So in my continuing experiments with artificial intelligence, I decided to ask Claude, the chatbot created by AI startup Anthropic, to help me with some holiday gift-giving, specifically for my wife. I highlighted some of her interests, including her newfound love for pickleball as well as her longtime love – reading. Claude offered up that … Continue reading Holiday Adventures with an AI Chatbot
Like so many other writers/editors, I’ve been playing with ChatGPT. Generally, as I’ve asked it to do very purposeful tasks, I’ve found it to be capable, though lacking insight and vulnerable to enormous gaps of understanding. My advice is, Use it … very, very carefully. So recently, I brought in some of the fall harvest … Continue reading What Happened When I Asked ChatGPT to Write a Short Story About a Pepper
We went to two movies this weekend. Surprisingly, they were both about parents and children. Other than that, they were wildly different. (Spoiler alert: I’m about to say things about both Everywhere Everything All at Once and Aftersun. If you care, stop now.) Everything Everywhere All at Once is an Oscar contender, starring Michelle Yeoh, … Continue reading 2 Very Different Parent-Daughter Movies
Like a lot of people, I played Wordle a lot this past year (see below). It’s ingenious, both simple and complex in the way that can remain intriguing over time. Six guesses to come up with a five-letter word sounds simultaneously super-difficult and pretty easy. Six seems like a lot, until you’re looking at S-A-E on … Continue reading 6 Things I Learned from Wordle
Listened to George Saunders’ first collection of short stories, Civilwarland in Bad Decline, this summer and all the things I enjoy about Saunders’ writing were there. But the real treat was his writer’s note at the end, where he shared his experience as a not-so-young writer who pursued writing while living a middle class existence with … Continue reading Some ‘Mountain-Climbing’ Advice from Writer George Saunders
Virginia and I continued on a torrid pace of movie-watching, this time watching Jerry Maguire with friends on New Year’s Night. One couple had never seen it. I hadn’t seen it in more than a decade, maybe closer to two. Anyway, I reacted to it a little differently than I did back in 1996. Some thoughts — … Continue reading 6 Thoughts on Jerry Maguire, 26 Years Later
Lately there have been a few things coming together and making me wonder about the long shadow of 9/11. I just finished re-listening to Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, which is an exhaustive take on Osama bin Laden, from his birth through his misadventures to his almost inexplicable eventual success and post-9/11 scurrying to Tora … Continue reading Why Laughing at the Seinfeld 9/11 Spec Script Felt So Wrong and So Right
