BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.
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Keyword: Ostranenie
Art and other stimuli exist to nudge us out of automatic recognition into seeing things afresh, which is more important now than ever. Oh, happy day! My son returned last night from five months of study abroad in Auckland. La Profesora, his girlfriend, and I greeted him at the airport, after which we went our…
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Keyword: Aura
Some objects carry the trace of everyone who’s cared about them, and it only happens in the analog world. Any issue of The Atlantic that arrives containing a piece by Caity Weaver is a treat to be gobbled up and then re-read and savored. She is a cornucopian writer, like Erasmus in the Dutch Renaissance, who delights…
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A Cannes-terbury Tale
Is the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity today’s holy pilgrimage? Last night, after a blessedly dull 22-hour journey, I returned home to misty Portland from the scorching heat of Cannes on the Côte d’Azur in France. It was my first visit to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity—the advertising celebration, not the film festival—even…
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Higher Education’s “Napster Moment”
Annals of Disruption: will a new initiative from Sal Khan change college forever? An April story about the new Khan TED Institute (KTI) had a moment then faded away. It deserves a second look. KTI is the brainchild of Sal Khan, creator of the Khan Academy, TED, and the Educational Testing Service (ETS), alongside what…
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Adventures in Paris, a Claude Unlock
Adventures in Paris La Profesora joined me in Paris for the RMN Europe Ascendant Boot Camp last week, which I programmed and hosted. After, we stuck around for the long weekend. The thing I love most about Paris is its excess of everyday aesthetics. A dozen years ago, I wrote “Paris as a Way of Seeing,” and…
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Presidential Laughter
Judd Apatow’s theory of presidential politics is that the funniest candidate wins, which isn’t a stretch for a comedy writer and director. I used to agree with this, but then Trump came along to complicate it. Trump never laughs. He doesn’t smile either. Instead, he has that bizarre grimace, a painted rictus. He has won…
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Subject Line Style
One of the few things about which La Profesora and I disagree is the purpose of writing. I contend that all writing is about persuasion—about getting your way. She disagrees. It’s likely that we disagree on the definition of “persuasion,” but we haven’t dug that deep. My mother, one of the other leading ladies in…
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Retro Futures: “Sneakers” (1992) and Anthropic’s Mythos (2026)
How does an early 1990s caper movie help us understand the threat and promise of today’s sharpest-edged AI models? On April 7th, Anthropic announced that it had created Mythos, an AI so powerful that it can find long-undiscovered software bugs, making banks, hospitals, and other key holders of personal data vulnerable to hackers and scammers.…
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My Neuroses’ Playlist & Another Modest Proposal
My Neuroses’ Playlist In previous articles, I’ve mentioned how earworms plague me. There are four flavors of earworm: For example, I watched the end of the movie Kingsman, which features Bryan Ferry’s Slave to Love; it stayed in my head for days. In fact, just writing that last sentence brought it back. For example, the other morning I…