MosesWrites

Periodical

Across the street from the RISD Museum, and just a block over from the First Unitarian Church, the Providence Athenæum offered a privileged world of books and stories throughout my childhood. A water dispenser that glug, glug, glugged with enchanting echo, a museum-like space in which you could play, and—above all—a periodicals room with a truly world-expanding range of newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies. 

I loved that room. I loved the papers from around the world, the present day’s held on a smart pole that allowed you to leaf through the pages without folding them. I loved the magazines in languages I didn’t know, the ones that explored topics I hardly knew existed. I loved quietly browsing through back issues, hours taken in journeys through months and years.

More than anything in our contemporary age, I hate the dominance of apps and algorithms in place of printed periodicals, and the deleterious distortions wrought in our faltering reality.
 
The internet (and even more ironically, social media) emerged with a hopeful, humanistic glisten of connection and unity, access and empowerment. Rural orphans in refugee camps will have access to the accumulated knowledge of our species, one in the same with an undergraduate at Yale!

So powerful a false consciousness, so malicious an acceleration of capitalism and hyper stratification. Through the screens we went, into the cavernous pockets of billionaires.

All of this has been said before, in many ways.

I’m most concerned with time.

In a graduate school seminar, the exceptional Professor Anthony Grafton made the point that great scholars—and most everyone—in the early modern era and for long before fretted far more about “when” they were versus our default wonder at where we are, GPS-driven orientations in space.

Rather than maps, timelines. Timelines with incredibly high stakes—the beginning of the world, history mapped—and the end. Creation and Revelation—the apocalypse, the Second Coming. Best prepare yourself!

With Daniel Rosenberg, Tony later published the beautiful and brilliant Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline, an accessible and what ought to be transformative work in the history of history and historiography.

Order matters. Chronology counts. Time ticks, it shapes our selves. Whether divine command in a fallen world, or the extraction of labor value, a tick-tock dialectic instantiates our consciousness (at least since Augustine and in a teleologically-minded west).

The end of the world bothered many people with far-reaching anxieties, part and parcel with concerns about salvation. American Puritan anxiety struck Max Weber as so powerful that it brought forth capitalism, the equation “time is money” birthed by the most exemplary, secularly Puritan man of them all, Ben Franklin.

Today’s time has lost direction, and anxiety has intensified without any sense of where it might take us. The anxious generation, the distracted generation, the never enough generation: hey, kids, it’s the algorithms that have eaten the future and left us spinning.

Rather than heaven or hell, for the over-abundantly privileged often the best we can muster is the secular salvation of a top ten university offer. All that devotion, stress, fear, doubt, mindless motion—rather than gods above we have admissions committees. Waitlisted, the new purgatory. Can you transfer into heaven?

The best has become backwards, literally, again: MAGA, a retrenchment to ethnonationalism, or for some, a perverted ethno-religious apartheid that has worryingly powerful traction amongst those pulling the algorithmic AI strings.

Jesus and Moses before him, the original “influencers” of a sort, relied rather more on word of mouth, on tablets (of the stone variety) and texts written after-the-fact. The former, like Socrates, paid with death, rather than Amex, to boost their content.

Christianity reconfigured time, from the year zero, to our present reckonings, swamping out (at least in global interconnection) many other quite serviceable calendars that put us in different moments, whether Jewish or Nepali or Chinese lunar cycles. Enlightenment hours and industrialized time zones standardized things all the more.

Within our modern era, periodicals gave record to those reckonings and allowed us to share in the same: give us this day, our daily data.

In my childhood we got no less than four newspapers, two local (Pawtucket and Woonsocket), one state-wide (the Providence Journal), and one national, The New York Times. Plus magazines, from Sports Illustrated to National Geographic. My grandma got trashy gossip rags to follow her soap opera devotion.

We clipped stories, relatives’ accomplishments on the sports field, honor roll lists, headlines that shaped generations. We all read the same words at the same time, more or less.

Now we get sponsored content and an infinite number of stories, many as imaginary as they are endless, distortions of truth, reinforced biases and predilections serviced by prediction, the predictive algorithms of AI.

That’s the future?

No wonder we can’t sleep at night.

Even for those publications that sort of endure in print, to get to an edition we need to dig and download in an app. No more inky fingers at the breakfast table, rather zombie-like eyes glazed over, either ads-driven sponsorships or everything-a-subscription extraction of wealth. It’s all breaking news, because the news has broken.

Amongst the reasons I have this website, foremost amongst them—independence. Clarity of reckoning and record. It’s mine, and mine alone. I’m sure if I wanted to substack or wordpress I might get more views or have the ability to monetize MosesWrites, but I don’t do this for money. I certainly don’t do this with a desire for others to profit. None of us can escape the belly of the beast, but we might at least try to feed him less directly, to devote ourselves to our own corruption.

I hope, dear readers, here you’ll always know it’s me, and when I’ve written, and that I’ve given my words without fear or favor. Never any AI (if my spell-check, alas, I think, has been worsely “AI-enabled”). Just me, typing.

I’m glad to write—it’s my own joy—my salvation.

I’ve not much else, but that’s all I need.

Time recedes.

Period.

 

(Krakow, 15 August 2026)