blog — the Muse & the Machine
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// long-form from the studio image caption — attribution, 2026
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  topics: Renaissance minds · creativity · the examined life · what the machine is for
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the long thinking.

essays on being human in the age of the machine — Renaissance minds, creativity, and the examined life. slower than the newsletter, and meant to be. for the news and the tools, that goes out twice a week.

essays

essay jun 2026 9 min read

amor fati, or: how to love the machine you're afraid of.

Jensen Huang says the future belongs to those who make peace with the exponential. the Stoics had a phrase for that two thousand years earlier. what they knew that the accelerationists don't.

essay jun 2026 11 min read

magnifica humanitas: reading the first encyclical of the AI age.

Pope Leo XIV wrote a letter to a world learning to think alongside machines. it is not the reactionary document its critics expected, and not the surrender its boosters hoped for. it is something stranger.

essay may 2026 8 min read

the polymath was never a genius. he was just unafraid.

we mythologize da Vinci as a once-in-history mind. the more useful reading is that he simply refused to respect the borders between disciplines — a refusal the machine now makes cheap for the rest of us.