Encounter with Picasso's Kitchen

July 9, 2026

art painting modernism

Picasso's 1948 painting "The Kitchen." Flat angular lines cover and intersect a beige surface. They could be figures or birds or I guess parts of a kitchen

On MoMA's 5th floor the other day, the painting I responded to most viscerally was this Picasso, "The Kitchen." On a screen it's just one more rectangle among all the rectangles we encounter, mediated by screens, throughout every day: the …

LLMs' alien linguistic parsing

June 18, 2026

language AI

Vilhelm Hammershoi's 1901 painting, "Room in Strandgade with Sunshine on the Floor." A quiet, minimal parlor. A woman sits at a modest wooden chair and table in the left side of the canvas, facing awa

I think anyone who's translated, or even studied a language with different word order than their native language, will have an intuitive grasp of the benefit of self-attention as opposed to sequentially interpreting a text word by word. A simple …

A crucial ambiguity in Magnifica Humanitas

May 28, 2026

AI religion Christianity theology

Georges Roualt's painting "Twilight." Three figures in the foreground of a vaguely biblical milieu. Expressionist style, lots of browns and reds.

I've been working through Pope Leo's encyclical on AI this week. It's a fascinating, thorough, and well-reasoned document, arguably the first major 'statement' on AI from outside the tech world. Leo rightfully focuses most of his attention on systemic issues: …

Style and AI

May 14, 2026

modernism language AI style

Wilfredo Lam's 1943 painting "Omi Obini."A tall, disproposrtionate, possibly many-limbed figure in the central foreground, surrounded by riotously colored banana leaves and bamboo stalks.

Trying to maintain a personal or 'authentic' style in the age of AI-generated text can feel like an impossible bind. For me personally, the em-dash was a source of pride.The only people you saw using it were real readers -- …

Kingship and agents

May 7, 2026

AI philosophy Plato politics sophistry

Velazquez's Las Meninas. A variety of aristocratic figures and a painter look at the viewer, who it turns out is the royal couple themselves, reflected in a mirror deep in the painting.

I finished up Plato's trilogy with the Statesman -- literally the 'Politician', a title that doesn't seem to promise much good to us moderns -- and it caught me off guard with how directly it speaks to our situation. One …