Playground

by Richard Powers

It was a kind of reciprocal autoerotic strangulation of the soul, and both parties were generous givers and grateful recipients.

Everyone needs to eat, but few people are aware of who sets the table.

“What’s a wardrobe?” “Just a clothes closet with a trust fund.

Of all the things we humans excel at, moving the goalposts may be our best trick. The moment advanced AIs get good at that, they’ll have passed the real Turing test.

SHE SAT BY HIS lifeless form until the authorities came to take it to the crematorium. Her children got home that night, and the three of them knew each other again through the fact of their grief. Even standing and walking took massive amounts of concentration, so Evelyne did little of either. Great bursts of color were coursing through her, a symphony of inexplicable, contradictory messages about nothing and everything. Your sea is so great and our craft so small, O Lord. The cuttlefish’s song.

’Ia tīa’i mai te Atua iā ’oe! ’Ia tīa’i mai te Atua iā ’oe! May God keep you! May God answer you!

Every canoe may be an island, but the whole island world is itself a canoe.