Eric Colburn

@j-tkelly.bsky.social This seems like your kind of wordplay (from this NYT article about Richard Hell: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...):

Keeping schools human-centered is easy; keeping the rest of the world human is hard What should ordinary worrywarts do?

Stuck in Colorado for a few days after visiting family, I wrote a quick post about what it's like to be a human being in the world just now: open.substack.com/pub/ericcolb...

Yes. The question is how to "stop needless sprawl." From Denver to the Springs, it's *all* sprawl (and that's just the direction I was in. And the thorny thing for me is that Denver has done a lot of what I think Boston should do: it's built more light rail, allowed infill, allowed density, etc.

Single stair would be great, but will it solve the car-dependent density problem? I am seeing endless miles of apartment buildings that we YIMBYs in my city would be happy to get built, double-stair or not, but they’re in a strip-mall wasteland.

I have never seen so much car-dependent density as here in Colorado. They’re building tons of townhomes and apartment buildings, but they are out along highways and strip malls and ridiculously wide streets. I saw this while driving; now, on the light rail, the stops are similarly bleak.

Visiting my daughter in CO this week was great—but also a challenging mental practice for an environmentalist like me: you see both the most spectacular nature AND the most obvious human wastefulness/destructiveness.

We need speed humps everywhere!!!

We need speed humps!

Lungers.

I’m reading @janezwart.bsky.social’s excellent new book, and finding wisdom and wit and beauty on every page—and I love the Cornell box cover!

You're welcome. Now tell me what the sonnet I just wrote is about...

I hope you’re right!

I hope you’re right!

I hope you’re right.

Great, I hope you’re right!

I have not used the LLMs, and they seem to have some issues (it used to be very easy for me to spot student papers written by them, for instance, partly bc of the hallucinations), but they are improving very, very quickly, and a lot of sci-fi scenarios don’t seem all *that* far off.

I think people are right to be scared, and on this platform I see a ton of what looks like denial.

It isn’t hard to imagine a wide range of nightmare scenarios. Autonomous war-fighting machines, or a world in which industry barons don’t need humans to produce stuff, or a world in which ordinary people get addicted to machine companions—etc. etc. These don’t seem impossible!

That seems a bit overstated to me. But I guess we will see!

Good one! I read it as about the coming AI disaster.

I really want to believe that, but I think you guys might be wrong,and we might be in big trouble.

Funny, my son is telling me about a book he’s enjoying, When We Cease to Understand the World, and he just said, “The book is great—it’s really Sebaldian!”

OK, Dickens is good too…

Is her new book Sebaldian?! (I kept waiting for more people to imitate him, but I can’t really remember anybody doing it after Teju Cole’s Open City…)

Living the boulevardier dream!

Find another cafe! (Don't you live in Brooklyn? Shouldn't there be a dozen other great spots within two blocks of your place?!)

Opinion | A.I. May Put Progressives to the Test

I am not a fan of this columnist, but here he is getting at important questions that a lot of us on the left tend to ignore: www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/o... I believe we on the left need to be building an almost religious argument for human exceptionalism, and we need to encode it in law.

Happy to have a poem in the new issue of The Windhover, along with beautiful poems by Carla Galdo and others. Here’s mine:

Post a banger not in English

My favorite Pomme song:

m.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc8p...

On Bluesky I've nearly fulfilled my dream of moving to Canada: