u/Plastic-Perception69

What the Hell Is… a Signature?

A few strokes of ink, perhaps an elaborate flourish, and suddenly a piece of paper carries your authority.

A signature is one of humanity’s oldest methods of declaring: I was here. I agree. This is mine.

Long before people signed their names, ancient Mesopotamians pressed engraved cylinder seals into wet clay. These identified individuals, authenticated transactions and established ownership.

As writing spread, signatures became increasingly important. Kings signed decrees, merchants authorized payments and ordinary people eventually began signing contracts.

But here’s something interesting.

Your signature doesn’t actually have to be legible.

It can be a scribble, a symbol, an X or even a mark made by someone unable to write. What matters legally is generally the intention to authenticate a document, although requirements vary by jurisdiction.

And signatures aren’t fingerprints.

They change with age, illness, haste, mood and even the pen you’re holding. Forgers exploit this variability, while handwriting examiners study the patterns beneath it.

Today, electronic signatures can carry the same legal force as handwritten ones in many circumstances. A typed name, digital authentication or electronic mark may be enough.

Which raises a curious question.

If a signature doesn’t have to resemble your name, and doesn’t even require a pen, what exactly makes it yours?

Intention.

A signature is more than handwriting. It’s a personal declaration of responsibility.

For thousands of years, civilizations have relied on a remarkably simple agreement:

A human being makes a mark… and the world agrees that it means something.

Spinoza… The Man Who Would Not Lie About God

Baruch Spinoza did something extraordinarily dangerous in the seventeenth century.

He followed his own thinking wherever it led.

Born in Amsterdam in 1632 into a Portuguese-Jewish community, Spinoza began questioning some of the deepest religious assumptions of his world. Eventually those questions became intolerable to the community that had raised him.

In 1656, at only twenty-three, he was placed under cherem, a severe form of excommunication. He was formally cast out.

Today, leaving a religion might mean an argument with your parents or some awkward Christmas dinners.

For Spinoza, it could mean losing much of the world you knew. Religion, family connections, friendships, business and community were woven together.

And still he kept thinking.

God Wasn’t Somewhere Else

Spinoza’s most famous idea was Deus sive Natura:

God, or Nature.

God wasn’t an old man somewhere beyond the universe, watching humanity and occasionally interfering with events.

For Spinoza, God was the infinite reality of existence itself. Everything that exists, from stars and stones to human bodies and thoughts, exists within this one reality.

There is no place where Nature ends and God begins.

That also changed the meaning of miracles. Why would God need to break the laws of Nature if those laws are themselves expressions of God?

Perhaps the miracle was that anything existed at all.

And Then He Went After Free Will

Spinoza believed we feel completely free because we know what we want, but usually don’t understand all the causes that made us want it.

You know you’re angry.

You may have very little idea where all that anger actually came from.

Yet Spinoza didn’t conclude that human life was meaningless.

He thought understanding those causes could make us more free.

We may never escape Nature, but we can understand ourselves within it. The person dragged around by fear, jealousy, hatred and desire is less free than the person who understands what those emotions are doing.

Freedom, then, wasn’t escaping causality.

It was understanding it.

The Intellectual Love of God

This may be the most beautiful part of Spinoza.

He didn’t think our highest relationship with God should be fear, obedience or bargaining for an afterlife.

It should be understanding.

The deeper we understand Nature, ourselves and existence, the closer we come to what he called the intellectual love of God.

His masterpiece, the Ethics, was even written almost like a mathematical proof, using definitions, axioms and propositions to work through God, the human mind, emotions, bondage and finally human freedom.

His Theological-Political Treatise was just as dangerous. Spinoza defended the freedom to philosophize and argued, essentially, that religious authority should not dictate what a human being is allowed to think.

The Price of Thinking

And this is the part that makes Spinoza extraordinary to me.

He could have simply kept quiet.

Instead, he pursued ideas that threatened his relationship with almost everything familiar to him.

Later descriptions of traditional excommunication ceremonies speak of bells ringing and candles being extinguished. (We don’t know that Spinoza’s own excommunication literally happened this way, and shouldn’t pretend that we do. But excommunication was for a grave mistake and no one was allowed to buy or sell or even make eye contact with the‘excommunicated’ individual.)

But the image is almost perfect.

The community extinguished its relationship with Spinoza.

Spinoza refused to extinguish his mind.

He hadn’t simply given up on God. In a strange way, he had found a new conception of God, one so enormous that God was no longer something inside reality explaining it.

God was reality itself.

Centuries later, Albert Einstein famously said:

“I believe in Spinoza’s God.”

A God revealed in the order and harmony of existence rather than one personally intervening in individual human lives.

That is why I think Spinoza’s courage matters almost as much as his philosophy.

He risked belonging rather than pretend to believe something his own mind could no longer accept.

They could cast him out.

They could condemn his ideas.

They could extinguish the candle…

But they couldn’t extinguish the thought.

Nearly four centuries later, we’re still talking about it…

What the Hell Is… McDonald’s?

Imagine building the world’s most recognizable restaurant empire… without inventing the restaurant.

That’s essentially the story of Ray Kroc.

In 1940, brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald opened a barbecue restaurant in San Bernardino, California. Eight years later, they revolutionized fast food by stripping away almost everything.

No waiters. No elaborate menu. No plates.

Just hamburgers, fries, milkshakes and astonishing efficiency.

Their revolutionary Speedee Service System turned the kitchen into an assembly line. Burgers were cheap, service was fast, and customers loved it.

Enter Ray Kroc.

In 1954, Kroc was a 52-year-old milkshake-machine salesman wondering why one little California restaurant needed eight of his machines.

He visited, saw the operation and recognized something extraordinary.

The brothers had invented an efficient restaurant. Kroc envisioned thousands of them.

In 1955, he opened his first McDonald’s franchise in Des Plaines, Illinois, and began expanding the business.

But there was a problem.

The brothers preferred a manageable operation. Kroc wanted an empire.

In 1961, he bought their company for $2.7 million, gaining control of the brand. The brothers retained their original restaurant, which eventually closed.

Kroc’s other stroke of genius was real estate. McDonald’s increasingly controlled the land and buildings beneath its franchised restaurants, collecting rent alongside franchise revenue.

The company wasn’t simply selling hamburgers. It was building a property-backed business empire.

Today, McDonald’s operates more than 40,000 restaurants worldwide, serving millions of customers daily.

And Ray Kroc? He became the face of the McDonald’s success story, despite arriving fourteen years after the brothers opened their restaurant.

The McDonald brothers invented the system. Ray Kroc figured out how to conquer the world with it.

Sometimes the biggest fortune doesn’t belong to the person who invents something… but to the person who figures out how to sell it everywhere.

What the Hell Is… St. Basil’s Cathedral?

Imagine building one of the most beautiful churches in the world, only to have the tsar order your architect blinded so he could never create anything as magnificent again.

That’s the legend of St. Basil’s Cathedral.

And fortunately for the architect, it’s probably nonsense.

Standing at the southern end of Moscow’s Red Square, St. Basil’s looks like something from a Russian fairy tale. Its colourful onion domes resemble giant candies, flames or enormous scoops of ice cream.

But why was it built?

In 1555, Ivan IV, better known as Ivan the Terrible, commissioned the cathedral to celebrate his conquest of the Tatar Khanate of Kazan in 1552.

Completed in 1561, the complex originally consisted of eight chapels surrounding a central church, symbolizing a unified religious monument rather than one enormous interior.

And here’s something surprising.

Those famous onion domes weren’t always painted in today’s extraordinary colours. The cathedral’s appearance evolved over centuries.

Its official name is the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat. The familiar name comes from Basil the Blessed, a Russian holy fool buried nearby, whose tomb became part of the complex.

During the Soviet era, the cathedral was converted into a museum. Although threatened during periods of redevelopment and anti-religious campaigns, it survived.

Today, it’s one of the most recognizable buildings on Earth.

And despite what millions of tourists assume, St. Basil’s isn’t the Kremlin.

It’s the magnificent cathedral standing just outside its walls.

A 465-year-old celebration of military conquest that somehow became Russia’s most colourful architectural ambassador.

Not bad for a building commissioned by a man called Ivan the Terrible.

What the Hell Is… Even Cowgirls Get the Blues?

Imagine a woman born with extraordinarily large thumbs who discovers that her supposed deformity makes her a magnificent hitchhiker.

That’s Sissy Hankshaw, the unforgettable heroine of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, a 1976 novel by American writer Tom Robbins.

And things only get stranger.

Sissy travels across America, eventually encountering an eccentric group of cowgirls running a ranch, a mysterious Japanese philosopher, and a world where conventional ideas about beauty, freedom, sexuality, and happiness are turned upside down.

Robbins wasn’t interested in writing an ordinary Western.

His novel is a wildly imaginative mixture of feminism, counterculture, philosophy, absurdist humour, and the American obsession with freedom.

The title itself is a clever twist on the cowboy myth.

Cowboys are supposed to be rugged, independent, emotionally indestructible figures riding into the sunset.

But cowgirls?

They get lonely. They fall in love. They question everything.

And sometimes they get the blues.

In 1993, director Gus Van Sant adapted the novel into a film starring Uma Thurman as Sissy, alongside Keanu Reeves and Lorraine Bracco.

The movie received largely negative reviews, but Robbins’s novel remains a countercultural cult classic.

And those enormous thumbs?

They’re more than a joke.

They symbolize the possibility that the very thing making you different might also be what makes you extraordinary.

Perhaps that’s the real message.

Freedom isn’t necessarily becoming what society expects.

Sometimes it’s discovering that you were built for an entirely different road.

What the Hell Is… a Four-Stroke Engine?

Every time you start your car, thousands of tiny explosions begin pushing metal pistons up and down, converting burning fuel into mechanical motion. The remarkable part? This controlled violence happens thousands of times every minute.

Most gasoline-powered cars use a four-stroke engine, a design developed in the 19th century and still fundamental to modern motoring.

The four strokes are surprisingly simple.

1. Intake: The piston moves downward, drawing air and fuel into the cylinder through an open intake valve.
2. Compression: Both valves close as the piston rises, squeezing the mixture into a smaller space.
3. Power: A spark plug ignites the compressed mixture. Expanding gases force the piston downward, turning the crankshaft and ultimately driving the wheels.
4. Exhaust: The piston rises again, pushing burned gases through the exhaust valve.

Then the cycle repeats.

Each cylinder produces one power stroke for every two crankshaft revolutions. At 6,000 RPM, that’s 50 power strokes per second per cylinder.

In a four-cylinder engine, that’s 200 power strokes every second.

Your engine isn’t simply burning gasoline. It’s conducting a precisely timed mechanical orchestra of pressure, heat, combustion, and motion.

And your right foot is the conductor.

THE ILLUMINATI CODE

Conspiracy Fiction and the Mythology of Control

There is a document that has circulated online for years under names like The Secret Covenant and The Illuminati Code.

It supposedly reveals the operating plan of an invisible elite: poison the population, control governments, manipulate the media, engineer wars, trap people in debt, divide them by race and religion…and keep everybody too distracted to notice who is really in charge.

There is no credible evidence that this is a leaked Illuminati document, a Rockefeller covenant or the confession of any real secret society.

It is anonymous conspiracy literature.

But that doesn’t make it uninteresting.

Quite the opposite.

Read it:

1. An illusion it will be, so large, so vast it will escape their perception.
2. Those who will see it will be thought of as insane.
3. We will create separate fronts to prevent them from seeing the connection between us.
4. We will behave as if we are not connected to keep the illusion alive. Our goal will be accomplished one drop at a time so as never to bring suspicion upon ourselves.
5. We will always stand above the relative field of their experience, for we know the secrets of the absolute.
6. We will work together always and remain bound by blood and secrecy. Death will come to he who speaks.
7. We will keep their lifespan short and their minds weak while pretending to do the opposite.
8. We will use our knowledge of science and technology in subtle ways so they will never see what is happening.
9. We will use soft metals, ageing accelerators and sedatives in food and water, also in the air.
10. They will be blanketed by poisons everywhere they turn.
11. The soft metals will cause them to lose their minds. We will promise cures from our many fronts, yet feed them more poison.
12. The poisons will be absorbed through their skin and mouths and destroy their minds and reproductive systems.
13. Their children will be born dead, and we will conceal this information.
14. The poisons will be hidden in everything surrounding them…what they drink, eat, breathe and wear.
15. We must be ingenious in dispensing the poisons, for they can see far.
16. We will teach them that the poisons are good, with fun images and musical tones.
17. Those they look up to will help. We will enlist them to push our poisons.
18. They will see our products being used in film and grow accustomed to them, never knowing their true effect.
19. When they give birth, we will inject poisons into the blood of their children and convince them it is for their help.
20. We will start early, when their minds are young, targeting their children with what children love most: sweet things.
21. When their teeth decay, we will fill them with metals that will kill their minds and steal their future.
22. When their ability to learn has been affected, we will create medicine that will make them sicker and cause other diseases, for which we will create yet more medicine.
23. We will render them docile and weak before us by our power.
24. They will grow depressed, slow and obese, and when they come to us for help, we will give them more poison.
25. We will focus their attention toward money and material goods so they may never connect with their inner self. We will distract them with fornication, external pleasures and games.
26. Their minds will belong to us and they will do as we say. If they refuse, we shall implement mind-altering technology into their lives. We will use fear as our weapon.
27. We will establish their governments and establish opposites within. We will own both sides.
28. We will always hide our objective but carry out our plan.
29. They will perform the labour for us and we shall prosper from their toil.
30. Our families will never mix with theirs. Our blood must remain pure.
31. We will make them kill each other when it suits us.
32. We will keep them separated from the oneness by dogma and religion.
33. We will control all aspects of their lives and tell them what to think and how.
34. We will guide them kindly and gently, letting them think they are guiding themselves.
35. We will foment animosity between them through our factions.
36. When a light shall shine among them, we shall extinguish it by ridicule or death, whichever suits us best.
37. We will make them rip each other’s hearts apart and kill their own children.
38. We will accomplish this using hate as our ally and anger as our friend.
39. Hate will blind them totally, and never shall they see that from their conflicts we emerge as their rulers.
40. They will bathe in their own blood and kill their neighbours for as long as we see fit.
41. We will benefit greatly from this, for they will not see us.
42. We will continue to prosper from their wars and their deaths.
43. We shall repeat this over and over until our ultimate goal is accomplished.
44. We will continue to make them live in fear and anger through images and sounds.
45. We will use all the tools we have to accomplish this.
46. The tools will be provided by their labour.
47. We will make them hate themselves and their neighbours.
48. We will always hide the Divine Truth from them, that we are all one. This they must never know.
49. They must never know that colour is an illusion; they must always think they are not equal.
50. Drop by drop, drop by drop, we will advance our goal.
51. We will take over their land, resources and wealth to exercise total control over them.
52. We will deceive them into accepting laws that will steal the little freedom they have.
53. We will establish a money system that will imprison them forever, keeping them and their children in debt.
54. When they band together, we shall accuse them of crimes and present a different story to the world, for we shall own all the media.
55. We will use our media to control the flow of information and their sentiment in our favour.
56. When they rise against us, we will crush them like insects.
57. They will be helpless to do anything, for they will have no weapons.
58. We will recruit some of their own to carry out our plans, promising eternal life they will never have.
59. The recruits will be called “initiates” and indoctrinated to believe in false rites of passage to higher realms.
60. For their work they will be rewarded with earthly things and great titles, but never become immortal or join us.
61. The truth will be hidden in their face, so close they will not be able to focus on it until it is too late.
62. So grand will the illusion of freedom be that they will never know they are our slaves.
63. When all is in place, the reality we create for them will own them. This reality will be their prison.
64. When our goal is accomplished, a new era of domination will begin.
65. Their minds will be bound by beliefs we have established from time immemorial.
66. But if they ever find out they are our equal, we shall perish. THIS THEY MUST NEVER KNOW.
67. If they ever discover that together they can vanquish us, they will take action.
68. They must never discover what we have done, for once the veil has fallen our actions will reveal who we are.
69. This is the secret covenant by which we shall live through present and future lives. This covenant is sealed by blood…our blood.

And then it ends with the warning that the covenant must never be written or spoken of, because awareness itself would destroy those behind it.

Which is wonderfully convenient for a conspiracy document that has just been written down.

But this is why I find it fascinating.

It gathers almost every modern anxiety into one enormous narrative: medicine, corporations, debt, propaganda, war, racism, religion, technology, government and media are no longer separate systems with competing interests and occasional corruption.

They become one intelligence.

One plan.

One enemy.

That is the seductive power of conspiracy mythology.

Reality is chaotic. Institutions fight one another. Governments screw things up. Corporations compete. People lie. History turns on accidents nobody predicted.

The Illuminati Code removes all of that uncertainty and replaces it with something strangely comforting:

Someone is in control.

And perhaps that is why it survives.

Not because it proves that the Illuminati exist…

but because human beings have always preferred a hidden hand to an empty sky.

The Architecture of Power

Look at what human beings build when they want power to become visible.

The Great Imperial Crown of Russia almost doesn’t look real.

Made for the coronation of Catherine the Great in 1762, it contains 4,936 diamonds weighing 2,858 carats, 75 enormous pearls, and a 398.72-carat red spinel at its summit. Court jeweller Georg Friedrich Eckart and diamond craftsman Jérémie Pauzié produced it in roughly two and a half months.

But after staring at it for a while, something occurred to me.

This isn’t really jewellery.

It is political architecture in miniature.

Every diamond is saying the same thing. Every pearl, every arch, every impossible millimetre of workmanship:

The person underneath this object is not like you.

That was one of the great technologies of monarchy.

Power is abstract. You cannot see sovereignty. You cannot hold authority in your hand.

So human beings gave it a shape.

A crown.

A throne.

A palace.

A cathedral.

A procession.

An army standing perfectly still.

The crown does not contain Catherine’s power.

It performs it.

A ruler is still just a human being — flesh, fear, hunger, illness, doubt. But surround that person with gold, marble, uniforms, ritual and architecture, and something strange happens.

The individual begins to look larger than the individual.

Power becomes theatre.

And the theatre matters because everyone can see it.

This is one reason Vladimir Putin is so interesting in this context.

The Soviet Union destroyed the monarchy, but modern Russian power still operates among the palaces, cathedrals, gilded halls and military rituals inherited from earlier Russian states. Putin has also repeatedly appeared within Orthodox and military symbolism, including a 2026 Orthodox Christmas service surrounded by servicemen and their families. (Reuters)

He does not need Catherine’s crown.

He inherited the stage.

And Donald Trump provides a striking American variation on the same phenomenon.

In 2026, Trump has been physically remaking parts of the presidential landscape: promoting a roughly $400-million White House ballroom, replacing asphalt with granite, installing a new flagpole and granite helipad, and pursuing a proposed monumental Independence Arch near the National Mall. During a tour of the construction, Trump himself emphasized its permanence, saying of one installation that it would remain long after those alive today were gone. (Reuters)

Different country.

Different political system.

Different history.

But an ancient human instinct remains recognizable:

Make authority physical.

Build something enormous.

Cover something in gold.

Raise the flag higher.

Make the doorway taller.

Make the room larger than anyone needs.

Turn political power into something you can walk beneath.

That is what the Russian crown was doing in 1762.

The crown was never simply an object of staggering wealth. It was political technology.

It told the crowd where to look.

It told the court where to bow.

It told rivals what they were competing against.

And perhaps most importantly, it told the person wearing it who they had become.

This is why empires build on impossible scales.

A crown concentrates authority into something small enough to place on a human head.

An empire takes the same idea and expands it outward until you are standing inside it.

The Kremlin does it.

The Forbidden City does it.

Buckingham Palace does it.

Washington does it.

The enormous plazas, gates, columns, domes, military parades and ceremonial avenues of history all speak versions of the same architectural language:

This power existed before you arrived. It will remain after you leave.

Except history keeps ruining the message.

Dynasties collapse.

Governments fall.

Palaces become museums.

Thrones sit behind velvet ropes.

Crowns end up beneath glass.

And perhaps that is the strangest thing about seeing the Great Imperial Crown today.

Catherine is gone.

Her empire is gone.

The political system that created the crown is gone.

Yet the object remains — still sparkling, still absurd, still transmitting the message it was designed to transmit more than 260 years ago:

Look at me.

Look at what we could command.

Look at what human beings build when they want power to become visible.

The Architecture of Power

Look at what human beings build when they want power to become visible.

The Great Imperial Crown of Russia almost doesn’t look real.

Made for the coronation of Catherine the Great in 1762, it contains 4,936 diamonds weighing 2,858 carats, 75 enormous pearls, and a 398.72-carat red spinel at its summit. Even more absurdly, court jeweller Georg Friedrich Eckart and diamond craftsman Jérémie Pauzié produced it in roughly two and a half months.

But after staring at it for a while, something occurred to me.

This isn’t really jewellery.

It is political architecture in miniature.

Every diamond is saying the same thing. Every pearl, every arch, every impossible millimetre of workmanship:

The person underneath this object is not like you.

That was one of the great technologies of monarchy. Power is abstract. You cannot see sovereignty. You cannot hold authority in your hand.

So human beings gave it a shape.

A crown.

A throne.

A palace.

A cathedral.

A procession.

An army standing perfectly still.

The crown does not actually contain Catherine’s power. Take it off her head and put it on a table and it commands nobody.

But put it on the head of the ruler of the Russian Empire, surround her with soldiers, priests, aristocrats and a palace built on a scale no ordinary human being could dream of possessing, and something extraordinary happens:

power becomes visible.

We still do this.

Vladimir Putin does not wear the Great Imperial Crown. Modern Russian power uses different architecture: the Kremlin, military parades, vast halls, presidential motorcades, state ceremony and, more importantly, institutions capable of turning presidential decisions into consequences. Russia today has a highly concentrated political system; Putin has dominated its politics for decades, while his allied United Russia party retained a constitutional parliamentary majority in the 2026 election.

America speaks the language differently.

Donald Trump doesn’t require a crown either. The presidency already sits at the centre of an enormous state: armed forces, diplomacy, executive departments, Air Force One, the White House and all the visual machinery accompanying the office. That power is constitutionally constrained and divided among institutions—but its physical manifestation is staggering.

And then there is Trump’s new White House ballroom.

Whatever one’s politics, look at it through the same lens as Catherine’s crown. The White House says the project will create approximately 90,000 square feet of ornate space capable of seating 650 people, replacing the East Wing and costing about $250 million, funded by Trump and other donors.

Suddenly the connection becomes fascinating.

The crown and the ballroom are separated by 264 years, two continents and completely different political systems.

Yet both demonstrate an ancient human instinct:

important power tends to build things large enough—or beautiful enough—that you can feel it before anyone explains it to you.

The pyramids did it.

Versailles did it.

The Vatican does it.

The Kremlin does it.

Washington does it.

Aircraft carriers do it.

Even a presidential motorcade does it.

None of this means power is good.

Awe is not approval.

You can oppose a ruler, a government, a war or an ideology while remaining astonished by the machinery humans have constructed to exercise authority over millions of other humans.

And perhaps that is what makes the Great Imperial Crown so mesmerizing.

It is almost five thousand diamonds arranged around one extraordinarily simple idea:

I have power.

A crown is power miniaturized.

An empire is the crown expanded until you are standing inside it.

The Architecture of Power

Look at what human beings build when they want power to become visible.

The Great Imperial Crown of Russia almost doesn’t look real.

Made for the coronation of Catherine the Great in 1762, it contains 4,936 diamonds weighing 2,858 carats, 75 enormous pearls, and a 398.72-carat red spinel at its summit. Even more absurdly, court jeweller Georg Friedrich Eckart and diamond craftsman Jérémie Pauzié produced it in roughly two and a half months.

But after staring at it for a while, something occurred to me.

This isn’t really jewellery.

It is political architecture in miniature.

Every diamond is saying the same thing. Every pearl, every arch, every impossible millimetre of workmanship:

The person underneath this object is not like you.

That was one of the great technologies of monarchy. Power is abstract. You cannot see sovereignty. You cannot hold authority in your hand.

So human beings gave it a shape.

A crown.

A throne.

A palace.

A cathedral.

A procession.

An army standing perfectly still.

The crown does not actually contain Catherine’s power. Take it off her head and put it on a table and it commands nobody.

But put it on the head of the ruler of the Russian Empire, surround her with soldiers, priests, aristocrats and a palace built on a scale no ordinary human being could dream of possessing, and something extraordinary happens:

power becomes visible.

We still do this.

Vladimir Putin does not wear the Great Imperial Crown. Modern Russian power uses different architecture: the Kremlin, military parades, vast halls, presidential motorcades, state ceremony and, more importantly, institutions capable of turning presidential decisions into consequences. Russia today has a highly concentrated political system; Putin has dominated its politics for decades, while his allied United Russia party retained a constitutional parliamentary majority in the 2026 election.

America speaks the language differently.

Donald Trump doesn’t require a crown either. The presidency already sits at the centre of an enormous state: armed forces, diplomacy, executive departments, Air Force One, the White House and all the visual machinery accompanying the office. That power is constitutionally constrained and divided among institutions—but its physical manifestation is staggering.

And then there is Trump’s new White House ballroom.

Whatever one’s politics, look at it through the same lens as Catherine’s crown. The White House says the project will create approximately 90,000 square feet of ornate space capable of seating 650 people, replacing the East Wing and costing about $250 million, funded by Trump and other donors.

Suddenly the connection becomes fascinating.

The crown and the ballroom are separated by 264 years, two continents and completely different political systems.

Yet both demonstrate an ancient human instinct:

important power tends to build things large enough—or beautiful enough—that you can feel it before anyone explains it to you.

The pyramids did it.

Versailles did it.

The Vatican does it.

The Kremlin does it.

Washington does it.

Aircraft carriers do it.

Even a presidential motorcade does it.

None of this means power is good.

Awe is not approval.

You can oppose a ruler, a government, a war or an ideology while remaining astonished by the machinery humans have constructed to exercise authority over millions of other humans.

And perhaps that is what makes the Great Imperial Crown so mesmerizing.

It is almost five thousand diamonds arranged around one extraordinarily simple idea:

I have power.

A crown is power miniaturized.

An empire is the crown expanded until you are standing inside it.

What the Hell Is… Nebraska?

I drove through all of the lower 48 states when I was 21, about 24,000 miles in two and a half months.

And if you asked me which state was the most boring to drive through?

Nebraska was like a southern North Dakota. I-80 runs about 455 miles (733 km) across the state, more than six hours of driving, punctuated mostly by the rumble strips waking me up from boredom.

So I asked my AI a simple question:

Sell me Nebraska.

Apparently… I may owe Nebraska an apology.

The first thing Luna threw at me was the Sandhills. Nearly 20,000 square miles of ancient sand dunes that are now covered in grass, forming the largest stabilized dune system in the Western Hemisphere and one of the biggest intact native grasslands left in North America.

Okay. That’s mildly better than corn.

Then she mentioned the birds.

Every spring, roughly a million sandhill cranes gather along Nebraska’s Platte River valley during their migration. At peak times, thousands can crowd into half a mile of river. It is considered one of the great wildlife spectacles in North America.

I did not see those.

I saw Highway.

Then things got weird.

Nebraska has a 76-mile National Scenic River called the Niobrara, with cliffs, rapids and more than 230 waterfalls along part of its valley. Nebraska. Waterfalls. Apparently I was driving through the wrong Nebraska.

Then there’s Chimney Rock, one of the great landmarks of the westward migration. The National Park Service says it was mentioned in more emigrant diaries than any other landmark on the Oregon Trail. Imagine crossing half a continent in a wagon and finally seeing that thing rising out of the plains.

Nebraska also gave us Arbor Day, first proposed there in 1872.

And, considerably more importantly, Kool-Aid was invented in Hastings, Nebraska, in 1927.

Then Nebraska played its final card:

Carhenge.

Someone near Alliance recreated Stonehenge using old automobiles.

Thirty-nine of them.

At that point I had to admit Nebraska understood road-trip culture better than I had given it credit for.

So perhaps Nebraska isn’t boring.

Perhaps Nebraska is quiet, and Americans have become so accustomed to mountains, cities, oceans, neon and spectacle that enormous empty space registers as “nothing.”

Driving across it at 21, I wanted something to happen.

Now?

Give me an empty two-lane road through the Sandhills, a WRX, nowhere I have to be, and about six hours.

I might finally understand Nebraska.

Nebraska, I think I owe you an apology.

What the Hell Is… a Swastika?

What the Hell Is… a Swastika?

A swastika is much older than Hitler.

Much, much older.

Versions of the hooked-cross symbol appear across ancient Eurasia and beyond, thousands of years before Nazi Germany existed. In Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, it has traditionally carried meanings connected with good fortune, well-being, prosperity, eternity and the sacred order of things.

The English word comes from the Sanskrit svastika, related to svasti: roughly, “well-being” or “good fortune.”

Which makes what happened next one of history’s strangest acts of symbolic theft.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European archaeologists became fascinated by swastika-like symbols found on ancient objects. At the same time, nationalist and racial movements in Germany began appropriating the symbol and connecting it to increasingly dubious ideas about an ancient “Aryan” race.

Then the Nazis took it.

Hitler’s movement turned the swastika into the emblem of the Nazi Party: a black hooked cross, generally tilted 45 degrees, inside a white circle on a red field.

After the Nazis seized power in Germany, the symbol became inseparable from the regime surrounding it: dictatorship, racial persecution, conquest, concentration camps and ultimately the Holocaust.

And that association became so powerful that it almost erased thousands of years of earlier meaning in much of the Western world.

But not everywhere.

Walk into a Hindu temple in India today and you may see swastikas used perfectly openly. You can find them in Buddhist traditions across Asia and in Jain religious imagery. There, the symbol did not suddenly become Nazi simply because Hitler appropriated a version of it.

This creates an extraordinary problem in semantics.

Can one symbol mean two almost opposite things at once?

Historically, yes.

Context does enormous amounts of work.

A swastika carved into an ancient temple is not a Nazi symbol. A black swastika displayed alongside SS insignia almost certainly is. The geometry may be similar while the meaning is radically different.

There have even been attempts to distinguish the Nazi emblem by calling it the Hakenkreuz, the German word meaning “hooked cross.” That can be useful, although historically the terminology is more complicated than simply declaring that one shape is a swastika and the other is not.

What fascinates me is what happened to the symbol itself.

Hitler did not invent the swastika.

He captured it.

And within roughly one generation, a symbol that had survived for thousands of years acquired a new meaning so powerful that, across much of the world, it overwhelmed almost everything that came before it.

That may be one of the most dramatic examples in history of a civilization changing the meaning of a shape.

What the Hell Is… the Anthropocene?

Imagine geologists 100,000 years from now digging through what remains of our civilization. They probably won’t find much of our politics, arguments, fashions, or social media, but they may find something much more durable: plastic, concrete, aluminium, chemical residues, radioactive fallout from nuclear testing, altered sediments, and perhaps an absurd number of chicken bones.

In other words, they may be able to identify us not through our stories, but through a layer in the Earth.

That is the idea behind the Anthropocene, a term used for the period in which human activity became powerful enough to alter the planet on a geological scale. We have changed the atmosphere, oceans, climate, nitrogen cycle, landscapes, ecosystems, and the materials accumulating in sediments around the world.

The interesting question is no longer whether humans have changed the Earth. The argument is over whether that change is distinct enough to deserve its own geological epoch.

The term was popularized around 2000 by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and ecologist Eugene Stoermer. Their suggestion was provocative because, officially, we still live in the Holocene, the epoch that began after the last Ice Age roughly 11,700 years ago.

If the Anthropocene were formally recognized, it would mean that human beings had become something geology normally associates with enormous natural forces: a species capable of leaving a planetary signature in the rocks.

Then came the harder question. When did it begin?

Some researchers pointed to the invention of agriculture. Others argued for the Industrial Revolution, when coal, factories, steam engines, and rapidly expanding cities began changing the atmosphere and landscape on a massive scale.

Another strong candidate was the enormous surge in human activity after the Second World War, sometimes called the Great Acceleration. Population, energy use, industrial production, fertilizer, automobiles, aviation, plastics, and carbon emissions all rose dramatically during this period.

Nuclear weapons testing provided something especially useful to geologists. Atmospheric tests scattered radioactive isotopes, including plutonium, around the planet. Those particles settled into soils, lake beds, ice, and ocean sediments, effectively leaving a timestamp from the middle of the twentieth century.

For a geologist, that matters because geological time is not simply about ideas. You need something physically detectable in the Earth.

Then came the twist.

In 2024, geologists rejected the proposal to make the Anthropocene an official geological epoch, so formally we still live in the Holocene. The word has not disappeared, though, because the underlying idea remains extraordinarily useful.

Human beings have become capable of altering planetary systems in ways that may remain visible long after our cities, languages, governments, and perhaps even our species are gone.

Which leaves us with one of the strangest thoughts of all.

Every previous geological layer was created by organisms that had no idea they were making one.

We may be the first species in Earth’s history to realize, while we are still here, that we are leaving a layer behind.

The Mathematics of Creation

There is something deeply strange about the universe.

It can be understood.

Not completely, obviously. We are still feeling our way through enormous mysteries. But again and again, nature turns out to have structure, and that structure can be expressed mathematically.

A falling stone can be described by an equation. So can the orbit of a planet. Light bends according to geometry. Quantum mechanics predicts the behaviour of particles with extraordinary accuracy. Even black holes, gravitational waves, and the expansion of the universe eventually become mathematics on a page.

And somehow, the mathematics works.

That fact is so familiar that we rarely stop to be astonished by it.

I was thinking recently about knowledge and God when someone left me a beautiful comment about the ancient Chinese figures Fuxi and Nüwa. They are often shown holding a carpenter’s square and a compass, instruments associated with straight lines, circles, measurement, and cosmic order.

Whatever one makes of the mythology itself, the symbolism is remarkable.

Reality has shape.

And the human mind can discover it.

That same idea keeps appearing throughout history. The Greeks found geometry hidden inside ordinary forms. Kepler searched for mathematical harmony in the heavens. Newton showed that the apple and the Moon were governed by the same physics. Einstein went further and described gravity itself as the curvature of spacetime.

The deeper we look, the less arbitrary the universe appears.

This creates an interesting problem for theology.

For a long time, God was often pushed into the gaps in human understanding.

Lightning? God.

Disease? God.

Planetary motion? God.

Then the mechanism was discovered, and one more hiding place disappeared.

But perhaps that was always the wrong place to look.

The deeper mystery is not simply why lightning happens.

It is why there are laws by which lightning happens at all.

Why should reality possess mathematical structure?

Why should equations developed inside human minds describe a universe that existed billions of years before humans appeared?

And perhaps strangest of all, why should the universe produce creatures capable of understanding the universe?

The more knowledge grows, the more intelligible creation becomes.

That does not necessarily make God smaller.

It changes the question.

Instead of asking:

What causes this?

we eventually arrive at:

Why is there an intelligible reality capable of being understood at all?

That is where science and theology become most interesting to me.

Not where one defeats the other.

Not where God is used to plug a hole in physics.

But where mathematics keeps revealing deeper order, and every answer seems to uncover another layer beneath it.

Perhaps creation is not mysterious because we know so little about it.

Perhaps it is mysterious because we can know so much.

The Future of Driving: The End of Crude Oil

Elon can keep his damn hands off my 5-speed...

Forty years ago, when I first received my driver’s licence, I filled up my dad’s car with unleaded gasoline and had a strangely serious thought for a sixteen-year-old: how long could this possibly last? I remember watching the clear fuel disappear into the tank and thinking about the sheer scale of what we were doing. Millions upon millions of cars were already driving around the planet, every one of them eventually returning to a pump for another tank.

So, long before Just Stop Oil protesters were blocking traffic in city centres, I was tearing through libraries worrying that we were going to run out of the stuff. Not because I had suddenly become an environmental activist. Quite the opposite. I had just discovered driving and already knew I wanted to keep doing it for the rest of my life.

Four decades later, humanity is still consuming oil on an almost incomprehensible scale. Cars are only part of it. Trucks, ships, industry and aircraft all depend heavily on petroleum products. The remarkable thing is that the disaster I imagined at sixteen never arrived. We did not simply count down the barrels until somebody pumped the last one out of the ground.

Part of the reason is that oil reserves do not work like a giant fixed tank under the Earth. New deposits are discovered, extraction technology changes, prices determine what is economical to recover, and resources once considered inaccessible become available. The question has gradually changed from, “When will we run out of oil?” to something much more interesting: “How long will we actually need it?”

That matters enormously to me because I love driving. I mean actually driving. I want a steering wheel in my hands, pedals under my feet and a gearbox that expects me to participate. My four-cylinder Subaru is not merely a device for transporting my body from one geographical location to another. If that were all I wanted, I could take the bus.

Even if Elon Musk announced tomorrow that Teslas were free, I would still want my Subaru.

I have nothing against electric cars. They are clearly going to be a major part of transportation, and for millions of people they make perfect sense. What I dislike is the assumption that the future must inevitably remove the driver from driving. A world of silent autonomous pods carrying passive humans around may be technically impressive, but it also sounds spectacularly boring.

I would prefer another future.

Synthetic fuels are one possibility. Instead of digging hydrocarbons out of the Earth, we can manufacture fuels using renewable electricity, hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The technology is still expensive and energetically demanding, but companies are already experimenting with it. Porsche, notably, has invested in synthetic e-fuels partly because it wants combustion engines to remain viable in a lower-carbon future.

That idea fascinates me.

The internal-combustion engine might actually outlive crude oil.

Biofuels offer another route. Aviation is also pushing hard into alternative fuels because batteries that work reasonably well in cars become a much more difficult proposition when you are trying to lift hundreds of tonnes into the sky. The future will probably involve a mixture of technologies rather than one miraculous replacement for petroleum.

None of this means synthetic fuel is automatically “clean.” Burn hydrocarbons and you still produce emissions. Producing e-fuels also requires a great deal of energy, and battery-electric cars are generally far more efficient at turning electricity into motion. But efficiency is not the only thing humans care about.

We still sail boats even though aircraft exist. People ride horses even though motorcycles are faster. Steam locomotives are lovingly restored despite being obsolete as transportation. Sometimes the machine itself becomes part of the experience.

That is how I feel about cars.

When I was sixteen, I imagined some Mad Max future where gasoline reached $50 a gallon and humanity fought over the last remaining oil wells. Now I suspect something much stranger and more optimistic may happen. We may leave enormous quantities of petroleum underground, not because we finally ran out, but because we became clever enough to manufacture better alternatives.

Perhaps ordinary commuting becomes overwhelmingly electric. Maybe autonomous cars handle the boring parts of travel. Aircraft increasingly use synthetic aviation fuels. Cities become quieter and cleaner.

And somewhere on a winding road, someone still pushes in a clutch, drops into third and hears an engine answer.

I hope that someone is me.

I want to drive for as long as I possibly can, but I would also like the road to remain open for the generations that come after me. We do not have to choose between loving machines and caring about the world they operate in.

We may simply have to reinvent what goes into the tank.

And Elon can keep his damn hands off my 5-speed.

A Canadian in All 50 States: A Reflective Odyssey

I grew up Canadian, and maybe that’s why the United States always shimmered for me with a kind of exotic allure. Not exotic like the spice markets of Marrakesh or the temples of Kyoto, but exotic because it was so close. It was across a river, a stretch of highway, a line on a map.

We lived near the border, and for our family vacations we crossed into America the way some people cross a threshold into a dream. Every trip south felt like stepping onto a vast stage set, where the cars were bigger, the soda cups endless, and even the motel signs seemed to hum with neon possibility.

For me, the U.S. wasn’t just geography. It epitomized travel. It was a country I could measure not only by distance, but by states, each one another chapter.

Long before I knew I’d become a writer, long before I wrote about Russia or North Korea, I was a kid staring out the window of our family car at American billboards, mesmerized.

That seed of wonder never left me. Years later, it grew into something larger than a vacation. It became a personal odyssey: to drive, wander and drift through all fifty states of the Union.

The Lower 48: A Long Road, A Long Dream

When people talk about traveling the U.S., they usually mean a handful of cities. Maybe a cross-country road trip. A taste of Route 66, a selfie with the Grand Canyon, a Broadway ticket stub.

I wanted something else.

I wanted the whole story, or at least as much of it as a person could see from behind the wheel.

So in one great sweep, a friend and I drove the lower 48 states.

Forty-eight states in one trip. About 24,000 miles in my 1978 Toyota Corolla, sleeping in the car at rest areas, beside closed roads or behind gas stations. We washed storefront windows for gas money and food.

It sounds ridiculous now.

It probably sounded ridiculous then.

But that was partly the point.

Jack Kerouac became synonymous with the American road. Bill Bryson turned wandering through America into literature. Steinbeck put a camper on a truck and went looking for his country.

We weren’t famous writers. We were two guys in an old Corolla trying to see everything.

To call it a road trip feels too small. It was a rolling classroom, a kaleidoscope, an endurance test and occasionally an exercise in spectacularly questionable judgment.

The Road Teaches You

On the road, America teaches you in its own accents.

It teaches you about hospitality in the South, where a stranger might still call you “hon.”

It teaches you about resilience in the Rust Belt, where factories can disappear without taking the identity of a place with them.

It teaches you about scale in the West, where the horizon can swallow you whole and the mountains look painted by a God with an oversized brush.

We ate in diners with menus laminated against decades of spilled coffee. We ran across the helipad on top of a Trump casino in Atlantic City. We snuck into a Kenny Rogers concert in Oklahoma City. We watched Misery in a theatre in Upstate New York.

We met people who sometimes felt like cousins we simply hadn’t met yet.

And through all of it, the car became a character in its own right.

There is something about driving thousands upon thousands of miles through deserts, forests, cities and empty interstate that fuses a person to a machine. My five-speed Corolla wasn’t just transportation. It was shelter, companion and mechanical passport.

In the years and roughly twenty vehicles since, my WRX has taken on some of that symbolic role, the drift car that occasionally appears to challenge theoretical physics. But the Corolla was the machine that made America unfold like a living map.

Alaska, 1999

The Lower 48 were complete, but two states remained outside the continental sweep: Alaska and Hawaii.

In 1999, I drove to Alaska.

And driving to Alaska is no small thing.

Alaska humbles you. The road begins to feel less like transportation and more like a narrow agreement between civilization and wilderness. Mountains remind you how small you are. Forests seem eternal. Rivers look less like bodies of water than geography itself in motion.

When I reached Alaska, I understood that this project wasn’t really about checking boxes anymore.

It was about scale.

It was about movement.

It was about the boy who once crossed the border with his family, fascinated simply by being somewhere else, now driving into one of the farthest corners of the continent.

And then one state remained.

Hawaii, 2025: State #50

Last year, I finally went to Hawaii.

Kona.

State number fifty.

There was something wonderfully fitting about finishing there. Hawaii is the one state you obviously cannot reach by road from the mainland, so after decades of driving across America, I had to fly thousands of kilometres across the Pacific just to continue the journey behind the wheel.

And I did.

I drove Hawaii.

The fiftieth state was no longer a blank space on the map.

Kona was wonderful, but there was also something slightly surreal about it. I had carried this unfinished geographical sentence around for decades. Forty-eight states became forty-nine in Alaska, and forty-nine remained forty-nine for more than a quarter-century.

Then suddenly there I was, driving in Hawaii.

Fifty.

No fireworks. No marching band. Just the road, the Pacific, and the quiet realization that something I had started when I was very young was finally complete.

Why It Matters

Why count states? Why measure travel in borders crossed?

For me, it is about continuity.

America had exerted a strange magnetic pull on me since childhood, and now I have memories attached to every state on its map.

Kansas. New Orleans. Hell’s Kitchen. MIT. Cape Canaveral. Hollywood. Chicago. St. Louis. Santa Fe. Miami. Memphis. Mount Rushmore. Dallas-Fort Worth. North Carolina.

Wyoming, still my favourite.

Names that once belonged to movies, business, history books and television gradually became actual places in my memory.

That transformation fascinates me.

A name becomes a road.

A road becomes an afternoon.

An afternoon becomes part of your life.

Travel, in the end, is a mirror. America has been one of the clearest mirrors I’ve ever looked into, each state reflecting not only itself but something about me: curiosity, persistence, restlessness and a lifelong delight in strangeness.

Fifty Stories

What I’ve learned is that the United States is simultaneously one country and fifty stories.

It is contradictions.

Generosity and suspicion. Beauty and ruin. Openness and defensiveness. Vast empty landscapes and cities where millions of lives occupy the same few square miles.

I’ve also learned that travel writing is not really about tallying miles.

It is about memory.

The eerie quiet of Pyongyang, North Korea years later can somehow remind me of the eerie quiet of a Nebraska highway at dawn.

The friendliness of strangers in Arkansas sits somewhere in memory beside the wariness of strangers in Manhattan.

Roadside barbecue in the Carolinas occupies the same strange mental atlas as a gas-station hot dog in Wyoming.

None of these moments seemed historically important when they happened.

But they stayed.

That is what travel does.

Closing the Loop

When I drove through Kona last year, I closed a loop that had begun decades earlier with a Canadian boy crossing the American border with his family, staring out a car window and realizing that the world was enormous and, somehow, reachable.

I have now driven in all fifty states.

But oddly enough, completing the map didn’t make travel feel finished.

It did the opposite.

Because after fifty states, 24,000-mile road trips, Alaska, Hawaii and decades of wandering around the planet, the lesson remains exactly what it was when I was a kid:

There is always another road.

And I still want to know where it goes…

What the Hell Is Wrong With Autocorrect?

We are constantly told that large language models are, at some fundamental level, astonishingly sophisticated next-word predictors.

Fine.

Then why is autocorrect still so bad at understanding what I’m trying to type?

For ages, whenever I typed Anthropic, my iPhone would enthusiastically offer anthropology, anthropological, and assorted cousins that were absolutely not Anthropic.

Then today, suddenly: Anthropic.

That got me wondering about a strange technological mismatch.

We now have AI systems that can take in paragraphs of context and make remarkably good guesses about what comes next. Yet the little strip of suggested words above my keyboard often seems to have no idea what conversation I’m having.

The reason is that these systems are solving related, but very different, problems.

An LLM can use a large amount of context and significant computing power to decide what token is likely to come next. Autocorrect has to react almost instantly while also trying to figure out whether I mistyped something, whether I meant a name, whether I’m using slang, whether I invented a word, and whether “fixing” it would be more annoying than leaving it alone.

And autocorrect has another problem:

Being wrong is far more noticeable than being right.

Nobody congratulates their phone for correctly predicting “the.”

But replace someone’s surname with “sandwich” once and you remember it for six years.

So perhaps autocorrect is not stupid so much as cautious, underpowered, and operating with less context than we imagine.

Still, the contrast is hilarious.

We have built machines that can summarize philosophy, write code, translate languages, and carry on conversations about consciousness…

…while my phone has spent years trying to convince me that Anthropic is not a word.

Which leaves me with one wonderfully stupid question:

If next-word prediction helped produce the AI revolution, why has the next word above my keyboard so often been completely useless?

What the Hell Happened to Company Names?

I noticed something during the dot-com era that has bothered me ever since: company names started getting strange.

Not necessarily bad strange. Often brilliant strange.

Words were being compressed, respelled, fused together, stripped of vowels, borrowed from mathematics, mythology, slang and ordinary speech. At first I thought it was just branding fashion, but I think something deeper happened. The internet turned naming into an optimization problem.

A company suddenly needed a name that was memorable, searchable, pronounceable, trademarkable, available as a domain and distinctive enough to survive in a rapidly filling digital world. That is a remarkable amount of pressure to put on a word.

Microsoft is almost beautifully literal: microcomputer + software. Google came from “googol,” the mathematical term for 10¹⁰⁰, while the altered spelling became the brand. Netflix compressed the internet and “flicks.” PayPal sounds like a friendly payment instruction. Reddit hides “read it” in plain sight.

Nvidia may be one of the better examples because the name feels invented without sounding meaningless. The company has connected it to the Latin invidia, meaning envy, while “NV” was also used internally for “next version.” Whatever mixture ultimately produced the name, it has exactly that quality many technology companies wanted: short, distinctive, futuristic and just mysterious enough to make you wonder what it means.

Then came the period when perfectly good words started losing letters: Flickr, Tumblr, Grindr, Lyft. Some of that was style, but scarcity mattered too. If the obvious word, trademark or domain was already taken, language itself had to mutate.

What interests me most, though, is that the original cleverness of the name may matter far less than we think. Facebook is not an especially imaginative word. A “face book” was already a literal student directory. Apple has nothing inherently to do with computers, and Amazon does not mean online shopping. Yet once millions or billions of people attach experience, money, identity, habit and memory to a word, the company begins rewriting the meaning of the word itself.

That may be the real trick. An iconic name does not always begin as an iconic name; sometimes the company earns the meaning afterward.

The dot-com era therefore did something curious to language. For perhaps the first time, enormous numbers of businesses were competing not only for customers, but for a tiny piece of vocabulary that nobody else could own.

The internet put evolutionary pressure on words.

What the Hell Is… a GMO?

I just learned something that completely changed the way I think about genetically modified food.

Kale, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and kohlrabi are all varieties of the same species, Brassica oleracea. Over centuries, people kept breeding the plants that exaggerated whichever part they liked. Bigger leaves eventually gave us things like kale. Enlarged buds gave us Brussels sprouts. Flowering structures were pushed in the direction of broccoli and cauliflower. Kohlrabi went off in another direction altogether and developed that enormous swollen stem.

Basically, humans looked at one plant for generations and kept saying, “I like that bit. Give me more of it.”

Of course, this isn’t the same thing as a modern GMO. Traditional breeding changes genetics indirectly by choosing which organisms reproduce. Genetic engineering allows us to intervene much more directly, introducing or altering particular pieces of DNA, while newer tools such as CRISPR can make remarkably targeted edits.

But that distinction made the subject much more interesting to me, because the phrase “genetically modified” sounds as though humans recently began interfering with pristine nature. We didn’t. Agriculture itself is an enormous experiment in changing living things. Corn, bananas, wheat, dogs, cattle and countless other organisms look the way they do partly because humans spent thousands of years deciding which traits reproduced.

Modern biotechnology changes the speed and precision of that process, and sometimes allows changes traditional breeding could never accomplish. That deserves scrutiny. Different modifications can have different ecological, economic and biological consequences, so throwing every GMO into one category of “good” or “bad” doesn’t tell us very much.

And now we have CRISPR, which makes the boundary stranger still. Scientists can sometimes make tiny DNA changes that could conceivably have arisen naturally, except instead of waiting around for evolution to stumble across them, we choose the edit ourselves.

So perhaps the surprising thing about GMOs isn’t that humanity has begun modifying life.

It’s that after thousands of years of doing it slowly, we finally learned how to reach inside and edit the instructions.

A Geometry of Knowledge and God

I’ve had this image in my head for years.

Imagine a cube inside a sphere.

The cube represents everything we can formalize: science, mathematics, AI, measurement, proof, the growing architecture of human knowledge.

The sphere represents something larger: the reality in which all of that exists.

For me, that larger reality is God.

I don’t mean this as a replacement for the Bible, or as some new theology. I still read Scripture as Scripture. This is simply a metaphor for something I’ve always struggled to put into words.

Science does not push God outward every time it discovers something new. That would make God merely the name we give to whatever we haven’t explained yet.

I think of it differently.

Science enlarges the cube.

God is not one unexplained object somewhere inside it. God is the reality in which the cube exists at all.

That is why I like the circle and sphere so much. Human systems tend toward grids, boxes, coordinates, boundaries. Nature gives us spheres, orbits, spirals, curves, fields.

Even the humble manhole cover carries a strange little geometric lesson: a circle can rotate without falling through its own opening.

None of this proves God.

It simply gives me a picture for something I already believe:

Knowledge grows.
Creation becomes more intelligible.
God does not become smaller.