The slow internet, and other modest hopes
Three years into the AI-content flood, a small, deliberate counter-movement is taking shape. It looks less like protest than like gardening — and may be just as durable.
Recent writing
7 selected pieces · 2025 – 2026
Notes on a vanishing classroom
For a year, I sat in on a community-college writing class that quietly rebuilt itself around what students still wanted to learn to do alone.
The new geography of attention
Cities full of people doing knowledge work no longer feel like the same places. A field report from four neighborhoods where remote work has rearranged everything.
Inside the last hand-tuned search engine
A profile of the four-person team in Lyon still maintaining a directory of the web — by hand, on purpose, with no plans to scale.
Who taught the model to talk like that?
A reporting trip through the labor markets that train the systems we speak with daily — and the long tail of dialects already being smoothed into a single corporate voice.
Letter from a translator
On translating a novel from Spanish while the publisher quietly asked whether a model could do a first pass. A short essay on what is lost and not lost.
The kids who grew up with chatbots
A generation is reaching adolescence having always had a machine to talk to. Six families, four years of conversations, one set of careful conclusions.