Liam Heneghan in Emergence Magazine:
1. Before my father’s final illness, I had not understood that when the call goes out to assemble family members dolefully about a deathbed, it’s because a decision has been made to let the loved one pass. The timer is set; the sand is trickling down. Death—that omnipresent possibility at the best of times—becomes calculable when sustenance is withheld. Paddy Heneghan, born in Tralee, Ireland, on 29 March 1927, lived ninety-five years and, though defying predictions by lingering beyond his appointed hour, is now, by all reasonable standards used to determine such matters, dead.1
2. During those nights holding vigil at my father’s hospital bedside, I stayed awake counting his breaths. Human breath, or so Aristotle conjectured, supplies the air—the most divine of the elements—needed to form the pneuma zôtikon, the living spirit.2 I counted as my father’s living spirit—still hitched to his wracked body—was sustained by twelve breaths a minute; seven hundred and twenty ragged breaths an hour. When he breathed a final time—the last of six hundred million by my calculation—I was away. My mother and two siblings were at his side.
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First, he and his colleagues test people on tasks related to language or vision. Then they compare the observed behavior or brain activity to results from AI models built to do the same things. Finally, they use the data to fine-tune their models to create increasingly humanlike AI.
Lateness may imply death or an ending, as when we speak of my late grandfather or the late afternoon. When the German social theorist Werner Sombart first used the term in the early twentieth century, late capitalism did mean the end of capitalism. Yet ‘late’ in the superlative also suggests up-to-date or state-of-the-art, pointing not to the demise of something but to its refinement and advance. Surveying the same developments as Sombart, the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding claimed that the emerging economy of the twentieth century was simply ‘the latest phase of capitalist development’, a phrase echoed by Lenin, who took pains to remind his followers that ‘there is no such thing as an absolutely hopeless situation’ for the bourgeoisie.
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As Dorothy Rowe’s classic study My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend explains, sibling relationships – invariably intense, often fraught – are among the most underexamined of familial connections. Although every sibling strives to create a unique place in the world, inescapably their longest relationships will be with loved, ignored or actively disliked brothers and sisters.
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Imagine you’re a copper miner in southeastern Europe in the year 3900 B.C.E. Day after day you haul copper ore through the mine’s sweltering tunnels.
On May 18, 2022, Elon Musk posted to Twitter a declaration of divorce from the Democratic Party. “In the past,” he 
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