7 for Sunday

Someone else’s death isn’t a period — it’s turning the page midway through a book and finding all the remaining pages inexplicably blank. A screw is an application of an inclined plane. And courage, it turns out, doesn’t make things easier; it just keeps raising the difficulty of what you’re willing to attempt.

The Wright Brothers changed the world, then waited for anyone to notice. Reindeer eyes shift from gold to blue as winter darkness falls — an adaptation that is, somehow, more astonishing than glowing noses. And “calm technology” turns out to be a phrase that, once encountered, cannot be unfound.

Marcus Aurelius stood where Socrates was put on trial, gazing at the Parthenon — all of history a conversation layered, erased, and rewoven. Somewhere in there, a playwright whose obsessive self-reflection only deepens his egotism. And Rousseau points out it’s never ignorance that leads to evil — it’s what people pretend they know.

Epictetus has the measure of you: saying “I’ll start tomorrow” is just a polite way of saying “I choose to be abject today.” A Harris hawk perched on your arm weighs nothing, moves like time runs faster for it, and is supremely efficient at killing — but basically dumb as a stump otherwise. Asimov’s note about libraries still lands.

Humans are remarkably reliable in worst-case situations — which turns out to be exactly where AI fails spectacularly. On your deathbed, you’d pay anything for one more ordinary evening, one more car ride, one more juicy peach. Meanwhile, 225 free films are sitting on YouTube waiting, including one that will leave you gobsmacked and horrified in repeated cycles.