I don’t demand anything. I have more than I need.I don’t search meaning, and find it everywhere.I don’t force. All my tasks get done. I don’t rush, and peace catches me up. My steps are slow.My plans are small.My actions are simple.My efforts are short. I rarely force things from start to finish. Instead, I…

I was reading a paper which started with this line: The Dedekind eta function \(\eta(\tau)\) is defined for \(\tau \in H\) by the infinite product: \[ \eta(\tau) = q^{1/24} \prod_{n=1}^{\infty} (1 – q^n), \quad \text{where } q = e^{2i\pi\tau} \] I railed against this. Why ? Too many questions, too many unknowns. My brain couldn’t…

I’m thrilled to share my submission for the Summer of Math Exposition! This essay is a nine-day diary of rediscovering Arnold’s topological proof. Before the diary begins: this problem stumped mathematicians like Euler, Bézout, and Lagrange for more than 200 years, and when it was finally solved, the reason turned out to be stranger than…

I want to enjoy this moment. Not a better moment. Not a different moment. Not a future moment. This one. Exactly as it is. The mind makes that hard. It was not built for peace. It was built to spot the snake. It scans. Predicts. Worries. Plans. It wants to use the moment, improve it,…

The Cabo Roig promenade is two hundred meters from my townhouse. When I step onto it, I am twenty-five meters above the sea. I can hear the rhythmic “shhh… shhh…” of the water below. I hear the gulls cry and stop to look up. Three of them hang above the cliff edge without moving their…

My family and I had taken a holiday to Naxos, Greece. That first morning I stepped out of the rented apartment to find a grocery store, something for breakfast. It was already warm at nine in the morning. The air carried the salt-and-mineral smell of the sea mixed with something sweet—jasmine, maybe, or oleander blooming…

This piece is a must-read for anyone using AI to assist their writing—and it’s absolutely essential if you write essays or non-fiction. There is a particular voice that AI defaults to when it touches your writing. It is confident, warm, and almost always wrong about what it’s confident about. It doesn’t announce itself as a…

In 1979, Michael Ende wrote a book about a boy named Bastian who disappears into a story to save a dying magical world. It’s a masterpiece of fantasy, but if you read it today through the lens of our age of AI, it feels like a prophecy. Swap Fantastica for AI. It’s not a stretch.…

My uncle was a typesetter.Leather trousers even in his fifties.Ears that stood out from his head.He lost his job. The machine did what he did, faster and cheaper.He opened a discotheque called Three Hearts in the center of Karlshamn. My sister-in-law was a proofreader at Hemmets Journal.Small and cute.Computers replaced her and she was let…

Last week I visited a writer’s forum, a place where aspiring authors swap tips on “finding your voice,” debate the death of creativity at AI’s hands, and rally against the companies whose stated ambition is to privatize intelligence itself. The arguments were familiar. AI, they said, can maybe handle clerical tasks, maybe the utilitarian labor…