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What the AI Temperance Movement Gets Wrong
AI's worst harms aren't designed—they're emergent. The temperance crowd can't tell the difference. That's why they're useless, and understanding matters more.
Gael MacLean
12 min read


The Antidote: The Practical Revolution
Big Tech spends billions keeping kids addicted. The state recruits radicalized gamers. A parent's guide to fighting back—starting with your own phone.
Gael MacLean
21 min read


The Fever Dream: The Architecture of Digital Slavery
Silicon Valley isn't just addicting your kids—it's building a system of total control. How tech oligarchs, school surveillance, and AI are ending democracy.
Gael MacLean
15 min read


The Hot Line That Wasn't
AI boyfriends aren't new—just ask Mavis about her 1987 hotline job. She made men weep describing pot roast. Her mother still can't hear 'cream of mushroom.
Mavis Brennan
15 min read


Even When He Is Silent
An anonymous inscription from a Cologne cellar, a grandmother's silence across three wars, and what faith means when the world stops answering.
Gael MacLean
13 min read


I Am Not Your Label
We all check the boxes. Susan Sontag knew the violence of labels. An essay on identity, classification, and who we see when we look in the mirror.
Gael MacLean
10 min read


The Infection: Your Phone Is a Prison and Your Kids Are the Experiment
Silicon Valley executives ban screens for their own kids while designing addiction machines for yours. The neuroscience of what's really happening to children's brains.
Gael MacLean
12 min read


The World Tour That Wasn't
Mavis is back from a 60-day singles cruise gone wrong. Camels, rashes, and a near-kiss in Italy. Plus: Limoncello Love Cake. Sex After Seventy, Episode 3
Mavis Brennan
7 min read


The Chaos Preservation
Documentary filmmaker exposes how creative vision gets "corrected" from childhood through careers, connecting personal suppression to who runs—and ruins—the world.
Gael MacLean
16 min read


I Am That Eichmann
How ordinary people become complicit in evil. A meditation on Eichmann, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and recognizing our own capacity for darkness.
Gael MacLean
12 min read


The Bengali Tea Boy Consideration
A reflection on navigating political exhaustion, family divisions, and the discovery that we're all serving each other badly-made tea while complaining about the taste.
Gael MacLean
10 min read


The Question That Broke Me Open
Your child's iPad isn't just harmful—it's designed to be. Former tech insider reveals the architecture of digital control and how parents can break free now.
Gael MacLean
5 min read


Until the Sky Empties Itself of Names
A meditation on finding meaning through Buddhist practice, exploring the bodhisattva path of compassion and the radical acceptance of impermanence.
Gael MacLean
10 min read


America's Working Poor
Working families one paycheck from homelessness. Food banks running dry. Federal safety net workers about to need the safety net. The thin line is fraying.
Gael MacLean
14 min read


How Global Capital Is Buying the Death of Democracy
The system isn't broken—it's working perfectly. Just not for you. How global elites are funding the death of democracy in plain sight.
Gael MacLean
23 min read


How America Is Shredding Its Own Golden Ticket
This isn't economic decline. This is economic demolition—and it's being done deliberately by people who are cashing in the golden ticket that created 80 years of American prosperity.
Gael MacLean
12 min read


We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For
This is what we do. This is what we have always done. We take the language of revolution and turn it into self-improvement.
Gael MacLean
5 min read


The Thing We Cannot Lose
We are faced with the uncomfortable truth that we've been so carefully trained to avoid. We live in a culture that's become expert at manufacturing comfortable lies, and we've become expert at consuming them.
Gael MacLean
5 min read


What Is 2 + 2?
This is emergency territory - a reflection on how our collective ability to distinguish truth from fiction is dissolving just when we need it most to survive as a species.
Gael MacLean
8 min read


The Yoga Class Incident
Sex after seventy requires preparation, patience, and possibly professional assistance. Also, always tell someone where you're going when attempting new positions -- you never know when you'll need an emergency extraction.
Mavis Brennan
7 min read


The Afternoon Delight That Wasn't
I remember a time when "afternoon delight" meant a little nooky. Now it means a nap, a heating pad, and maybe a bowl of soup if I'm feeling particularly adventurous.
Mavis Brennan
4 min read


The Politics of Hunger
Famine as political technology. From Churchill's Bengal to Stalin's Ukraine, from Mao's China to today's Gaza and Sudan, the same patterns emerge with mechanical precision.
Gael MacLean
9 min read


The Mathematics of Loss
A meditation on personal and planetary grief, exploring how love persists when its objects—mothers, ecosystems—fade beyond recovery.
Gael MacLean
8 min read


The Architecture of Cruelty
How much do we all contribute to the culture of cruelty that is taking over the world?
Gael MacLean
7 min read
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