Ai-Assisted

There’s an oddity to my vocation: It’s really new. I remember taking my first intro class in spring 1998 in the now-defunct computer science department at Georgetown College (No, really, it’s gone now. Gone for lack of interest.), and the professor, Brian Crawley, said, “What’s interesting about Computer Science is, many of its creators are still with us. This field is largely less than 50 years old.” He was right. Leaving aside Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and the general concept of algorithms, the digital computer as a device was shockingly recent: ENIAC in 1945, EDSAC in 1949. The first programming languages FORTRAN, LISP, ALGOL in the late ’50s. As I sat in that classroom, I was barely 40 years removed from people who “programmed” with plug boards, switches, and machine code. ...

I said “machts nix” to a coworker last week. Meant it, reflexively, the way you’d say “bless you.” It’s not my phrase. It’s my wife’s—and it isn’t even really hers. She got it from her dad, who picked it up in Germany in the 1960s, stationed there before she was born. It’s no problem; forget about it. It crossed an ocean and two generations to get to me, and I never decided to start saying it. I just looked up one day and it was in my mouth, load-bearing, like it had always been there. ...

When half your face stops working, you brace for it. You picture the flinch. The kid who points. The cashier who suddenly finds the register very interesting. You figure you’re about to become a leper—ring the bell, unclean, unclean—and you steel yourself for a world that recoils. Then you walk out into that world and discover the truth: nobody notices a damned thing. Strangers See a Ghost I’ve been out. Grocery store, gas station, drive-thru. Slurring, drooping, sipping coffee out of the one corner of my mouth that still takes orders. And the strangers of the world have, to a person, treated me exactly as they always have. ...

My commute runs about ninety minutes round-trip, which works out to a lot of hours in the ear. Here is what fills them, grouped by category, with a quick word on each. History The Age of Napoleon Podcast — Monumental work on Napoleon’s life, his ascent to the throne, the Napoleonic wars, and his incredible influence on world history. History That Doesn’t Suck — A somewhat jingoistic retelling of American history. It does the “awesome to awesome” thing with a generous helping of American exceptionalism, which grates. I’m an ancient-history guy, so I find American history narrow and a little boring — but it’s well told and diverting enough. ...