Nonfiction

How do you win when everyone else is playing by the same rules—and what happens when someone rewrites the rules mid-race? This essay examines the invisible architecture of strategy, tempo, and surprise, tracing what cycling prodigy Tadej Pogačar and Kendrick Lamar have in common: a mastery of when to attack, not just how. From the Tour de France to the year’s most lopsided rap beef, victory belongs to those who see the openings no one else notices—those who weaponize recovery, exploit psychological lulls, and stay unpredictable long after their rivals have shifted to defense. The lesson: real advantage isn’t brute strength or even timing—it’s knowing when the game has quietly changed, and having the nerve to move first.

Public debate about artificial intelligence is stuck on the wrong frequency—cycling through panic, doomsday, and easy outrage, while missing the more subtle but urgent shifts happening underneath the surface. This essay argues that fear isn’t just a bad lens; it’s a trap that narrows what we can see, name, or even ask. By retracing the history of tech anxiety and examining how moral panic crowds out deeper critique and complexity, the piece calls for a new vocabulary—one that looks past the spectacle of disaster and into the actual politics, labor, and meaning-making that shape the AI world. The real risk isn’t what the machines might do; it’s what our fear keeps us from imagining, questioning, or building.

What’s it like to build a masterpiece you can never truly hear? This essay cracks open the bittersweet paradox at the heart of creation: David Gilmour was vital in giving the world Dark Side of the Moon, but he’ll never know its magic the way every first-time listener does. Moving through decades, formats, and fleeting arrivals, this piece traces the endless present tense of discovery—the miracle Gilmour helped engineer but can never inhabit, the loss that comes with making something unforgettable.

Not quite famous, not candlemakers, and barely remembered even in their own zip code, The Famous Candlemakers of Lebanon are what happens when a band writes itself into the margins of American music and somehow never fades out. This imagined reissue liner note traces the ghost story of a group that sounded exactly like the town that made and nearly erased them: songs for highways at midnight, bowling alleys, and lives measured in shift work and local weather. Failure is the refrain, but survival—just barely—is the legacy.