In 1989, Jonathan boards a plane to Manhattan, Kansas, where he rents a car, explaining to the man at the Hertz desk that he’s dying.

“The capacity to face an open universe. Physically open, psychically open. No doors shut.”

This is one of Le Guin’s earliest collections of essays, bringing together writing about the genre of science fiction and fantasy with reflections on her own fiction.

Billy Harrow is taking people on a tour at London’s Natural History Museum when he makes a discovery: the enormous specimen of *Architeuthis dux,* the museum’s carefully preserved giant squid, is gone, tank and all.

You cannot fill your belly with illusions.

On the planet Victoria, the people of Shantih Town live alongside the people of the City.

“Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking.”

An anarchism of doing rather than an anarchism of theory.

Twenty years after she disappears without a trace, Selena’s sister Julie rings her up.

Reading is the art of attention.

“After all, who could be opposed to getting more done with less work?”

In 1934, eight-year-old Helen Priestly sets out from her home in Aberdeen, Scotland, and is never seen alive again.

“Fear that there may be no alternative to the will of the AI arise because we have been told for decades that there is no alternative to neoliberalism.”

Our fears of what AI will do to us are really just our fears of what capitalism is *already* doing.

In a region that was once Germany but is now Poland, a woman and her husband make a life in a house where a stream runs through the foundation.

Four great teachers.

Pedro is vast, but he is also hidden and mysterious, tucked behind locked doors and a colloquy of priests and doctors.

It is right that the murder of many people be mourned and lamented.

Olúfémi O. Táíwò argues for a *constructive* form of reparations: distributive justice that looks to the past to construct a transition from the global racial empire we have today to the more just world we wish to arrive at tomorrow—and beyond.

Struck by the sudden and untimely death of her cousin, and distressed by the terrible political order, Samantha Harvey finds that she cannot sleep.

In one layoff announcement after another, we hear that AI can now do the work of a great many people, which is why fewer people are needed to do the work.

In 1933, shortly after Hitler took power, Charlotte Beradt started having nightmares.

In our effort to escape anxiety, we run further into its jaws.

Rollo May refutes the assertion that mental health is living *without* anxiety, proposing instead that anxiety is a necessary condition for creativity, intellect, and freedom.

Six people—four astronauts and two cosmonauts—may be among the last to circle the Earth.

In a glass-walled city ruled by the totalitarian One State, citizens have no privacy, no identity, no freedom, and no names: they each bear only a number.

A trained secret police is still the secret police.

“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?”

What kind of people are we designing now?

Six children—three girls and three boys—play in a garden by the sea.