Books & Ideas · Week of July 9, 2026
AI's physical reckoning, cognitive claims, epistemic power, and the enduring human need for meaning
- The AI Backlash Goes Physical: Data Centers, Energy, and Environmental JusticeHere is a contradiction worth sitting with. Sam Altman spent this month in the Financial Times arguing, again, for something like an International Atomic Energy Agency for AI—an international body to govern safety, to ke…
- Generative AI as Epistemic Power Broker: Who Controls What Counts as KnowledgeThe oldest name we have was not a prophet's or a pharaoh's. It belonged to an accountant.
- Does AI Think, or Only Mimic? The Cognition Debate and the Superintelligence RaceFive hundred safety-critical events in a hundred days. That is the count Zuduo Zheng and his colleagues logged after driving a Tesla Model Y with Full Self-Driving every day on Queensland roads — more than 500 moments wh…
- Reading Under Pressure: Print, Deep Attention, and the AI-Assisted Literacy QuestionArticle — "Reading Under Pressure: Print, Deep Attention, and the AI-Assisted Literacy Question": Article — "Reading Under Pressure: Print, Deep Attention, and the AI-Assisted Literacy Question": Here is the contradictio…
- The Persistence of the Metaphysical: Prayer, Souls, and Love After DeathRichard Feynman — the Great Explainer, the physicist who revered above all the indomitable laws that tend toward decay — addressed those words to a woman who no longer existed by any measure he would have accepted in a l…
Threads we are following
- Will Ohio's ballot amendment survive legal challenge and set a template other states copy?
- Whether any jurisdiction will actually classify frontier AI systems as public epistemic infrastructure subject to independent auditing
- Whether a 'science of intelligence' mapping distinct modes of understanding gains traction against the single-substance view of cognition
- Whether AI translation aids like DeepSeek sustain comprehension gains over time, or erode the very effort that reading requires
- Whether a secular culture can ever invent a grammar for ending love that isn't also erasing it
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