7 for Sunday

Haiti is the only country where slavery was defeated by a slave revolution — and one of the poorest nations in the hemisphere. You can’t reason someone out of something they didn’t reason themselves into. And here, tucked between the philosophy and the history, is an actual cure for hiccups.

Show an adult a meadow and they’ll declare it unplayable. There’s a phrase — “QM’ing to Valhalla” — that describes crawling across the Williamsburg Bridge on your hands and feet toward a destination that doesn’t exist, for reasons that fall apart the moment you try to explain them. Paulo Coelho says there are only four stories.

Sarcasm turned out to have a simple formula — easy to mimic, adding nothing. Today’s LLMs are astonishing and not yet intelligent, and the word we should be talking about before real AI arrives is agency. Meanwhile, a criterion for a good day sometimes shrinks all the way down to “did a single push-up.”

A million years from now, alien anthropologists will dig up the self-help section and know exactly what we were struggling with. Aurelius points out that the person who betrayed your trust was your own misjudgment. And step two — the one between the big idea and the profit — keeps getting skipped, every time.