What Still Cannot Be Made Coherent

jan burzlaff on history in the age of ai.Jackson Pollack, Mural, 1943.

What this essay has offered is not a blueprint, but a series of refusals: narrative smoothness and moral simplification, a refusal to let the fracture be folded into the frame. Each voice—Luisa D., Jacobo K., Samuel W., Helen L., and Henryk P.—reminds us that history is not the story of what happened. It is the struggle to name what still cannot be made coherent.

— Jan Burzlaff, “Fragments, not prompts: five principles for writing history in the age of AI”