I am, by temperament, allergic to first numbers. When someone tells me an apartment is worth €200,000, my immediate reaction is to assume it is worth €150,000, because anyone offering me a number on first contact has a reason for offering that specific number, and the reason is rarely my benefit. I do not take…

I work in artificial intelligence. I should be excited about the moment we’re in. According to the industry I belong to, we are weeks away from artificial general intelligence, months away from the obsolescence of all knowledge work, and years away from a post-scarcity utopia administered by benevolent algorithms. I receive these forecasts in my…

In the tenth grade, I bought a ring for a girl I liked. Not a metaphorical ring. An actual ring, from an actual store, with actual money I’d saved from doing nothing particularly useful — which, at sixteen, is the only kind of money available. The plan was not entirely my own: a female friend…

In my family, health was measured in cheek color. If you were red and round in the face, you were healthy. If you were thin, something was wrong with you and you probably needed a second lunch. This was not a fringe position. It was the consensus medical framework of an entire generation of Romanian…

At my workplace, there’s a gate in the courtyard. It has a lock. It has a key. For a brief, shining period in institutional history, it worked exactly as gates are supposed to work: it stayed locked, and people with keys used them. I understand this era has ended elsewhere as well. Then someone left…

I have a disc protrusion — right foraminal, L5-S1, in case you need the coordinates, and you don’t, but I’m going to give them to you anyway because that’s the kind of person I am — and a shoulder that has been sending me passive-aggressive signals for months. I haven’t had the shoulder investigated yet,…