Peter Topolewski is a graduate of Georgetown University. He has worked remotely since 1999, writing, developing curricula, and managing product development. He is interested in and occasionally writes about our progress and our evolution--personal and societal. His fiction works-in-progress are inspired by the promises of new technology, the mysteries of consciousness, the beauties we strive for, and the bridges we build across the gaps between us. Email: peter [at] darwinsgongshow.com
by Peter Topolewski Ram in choice cuts and scraps. Crank the handle. Ground meat comes out. Quite the invention, the meat grinder. Unless you’re the meat. Someone—a general, maybe a politician, probably a soldier—first applied the term to the battlefield during WWI. It encapsulated perfectly the math of modern warfare: Old tactics + new technology…
by Peter Topolewski The swirl might not be the most fitting euphemism for it any longer, the place where since the inception of ChatGPT nearly a third of web pages are “written” by AI. But it is among the swirl of the Internet most certainly written by people that a particular phrase catches the eye—or…
by Peter Topolewski Biohackers pour in effort to extend it, the ultrarich pour in money to make it eternal. Life, that is. But death does not discriminate. It takes us all. We know this, and yet a death rarely fails to shake us out of our routines. Death likes to creep up at inopportune times.…
by Peter Topolewski Doesn’t it feel like the extravagance of the Roman games rose as the empire stepped and then stumbled ever closer toward ruin? In fact, the grandeur of Roman entertainment peaked at the height of the empire’s power. Considering the spectacle of sport in 2026, the Roman example suggests we are living through…
by Peter Topolewski For parents it’s easy, but even for anyone without kids it’s not hard to imagine: the fear that your child is anything but safe and healthy. It starts before they’re born, with worry and greater amounts of hope that they enter this world free of pain and deformity and developmental irregularities. If…
by Peter Topolewski When a certain earthly ruler, soaked in irony, recently lectured Pope Leo XIV about theology, one of the pope’s many charges, Monsignor Arthur Holquin, came to his defense, noting among other things that “Catholic Social Teaching from Rerum Novarum onward has always insisted that the Gospel is not a private spiritual comfort…
by Peter Topolewski “Wilcox married a police officer who worked crime scenes. He gave her advice on how to protect herself from an attacker: She should always carry keys in her hand when she walked to her car alone, and she shouldn’t keep a block of knives exposed in the kitchen. Too often, her husband…
by Peter Topolewski We humans keep seeing articles about AI. An endless parade of them, it feels like. We’re the authors, we’re the culprits. We have our reasons. Good ones, too. Starting with our awe of AI’s growing catalogue of capabilities. Making films indistinguishable from our own, co-working with humans in HR departments, and chatting…
by Peter Topolewski Most of us haven’t smoked or snorted crystal meth. Not in meaningful quantities. Same goes for heroin and fentanyl. But by now, no matter where we live, most of us have stepped over or around someone who has. Someone who is, if not dead, smoking or snorting or shooting up again right…
by Peter Topolewski Happy New Year, and not soon enough. Out with the old. Good riddance, too. The laundry list of doom and gloom from 2025 looks long. If you shake out the cobwebs, and gaze back across December and the months prior, the list keeps unfurling. No let up, it seems. Time to forge…
by Peter Topolewski Before the violence in the movie Bugonia moves center screen—and the narrative takes a not completely unexpected left turn—it’s made clear Teddy’s paranoia and consuming conspiracism and violent nature all have roots in childhood trauma. Things like child molestation and the hospitalization of his drug addled mother. Oh gawd, you think, another…
by Peter Topolewski On a stage in London, and another in New York City, is a play called Punch. It tells the story of young man from a scuffed up section of Nottingham who, at the end of a pub crawl, throws a single punch at an unsuspecting 28-year-old named James. A paramedic in training,…
by Peter Topolewski Isn’t it time we talk about you? You. A collection in the realm of 4.5 x 10^27 atoms. A portion of your hydrogen and helium atoms originated in the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago. The heavier elements in you, the stuff of life, the carbon and nitrogen, they came from stars.…
by Peter Topolewski Imagine you could you travel back in time with your phone. Imagine you presented your phone to the first stranger you encountered. Didn’t dilly dally at all but straightaway showed this lucky stranger the Google Home app. How far back in time would you have to travel to ensure the app didn’t…
by Peter Topolewski Field update XXXIXB. Location: inner edge of the Orion Arm. Subject: only known life forms in the Milky Way galaxy. During reporting period, subjects continued uninterrupted passage through the Radcliffe Wave; movement of 1.29E-9 radians on orbit around Sagittarius A. Estimated number of life form species extinct over this period: 86 million.…
by Peter Topolewski The 2020 documentary Gunda captures a stage in the life of a barnyard sow and her brood. The director, Viktor Kossakovsky, embarked on this mission to at least in part remind “us of the inherent value of life and the mystery of all animal consciousness, including our own.” It would be foolhardy…