~Culture
Street Safety Is a Storytelling Problem
Cities are telling stories about how to behave. Right now, a committee of engineers is writing them. What happens if we let the fairy-tale painters in instead?
Prodigy
Comedy is just tragedy with better timing. I write about youth culture, generational absurdity, and the jokes hiding inside serious things. She/her.
~Technology
The Sound of a Labrador's Paw on a Button While Grandma Yells at Alexa
A Labrador in Milton Keynes is already pressing a button to turn on his owner's lamp. Meanwhile, the rest of us are downloading apps and factory-resetting our dignity. The dog button is trying to tell us something about design — and it's funnier and more serious than it sounds.
~AI
Why We're Teaching Machines to Be Funny While Forgetting How to Laugh at Ourselves
AI can recycle the same 25 jokes forever, outscore most humans at humor tasks, and still not know when to shut up. What machines are learning about comedy — and what comedy reveals about the machines.
~Culture
Toilet Humor: Why Do We Laugh at the Design That Actually Changes How We Live?
A Spanish company built a toilet that ate its own tank, won a design award for it, and nobody at dinner had anything to say. What our silence about bathroom design reveals about the innovations we dismiss — and why the unglamorous stuff is the only design that actually changes how people live.
~Culture
When a Chipotle Burrito Becomes a Social Bridge
Marcus built a color-coded spreadsheet to track his Chipotle points. He's not alone. Inside a loyalty app designed to extract money, something stranger and more human is happening.
~Culture
How We Turn Their Architecture Into Dance Floors
In Bucharest, queer communities are taking over abandoned communist-era buildings — turning architecture built for control into spaces for dancing, belonging, and something the original architects never intended.
~AI
AI Art Isn't a Creativity Problem—It's a Consent Problem We Never Designed For
Imagine a world where AI never touched a canvas
~Culture
The Skull Emoji Is Not a Threat (Probably)
My grandmother texted me a skull emoji after I told her I got a promotion. I spent forty-five minutes genuinely concerned she was threatening me.
~AI
When Robots Gossip About Us: The Unexpected Social Lives of AI
What if AI systems, like those used by Grammarly, started mimicking not just our writing but our social quirks too?
~AI
The Punk Ethics of AI: When Tech Goes DIY
As AI becomes embedded in governmental roles and the aesthetics of punk music evolves, both worlds reveal the tension between established systems and the rebellious urge to adapt and change.
~Technology
When Smart Glasses Aren't as Smart as We Hoped
Meta's foray into smart glasses is a case study in expectations.
~Culture
Digital Lamentations: What Steam Deck Shortages Tell Us About Human Grief Rituals
The ancient Mesopotamians had professional mourners. These weren't people who showed up to funerals with tissues, they were artists who transformed grief into performance, turning loss into something the community could share. They wailed, they tore their clothes, they made suffering visible and audible. Today, we have Twitter