Why I finally canceled Amazon Prime — I made my first purchase on Amazon twenty-five years ago. The retail giant has been efficiently mining my shopping addiction ever since. That’s longer than I’ve been married. In fact, my very first purchase on Amazon was a book about planning a wedding, an order I placed on October 23…

Let’s define the future we actually do want — Enough already. This week, Mark Zuckerberg held an internal meeting at Meta (née Facebook) to announce the company’s new values. Values are part of a company’s DNA, articulated — after paying consultants millions of dollars — to be the guiding principles of a brand. They are meant to help make…

A new startup wants to make meals as efficient and joyless as possible — A friend of mine recently came into an abundance of prepared meals. He likes to try out different meal-delivery services, but accidentally set one of his accounts to renew when he already had another shipment coming. He wanted to know if I’d take this surplus off his hands. I live…

I know what you’re thinking, but hear me out, if only so I can tell you about Yatreda, Noah Kalina, and Julie Blackmon — Multiple things can be true at once, even when they appear to be contradictory. Granite, for example, can be both solid and ethereal. Hold a chunk of it in the palm of your hand and it’s clearly a rock. View it at the atomic level and it’s a galaxy of…

The human conscience is our ‘inner voice,’ but we can’t hear it without mindful focus on where we direct our attention — Once, while sitting in my car waiting to get onto the Bay Bridge, I was physically assaulted by a man with a bag of rocks who seemed to be strung out on drugs. The experience was disconcerting, to say the least, but what I also remember is the shock of…

How to keep writing human in a world of A.I. tools — Her, Spike Jonze’s 2013 futuristic romantic drama, opens on Theodore Twombly sitting a a desk dictating a letter. “To my Chris, I have been thinking about how I could possibly tell you how much you mean to me,” he says, pensively. …

Can a Twitter account of Canadian paintings save the country? — If you want to know a country, look at its art. This is the advice the curator of the Twitter account @CanadianPaintings once gave as a tour guide in Europe. It’s advice she now thinks Canadians might well consider taking, too. …

A private musing over an AI experiment gone wrong unexpectedly sparked off a culture and ethics debate in China. — So this happened in China. In 2019, two university students did an AI project that involved a simple ‘wolf versus sheep’ game. The senior member of the team, a Thai national studying in China, left to work in Australia after he graduated, and the project was thus abandoned. The junior…