Another AI assisted section of a longer work. This tech is great fun, as much as anything else. The Zapruder film is not cinema. It is liturgy. A 26-second Stations of the Cross, shot in Kodachrome, where the American century bleeds out in Dealey Plaza. Hughes might have called it a fresco of violence—brutal, unflinching, and framed by the architectural banality of Dallas, that city of glass and asphalt, where the myth of Camelot met the geometry of a sniper’s perch. The motorcade glides like a reliquary—Kennedy radiant, Jackie sculpted in pink. Then rupture. Frame 313: the head snaps, the crown splits, and the republic loses its sacrament. Zapruder’s lens, perched like a minor prophet on the grassy knoll, captures not just the death of a man but the implosion of a national narrative. The film is grainy, yes, but myth is always grainy. It resists clarity. It demands interpretation. Roy Foster might have seen in Jackie’s scramble across the trunk a gesture of tragic fide...
AI and I have been trying to make sense of what I think about the emerging political and legal landscape online. I'd thought of this as a lecture series building on somewhat vague ideas I had about what AI is, where it comes from, and how to use it for the purposes of merging Catholic thought with Georgism to escape liberalism. All quite soupy stuff. Here is one of our efforts. The Devil’s Boolean: How Modernity Turned Us Into Conspiracy Machines Modern democracies rest on a paradox. They promise freedom, rational control, and technological progress—yet deliver burnout, conspiracy, and deepening distrust. Tools meant to liberate us—social media, artificial intelligence, the market—now trap us in a relentless binary logic: success or failure, visibility or obscurity, control or collapse. That binary—what might be called a Boolean logic of the self —runs deeper than technology. It comes out of a Protestant-inflected culture that prizes achievement as a moral duty. As philosopher...