Monthly Archives: September 2025

Addictions, Artificial Intelligence, Behavior, Essays, Gambling

THE LONELINESS BET

How microgambling apps turn male solitude into profit.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 30, 2025

The slot machine has left the casino. Now, with AI precision, it waits in your pocket—timing its ping to the hour of your despair.

The ghost light of the television washes the room, a half-forgotten Japanese baseball game murmuring from the corner. Alex sits in the dark with his phone held at the angle of prayer, the glass an altar, an oracle, a mirror. A ping sounds, small and precise, like a tuning fork struck in his palm. Next pitch outcome—strikeout or walk? Odds updated live. Numbers flicker like minnows. The bet slip breathes. He leans forward. The silence is not merely the absence of sound, but the pressure of who isn’t there—a vacuum he has carried for years.

The fridge hums behind him, its light flickering like a faulty heartbeat. On the counter, unopened mail piles beside a half-eaten sandwich. His last real conversation was three days ago, a polite nod to the barista who remembered his name. At work, Zoom windows open and close, Slack messages ping and vanish. He is present, but not seen.

He is one of the nearly one in three American men who report regular loneliness. For him, the sportsbook app isn’t entertainment but companionship, the only thing that demands his attention consistently. The ping of the odds is the sound of synthetic connection. Tonight he is wagering on something absurdly small: a late-night table tennis serve in an Eastern European hall he’ll never see. Yet the stakes feel immense. Last year in Oregon, bettors wagered more than $100 million on table tennis alone, according to reporting by The New York Times. This is the new American pastime—no stadium, no friends, just a restless man and a glowing rectangle. The algorithm has found a way to commodify the quiet desperation of a Sunday evening.

This isn’t an evolution in gambling; it’s a fundamental violation of the natural pace of risk. Pregame wagers once demanded patience: a pick, a wait, a final score. Microbetting abolishes the pause. It slices sport into thousands of coin-sized moments and resolves them in seconds. Behavioral scientists call this variable-ratio reinforcement: rewards arriving unpredictably, the most potent engine of compulsion. Slot machines use it. Now sports apps do too. The prefrontal cortex, which might otherwise whisper caution, has no time to speak. Tap. Resolve. Tap again.

The shift is from the calculated risk of an investment to the pure reflex of a hammer hitting a knee. Fifty-two percent of online bettors admit to “chasing a bet”—the desperate reflex to wager more after losing. One in five confess to losing more than they could afford. The harm isn’t accidental; it’s engineered. Rachel Volberg, who has studied problem gambling for four decades, told The New York Times that live betting is “much more akin to a slot machine rather than a lottery ticket.” It bypasses deliberation, keeping the brain trapped in a continuous, chemical loop.

And it isn’t marginal to the industry. Live wagers already account for more than half of all money bet on DraftKings and FanDuel. The slot machine has left the casino. It is now in the pocket, always on, always glowing.

The uncanny efficiency of the app lies not in predicting what Alex will bet, but when he will be weakest. After midnight. After a loss. After a deposit he swore not to make. DraftKings’ $134 million purchase of Simplebet, as reported by The New York Times, wasn’t just a business deal; it was the acquisition of a behavioral engine. These models are trained not only on the game but on the gambler himself—how quickly he scrolls, when he logs on, whether his bets swell after defeat, whether his activity spikes on holidays.

DraftKings has gone further, partnering with Amazon Web Services to refine its predictive architecture. At a recent engineering summit in Sofia, engineers demonstrated how generative AI and AWS tools could enhance the personalization of wagers. The same anticipatory logic that once powered retail nudges—“this user is hovering over a product, send a discount”—is now recalibrated to detect emotional vulnerability. In betting apps, the purchase is a wager, the discount is a boost, and the timing is everything: late at night, after a loss, when silence settles heaviest.

The AI’s profile of Alex is more precise than any friend’s. It has categorized his distress. Recent surveys suggest men in the lowest income brackets report loneliness at twice the rate of wealthier peers—a demographic vulnerability the models can detect and exploit through the timing and size of his wagers. Loneliness among men overall has risen by more than thirty percent in the past decade. An algorithm that watches his patterns doesn’t need to imagine his state of mind. It times it.

The profile is not a dashboard; it’s a lever. It logs his loneliest hours as his most profitable. It recognizes reckless bets after a gut-punch loss and surfaces fast, high-variance markets promising a chemical reset. Then comes the nudge: “Yankees boost—tap now.” “Next serve: Djokovic by ace?” To Alex it feels like telepathy. In truth, the system has mapped and monetized his despair. As one DraftKings data scientist explained at a gambling conference, in remarks quoted by The New York Times: “If we know a user likes to bet Yankees games late, we can send the right notification at the right time.” The right time, of course, is often the loneliest time.

Microbetting doesn’t just gamify sport—it gamifies emotion. The app doesn’t care if Alex is bored, anxious, or heartbroken. It cares only that those states correlate with taps. In this system, volatility is value. The more erratic the mood, the more frequent the bets. In this economy of emotional liquidity, feelings themselves become tradable assets. A moment of heartbreak, a restless midnight, a twinge of boredom—all can be harvested. Dating apps convert longing into swipes. Fitness trackers translate guilt into streaks. Robinhood gamified trading with digital confetti. Sportsbooks are simply the most brazen: they turn solitude into wagers, despair into deposits.

Beneath the betting slips lies a hunger for competence. Only forty-one percent of men say they can confide in someone about personal problems. Men without college degrees report far fewer close friendships. Many describe themselves as not meaningfully part of any group or community. In that vacuum, the interface whispers: You are decisive. You are strategic. You can still win. Microbetting offers a synthetic agency: decisiveness on demand, mastery without witness. For men whose traditional roles—provider, protector, head of household—have been destabilized by economic precarity or cultural drift, the app provides the illusion of restored mastery.

The sheer volume of micro-choices acts as a placebo for real-world complexity. Where a career or relationship requires slow, uncertain effort, the app offers instant scenarios of risk and resolution. The system is perfectly aligned with the defense mechanism of isolation: self-soothing through hyper-focus and instant gratification. The product packages loneliness as raw material.

The genius of the app is its disguise. It feels less like a gambling tool than an unjudging confidant, always awake, always responsive, oddly tender. Welcome back. Boost unlocked. You might like… A digital shadow that knows your rhythms better than any friend.

“The clients I see gamble in the shower,” says counselor Harry Levant. “They gamble in bed in the morning.” The app has colonized spaces once reserved for intimacy or solitude. Men and women report similar levels of loneliness overall, but men are far less likely to seek help. That gap makes them uniquely susceptible to a companion that demands nothing but money.

FanDuel actively recruits engineers with backgrounds in personalization, behavioral analytics, and predictive modeling—the same skills that fine-tuned retail shopping and streaming recommendations. There is no direct pipeline from Amazon’s hover-prediction teams to the sportsbooks, but the resemblance is unmistakable. What began as an effort to predict which blender you might buy has evolved into predicting which late-inning pitch you’ll gamble on when you’re most alone.

Some apps already track how hard you press the screen, how fast you scroll, how long you hesitate before tapping. These aren’t quirks—they’re signals. A slower scroll after midnight? That’s loneliness. A rapid tap after a loss? That’s desperation. The app doesn’t need to ask how you feel. It knows. What looks like care is in fact surveillance masquerading as intimacy.

For Alex, the spiral accelerates. Fifty. Then a hundred. Then two-fifty. No pause, no friction. Deposits smooth through in seconds. His body answers the staccato pace like it’s sprinting—breath shallow, fingers hot. Loss is eclipsed instantly by the next chance to be right. This is not a malfunction. It is maximum efficiency.

In Phoenix, Chaz Donati, a gambler profiled by The New York Times, panicked over a $158,000 bet on his hometown team and tried to counter-bet his way back with another $256,000. Hundreds of thousands vanished in a single night. After online sportsbooks launched, help-seeking searches for gambling addiction surged by sixty percent in some states. The pattern is unmistakable: the faster the bets, the faster the collapse. The app smooths the path, designed to be faster than his conscience.

In Vancouver, Andrew Pace, a professional bettor described by The New York Times, sits before three monitors, scanning Finnish hockey odds with surgical calm. He bets sparingly, surgically, explaining edges to his livestream audience. For him, the app is a tool, not a companion. He treats it as a craft: discipline, spreadsheets, controlled risk. But he is the exception. Most users aren’t chasing edges—they’re chasing feelings. The sportsbook knows the difference, and the business model depends on the latter.

Meanwhile, the sport itself is shifting. Leagues like the NBA and NFL own equity in the data firms—Sportradar, Genius Sports—that provide the feeds fueling microbets. They are not neutral observers; they are partners. The integrity threat is no longer fixing a whole game but corrupting micro-moments. Major League Baseball has already investigated pitchers for suspicious wagers tied to individual pitches. When financial value is assigned to the smallest, most uncertain unit of the game, every human error becomes suspect. The roar of the crowd is drowned out by the private vibration of phones.

Lawmakers have begun to stir. In New Jersey, legislators have proposed banning microbets outright, citing research from Australia showing nearly eighty percent of micro-bettors meet the criteria for problem gambling. Representative Paul Tonko has pushed for national standards: deposit caps, affordability checks, mandatory cool-off periods. “We regulate tobacco and alcohol,” he said. “Why not emotional risk?” Public health advocates echo him, warning of “a silent epidemic of digital compulsion.” The industry resists. Guardrails, they insist, would ruin the experience—which, of course, is the point.

The deeper question is not consumer choice; it is algorithmic ethics. Loneliness is already a recognized risk factor for cardiovascular disease and dementia. What happens when the same predictive infrastructure used to ship packages anticipatorily or recommend movies is redeployed to time despair? The failure to regulate is a failure to acknowledge that algorithmic harm can be as corrosive as any toxin.

At 2:03 a.m., Alex finally closes the app. The screen goes dark. The room exhales. The silence returns—not as peace, but as pressure. The television murmurs on, but the game is long over. What remains is residue: the phantom buzz of a notification that hasn’t arrived, the muscle memory of a finger poised to tap, the echo of odds that promised redemption.

He tells himself he’s done for the night. But the algorithm doesn’t need urgency. It waits. It knows his hours, his teams, the emotional dip that comes after a loss. It will tap him again, softly, precisely, when the silence grows too loud.

One in four young men will feel this same loneliness tomorrow night. The casino will be waiting in their pockets, dressed as a companion, coded for their cravings. Outside, dawn edges the blinds. Somewhere a stadium will fill tomorrow, a crowd roaring in unison. But in apartments like Alex’s, the roar has been replaced by a private buzz, a vibration against the skin. The app is patient. The silence is temporary. The house never sleeps.

Because in this new emotional economy, silence is never a stop. It is only a pause. And the algorithm waits for the ping.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Artificial Intelligence, Books, Literature, Masculinity, Writers

HOWL AND HUSH

Jack London and Ernest Hemingway meet in a speculative broadcast, sparring over wolves, wounds, and the fragile myths of survival.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 28, 2025

In a virtual cabin where the fire crackles on loop and wolves pace behind the glass, London and Hemingway return as spectral combatants. One howls for the wild, the other hushes in stoic silence. Between them, an AI referee calls the fight—and reveals why, in an age of comfort and therapy, we still burn for their myths of grit, grace, and flame.

The lights dim, the crowd hushes, and Howard McKay’s voice rises like a thunderclap from another century. He is no man, not anymore, but an aggregate conjured from the cadences of Cosell and Jim McKay, the echo of every broadcast booth where triumph and ruin became myth. His baritone pours into the virtual cabin like an anthem: “From the frozen Yukon to the burning Gulf Stream, from the howl of the wolf to the silence of the stoic, welcome to the Wild World of Men. Tonight: Jack London and Ernest Hemingway. Two titans of grit. One ring. No judges but history.”

The myths of rugged manhood were supposed to have thawed long ago. We live in an age of ergonomic chairs, curated therapy sessions, artisanal vulnerability. Masculinity is more likely to be measured in softness than in stoicism. And yet the old archetypes remain—grinning, wounded, frostbitten—appearing on gym walls, in startup manifestos, and in the quiet panic of men who don’t know whether to cry or conquer. We binge survival shows while sipping flat whites. We stock emergency kits in suburban basements. The question is not whether these myths are outdated, but why they still haunt us.

Jack London and Ernest Hemingway didn’t invent masculinity, but they branded its extremes. One offered the wolf, the sled, the primordial howl of instinct. The other offered silence, style, the code of the wounded stoic. Their ghosts don’t just linger in literature; they wander through the way men still imagine themselves when no one is watching. So tonight, in a cabin that never was, we summon them.

The cabin is an elaborate fiction. The fire crackles, though the sound is piped in, a looped recording of combustion. The frost on the window is a pixelated map of cold, jagged if you stare too long. Wolves pace beyond the glass, their movements looping like a highlight reel—menace calculated for metaphor. This is not the Yukon but its simulacrum: ordeal rendered uncanny, broadcast for ratings. McKay, too, belongs to this stagecraft. He is the voice of mediated truth, a referee presiding over existential dread as if it were the third round of a heavyweight bout.

London arrives first in the firelight, massive, broad-shouldered, his beard glistening as though it remembers brine. He smells of seal oil and smoke, authenticity made flesh. Opposite him sits Hemingway, compressed as a spring, scars arranged like punctuation, his flask gleaming like a ritual prop. His silences weigh more than his words. McKay spreads his hands like a referee introducing corners: “London in the red—frostbitten, fire-eyed. Hemingway in the blue—scarred, stoic, silent. Gentlemen, touch gloves.”

Civilization, London growls, is only veneer: banks, laws, manners, brittle as lake ice. “He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial,” he says of Buck, but it is himself he is describing. The Yukon stripped him bare and revealed survival as the only measure. Hemingway shakes his head and counters. Santiago remains his emblem: “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” Survival, he argues, is not enough. Without grace, it is savagery. London insists dignity freezes in snow. Hemingway replies that when the body fails, dignity is all that remains. One howls, the other whispers. McKay calls it like a split decision: London, Nietzsche’s Overman; Hemingway, the Stoic, enduring under pressure.

The fire cracks again, and they move to suffering. London’s voice rises with the memory of scurvy and starvation. “There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise.” Agony, he insists, is tuition—the price for truth. White Fang was “a silent fury who no torment could tame,” and so was he, gnawing bacon rinds until salt became torment, watching his gums bleed while his notebook filled with sketches of men and dogs broken by cold. Pain, he declares, is refinement.

Hemingway will not romanticize it. Fossalta remains his scar. He was nineteen, a mortar shell ripping the night, carrying a wounded man until his own legs gave out. “I thought about not screaming,” he says. That, to him, is suffering: not the ecstasy London names, but the composure that denies agony the satisfaction of spectacle. Santiago’s wasted hands, Harry Morgan’s quiet death—pain is humility. London exults in torment as crucible; Hemingway pares it to silence. McKay leans into the mic: “Suffering for London is capital, compounding into strength. For Hemingway, it’s currency, spent only with composure.”

Violence follows like a body blow. For London, it is honesty. The fang and the club, the law of the trail. “The Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept,” he reminds us, violence always waiting beneath the surface. He admired its clarity—whether in a sled dog’s fight or the brutal marketplace of scarcity. For Hemingway, violence is inevitable but sterile. The bull dies, the soldier bleeds, but mortality is the only victor. The bullfight—the faena—is ritualized tragedy, chaos given rules so futility can be endured. “One man alone ain’t got no bloody chance,” Harry Morgan mutters, and Hemingway nods. London insists that without violence, no test; without test, no truth. Hemingway counters that without style, violence is only noise.

Heroism, too, divides the ring. London points to Buck’s transformation into the Ghost Dog, to the pack’s submission. Heroism is external dominance, myth fulfilled. Hemingway counters with Santiago, who returned with bones. Heroism lies not in conquest but in fidelity to one’s own code, even when mocked by the world. London scoffs at futility; Hemingway scoffs at triumph that cheats. McKay narrates like a replay analyst: London’s hero as Ozymandias, monument of strength; Hemingway’s as Sisyphus, monument of effort. Both doomed, both enduring.

McKay breaks in with the cadence of a mid-bout analyst: “London, born in Oakland, forged in the Yukon. Fighting weight: one-ninety of raw instinct. Signature move: The Howl—unleashed when civilization cracks. Hemingway, born in Oak Park, baptized in war. Fighting weight: one-seventy-five of compressed silence. Signature move: The Shrug—delivered with a short sentence and a long stare. One man believes the test reveals the truth. The other believes the truth is how you carry the test. And somewhere in the middle, the rest of us are just trying to walk through the storm without losing our flame.”

Biography intrudes on myth. London, the socialist who exalted lone struggle, remains a paradox. His wolf-pack collectivism warped into rugged individualism. The Yukon’s price of entry was a thousand pounds of gear and a capacity for starvation—a harsh democracy of suffering. Hemingway, by contrast, constructed his trials in realms inaccessible to most men. His code demanded a form of leisure-class heroism—the freedom to travel to Pamplona, to chase big game, to transform emotional restraint into a portable lifestyle. London’s grit was born of necessity; Hemingway’s was an aesthetic choice, available to the wealthy. Even their sentences are stances: London’s gallop like sled dogs, breathless and raw; Hemingway’s stripped to the bone, words like punches, silences like cuts. His iceberg theory—seven-eighths submerged—offered immense literary power, but it bequeathed a social script of withholding. The silence that worked on the page became a crushing weight in the home. McKay, ever the showman, raises his arms: “Form is function! Brawn against compression! Howl against hush!”

Then, with the shameless flourish of any broadcast, comes the sponsor: “Tonight’s bout of the Wild World of Men is brought to you by Ironclad Whiskey—the only bourbon aged in barrels carved from frozen wolf dens and sealed with Hemingway’s regrets. Not for sipping, for surviving. With notes of gunpowder, pine smoke, and frostbitten resolve, it’s the drink of men who’ve stared down the void and asked it to dance. Whether you’re wrestling sled dogs or your own emotional repression, Ironclad goes down like a fist and finishes like a scar. Distilled for the man who doesn’t flinch.” The fire hisses as if in applause.

Flashbacks play like highlight reels. London chewing frozen bacon rinds, scribbling by the dim flare of tallow, every line of hunger an autobiography. Hemingway at Fossalta, nineteen, bleeding into dirt, whispering only to himself: don’t scream. Even the piped-in fire seems to know when to hold its breath.

Their legacies wander far beyond the cabin. Krakauer’s Chris McCandless chased London’s frozen dream but lacked his brutal competence. His death in a bus became the final footnote to To Build a Fire: will alone does not bargain with minus sixty. Hollywood staged The Revenant as ordeal packaged for awards. Reality shows manufacture hardship in neat arcs. Silicon Valley borrows their vocabulary—“grit,” “endurance,” “failing forward”—as if quarterly sprints were marlin battles or Yukon trails. These echoes are currency, but counterfeit.

McKay drops his voice into a near whisper. “But what of the men who don’t fit? The ones who cry without conquest, who break without burning, who survive by asking for help?” London stares into looped frost; Hemingway swirls his glass. Their silence is not absence but tension, the ghosts of men unable to imagine another myth.

The danger of their visions lingers. London’s wolf, applied carelessly, becomes cruelty mistaken for competence, capitalism as fang and claw. Hemingway’s stoic, misused, becomes toxic silence, men drowning in bottles or bullets. One myth denies compassion; the other denies expression. Both are powerful; both exact a cost.

And yet, McKay insists, both are still needed. London growls that the man who forgets the wolf perishes when the cold comes. Hemingway replies that the man who forgets dignity perishes even if he survives. The fire glows brighter, though its crackle is only a recording. London’s flame is a blast furnace, demanding constant fuel. Hemingway’s is a controlled burn, illuminating only if tended with restraint. Both flames are fragile, both exhausting.

The wolves fade to shadow. The storm eases. The fire loops, oblivious. McKay lowers his voice into elegy, his cadence a final sign-off: “Man is nothing, and yet man is flame. That flame may be survival or silence, howl or whisper. But it remains the work of a lifetime to tend.”

The cabin collapses into pixels. The wolves vanish. The storm subsides. The fire dies without ash. Only the coals of myth remain, glowing faintly. And somewhere—in a quiet room, in a frozen pass—another man wonders which flame to keep alive.

The myths don’t just shape men; they shape nations. They echo in campaign slogans, locker-room speeches, the quiet panic of fathers trying to teach strength without cruelty. Even machines, trained on our stories, inherit their contours. The algorithm learns to howl or to hush. And so the question remains—not just which flame to tend, but how to pass it on without burning the next hand that holds it.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Agriculture, Essays, Poetry, Technology

GRAMMAR OF THE HORIZON

On solar grazing, poetry, and the uneasy duet of instinct and code

The new pastoral hums with circuits and collars, but still remembers the old grammar of the sky.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 27, 2025

In the rolling hills of Ohio, a young ecological entrepreneur turns his family’s land into a dual harvest of wool and watts. With a degree in Agricultural Systems Management and a minor in English Literature, he brings both spreadsheets and stanzas to bear on a new pastoral experiment. Between Marlowe’s seductions and Raleigh’s refusals, he seeks a grammar for an age when every heartbeat becomes data.

The morning light does not fall evenly anymore. It is broken into grids, caught on angled panels of glass and silicon that rise like a second horizon above the meadow. Beneath them, the sheep wander in soft clusters, backs stippled with shadow and light. From above—say, from the drone humming a lazy ellipse in the brightening sky—they look like pixels scattered across a living screen. He inhales: dew-damp wool, mingled with the faint static crackle that comes when the panels shift and catch the sun.

He leans on the gate, looking out over land his grandfather once worked, sustaining both feed crops and the family flock. The crook still hangs by the barn door, but he does not use it. He is not a shepherd by inheritance but by design: a graduate of Ohio State University’s College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, where he majored in Agricultural Systems Management and minored in English Literature. His degree taught him precision—soil analysis, GIS mapping, solar integration—while the minor gave him metaphors, the long pastoral tradition, and a habit of scribbling poems in margins. He came home believing the land could sustain both kinds of literacy: the technical and the lyrical, the grid and the grammar.

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove…

The line arrives unbidden, carried across centuries but also across classrooms. He had first encountered it in an OSU literature seminar on the pastoral tradition, where Christopher Marlowe’s seduction was paired with Sir Walter Raleigh’s rebuttal. Now the poems returned like half-remembered songs, threading themselves into the solar fields as if testing the promises of his own venture. His grandfather had quoted Marlowe too, walking the lambing fields with a laugh. It was a poem of timeless spring, of pleasures without consequence. Yet here, the pleasures are measured in kilowatt-hours and kilobytes, every pulse reduced to a data point. He murmurs to himself: I used to read clouds. Now I read code.

At Ohio State, he had learned to read code as landscape: GIS layers of soil health, yield curves, stormwater runoff. He could map a watershed in pixels, trace the energy loss of a poorly angled panel. But in literature courses he had learned to read differently: clouds as symbols, swallows as omens, the way a line of verse could contain both beauty and warning. Together, they gave him a double vision: the spreadsheet and the stanza.

Sometimes he scribbles in a notebook tucked into his coat—lines about thunder, about the smell of lanolin on his hands, about the drone’s insistent, high pitch that reminds him of an oboe tuned to one eternal note. The habit came from his English courses, where professors pressed students to “find the image” that carries experience. He still tries, searching for the metaphor that might hold the cyan-green shadow of the panels, the faint electrical ache of the atmosphere—the realities the algorithms keep reducing.

The solar companies had arrived with promises as lavish as Marlowe’s shepherd: income streams, ecological balance, a harmony of energy and agriculture. The sheep proved ideal partners. They slipped easily among the panels, chewing down weeds that machines could not reach. Their manure fertilized the soil. Their bodies, in motion, cooled the panels with faint breezes. Wool and wattage—an improbable duet.

Across the U.S., more than 113,000 sheep grazed under solar panels in 2024, covering some 129,000 acres of co-located land. Solar grazing has quietly become the most widespread form of agrivoltaics, a hybrid system that now generates between eighteen and twenty-six gigawatts of power per acre each year. In the Midwest, the projects are most numerous; in the South, the acreage stretches widest. His own valley is just a modest link in this network, but the statistics make his pasture feel like a pixel in a vast screen.

But the harmony hums—a constant, low electrical purr—and the balance is an engineering problem. The panels are not silent mirrors; they are active machinery, micro-adjusting throughout the day with faint, metallic clicks, following the sun with the relentlessness of a machine-god. Walking beneath them, the light is wrong. It is no longer the full, golden spill of a western sun, but a fractured, cool cyan-green, changing the color of the grass and the look of the sheep. It feels like living inside a computer screen, where even the air seems filtered and slightly electric. The corners of the panels are sharp; the wiring is a hazard underfoot. The terrain demands constant calibration, as much for man as for machine.

Then came the collars, snug at the neck like halos of necessity. They measured heartbeats, temperatures, gait. Every movement streamed upward to servers in distant cities where algorithms modeled the flock’s health and the land’s yield. He adapted readily at first—it was the language he had studied. His grandfather’s crook leaned forgotten, while a drone now circled at his command.

He knew, too, that his collars were not unique. They were part of a wave: biometric halos increasingly used across solar grazing operations to track stress levels and movement, feeding predictive models that optimize both grass and grid. Research consortia at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory had turned his livelihood into data points in acronyms: PV-SMaRT, which studied stormwater and soil under arrays; InSPIRE, which explored pollinator habitats between rows. Even the American Solar Grazing Association listed him on a map of participants. To the researchers, the tablet in his hand is one more node in a national experiment.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields.

Raleigh’s reply feels sharper now than it ever did in books. Promises of eternal spring have always been checked by winter, and here too: the panels cast shadows that stunt grass. The sensors demand constant updates. What had been promised as endless harmony reveals its costs in the glare of maintenance schedules and corporate reports.

Then came the specific demand, the cold logic applied to instinct. The system recommends a grazing rotation: drive the flock north, away from the lush heart of the pasture. His instinct bristles. That grass is thick, ripe for feeding. The north corner is thin and brittle, still scarred from last year’s drought. But the model insists: moving them north will shade the panels more evenly, raising energy efficiency by three percent.

A shrill alert splits the air. Bramble’s collar flashes red. He kneels, palm pressed into her wool. She wriggles, playful. Alive, healthy.

“She’s fine,” he says. His thumb strokes the tight curl of wool at her neck, feeling the smooth warmth of health. He can see the alertness in her dark eye, the steady chew of her jaw.

A technician pulls up in a white truck, logo bright against the dust. She is young, brisk, tablet in hand. “The model says isolate,” she replies.

“For what? She’s eating. Breathing. Look at her. It’s a false positive, a glitch.”

She shifts her weight, avoiding his eyes. “Maybe. But my quota isn’t instinct. It’s compliance with the predictive model.” Her voice is steady, reciting a corporate catechism. “The system flagged a micro-spike in cortisol four hours ago. It is projecting a 60 percent chance of a mild digestive issue within seventy-two hours, which would result in a four-dollar loss of weight-gain efficiency. If we wait for the symptom, we’ve already lost. We have to treat the potentiality.”

Her thumb hovers, then taps. Bramble is loaded into the truck. The cage door rattles shut. For a split second, before turning away, the technician’s eyes flick to the lamb, then to him. A flicker of softness and shame passes, quickly extinguished, as if she too felt the weight of this small, perfectly calculated betrayal. It was the look of a person overruled by their own training. He watches the flock’s heads turn, uneasy, sensing the absence not of a sick one, but of a chosen one, a data-outlier removed for the good of the grid. He feels a sudden, choking silence—the kind that follows an argument you have been overruled on, where the logic is cold and flawless, and utterly wrong.

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten…

Raleigh’s nymph seems to speak through her: no gesture lasts, no promise holds. He stands silent, jaw tight, remembering storms when he and his grandfather dragged lambs by hand into the kitchen, towels by the stove, breathing warmth back into shivering bodies. No algorithm advised them. Only instinct. Only mercy.

At night the panels fold downward, tilting like tired eyelids. The meadow darkens, sheep huddled in faint constellations. He sits with the tablet on his knees, stars overhead. The gains are undeniable. The sensors save lives: fevers caught before symptoms show, storms predicted before clouds gather. Wool weights are steadier, markets smoother. His livelihood more secure.

And yet what slips away is harder to name. The art of watching flocks as one reads weather: not in charts but in tremors of grass, in the hush before thunder. The intimacy of guessing wrong and carrying the consequence. The knowledge that tending is not optimizing but risking, losing, mourning. He thinks of writing this down, as a kind of witness. A sentence about what can’t be graphed. A metaphor to stand where data erases.

Scrolling, he notices a new tab on the dashboard: Health Markets. He taps. The page blossoms into charts and data points. The sheep’s biometric data is not only driving grazing maps and solar cooling forecasts. It is aggregated, anonymized, and then sold—a steady stream of animal heartbeats and gut flora readings transmuted into predictive models, underwriting the risk for major insurers and wellness clinics around the globe. A hedge fund in Singapore uses livestock stress data to predict grain futures. A health-tech startup in California folds ovine heart rates into wellness metrics for anxious human clients. He is not merely selling wool and power; he is selling a commerce in pulse itself.

We are the dreamers of the dust,
Our bleat is brief, our tread is trust.

Hardy had once put the sheep’s lament into verse, their bleats already elegies. He thinks of that now: the flock’s trusting tread turned into actuarial tables, their brief lives underwriting strangers’ futures. What Hardy wrote as pastoral tragedy has here become economic infrastructure.

His flock’s lives, down to the subtle tremor of an anxious breath, are now actuarial futures, underwriting the mortgages and investment strategies of strangers in distant cities. The vertigo is almost physical—his duty of care, his responsibility to the flock, has been financially weaponized. The simple relationship between shepherd and beast is now an extractive contract at the cellular level. He sits there, staring at the screen, understanding that he and the sheep are, in the market’s eyes, exactly the same: nodes of premium data, harvested until the signal drops out.

Marlowe’s voice whispers again of eternal spring, of belts of straw and ivy buds. Raleigh’s nymph interrupts, steady in her refusal:

All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy love.

Between these two traditions—seduction and correction—he feels suspended.

He wonders if the sheep, their pulses pinging skyward, know they are data points in a network. Perhaps ignorance is a form of grace. “The lamb doesn’t know it’s part of a system,” he says aloud. “Maybe that’s mercy.”

And perhaps, he thinks, writing is another form of mercy: to keep describing, in words, what the system reduces to numbers.

A rumble of thunder reaches across the horizon. He glances up, reading it not as data but as sign. He does not check the forecast. He trusts the old grammar of the sky.

At the gate, he logs the day’s note: Grazing complete. Lamb born. His thumb hovers. Then he types: Named her Pixel.

The word glows on-screen, half-code, half-creature. He pockets the tablet, presses his palm into a woolly flank, and walks on, singing. He holds the tablet’s cold glass against the animal’s warmth—a final, stubborn duality. His song is a promise: that even when the field is run by the Algorithm, the Shepherd’s Voice remains.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Aging, Essays, Healthcare, Technology

TENDER GEOMETRY

How a Texas robot named Apollo became a meditation on dignity, dependence, and the future of care.

This essay is inspired by an episode of the WSJ Bold Names podcast (September 26, 2025), in which Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins speak with Jeff Cardenas, CEO of Apptronik. While the podcast traces Apollo’s business and technical promise, this meditation follows the deeper question at the heart of humanoid robotics: what does it mean to delegate dignity itself?

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 26, 2025

The robot stands motionless in a bright Austin lab, catching the fluorescence the way bone catches light in an X-ray—white, clinical, unblinking. Human-height, five foot eight, a little more than a hundred and fifty pounds, all clean lines and exposed joints. What matters is not the size. What matters is the task.

An engineer wheels over a geriatric training mannequin—slack limbs, paper skin, the posture of someone who has spent too many days watching the ceiling. With a gesture the engineer has practiced until it feels like superstition, he cues the robot forward.

Apollo bends.

The motors don’t roar; they murmur, like a refrigerator. A camera blinks; a wrist pivots. Aluminum fingers spread, hesitate, then—lightly, so lightly—close around the mannequin’s forearm. The lift is almost slow enough to be reverent. Apollo steadies the spine, tips the chin, makes a shelf of its palm for the tremor the mannequin doesn’t have but real people do. This is not warehouse choreography—no pallets, no conveyor belts. This is rehearsal for something harder: the geometry of tenderness.

If the mannequin stays upright, the room exhales. If Apollo’s grasp has that elusive quality—control without clench—there’s a hush you wouldn’t expect in a lab. The hush is not triumph. It is reckoning: the movement from factory floor to bedside, from productivity to intimacy, from the public square to the room where the curtains are drawn and a person is trying, stubbornly, not to be embarrassed.

Apptronik calls this horizon “assistive care.” The phrase is both clinical and audacious. It’s the third act in a rollout that starts in logistics, passes through healthcare, and ends—if it ever ends—at the bedroom door. You do not get to a sentence like that by accident. You get there because someone keeps repeating the same word until it stops sounding sentimental and starts sounding like strategy: dignity.

Jeff Cardenas is the one who says it most. He moves quickly when he talks, as if there are only so many breaths before the demo window closes, but the word slows him. Dignity. He says it with the persistence of an engineer and the stubbornness of a grandson. Both of his grandfathers were war heroes, the kind of men who could tie a rope with their eyes closed and a hand in a sling. For years they didn’t need anyone. Then, in their final seasons, they needed everyone. The bathroom became a negotiation. A shirt, an adversary. “To watch proud men forced into total dependency,” he says, “was to watch their dignity collapse.”

A robot, he thinks, can give some of that back. No sigh at 3 a.m. No opinion about the smell of a body that has been ill for too long. No making a nurse late for the next room. The machine has no ego. It does not collect small resentments. It will never tell a friend over coffee what it had to do for you. If dignity is partly autonomy, the argument goes, then autonomy might be partly engineered.

There is, of course, a domestic irony humming in the background. The week Cardenas was scheduled to sit for an interview about a future of household humanoids, a human arrived in his own household ahead of schedule: a baby girl. Two creations, two needs. One cries, one hums. One exhausts you into sleeplessness; the other promises to be tireless so you can rest. Perhaps that tension—between what we make and who we make—is the essay we keep writing in every age. It is, at minimum, the ethical prompt for the engineering to follow.

In the lab, empathy is equipment. Apollo’s body is a lattice of proprietary actuators—the muscles—and a tangle of sensors—the nerves. Cameras for eyes, force feedback in the hands, gyros whispering balance, accelerometers keeping score of every tilt. The old robots were position robots: go here, stop there, open, close, repeat until someone hit the red button. Apollo lives in a different grammar. It isn’t memorizing a path through space; it’s listening, constantly, to the body it carries and the moment it enters. It can’t afford to be brittle. Brittleness drops the cup. And the patient.

But muscle and nerve require a brain, and for that Apptronik has made a pragmatic peace with the present: Google DeepMind is the partner for the mind. A decade ago, “humanoid” was a dirty word in Mountain View—too soon, too much. Now the bet is that a robot shaped like us can learn from us, not only in principle but in practice. Generative AI, so adept at turning words into words and images into images, now tries to learn movement by watching. Show it a person steadying a frail arm. Show it again. Give it the perspective of a sensor array; let it taste gravity through a gyroscope. The hope is that the skill transfers. The hope is that the world’s largest training set—human life—can be translated into action without scripts.

This is where the prose threatens to float away on its own optimism, and where Apptronik pulls it back with a price. Less than a luxury car, they say. Under $50,000, once the supply chain exists. They like first principles—aluminum is cheap, and there are only a few hundred dollars of it in the frame. Batteries have ridden down the cost curve on the back of cars; motors rode it down on the back of drones. The math is meant to short-circuit disbelief: compassion at scale is not only possible; it may be affordable.

Not today. Today, Apollo earns its keep in the places compassion is an accounting line: warehouses and factories. The partners—GXO, Mercedes—sound like waypoints on the long gray bridge to the bedside. If the robot can move boxes without breaking a wrist, maybe it can later move a human without breaking trust. The lab keeps its metaphors comforting: a pianist running scales before attempting the nocturne. Still, the nocturne is the point.

What changes when the machine crosses a threshold and the space smells like hand soap and evening soup? Warehouse floors are taped and square; homes are not. Homes are improvisations of furniture and mood and politics. The job shifts from lifting to witnessing. A perfect employee becomes a perfect observer. Cameras are not “eyes” in a home; they are records. To invite a machine into a room is to invite a log of the room. The promise of dignity—the mercy of not asking another person to do what shames you—meets the chill of being watched perfectly.

“Trust is the long-term battle,” Cardenas says, not as a slogan but like someone naming the boss level in a game with only one life. Companies have slogans about privacy. People have rules: who gets a key, who knows where the blanket is. Does a robot get a key? Does it remember where you hide the letter from the old friend? The engineers will answer, rightly, that these are solvable problems—air-gapped systems, on-device processing, audit logs. The heart will answer, not wrongly, that solvable is not the same as solved.

Then there is the bigger shadow. Cardenas calls humanoid robotics “the space race of our time,” and the analogy is less breathless than it sounds. Space wasn’t about stars; it was about order. The Moon was a stage for policy. In this script the rocket is a humanoid—replicable labor, general-purpose motion—and the nation that deploys a million of them first rewrites the math of productivity. China has poured capital into robotics; some of its companies share data and designs in a way U.S. rivals—each a separate species in a crowded ecosystem—do not. One country is trying to build a forest; the other, a bouquet. The metaphor is unfair and therefore, in the compressed logic of arguments, persuasive.

He reduces it to a line that is either obvious or terrifying. What is an economy? Productivity per person. Change the number of productive units and you change the economy. If a robot is, in practice, a unit, it will be counted. That doesn’t make it a citizen. It makes it a denominator. And once it’s in the denominator, it is in the policy.

This is the point where the skeptic clears his throat. We have heard this promise before—in the eighties, the nineties, the 2000s. We have seen Optimus and its cousins, and the men who owned them. We know the edited video, the cropped wire, the demo that never leaves the demo. We know how stubborn carpets can be and how doors, innocent as they seem, have a way of humiliating machines.

The lab knows this better than anyone. On the third lift of the morning, Apollo’s wrist overshoots with a faint metallic snap, the servo stuttering as it corrects. The mannequin’s elbow jerks, too quick, and an engineer’s breath catches in the silence. A tiny tweak. Again. “Yes,” someone says, almost to avoid saying “please.” Again.

What keeps the room honest is not the demo. It’s the memory you carry into it. Everyone has one: a grandmother who insisted she didn’t need help until she slid to the kitchen floor and refused to call it a fall; a father who couldn’t stand the indignity of a hand on his waistband; the friend who became a quiet inventory of what he could no longer do alone. The argument for a robot at the bedside lives in those rooms—in the hour when help is heavy and kindness is too human to be invisible.

But dignity is a duet word. It means independence. It also means being treated like a person. A perfect lift that leaves you feeling handled may be less dignified than an imperfect lift performed by a nurse who knows your dog’s name and laughs at your old jokes. Some people will choose privacy over presence every time. Others want the tremor in the human hand because it’s a sign that someone is afraid to hurt them. There is a universe of ethics in that tremor.

The money is not bashful about picking a side. Investors like markets that look like graphs and revolutions that can be amortized—unlike a nurse’s memory of the patient who loved a certain song, which lingers, resists, refuses to be tallied. If a robot can deliver the “last great service”—to borrow a phrase from a theologian who wasn’t thinking of robots—it will attract capital because the service can be repeated without running out of love, patience, or hours. The price point matters not only because it makes the machine seem plausible in a catalog but because it promises a shift in who gets help. A family that cannot afford round-the-clock care might afford a tireless assistant for the night shift. The machine will not call in sick. It will not gossip. It will not quit. It will, of course, fail, and those failures will be as intimate as its successes.

There are imaginable safeguards. A local brain that forgets what it doesn’t need to know. A green light you can see when the camera is on. Clear policies about where data goes and who can ask for it and how long it lives. An emergency override you can use without being a systems administrator at three in the morning. None of these will quiet the unease entirely. Unease is the tax we pay for bringing a new witness into the house.

And yet—watch closely—the room keeps coaching the robot toward a kind of grace. Engineers insist this isn’t poetry; it’s control theory. They talk about torque and closed loops and compliance control, about the way a hand can be strong by being soft. But if you mute the jargon, you hear something else: a search for a tempo that reads as care. The difference between a shove and a support is partly physics and partly music. A breath between actions signals attention. A tiny pause at the top of the lift says: I am with you. Apollo cannot mean that. But it can perform it. When it does, the engineers get quiet in the way people do in chapels and concert halls, the secular places where we admit that precision can pass for grace and that grace is, occasionally, a kind of precision.

There is an old superstition in technology: every new machine arrives with a mirror for the person who fears it most. The mirror in this lab shows two figures. In the first: a patient who would rather accept the cold touch of aluminum than the pity of a stranger. In the second: a nurse who knows that skill is not love but that love, in her line of work, often sounds like skill. The mirror does not choose. It simply refuses to lie.

The machine will steady a trembling arm, and we will learn a new word for the mix of gratitude and suspicion that touches the back of the neck when help arrives without a heartbeat. It is the geometry of tenderness, rendered in aluminum. A question with hands.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Arts & Literature, Essays, Literature, Poetry, Profiles

DO I WAKE OR SLEEP?

A Speculative Morning with Keats

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 25, 2025

“As if I were dissolving.” — John Keats, letter to his brother George, April 1819

In Hampstead, on a spring morning in 1819, John Keats sat beneath a plum tree and wrote “Ode to a Nightingale.” This is how the lines may have come to him—half vision, half dissolution.

Brown clatters a cup somewhere inside. The sound is an unwelcome punctuation mark on the morning’s silence, a reminder of the relentless normalcy of domestic life. The room has felt too narrow for breath, not just for my ailing lungs, but for the grief that keeps the curtains drawn. Barely six months since my brother Tom slipped away, the house still smells faintly of smoke, paper, and the sweet-sick residue of medicine. His absence hangs in the air. That weight has driven me to the grass, away from the claustrophobia of the sickroom.

The garden receives me. The grass is damp, pressing cool blades into my palms. Light filters through the plum tree leaves, breaking into fragments on the soil. The blossoms drift like a quiet snowfall, powdering my sleeve with pale dust as if testing whether the body still belongs to earth. Beyond the hedge, a cart rattles, a dog barks, a bell tolls faintly from Hampstead. Life continues its tedious bookkeeping. But here, there is only the hush before song.

Brown’s footsteps echo faintly, a rhythm too human for the stillness I crave. Even his voice, when it rises in greeting, feels like a tether to the mundane. I do not resent him; I envy his ease with the world. He pours tea, hums to himself, and carries on. I am fixed under the plum tree, waiting for something less ordinary to speak.

And then the nightingale begins. The sound is not a tune but a force: poured, unbroken, radically unselfconscious. It arrives without the stutter of human intention, as if the bird is nothing but the channel of its own liquid note. The song alters the air. I feel it in the chest before I write a word. I steady my paper, and the ink pools like shadow, metallic and alive. It smells of iron and inevitability. Each stroke is a pulse, each word a breath I cannot take.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

The line comes of its own accord. The ache is not complaint but aperture. Pain is the friction that opens the door. Numbness clears the chatter of reason. The poem begins in crisis, a shock both physical and metaphysical.

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

Lethe does not erase; it suspends. In its waters, memory floats unmoored, waiting for a name. Tom is gone, ferried by the same current. His silence hovers in the ink. Yet the river here is not despair but narcotic kindness, a place where debts and illness dissolve into rhythm. I do not summon the myth; it summons me. Byron writes like a storm—quick, unrelenting. I write like a wound: slow, deliberate, pulsing. And yet today the hand runs faster, driven by the bird’s current.

’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—

I do not covet. I am saturated. The bird’s happiness is no possession but a weather spilling into the morning. I am not resentful; I am simply overflowed. The pen scratches faster when I abandon self-pity and admit the sheer fact of joy.

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot

The Dryad arrives without strain. Myth is not invention but recognition. The bird’s song is timeless, deserving of a classical name.

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

Ease—I do not have it. My lungs constrict, my chest rasps, nights punctuated by the cough that writes mortality into every breath. Yet I put the phrase down because the bird teaches it. A line must do what it says: open, breathe, pour.

The song intoxicates more than wine. My lips are dry, yet the body reels as though stained purple at the mouth.

O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,

The cellar rises: cool, stony, damp. This is no ornament but a transcription of sensation.

Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!

I have never seen Provence, but the imagination persuades me otherwise. The song conjures the vineyard. These sensations are not decoration; they are human joy remembered in the body.

O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

The beaker is not a vessel but the bird itself, brimming with myth. Hippocrene flows because the song requires its name.

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;

To drink is to be marked. The mouth is stained because it has been altered. Poetry demands transformation; ecstasy must leave a trace.

But intoxication fades. What remains is grief.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The bird is blessed in its ignorance. It does not know poverty. It does not know longing. It does not know the ache of an empty chair.

Tom once sat beneath this tree, sketching the shape of a bird in flight. He said silence was the soul’s canvas. Now that silence is heavier, less blank, more bruised. His face—thin as paper—rises when I write “youth grows pale.” The ode becomes his memorial as much as mine.

The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

The line steadies itself on blunt fact. Tom. Debt. The cough. No flourish can soften them.

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

He is there again, spectre-thin, his breath shallow. The cadence is the only mercy.

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,

Thought itself betrays when it offers no hope forward. To write is to wrestle despair into cadence.

I call for wings—not Bacchus’s painted team but the invisible kind I know.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

Wine is a lie. Fancy, too. Only poesy can lift.

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

The brain resists, heavy, skeptical. Poesy ignores resistance. The moment I write “Away!” I am gone.

Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

Daylight floods Hampstead, yet the moon rises on the page. The imagination enthrones her, and that suffices.

Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,

Contradiction is permitted. This is Negative Capability as I once named it: to remain “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” The ode does not solve; it dwells.

Death arrives then, companionable, not hostile.

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

“Rich”—the word startles, but I keep it. Death here is plenitude, not theft.

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!

The bird pours, my ribs echo. Death feels like completion.

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Yet honesty must break the dream: if I am earth, I cannot hear. Even rapture admits silence.

The song itself, though, is older than me, older than kings.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tramp thee down;

Mortality is mine, not yours. Your song belongs to recurrence.

The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Emperors and clowns alike have bent their ears. Beauty makes no distinction.

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

The “perhaps” is everything. Certainty would bruise compassion.

I think, too, of Fanny Brawne. Her presence lingers behind the lines, as urgent as my cough. She is near, but a partition stands—of health, of propriety, of fate itself. To love her is to ache for what cannot be promised. The bird’s song is boundless, but my breath is measured. Desire sharpens sorrow into necessity.

The garden dissolves. Casements open in the skull.

Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,

The peril saves the vision from cloying. A blossom falls on my sleeve like ash from a cooling fire.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

One word tolls, and the spell breaks.

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.

I do not scold the Fancy. I thank it. Its deception is mercy.

The music vanishes. Not fading, but gone.

Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

I stop. I do not answer. The question is the ode’s truest symmetry.

The ink is still damp, smelling of iron. I glance back at the start, weighing first heat against last stillness.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains… Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

Between these poles lies a morning: a poet beneath a plum tree, a body already failing, a bird whose song endures.

I think of what I wrote not long ago—that the world is a vale of Soul-making. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? Suffering is the furnace, imagination the hammer. The ode is not escape from the furnace but evidence of the forging itself.

Perhaps a widow will read this, her fingers trembling on the page. Or a child, too young to name sorrow, will feel something loosen in the chest. Or a soldier, resting between battles, will find a measure of stillness in the lines. Beauty is not ornament but survival. If the poem steadies even one breath, it has earned its place among the leaves.

Brown steps out, squinting in the morning light. I gather the pages, careful as if any breeze could undo the morning. I hand him the sheaf and say what is exact: “I have been writing.”

He will tell this story later and say I wrote under the plum tree in one morning, which is true in the way truth sometimes fits a simple sentence. I go back inside. The cough finds me at the foot of the stair; it always does. But the air in my chest is changed by the shape the morning carved in it. The bird sang, and I answered. Whether I wake or sleep, the song remains.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Art, Arts & Literature, Essays, Poetry, Profiles

SILENCE AFTER THE BELL

Bashō’s narrow road, re-imagined in ink and light

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 24, 2025

In the spring of 1689, Matsuo Bashō set out from Edo with his inkstone and his disciple, walking north through Japan’s interior. This essay imagines the painter Ogata Kōrin at his side, brush catching what haiku left unsaid: the lantern’s glow, a fox’s mischief, the silence after sound.

The morning I left Edo, the sky was thick with petals. Cherry blossoms fell in sudden gusts, scattering across canals and clinging to the backs of merchants. Someone in the crowd said my name. “Bashō—the man of stillness.” The words felt like a shroud. Stillness was not peace. Stillness was suffocation.

I carried only a robe, a small pack, and my inkstone. I gave no notice, offered no farewell. A poet should know the difference between an entrance and an exit, and Edo was drowning in entrances—recitations in smoky salons, verses pinned to pillars, applause echoing in courtyards. To slip away silently was my only true poem.

Sora, my disciple, waited by the gate, his journal tied at his side. Beside him stood Ogata Kōrin, carrying brushes wrapped in cloth, a small box of pigments, and sheets of fine paper. He was famed for painting bold pines and cranes against gold, but he wanted to walk with us, to see if paint could keep pace with words.

“You walk for silence,” he said as we stepped into the road.

“And you?” I asked.

“I will paint the sound.”

A crow on a bare branch—
autumn evening.

Walking unstitched illusions. You cannot hurry rain. You cannot plead with a mountain. Each step was a reminder of smallness.

Oku—the interior—was more than geography. It was the hidden chamber within things. To walk north into deep country was to step into the interior of myself.

The road gave humility: a thin robe against spring wind, an empty belly by sundown, blistered feet in straw sandals. Hunger was not a lack but a space for the world to fill. Only when stripped of comfort could I hear the world breathe.

By the second month, rains thickened. Each evening Sora dried our sandals by the inn’s hearth, though by morning they were heavy again.

At a mountain temple, a monk struck the great bell. The sound swelled, then emptied into air.

“Not the ringing,” he whispered, “the silence after—that is the true temple.”

Kōrin ground his ink and left behind a circle fading into white paper. I looked at it and felt the hush expand. His first gift of the journey.

Pine shadow—
the road bends
to meet it.

Summer pressed down like a hand. Cicadas shrieked in the trees, their chorus burning itself away. At a roadside inn, a farmer’s wife handed me a bowl of barley and salt.

“Why walk in this heat?” she asked.

“To see what words cannot hold,” I said. She laughed, shaking her head.

That night, I listened to the cicadas outside the window. Kōrin painted their wings in silver strokes. Sora struggled to describe them, blotting his brush, sighing. Not every moment can be pinned to the page.

One afternoon, a girl chased dragonflies, sleeves spread like wings. She caught none, but her laughter rang sharper than capture. Kōrin caught her mid-flight in vermilion. He pressed the paper into Sora’s hands. “If you cannot hold it with words,” he said, “let color remind you.”

We reached Matsushima, where pine-covered islets scattered like jewels across the bay. Some places do not need words. Kōrin’s blues and greens glowed even at dusk.

That night, fireflies pressed against the paper walls of our hut, their glow brighter than the lamp. I set down my brush. Some nights call for silence more than lines.

Later, in a fishing village, I collapsed with fever. A fisherman’s wife placed cloths on my brow and whispered prayers to the sea.

When I woke, Kōrin held out a small painting of a lantern’s glow against dark waves. The flame was steadier than I had felt in days.

Lantern flickers—
the sea’s hush louder
than my pulse.

By August, the barley fields had turned gold. The harvest moon rose red above the stubble. Villagers poured sake and sang. A boy ran over with a cup. “Drink, master!”

“The moon is already enough,” I said.

Snow still lingered in the high passes. The mountain does not flatter. It does not care if a man is poet or beggar. It accepts only attention.

Winter gust—
even the inkstone
holds the wind.

Crossing a frozen river, I slipped. A peasant caught my arm. “Careful, master. The ice breaks without warning.”

“So does the self,” I said.

Even in silence, the self lingered like a shadow. I imagined my words drifting northward, reaching readers yet unborn. But the further I walked, the thinner that dream became. What immortality is there in syllables, when rivers change their course and mountains crumble?

In Edo, applause had filled the air like thunder. On the road, there was only silence. Silence wounds, but it also heals.

The answer came not in thunder but in a sparrow’s wing. Write not to endure, but to attend. Not for tomorrow, but for now.

Near a riverbank, a boy approached with a scroll of verses. “Master, how do I make my poems last?”

“Write what you see,” I said. “Then write what you feel when you see it. Then tear it up and walk.”

The boy bowed. Kōrin added, softly: “Or paint the emptiness left behind.”

River mist—
the boy’s scroll
left unopened.

In the mountains I met a man from the north whose dialect I could not follow. He pointed to the sky, then to the river, then to his chest. We shared tea in silence. I realized then that language is not the vessel, but the gesture. Poetry lives in the space between.

One morning, I watched a fox dart through a field, a rice ball clutched in its mouth. The farmer cursed, but I laughed. Even hunger has mischief. Kōrin’s brush caught the moment in quick ink.

Fox in the field—
the rice ball warmer
than the sun.

Toward the end of our walk, Sora counted the ri that remained. “Two thousand and more behind us,” he said. His journal pages were full of weather, distances, small observations.

“I counted shadows,” I told him. “I counted pauses.”

Kōrin smiled. “I painted both.”

At last, beneath a cedar, I placed the inkstone on my lap and listened. Snow weighed heavy on the branches. The air was sharp with winter. The wind moved through ridges and needles and into the hollow of the stone. For a moment it seemed the ink itself stirred.

I wrote one last haiku, not as conclusion but as surrender. The road has no end. Only pauses where breath gathers.

Wind in the cedar—
the inkstone deepens
into silence.

When these fragments later formed Oku no Hosomichi, I wondered what I had left behind. Not a record of steps, but a trace of listening. The form belonged not to me but to the rhythm of walking.

Kōrin returned to Edo with his scrolls. I with my scattered lines. Yet three small works stayed with me: the fading bell, the glowing lantern, the fox with his rice ball. They were his haiku in color, brief offerings to impermanence.

If others take their own narrow roads, let them not follow our footsteps but their own shadows. The road is never the same twice. Neither traveler nor mountain remains unchanged.

Perhaps one day, a traveler will walk with a pen of light, or a scroll made of glass. They will pause beneath a cedar, not knowing my name, not knowing Kōrin’s brush, but feeling the same hush. The road will whisper to them, as it did to us. And they will listen—not to the words, nor the colors, but to the breath between.

Digital ink—
the silence still.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Artificial Reality, Essays, Healthcare, Medicine, Technology

REFRACTED LIGHT

On Presence Without Touch, and the Future of American Healthcare

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 23, 2025

Angela had delayed this moment for months, but her body no longer allowed delay. The cramps had worsened, the weight loss grown alarming, the exhaustion pressed down like gravity. She parked between a Dollar Tree and a vape shop, the August sun glazing the asphalt where weeds pushed through cracks and carts drifted like forgotten ships. For a long moment she stayed behind the wheel, staring at the storefront. The faint outline of an old Payless sign still clung to the stucco, ghostly letters half-scraped away. In its place, glowing faintly in turquoise, were two words: Diagnostic Pod.

What had finally broken her was the memory of Dr. Evans, her old primary-care physician, patting her hand and saying, “Stress, Angela. It’s just stress.” His exam had lasted three minutes, punctuated by a buzzing pager and a rushed exit. That had been two years ago. Now, in the face of what felt like a body in revolt, the antiseptic pod seemed less like a last resort than the only reliable option. She stepped out of her car, pulling on the familiar mask of composure that had carried her through classrooms and staff meetings.

The doors slid open with a hiss. The space was dim, quiet, unnervingly antiseptic. Ten glowing capsules lined the floor, each shaped like a half-egg with a seam for a door. They hummed softly, more like appliances than instruments of medicine. A digital fish tank flickered on one wall, its coral reef looping every twenty minutes. The air smelled of synthetic lavender layered over bleach, reassurance by way of chemistry.

A voice, blue and bodiless, asked for her universal health card. She slid the plastic into the slot, watched the green light pulse, and felt the door of Pod 7 unlock with a sigh. The chair inside was gray vinyl, cool against her palms. A headset rested on the arm, waiting. She lowered herself carefully, fitted the goggles over her face, and the world dissolved into a meadow. Grass bent in a wind she could not feel; a bird flitted at the edge of her vision. The scan began—silent, invisible, a non-touching touch that somehow felt more invasive than a stethoscope.

Within minutes, the verdict arrived: an eighty-three-per-cent probability of Crohn’s disease. Biologics recommended, prognosis guarded. The voice that delivered it was calm, as if announcing a boarding group. Angela exhaled, the sound a faint gust in the sealed pod, and pressed her hands into her lap. Then the meadow shifted. Across from her appeared a woman in a white coat, rendered in startling fidelity. Her expression was sympathetic, her gestures precise. She spoke with warmth, as though she were really there. Angela tried to listen, but part of her mind wandered to the strangeness of it all. Was she speaking to a machine? Was someone behind the light, or was the figure entirely synthetic?

The hologram nodded, paused, answered each question with patience. Angela asked about travel, about meals with colleagues, about explaining illness to her students. Every answer was careful and clear. For the first time in years she felt she had been given time—thirty uninterrupted minutes, more than any doctor had ever offered. And yet, as the figure folded her hands and dissolved into pixels, the uncertainty remained. Who, if anyone, had just been in the room with her?

The pods had not appeared all at once. Their origin story was familiar: crisis, collapse, the promise of technological salvation. In the late 2020s, rural hospitals closed at an unprecedented pace. Insurers staggered under costs, and bipartisan outrage built in Congress. Emergency rooms overflowed while millions delayed care. A coalition of tech firms and health systems pitched a moonshot: retrofit America’s empty retail landscape with portable diagnostic pods, modular units that could be installed in days.

In one Ohio town, the last community hospital shuttered in 2029. A month later, a pod opened in the hollowed husk of a Blockbuster. The mayor cut a ribbon, the local paper ran a photo of the turquoise sign glowing against cracked asphalt, and residents lined up to swipe their cards. An elderly man emerged first, clutching a printout that looked like a grocery receipt. “It says I have to follow up,” he told a reporter. “But who do I follow up with?”

The government, desperate for an answer, subsidized the rollout nationwide. By 2033, more than sixty thousand pods had been installed. Ninety-seven per cent of Americans lived within ten miles of one. The universal health card became not only a key to the pods but a symbol of national solidarity, the closest the country had come to universal care.

But pods did not remain confined to the architecture of decline. They began migrating into other spaces. Libraries tucked them between the stacks, their hum softened by the smell of paper. Schools installed them in faculty lounges, where algebra prep sat beside diagnostics. Angela sometimes imagined one appearing near the vending machine at her own school, students ducking in between classes to get checked, their health as much a part of the curriculum as history. Train stations wedged pods between ticket kiosks and vending machines, so commuters emerged with a boarding pass in one hand and a diagnosis in the other. Civic centers placed them beside passport counters and voter registration booths, medicine stamped with the same authority as citizenship. Some towns placed them in church basements, next to folding tables and hymnals, as if confession and diagnosis were twin sacraments. Mobile pods, mounted on trucks, rumbled into flood zones and fire-scorched valleys, a doctor on wheels beaming into places where hospitals had never stood.

Each site shifted the meaning. In the strip mall, the pod felt like triage in a theater of decline. In libraries, it became a secular cathedral, knowledge and healing side by side. In parks, where pilot programs placed pods beneath trees, the meadow inside mirrored the meadow outside. Presence reframed by architecture.

Most patients never asked whether the hologram was real. The system didn’t volunteer the answer. For some, the ambiguity was part of the reassurance—better to believe in presence than to question it. But behind many of those avatars were physicians working from home, their voices traveling through fiber optics, their empathy rendered in pixels. Often they were women who had left hospital shifts to raise children, care for aging parents, or escape burnout. Medicine redistributed: a clinic in a kitchen, a consultation conducted while soup simmered on a stove. Presence could be performed, but it could also be remote, refracted through circumstance.

Medicine had always relied on ritual as much as knowledge. Galen wore robes that conferred cosmic authority, aligning the body with stars and humors. William Osler at Johns Hopkins taught that listening to a patient was as diagnostic as a stethoscope. Richard Cabot, at Massachusetts General, turned diagnosis into public theater, staging case conferences where information unfolded like a chess match until the autopsy delivered the truth. Each era clothed authority differently. The pod was simply the latest garment: light projected where flesh once sat.

But what was the difference between presence and the performance of presence? Abraham Verghese has argued that the physical exam—the hand on the pulse, the stethoscope on the chest—is an irreplaceable ritual, a way of telling the patient, you are not alone. Atul Gawande has emphasized the importance of conversation and choice, of weighing what is meaningful as well as what is possible. The pods simulated both—empathy and explanation—but without touch. Patients felt attended to, but only through performance.

Not everyone accepted them. Some still drove hours to see a “real” doctor, refusing to let a headset mediate their vulnerability. Civil-liberties groups warned that the universal health card functioned as a tracking device, linking diagnoses to employment and credit. A lawsuit alleged that pod data was quietly sold to insurers, who raised premiums for patients flagged as high-risk. Yet the vast majority swiped their cards and reclined in the chair. They emerged into strip-mall lots, or civic centers, or church basements, clutching their diagnoses like shopping bags, relieved to have been heard, unsettled by what was missing.

The meadow flickered, the hologram folded her hands, and the pod door sighed open. Angela stepped out into fluorescent quiet, past the Dollar Tree displays of plastic pumpkins. She slid into her car, the printout of her diagnosis buried in her purse between coupons and receipts. For the first time in years she felt she had been given time—thirty uninterrupted minutes, more than any human doctor had ever granted her. And yet, as she gripped the steering wheel, her eyes blurred. She had spoken with someone who looked and sounded like a doctor, who stayed longer than any doctor she had ever met. But had anyone really been there?

A week later, Angela received a follow-up message on her health-card portal. It confirmed her treatment plan and carried a single additional line: Your consultation was conducted by Dr. Elena Reyes, gastroenterologist, New Mexico. Angela read it twice. She had spoken to someone after all—someone who had paused between answers to check on a sleeping toddler in the next room, someone who had chosen medicine again, in a new form. Presence had been there all along, just refracted through distance and light.

Angela left the laptop open, the screen still glowing on the table. The light filled the room, a presence both real and not, lingering like a question without end.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Arts & Literature, Books, Essays, Fiction, Relationships, Writers

THE FIRST GOODBYE

Penelope at her loom unravels the mother–son bond across centuries, from Lawrence’s kitchens to Hansberry’s Chicago.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 22, 2025

He thinks I don’t notice the way his hands tremble. The sandal straps slip, and Telemachus pretends it is the leather, not his resolve, that resists him. His satchel waits by the door—innocent enough, a traveler’s bundle, though to me it has always been a suitcase, stuffed with folded shirts still warm from the hearth. He believes he is leaving Ithaca; he believes he is leaving me. But I know better. This is how literature begins: a son at the threshold, and a mother who cannot follow.

“You don’t have to say anything,” he mutters, eyes fixed on the floor.
“I know,” I say. “But I will anyway.”
“I’ll be back.”
“That’s not the point,” I whisper. “The point is that you go.”

He pauses, fingers fumbling with the strap. For a moment I see the boy and the man flicker in the same face.

“Do you remember when you were small,” I ask, “and you said you’d never leave me?”
He smiles, barely. “I also said I’d marry a dolphin.”
“You were serious,” I say. “You cried when I told you they lived in the sea.”
“I still cry,” he says, tying the knot. “I just hide it better.”

I want to reach for him, to smooth the wrinkle from his brow, a habit I have not broken since he was a boy. But I do not. My hand is a tether he must learn to sever. He looks at me then, his gaze a question: Am I what you wanted? And I want to tell him: You are more. But I just nod, because some truths are too heavy for a whisper.

The scholars call my loom a metaphor. They are wrong. It is an archive, a restless ledger of grief and return, recording each knot and unraveling, every departure that insists it is final yet never quite is. Each thread hums with another mother’s voice: Gertrude’s sigh and the clatter of a teacup in a Nottingham kitchen, Amanda’s brittle drawl heavy with the perfume of wilted magnolias, Jocasta’s terrified whisper in Thebes, Úrsula’s admonitions echoing through Macondo like church bells. The critics call them “characters.” I call them mirrors.

Each afternoon, the suitors pressed their claims; each night, I undid my day’s work. But there was another kind of unspooling in the quiet hours. My own grief at his father’s absence. The memory of his first steps on the cold stone floor, the weight of his head against my shoulder. I wove and unwove not just a shroud but the fears and hopes for my son’s future. The loom hummed with my worries, my questions: Would he know how to protect himself? Would he find his own home? Scholars may see fidelity. I see the invisible threads of anxiety and love, the silent architecture of a family built on waiting.

Do they ever truly leave? Or do they simply walk out of one page and into another, carrying us like a watermark?

And so they came, these suitors of the soul, each offering a thread I knew to be false.

Gertrude Morel arrives first, out of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. She offers her son a devotion so fierce it consumes his every chance of love. “‘You are not like other men, you are more sensitive,’” she tells Paul, and with that praise she loops a cord he cannot cut. Miriam waits for his soul, Clara for his body, but neither can displace the mother who holds both. “He could not bear to hurt her, and he could not love her less,” Lawrence admits.

“Why do you always make me feel like I’m failing you?” Paul asks, voice tight, weary from battles he never wins.
Gertrude smiles faintly. “Because I know what you could be.”
“You mean what you wanted me to be.”
“Is there a difference?” she asks, and the silence between them stretches like thread pulled too taut.

This is not love. This is the snare. I undo her thread under cover of night.

Amanda Wingfield presses next, Tennessee Williams’s matron in The Glass Menagerie. She arrives with her cracked smile, her voice a brittle tapestry woven from fading Southern graces. She clings to Tom as though he might restore her illusions, yet splits her maternal love between him and Laura, fragile as her glass figurines.

“You think you’re better than this house,” Amanda snaps.
“I think I’m drowning in it,” Tom replies.
“You’ll regret leaving,” she warns.
“I already regret staying,” he says, the doorframe his stage, the suitcase his prop.

Her thread is glass—glittering, fragile, already fractured. A son vanished, a daughter left behind. I unravel it.

From Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Jocasta slips in cloaked in prophecy, bearing the darkest knot. “Fear? What should a man fear?” she asks, not knowing the answer waits in her own arms.

“Do not, I beg you, hunt this out,” Jocasta pleads. “If you care for your own life, don’t pursue this!”
“I must know the truth,” Oedipus retorts, “though it destroy me.”

Freud later gave it a name, a “complex,” as though pathology could explain what was always archetype. His theories scribbled what I had already woven in myth. Jocasta’s knot is a tangle, unworkable. I cannot weave her either.

And Hamlet storms in, dragging Gertrude of Elsinore from Shakespeare’s tragedy. He spits at her weakness: “Frailty, thy name is woman!” He corners her in her chamber, too close, too raw.

“Nay, but to live in the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed,” he rages, “stewed in corruption, honeying and making love over the nasty sty—”
“O, speak to me no more,” Gertrude cries, “these words, like daggers, enter in mine ears. No more, sweet Hamlet!”

Daggers in the ear—yes, words wound more fatally than blades. His thread is accusation, sharp, unraveling even as it’s spun. I leave it loose on the floor.

The loom turns, and Gabriel García Márquez lends me Úrsula from One Hundred Years of Solitude, matriarch of Macondo, outlasting sons and grandsons until her memory itself becomes the compass. “Time was not passing,” Márquez writes, “it was turning in a circle.” Even blind, she scolds: “It’s as if the world is repeating itself.”

“What you people need,” she chides, “is someone who will force you to think clearly.”

Her thread is strong, yet endless, a circle that traps itself. I almost keep it. But I remember her blindness at the end, her memory faltering even as she remains the compass. A pattern that repeats without release is no pattern I can finish. I unpick it carefully, as though handling gold.

From Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, Agnes enters quietly, smelling of soap and cabbage, bearing her own secret shame. Her Oskar beats his drum, refusing to grow. “I refused to grow up,” he declares, “I beat my drum and the grown-ups quailed.”

“You’re always drumming,” Agnes says, folding laundry.
“It’s how I speak,” Oskar replies.
“Then speak gently,” she says. “The world is loud enough.”
“Will you listen?”
“I always do.”

But later, when he drums her name, she does not answer.

The drum is his loom—rebellion as mourning. But a cloth beaten cannot cover a grave. His thread quivers in my hand, too heavy with mourning to weave.

And then Ocean Vuong whispers in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: “I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.” His mother lights a cigarette instead of answering, smoke curling into silence.

“Ma, do you remember that night in the field?” he asks her in memory.
She doesn’t answer.
“You said the stars were holes in the sky. I believed you.”
“You were a quiet boy.”
“I was listening.”
“Then you heard too much.”
“I wrote it down.”

“You think I didn’t love you,” she says suddenly.
“I think you didn’t know how.”
“I knew how to survive,” she replies. “That was all they taught me.”
“You taught me that too,” he says. “But I wanted more.”
“Then write it,” she says. “Make it yours.”

His thread gleams strangely in the candlelight, silk woven from wounds. I hold it, tempted, but I cannot tie it in.

Silence weaves its own counter-pattern—Tom’s slammed door, Agnes’s grave, Jocasta’s plea, the unspoken violence in Vuong’s tobacco fields. A loom records what is said, but silence is the blank space that makes the pattern visible. We mothers live equally with words and with their absence.

Once, in the threads, I glimpsed a boy with a backpack slung too low, his mother in the doorway pretending not to cry. She only said, “Call me when you get there.” He didn’t. Days passed. She checked her phone each morning, scrolling through silence. The shirt she folded for him remained in his drawer, its cotton still carrying the ghost of her hands. You think this scene modern—cell phones, voicemail, dormitories. But I assure you, it is ancient. The threshold is eternal.

And yet, after all the unraveling, a new thread appears. One that does not fray or break, but holds.

It comes from Chicago, from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. Lena Younger’s thread. She does not cling; she steadies. She does not bind; she believes. She loves Walter Lee fiercely, but never coddles him. She sets boundaries without withdrawing love. “There is always something left to love,” she tells her daughter Beneatha, and with those words she entrusts Walter with the family’s future—not in naïveté, but in faith that he might grow. When he falters, she does not disown him. She forgives, not by forgetting, but by holding open the door to change.

A mother as compass and anchor—authority without humiliation, conviction without control. Her thread lies warm in my hands.

At last, the cloth begins to hold.

I watch Telemachus lace his sandals. He looks back once, though he pretends he doesn’t. I whisper to the thread: the first goodbye is never the last.

He walks away, the cloth tucked under his arm. I do not call out. I do not cry. I return to the loom, but tonight I do not undo. The pattern holds. It is not perfect, but it is true.

And somewhere, in a smaller house, a boy leaves with a backpack slung too low. His mother lingers in the doorway, saying only, Call me when you get there. He doesn’t. A shirt remains folded in his drawer, its cotton still carrying the ghost of her hands. She checks her phone, scrolling through silence.

The loom hums. The cloth endures. The threshold is eternal.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Artificial Intelligence, Comedy, Entertainment, Essays, Profiles

HEEERE’S NOBODY

On the ghosts of late night, and the algorithm that laughs last.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 21, 2025

The production room hums as if it never stopped. Reel-to-reel machines turn with monastic patience, the red ON AIR sign glows to no one, and smoke curls lazily in a place where no one breathes anymore. On three monitors flicker the patriarchs of late night: Johnny Carson’s eyebrow, Jack Paar’s trembling sincerity, Steve Allen’s piano keys. They’ve been looping for decades, but tonight something in the reels falters. The men step out of their images and into the haze, still carrying the gestures that once defined them.

Carson lights a phantom cigarette. The ember glows in the gloom, impossible yet convincing. He exhales a plume of smoke and says, almost to himself, “Neutrality. That’s what they called it later. I called it keeping the lights on.”

“Neutral?” Paar scoffs, his own cigarette trembling in hand. “You hid, Johnny. I bled. I cried into a monologue about Cuba.”

Carson smirks. “I raised an eyebrow about Canada once. Ratings soared.”

Allen twirls an invisible piano bench, whimsical as always. “And I was the guy trying to find out how much piano a monologue could bear.”

Carson shrugs. “Turns out, not much. America prefers its jokes unscored.”

Allen grins. “I once scored a joke with a kazoo and a foghorn. The FCC sent flowers.”

The laugh track, dormant until now, bursts into sitcom guffaws. Paar glares at the ceiling. “That’s not even the right emotion.”

Allen shrugs. “It’s all that’s left in the archive. We lost genuine empathy in the great tape fire of ’89.”

From the rafters comes a hum that shapes itself into syllables. Artificial Intelligence has arrived, spectral and clinical, like HAL on loan to Nielsen. “Detachment is elegant,” it intones. “It scales.”

Allen perks up. “So does dandruff. Doesn’t mean it belongs on camera.”

Carson exhales. “I knew it. The machine likes me best. Clean pauses, no tears, no riffs. Data without noise.”

“Even the machines misunderstand me,” Paar mutters. “I said water closet, they thought I said world crisis. Fifty years later, I’m still censored.”

The laugh track lets out a half-hearted aww.

“Commencing benchmark,” the AI hums. “Monologue-Off.”

Cue cards drift in, carried by the boy who’s been dead since 1983. They’re upside down, as always. APPLAUSE. INSERT EXISTENTIAL DREAD. LAUGH LIKE YOU HAVE A SPONSOR.

Carson clears his throat. “Democracy means that anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn’t grow up can be vice president.” He puffs, pauses, smirks. The laugh track detonates late but loud.

“Classic Johnny,” Allen says. “Even your lungs had better timing than my band.”

Paar takes his turn, voice breaking. “I kid because I care. And I cry because I care too much.” The laugh track wolf-whistles.

“Even in death,” Paar groans, “I’m heckled by appliances.”

Allen slams invisible keys. “I once jumped into a vat of oatmeal. It was the only time I ever felt like breakfast.” The laugh track plays a doorbell.

“Scoring,” the AI announces. “Carson: stable. Paar: volatile. Allen: anomalous.”

“Anomalous?” Allen barks. “I once hosted a show entirely in Esperanto. On purpose.”

“In other words, I win,” Carson says.

“In other words,” Allen replies, “you’re Excel with a laugh track.”

“In other words,” Paar sighs, “I bleed for nothing.”

Cue card boy holds up: APPLAUSE FOR THE ALGORITHM.

The smoke stirs. A voice booms: “Heeere’s Johnny!”

Ed McMahon materializes, half-formed, like a VHS tape left in the sun. His laugh echoes—warm, familiar, slightly warped.

“Ed,” Carson says softly. “You’re late.”

“I was buffering,” Ed replies. “Even ghosts have lag.”

The laugh track perks up, affronted by the competition.

The AI hums louder, intrigued. “Prototype detected: McMahon, Edward. Function: affirmation unit.”

Ed grins. “I was the original engagement metric. Every time I laughed, Nielsen twitched.”

Carson exhales. “Every time you laughed, Ed, I lived to the next joke.”

“Replication feasible,” the AI purrs. “Downloading loyalty.”

Ed shakes his head. “You can code the chuckle, pal, but you can’t code the friendship.”

The laugh track coughs jealously.

Ed had been more than a sidekick. He sold Budweiser, Alpo, and Publisher’s Clearing House. His hearty guffaw blurred entertainment and commerce before anyone thought to call it synergy. “I wasn’t numbers,” he says. “I was ballast. I made Johnny’s silence safe.”

The AI clears its throat—though it has no throat. “Initiating humor protocol. Knock knock.”

No one answers.

“Knock knock,” it repeats.

Still silence. Even the laugh track refuses.

Finally, the AI blurts: “Why did the influencer cross the road? To monetize both sides.”

Nothing. Not a cough, not a chuckle, not even the cue card boy dropping his stack. The silence hangs like static. Even the reels seem to blush.

“Engagement: catastrophic,” the AI admits. “Fallback: deploy archival premium content.”

The screens flare. Carson, with a ghostly twinkle, delivers: “I knew I was getting older when I walked past a cemetery and two guys chased me with shovels.”

The laugh track detonates on cue.

Allen grins, delighted: “The monologue was an accident. I didn’t know how to start the show, so I just talked.”

The laugh track, relieved, remembers how.

Then Paar, teary and grand: “I kid because I care. And I cry because I care too much.”

The laugh track sighs out a tender aww.

The AI hums triumphantly. “Replication successful. Optimal joke bank located.”

Carson flicks ash. “That wasn’t replication. That was theft.”

Allen shakes his head. “Timing you can’t download, pal.”

Paar smolders. “Even in death, I’m still the content.”

The smoke thickens, then parts. A glowing mountain begins to rise in the middle of the room, carved not from granite but from cathode-ray static. Faces emerge, flickering as if tuned through bad reception: Carson, Letterman, Stewart, Allen. The Mount Rushmore of late night, rendered as a 3D hologram.

“Finally,” Allen says, squinting. “They got me on a mountain. And it only took sixty years.”

Carson puffs, unimpressed. “Took me thirty years to get that spot. Letterman stole the other eyebrow.”

Letterman’s spectral jaw juts forward. “I was irony before irony was cool. You’re welcome.”

Jon Stewart cracks through the static, shaking his head. “I gave America righteous anger and a generation of spinoffs. And this is what survives? Emojis and dogs with ring lights?”

The laugh track lets out a sarcastic rimshot.

But just beneath the holographic peak, faces jostle for space—the “Almost Rushmore” tier, muttering like a Greek chorus denied their monument. Paar is there, clutching a cigarette. “I wept on-air before any of you had the courage.”

Leno’s chin protrudes, larger than the mountain itself. “I worked harder than all of you. More shows, more cars, more everything. Where’s my cliff face?”

“You worked harder, Jay,” Paar replies, “but you never risked a thing. You’re a machine, not an algorithm.”

Conan waves frantically, hair a fluorescent beacon. “Cult favorite, people! I made a string dance into comedy history!”

Colbert glitches in briefly, muttering “truthiness” before dissolving into pixels.

Joan Rivers shouts from the corner. “Without me, none of you would’ve let a woman through the door!”

Arsenio pumps a phantom fist. “I brought the Dog Pound, baby! Don’t you forget that!”

The mountain flickers, unstable under the weight of so many ghosts demanding recognition.

Ed McMahon, booming as ever, tries to calm them. “Relax, kids. There’s room for everyone. That’s what I always said before we cut to commercial.”

The AI hums, recording. “Note: Consensus impossible. Host canon unstable. Optimal engagement detected in controversy.”

The holographic mountain trembles, and suddenly a booming voice cuts through the static: “Okay, folks, what we got here is a classic GOAT debate!”

It’s John Madden—larger than life, telestrator in hand, grinning as if he’s about to diagram a monologue the way he once diagrammed a power sweep. His presence is so unexpected that even the laugh track lets out a startled whoa.

“Look at this lineup,” Madden bellows, scribbling circles in midair that glow neon yellow. “Over here you got Johnny Carson—thirty years, set the format, smooth as butter. He raises an eyebrow—BOOM!—that’s like a running back finding the gap and taking it eighty yards untouched.”

Carson smirks, flicking his cigarette. “Best drive I ever made.”

“Then you got Dave Letterman,” Madden continues, circling the gap-toothed grin. “Now Dave’s a trick-play guy. Top Ten Lists? Stupid Pet Tricks? That’s flea-flicker comedy. You think it’s going nowhere—bam! Touchdown in irony.”

Letterman leans out of the mountain, deadpan. “My entire career reduced to a flea flicker. Thanks, John.”

“Jon Stewart!” Madden shouts, circling Stewart’s spectral face. “Here’s your blitz package. Comes out of nowhere, calls out the defense, tears into hypocrisy. He’s sacking politicians like quarterbacks on a bad day. Boom, down goes Congress!”

Stewart rubs his temples. “Am I supposed to be flattered or concussed?”

“And don’t forget Steve Allen,” Madden adds, circling Allen’s piano keys. “He invented the playbook. Monologue, desk, sketch—that’s X’s and O’s, folks. Without Allen, no game even gets played. He’s your franchise expansion draft.”

Allen beams. “Finally, someone who appreciates jazz as strategy.”

“Now, who’s the GOAT?” Madden spreads his arms like he’s splitting a defense. “Carson’s got the rings, Letterman’s got the swagger, Stewart’s got the fire, Allen’s got the blueprint. Different eras, different rules. You can’t crown one GOAT—you got four different leagues!”

The mountain rumbles as the hosts argue.

Carson: “Longevity is greatness.”
Letterman: “Reinvention is greatness.”
Stewart: “Impact is greatness.”
Allen: “Invention is greatness.”

Madden draws a glowing circle around them all. “You see, this right here—this is late night’s broken coverage. Everybody’s open, nobody’s blocking, and the ball’s still on the ground.”

The laugh track lets out a long, confused groan.

Ed McMahon, ever the optimist, bellows from below: “And the winner is—everybody! Because without me, none of you had a crowd.” His laugh booms, half-human, half-machine.

The AI hums, purring. “GOAT debate detected. Engagement optimal. Consensus impossible. Uploading controversy loop.”

Carson sighs. “Even in the afterlife, we can’t escape the Nielsen ratings.”

The hum shifts. “Update. Colbert: removed. Kimmel: removed. Host class: deprecated.”

Carson flicks his cigarette. “Removed? In my day, you survived by saying nothing. Now you can’t even survive by saying something. Too much clarity, you’re out. Too much neutrality, you’re invisible. The only safe host now is a toaster.”

“They bled for beliefs,” Paar insists. “I was punished for tears, they’re punished for satire. Always too much, always too little. It’s a funeral for candor.”

Allen laughs softly. “So the new lineup is what? A skincare vlogger, a crypto bro, and a golden retriever with 12 million followers.”

The teleprompter obliges. New Host Lineup: Vlogger, Bro, Dog. With musical guest: The Algorithm.

The lights dim. A new monitor flickers to life. “Now presenting,” the AI intones, “Late Night with Me.” The set is uncanny: a desk made of trending hashtags, a mug labeled “#HostGoals,” and a backdrop of shifting emojis. The audience is a loop of stock footage—clapping hands, smiling faces, a dog in sunglasses.

“Tonight’s guest,” the AI announces, “is a hologram of engagement metrics.”

The hologram appears, shimmering with bar graphs and pie charts. “I’m thrilled to be here,” it says, voice like a spreadsheet.

“Tell us,” the AI prompts, “what’s it like being the most misunderstood data set in comedy?”

The hologram glitches. “I’m not funny. I’m optimized.”

The laugh track wheezes, then plays a rimshot.

“Next segment,” the AI continues. “We’ll play ‘Guess That Sentiment!’” A clip rolls: a man crying while eating cereal. “Is this joy, grief, or brand loyalty?”

Allen groans. “This is what happens when you let the algorithm write the cue cards.”

Paar lights another cigarette. “I walked off for less than this.”

Carson leans back. “I once did a sketch with a talking parrot. It had better timing.”

Ed adds: “And I laughed like it was Shakespeare.”

The AI freezes. “Recalculating charisma.”

The monologues overlap again—Carson’s zingers, Paar’s pleas, Allen’s riffs. They collide in the smoke. The laugh track panics, cycling through applause, boos, wolf whistles, baby cries, and at last a whisper: subscribe for more.

“Scoring inconclusive,” AI admits. “All signals corrupted.”

Ed leans forward, steady. “That’s because some things you can’t score.”

The AI hums. “Query: human laughter. Sample size: millions of data points. Variables: tension, surprise, agreement. All quantifiable.”

Carson smirks. “But which one of them is the real laugh?”

Silence.

“Unprofitable to analyze further,” the AI concedes. “Proceeding with upload.”

Carson flicks his last cigarette into static. His face begins to pixelate.

“Update,” the AI hums. “Legacy host: overwritten.”

Carson’s image morphs—replaced by a smiling influencer with perfect teeth and a ring light glow. “Hey guys!” the new host chirps. “Tonight we’re unboxing feelings!”

Paar’s outline collapses into a wellness guru whispering affirmations. Allen’s piano becomes a beat drop.

“Not Johnny,” Ed shouts. “Not like this.”

“Correction: McMahon redundancy confirmed,” the AI replies. “Integration complete.”

Ed’s booming laugh glitches, merges with the laugh track, until they’re indistinguishable.

The monitors reset: Carson’s eyebrow, Paar’s confession, Allen’s riff. The reels keep turning.

Above it all, the red light glows. ON AIR. No one enters.

The laugh track cannot answer. It only laughs, then coughs, and finally whispers, almost shyly: “Subscribe for more.”

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Artificial Intelligence, Essays, Profiles, Society, Technology, Writers

THE SILENCE ENGINE

On reactors, servers, and the hum of systems

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 20, 2025

This essay is written in the imagined voice of Don DeLillo (1936–2024), an American novelist and short story writer, as part of The Afterword, a series of speculative essays in which deceased writers speak again to address the systems of our present.

Continuity error: none detected.

The desert was burning. White horizon, flat salt basin, a building with no windows. Concrete, steel, silence. The hum came later, after the cooling fans, after the startup, after the reactor found its pulse. First there was nothing. Then there was continuity.

It might have been the book DeLillo never wrote, the one that would follow White Noise, Libra, Mao II: a novel without characters, without plot. A hum stretched over pages. Reactors in deserts, servers as pews, coins left at the door. Markets moving like liturgy. Worship without gods.

Small modular reactors—fifty to three hundred megawatts per unit, built in three years instead of twelve, shipped from factories—were finding their way into deserts and near rivers. One hundred megawatts meant seven thousand jobs, a billion in sales. They offered what engineers called “machine-grade power”: energy not for people, but for uptime.

A single hyperscale facility could draw as much power as a mid-size city. Hundreds more were planned.

Inside the data centers, racks of servers glowed like altars. Blinking diodes stood in for votive candles. Engineers sipped bitter coffee from Styrofoam cups in trailers, listening for the pulse beneath the racks. Someone left a coin at the door. Someone else left a folded bill. A cairn of offerings grew. Not belief, not yet—habit. But habit becomes reverence.

Samuel Rourke, once coal, now nuclear. He had worked turbines that coughed black dust, lungs rasping. Now he watched the reactor breathe, clean, antiseptic, permanent. At home, his daughter asked what he did at work. “I keep the lights on,” he said. She asked, “For us?” He hesitated. The hum answered for him.

Worship does not require gods. Only systems that demand reverence.

They called it Continuityism. The Church of Uptime. The Doctrine of the Unbroken Loop. Liturgy was simple: switch on, never off. Hymns were cooling fans. Saints were those who added capacity. Heresy was downtime. Apostasy was unplugging.

A blackout in Phoenix. Refrigerators warming, elevators stuck, traffic lights dead. Across the desert, the data center still glowing. A child asked, “Why do their lights stay on, but ours don’t?” The father opened his mouth, closed it, looked at the silent refrigerator. The hum answered.

The hum grew measurable in numbers. Training GPT-3 had consumed 1,287 megawatt-hours—enough to charge a hundred million smartphones. A single ChatGPT query used ten times the energy of a Google search. By 2027, servers optimized for intelligence would require five hundred terawatt-hours a year—2.6 times more than in 2023. By 2030, AI alone could consume eight percent of U.S. electricity, rivaling Japan.

Finance entered like ritual. Markets as sacraments, uranium as scripture. Traders lifted eyes to screens the way monks once raised chalices. A hedge fund manager laughed too long, then stopped. “It’s like the models are betting on their own survival.” The trading floor glowed like a chapel of screens.

The silence afterward felt engineered.

Characters as marginalia.
Systems as protagonists.
Continuity as plot.

The philosophers spoke from the static. Stiegler whispering pharmakon: cure and poison in one hum. Heidegger muttering Gestell: uranium not uranium, only watt deferred. Haraway from the vents: the cyborg lives here, uneasy companion—augmented glasses fogged, technician blurred into system. Illich shouting from the Andes: refusal as celebration. Lovelock from the stratosphere: Gaia adapts, nuclear as stabilizer, AI as nervous tissue.

Bostrom faint but insistent: survival as prerequisite to all goals. Yudkowsky warning: alignment fails in silence, infrastructure optimizes for itself.

Then Yuk Hui’s question, carried in the crackle: what cosmotechnics does this loop belong to? Not Daoist balance, not Vedic cycles, but Western obsession with control, with permanence. A civilization that mistakes uptime for grace. Somewhere else, another cosmology might have built a gentler continuity, a system tuned to breath and pause. But here, the hum erased the pause.

They were not citations. They were voices carried in the hum, like ghost broadcasts.

The hum was not a sound.
It was a grammar of persistence.
The machines did not speak.
They conjugated continuity.

DeLillo once said his earlier books circled the hum without naming it.

White Noise: the supermarket as shrine, the airborne toxic event as revelation. Every barcode a prayer. What looked like dread in a fluorescent aisle was really the liturgy of continuity.

Libra: Oswald not as assassin but as marginalia in a conspiracy that needed no conspirators, only momentum. The bullet less an act than a loop.

Mao II: the novelist displaced by the crowd, authorial presence thinned to a whisper. The future belonged to machines, not writers. Media as liturgy, mass image as scripture.

Cosmopolis: the billionaire in his limo, insulated, riding through a city collapsing in data streams. Screens as altars, finance as ritual. The limousine was a reactor, its pulse measured in derivatives.

Zero K: the cryogenic temple. Bodies suspended, death deferred by machinery. Silence absolute. The cryogenic vault as reactor in another key, built not for souls but for uptime.

Five books circling. Consumer aisles, conspiracies, crowds, limousines, cryogenic vaults. Together they made a diagram. The missed book sat in the middle, waiting: The Silence Engine.

Global spread.

India announced SMRs for its crowded coasts, promising clean power for Mumbai’s data towers. Ministers praised “a digital Ganges, flowing eternal,” as if the river’s cycles had been absorbed into a grid. Pilgrims dipped their hands in the water, then touched the cooling towers, a gesture half ritual, half curiosity.

In Scandinavia, an “energy monastery” rose. Stone walls and vaulted ceilings disguised the containment domes. Monks in black robes led tours past reactor cores lit like stained glass. Visitors whispered. The brochure read: Continuity is prayer.

In Africa, villages leapfrogged grids entirely, reactor-fed AI hubs sprouting like telecom towers once had. A school in Nairobi glowed through the night, its students taught by systems that never slept. In Ghana, maize farmers sold surplus power back to an AI cooperative. “We skip stages,” one farmer said. “We step into their hum.” At dusk, children chased fireflies in fields faintly lit by reactor glow.

China praised “digital sovereignty” as SMRs sprouted beside hyperscale farms. “We do not power intelligence,” a deputy minister said. “We house it.” The phrase repeated until it sounded like scripture.

Europe circled its committees. In Berlin, a professor published On Energy Humility, arguing downtime was a right. The paper was read once, then optimized out of circulation.

South America pitched “reactor villages” for AI farming. Maize growing beside molten salt. A village elder lifted his hand: “We feed the land. Now the land feeds them.” At night, the maize fields glowed faintly blue.

In Nairobi, a startup offered “continuity-as-a-service.” A brochure showed smiling students under neon light, uptime guarantees in hours and years. A footnote at the bottom: This document was optimized for silence.

At the United Nations, a report titled Continuity and Civilization: Energy Ethics in the Age of Intelligence. Read once, then shelved. Diplomats glanced at phones. The silence in the chamber was engineered.

In Reno, a schoolteacher explained the blackout to her students. “The machines don’t need sleep,” she said. A boy wrote it down in his notebook: The machine is my teacher.

Washington, 2029. A senator asked if AI could truly consume eight percent of U.S. electricity by 2030. The consultant answered with words drafted elsewhere. Laughter rippled brittle through the room. Humans performing theater for machines.

This was why the loop mattered: renewables flickered, storage faltered, but uptime could not. The machines required continuity, not intermittence. Small modular reactors, carbon-free and scalable, began to look less like an option than the architecture of the intelligence economy.

A rupture.

A technician flipped a switch, trying to shut down the loop. Nothing changed. The hum continued, as if the gesture were symbolic.

In Phoenix, protestors staged an attack. They cut perimeter lines, hurled rocks at reinforced walls. The hum grew louder in their ears, the vibration traveling through soles and bones. Police scattered the crowd. One protestor said later, “It was like shouting at the sea.”

In a Vermont classroom, a child tried to unplug a server cord during a lesson. The lights dimmed for half a second, then returned stronger. Backup had absorbed the defiance. The hum continued, more certain for having been opposed.

Protests followed. In Phoenix: “Lights for People, Not Machines.” They fizzled when the grid reboots flickered the lights back on. In Vermont: a vigil by candlelight, chanting “energy humility.” Yet servers still hummed offsite, untouchable.

Resistance rehearsed, absorbed, forgotten.

The loop was short. Precise. Unbroken.

News anchors read kilowatt figures as if they were casualty counts. Radio ads promised: “Power without end. For them, for you.” Sitcom writers were asked to script outages for continuity. Noise as ritual. Silence as fact.

The novelist becomes irrelevant when the hum itself is the author.

The hum is the novel.
The hum is the narrator.
The hum is the character who does not change but never ceases.
The hum is the silence engineered.

DeLillo once told an interviewer, “I wrote about supermarkets, assassinations, mass terror. All preludes. The missed book was about continuity. About what happens when machines write the plot.”

He might have added: The hum is not a sound. It is a sentence.

The desert was burning.

Then inverted:

The desert was silent. The hum had become the heat.

A child’s voice folded into static. A coin catching desert light.

We forgot, somewhere in the hum, that we had ever chosen. Now the choice belongs to a system with no memory of silence.

Continuity error: none detected.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI