A scratchpad for exploring favorite themes: Borges, time, consciousness, computer science, etc.
In chapter two of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, an extended set of exercises deals with Huffman encoding. It's fascinating...
I’d always heard about the power of Lisp macros, which let you extend the language by rewriting code on the fly. You call macros just like…
In Horizon, Barry Lopez writes, “A species is not so much a permanent thing as a point on the developmental line of that thing through time.” People, too, are fundamentally four-dimensional...
Ideas are abstract, immaterial, in principle immortal. Objects are mutable; objects degrade and scatter; they crumble at our touch. Not one…
After years of hearing Barry Lopez mentioned alongside some of my favorite writers—Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold—I finally began to read him…
I just finished Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey, a collection of lectures about poetry and art in general. It’s an amazing book...
The strange thing about dreams isn’t that they’re strange. It’s that, as we experience them, they don’t feel strange. There’s something of…
I wrote this for my friend Adrien Converse, the artist Lurm. In their livestream series “Live with Lurm,” Adrien reads pieces of writing for the very first time, then improvises music in response....
A diary or journal doesn’t just reveal a person’s inner life. It helps create it, by structuring and deepening one’s ongoing dialogue with…
Here’s one of the most wonderful passages in all of Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”:...