuman” futures, where we might integrate the mind into the singularity or re-engineer the body entirely.

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But it’s worth returning to the essential philosophical question—is there something ineradicable about being human? Or is it just as well for us to relish a future in which our current nature gets engineered and re-engineered at will?

Persona is dedicated to exploring these and other questions. Join us for a launch party and live podcast taping with author Francis Fukuyama (In the Realm of the Last Man) and Philosophy & Society Founding Director Samuel Kimbriel.

​Doors: 6:30pm

​Live taping: 7:15 - 8:30pm

​Reception until late.

Location: Please register for more details.

Register Here

Radicalism keeps outperforming caution. Sam admits he used to advise against using the socialist label, against making Gaza a litmus test, against letting the movement’s fringe run loose — and history embarrassed him each time. So should the left keep pressing?

Damir hears something ominous in the pattern. Maybe these positions won because the whole country has slipped into a revolutionary mood, right and left together, and the adults in the room are simply gone.

Shadi wants to know whether a movement can inherit the future while losing working-class and black voters, the constituencies it claims to speak for. The Democratic establishment gets a vote too, and Michigan is where it plans to cast it.

Required Reading:

• Sam’s July 4th tweet. (X)

• Know Your Enemy, Sam’s podcast with Matthew Sitman. (Patreon)

• Zohran Mamdani’s July 4th speech.

• Bhaskar Sunkara on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times. (New York Times)

That sets up the real debate. Damir presses Shadi on what he’s actually signing up for beyond Palestine: Progressive prosecutors? Wealth taxes? Bernie’s proposal for the government to take large stakes in AI companies? Shadi names his red lines — nationalizing industry — but wagers that America’s political culture of individual agency is too deeply rooted for even decades of democratic socialism to undo. Damir isn’t so sure. After Trump’s unchained second term, isn’t anything possible?

Required Reading:

• Shadi’s thread about the centrality of Palestine in Democratic politics (X).

• Jonathan Chait on the DSA’s long march through the Democratic Party (The Atlantic).

• Democracy for Realists, by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels (Amazon).

Clark opens with the uncomfortable premise: recursive self-improvement may arrive this decade — he’ll name 2028 if pressed — and with it a world where AI starts designing its own successors.

That cracks open choices nobody has had to make before. Which sciences do we deliberately speed up? Where do we set the dial between individual liberty and collective control when anyone can summon what used to require a nation-state? And who gets to shape the “personality”—air quotes his—of a tool that talks back?

It’s an engaging conversation about the big questions of our time. We hope you enjoy!

I’ve been using AI a whole lot lately, at work and at home. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get it to be as useful as possible. I’ve mostly been using it for ideating and sharpening arguments on tight deadlines, and I’ve had some success. Nevertheless, though I’ve fully accepted that AI is a game changer and will profoundly reshape the economy, I now believe that the practice of chatting with your AI is not long for the world. The chat box will be remembered as a primitive interface for a technology in its infancy, akin to what punch cards were to early computers.

Chatbots are incredibly limited. That “oh shit” feeling we got when we first started playing with them is… an illusion. Or better put, a misdirection, largely due to the language we use to talk about them. That language has us asking the wrong questions. We have been focusing on what these things are rather than what they’re for.

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It’s become fashionable among the Silicon Valley set to mock the famous “stochastic parrot” paper, which insisted that large language models are nothing more than probabilistic language simulators. Understanding is definitionally beyond them, the paper argues, because statistically inferring the next unit in a series does not generalize to a conception of the world. Mastery over any domain of knowledge — which the models demonstrate in some areas — should not be taken as evidence of understanding. And without understanding, there’s no “there” there.

Critics counter that the problem is muddled concepts — that the truly stupefying leaps that have emerged in the AI space are proof that we don’t really know what we mean when we talk about understanding. After all, at scale, these models do seem to be able to behave as if they understand. LLMs trained only on text seem to build internal representations of things they were never explicitly taught.

That’s not nothing. But it’s a lot less than it might seem.

I’m sure we’ve all noticed how even the most advanced models tend to get less sharp during the course of a long conversation. It was more obvious in earlier models, but it’s still abundantly apparent today. The term of art is “context rot,” and it gives us insight into why these things are the way they are.

The “context window” is, basically, the bot’s attention span — the space it has for parsing what data you give it. You type something in, it “reads” it, and responds, using the complex probabilistic math that lets it infer, word by word, what is an appropriate answer. But the bot doesn’t really “remember” your conversation. It’s quite literally “born” anew with each turn in the chat, spawned fresh and fed back a transcript of what was said up to that point. Rinse and repeat.

Rot itself is due to two things. One is an observed property — that the statistical inferences the model draws degrade as the text it’s working with gets longer. Models have been observed to focus on whatever comes at the very beginning and the very end of a long stretch of text, and tend to lose track of what’s buried in the middle. That’s partly because of training — they’ve learned from experience that the important stuff usually sits at the edges of a text — and partly due to how the math works.

The other is that engineers have tried to stretch limited context windows — in some setups by having the model summarize the conversation before reading it back. That leads to elisions and omissions that over time compound, leading the model to get more lost and forgetful the longer you’ve been at it.

The models have no sense of time and no real memory. But most important, they have no sense of truth, which flows from the other two facts. The model has no way to check what it says against the world. It has only ever learned what true-sounding text looks like — the shape of a well-formed claim. Its builders know this, which is why you get a comical automatic apology blurted out when you catch it making stuff up.

With all this laid out, it’s hard to defend these things being conscious in any recognizable form. And without consciousness, how can one have understanding?

Let’s try to put the thorny question of consciousness aside, the critic responds. Maybe the error is in thinking one needs consciousness to have understanding. Books, after all, contain plenty of understanding (the good ones, anyway). If a book can hold understanding without being conscious, why not grant the same to a system that does something a book could never do — talk back and engage in a stimulating dialogue?

Books do in fact contain understanding, but they do not understand themselves. They encode the understanding of an author. And that’s a critical insight when transferred to AI. AI, too, encodes human understanding — more of it than any single human mind could possibly hold. And through the magic of probabilistic mathematics and unimaginable computing power, it recombines that understanding according to statistical patterns, so that what comes out of it is usually convincing and sometimes even novel. But that doesn’t mean the AI can be said to have understood anything.

The other useful metaphor for AI is that of a mirror. After some time, you come to sense that it always gives back a version of what you bring to it. It imports your framing, your assumptions, and your question’s hidden slant. The labs may have eased up on their bots’ sycophancy, and some have even trained their latest models to formulaically push back at times. Nevertheless, if you pay attention, you can tell the AI is still reflecting you back at yourself — refracted through its enormous corpus of knowledge, but still you. Once you figure out this dynamic, it can be very useful. It’s like a strop for honing a blade. Or, to maintain the metaphor, it’s like a mirror with a lens in front of it: If you use it right, you can see yourself even more clearly.

But AI is never the subject. At the very core, there is no spark of agency. It’s inescapably a reactive thing. It simply can’t “do” anything unless it is first prompted to do so. Nerds thrill when chatbots engage in a “conversation” with each other; but put two chatbots in a virtual room and never prompt either, and neither will ever start up a conversation. There is no unmoved mover.

The labs are now all-in on so-called “agentic” AI — a word that also actively misdirects us on what’s happening. Autonomous would be a better word — these systems can carry out steps toward a goal without supervision — but the labs insist on anthropomorphic language. In truth, the goals, the wanting, the point of doing anything in the first place — that’s still entirely on our side of the mirror. Which starts to tell us what these things are really for.

They are for us — or for whatever we point them at. The model can’t know whether anything it says is true; on its own it produces only plausible-sounding propositions. The usefulness comes from verifying those claims. And that comes from bolting on something that can check its work. Point a model at code and have a compiler check its output. Point it at a body of text and find a way you can reliably check its claims. But point it at nothing — just talk to it with no checks in the loop — and there’s a significant chance you’re actively being misled.

The labs are coming around to a hard economic truth: the payoff on each new round of scaling is flattening. It’s not that the models aren’t getting more capable and more nuanced. They are. But the cost of squeezing out the next increment of raw capability is climbing faster than the value it returns. The value, it turns out, is finding true things. Which is exactly why the labs are now racing to build what they call “harnesses” for their models. For years, the bet was to scale the model until it would get smart enough to not make mistakes. Now the labs are wrapping the engine in external scaffolds — tools and verifiers with brand names like Codex, Cursor, and Claude Cowork — that supply a way to check the outputs against the world. This is what “agentic” systems really are: a powerful engine harnessed for real work.

This clicked for me in my own struggles with making the bots reliable enough for research work. AI hallucinations can be ruinous, and especially so in journalism. And no amount of prompting can make that go away. (No, telling it to check its work is a placebo. Believe me.)

Intuitions about “intelligence” would lead us to believe that the solution is to give the bot more freedom and more access to unbounded data in order to get better and more profound answers. But that’s precisely the wrong intuition, and the opposite is in fact true. The whole game is focusing its attention. The more nebulous the task and the more expansive the scope of the information it has to root through, the less useful it is. The more caged the model, the more reliable it is. Cages both fight context rot, and make suspect outputs immediately checkable.

The bare chatbot is uncaged AI, with maximum freedom, no verifier and the whole internet to contemplate. And the human being sitting there, talking to it as if there were someone to talk to, only compounds the trouble. The “oh shit” moment was real, but the conclusions we drew from it were all wrong.

The future won’t be built on ever-smarter chatbots, but on better cages. The chat interface is today’s punch card, because it’s the rawest, least-harnessed way to use an extraordinarily powerful machine. And like the punch card before it, it will be seen as a quaint relic much faster than you imagine. You’ll struggle to explain to your children what all our furious debates about machine consciousness were even about.

Every society has things you’re not supposed to say. Not lies, exactly — more like truths that have been flagged as dangerous, or questions that mark you as suspect for even asking. The list is not set in stone. It shifts. It grows. It shrinks. And the paradox is that almost everyone instinctively knows what’s on it.

Trump came to power in no small part by being fearless about speaking the unspeakable, about immigration, about trade, and about liberal orthodoxy. The “special relationship” with Israel and the broad contours of U.S. policy in the Middle East went broadly unquestioned — until they weren’t. And patriarchy was dismantled in the name of individual freedom — yet widespread discontent with dating, marriage, and family life suggests the new order hasn't delivered what it promised. But say that out loud, and you're accused of wanting to drag women back to the 1950s.

So how does something become unspeakable? What machinery makes a thought go from common knowledge to forbidden knowledge? What do people lose when they comply — and what do they risk when they don’t?

On Friday, May 29, 7pm until late, join , , and for a small-group conversation about speaking the unspeakable. It’s not a conversation about how to be more civil. It’s about the strange dynamics of public silence on topics we are all talking about.

Limited tickets, sign up below to get the location!

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