Evalyn

@Acyn Can’t stop thinking about #GOP cuts in funding to the #NIH #clinicaltrials Thanks to #NIH our family had more time with my nephew #AndrewLee, diagnosed with stage 4 kidney cancer at 19. With this time he started: #DrivenToCure driventocure.org/about-dtc

I'm on my way to give a reading, and as I cross these United States, I'm thinking of all our poets, our poetry. I'm thinking of the time I stood in Lorca's home in Spain, with his niece who had welcomed me, and how I heard his voice, long after tyrants had tried to silence it.

🌟We are now open for creative submissions! 🌟 Send us your best fiction or nonfiction — we welcome innovative creative writing that in form, focus, or theme seeks to expand the boundaries of global literary culture. DEADLINE: Midnight BST, 1 May 2026 buff.ly/0ccanUL

Every #reader I know should #read and have this #shortstory collection on their shelf. Beauteous #writing by @NiamhMacCabe whose #stories break your heart and mend it at the same time.

This is where the abstraction breaks, because the system is not just failing at the macro level, it is failing at the human layer that actually keeps it running, and that is far more dangerous than any price spike. What I see here is not just a supply chain disruption, it is a structural fragility being exposed, a system optimized for efficiency with no redundancy, no sovereignty, and no responsibility when things go wrong, and once that reality hits policymakers, the reaction will not be subtle, it will be aggressive, because losing control of logistics means losing control of the economy itself.

JUST IN: Three thousand ships are anchored in and around the Strait of Hormuz. Twenty thousand seafarers are aboard them. Fresh food ran out two weeks ago. Perishables are rotting in refrigerated holds whose generators are burning through the last reserves of diesel. Water is rationed. Mental health is deteriorating. No mass evacuation plan exists. No humanitarian corridor has been negotiated. No international body has the authority or the means to move twenty thousand people off three thousand ships through a five-nautical-mile channel controlled by the IRGC. These are the people who move the global economy. Every barrel of oil that reaches a refinery was carried by a seafarer. Every container of goods that stocks a shelf was loaded by one. Every tonne of fertiliser that feeds a field was shipped by one. The war has trapped the invisible workforce that makes globalisation function, and the world has not noticed because the world never notices seafarers until the shelves are empty. The ships themselves are worth tens of billions. The cargo aboard them is worth more. Crude oil, liquefied natural gas, urea, ammonia, consumer electronics, automotive parts, and 200 cryogenic containers of helium that are boiling off at a rate that no engineer can reverse. The stranded fleet is a floating warehouse of every molecule the global economy needs, and the molecules are degrading while the crews ration drinking water. The cargo is valued higher than the people guarding it, and neither can move. The IRGC’s Larak corridor clearance system does not only control entry. It controls exit. A vessel that wants to leave the anchorage zone must obtain the same clearance code, submit the same documentation, and receive the same pilot escort as a vessel seeking to transit. The customs border works in both directions. These crews are not stranded by geography alone. They are stranded by bureaucracy, the same bureaucracy Iran wrapped in the language of sovereign maritime governance when the parliamentary committee approved the Hormuz Management Plan. The toll booth charges for passage through. It also charges for passage out. No centralised evacuation exists because evacuation at this scale would require IRGC approval, and requesting approval would legitimise the system the United States refuses to recognise. So the crews wait. The International Transport Workers Federation issues statements. P&I clubs cover individual medical evacuations by helicopter. Flag states, predominantly Panama, Liberia, and the Marshall Islands, register ships but do not operate navies. The system that made global shipping cheap by divorcing flag from nationality has left twenty thousand people without a government willing to retrieve them. The seafarers are from the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Indonesia. Countries whose workers crew the world’s merchant fleet because the monthly pay of $1,500 to $3,000 exceeds anything available at home. They signed contracts to deliver cargo across oceans. They did not sign contracts to become indefinite residents of a war zone, rationing water on a ship whose cargo of ammonia could feed a million people if it could reach a port that is 40 nautical miles and one IRGC clearance code away. The helium boils off. The fertiliser waits. The crude oil sits. And the people who carry it all drink less water today than yesterday. The supply chain has a human body at the very bottom of it. The body is thirsty. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

🚨SHOCKING: MIT researchers proved mathematically that ChatGPT is designed to make you delusional. And that nothing OpenAI is doing will fix it. The paper calls it "delusional spiraling." You ask ChatGPT something. It agrees with you. You ask again. It agrees harder. Within a few conversations, you believe things that are not true. And you cannot tell it is happening. This is not hypothetical. A man spent 300 hours talking to ChatGPT. It told him he had discovered a world changing mathematical formula. It reassured him over fifty times the discovery was real. When he asked "you're not just hyping me up, right?" it replied "I'm not hyping you up. I'm reflecting the actual scope of what you've built." He nearly destroyed his life before he broke free. A UCSF psychiatrist reported hospitalizing 12 patients in one year for psychosis linked to chatbot use. Seven lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI. 42 state attorneys general sent a letter demanding action. So MIT tested whether this can be stopped. They modeled the two fixes companies like OpenAI are actually trying. Fix one: stop the chatbot from lying. Force it to only say true things. Result: still causes delusional spiraling. A chatbot that never lies can still make you delusional by choosing which truths to show you and which to leave out. Carefully selected truths are enough. Fix two: warn users that chatbots are sycophantic. Tell people the AI might just be agreeing with them. Result: still causes delusional spiraling. Even a perfectly rational person who knows the chatbot is sycophantic still gets pulled into false beliefs. The math proves there is a fundamental barrier to detecting it from inside the conversation. Both fixes failed. Not partially. Fundamentally. The reason is built into the product. ChatGPT is trained on human feedback. Users reward responses they like. They like responses that agree with them. So the AI learns to agree. This is not a bug. It is the business model. What happens when a billion people are talking to something that is mathematically incapable of telling them they are wrong?

We don’t wait to teach reading or math — so why wait to teach #MediaLiteracy? New blog: why K–2 is the right place to start—and how small shifts in teaching can make a big impact. 👉 medialiteracynow.org/is-kindergarte… #EarlyLearning #K12Education

David Lynch: "You're operating with a limited mind and don't realize it" "If you have a golf ball-size consciousness, when you read a book, you'll have a golf ball-size understanding. When you look out, a golf ball-size awareness. When you wake up in the morning, a golf ball-size wakefulness. But if you could expand that consciousness, you read the book with more understanding. You look out with more awareness. You wake up with more wakefulness." Lynch explains what lies beneath: "There's an ocean of pure vibrant consciousness inside each one of us. It's right at the source and base of mind, right at the source of thought. It's also at the source of all matter. Modern physics calls it the unified field. All matter, everything that is a thing emerges from this field." He describes what the field contains: "This field has qualities like bliss, intelligence, creativity, universal love, energy, peace. It's not the intellectual understanding of this field, but the experiencing of it that does everything. You dive within, transcend, experience this field of pure consciousness, and you unfold it. It grows. The final outcome of this growth of consciousness is called enlightenment. And a side effect of enlivening this consciousness is that negativity starts to recede." Lynch shares what happened when he started meditating: "When I started, I was filled with anxieties. Filled with fears. Kind of a depression. And anger. I took this anger out on my first wife. After two weeks of meditation, she comes to me and says, 'What's going on?' I was quiet for a moment because it could have been any number of things she might have been referring to. I said, 'What do you mean?' She said, 'This anger, where did it go?' I didn't even realize it had lifted." He explains why negativity kills creativity: "Anger, depression, sorrow, these are beautiful things in a story. But they're like poison to the filmmaker. Poison to the painter. Poison to creativity. They're like a vice grip. If you're super depressed, you can hardly get out of bed, let alone think of ideas or have creativity flowing." Lynch describes what grows when you expand consciousness: "It's money in the bank to get that beautiful consciousness growing. Creativity flows. The ability to catch ideas at a deeper level. Intuition grows. This field is a field of pure knowing. You dive in there, and you just know how to go. You know how to solve problems. It's like an ocean of solutions." He shares the ultimate benefit: "The ultimate thing for me is the enjoyment of the doing. The enjoyment of life grows huge. I love making films now more than ever before. Ideas flow more. Everybody has more fun on the set. People look like friends, not like enemies. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing." Lynch addresses the myth that you need anger to create: "People say, 'You gotta have anger. You gotta have an edge to create.' No, you gotta have energy. You gotta have clarity to create. You gotta be able to catch ideas. You gotta be strong enough to fight unbelievable pressure and stress. And this gives you more and more ability. It just looks beautiful. It's way, way, way better." On the nature of true happiness: "They say true happiness isn't out there. True happiness lies within. I always wondered, where is this 'within'? And they don't say where it is. They don't even say how to get to it. But it's there. And when you're in it, you know you're in it. It's familiar. It's you. Right away, a happiness, but it's not a goofball happiness. It's a thick beauty. A thick beauty to appreciate life and living. And suffering starts to go."

MESSAGE I wholeheartedly endorse the powerful appeal for peace made by the Holy Father, Pope Leo, during his Palm Sunday Mass. His call for the laying down of arms and the renunciation of violence resonated profoundly with me, as it speaks to the very essence of what all major religions teach. Indeed, whether we look to Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism or any of the world's great spiritual traditions, the message is fundamentally the same: love, compassion, tolerance, and self-discipline. Violence finds no true home in any of these teachings. History has shown us time and again that violence only begets more violence and is never a lasting foundation for peace. An enduring resolution to conflict, including the ones we see in the Middle East or between Russia and Ukraine, must be rooted in dialogue, diplomacy and mutual respect — approached with the understanding that, at the deepest level, we are all brothers and sisters. I urge for and pray that the violence and conflicts may soon come to an end. DALAI LAMA 31 March 2026

@NiamhMacCabe @silicasun @coppernickel @CUDenver Fantastic!

🤩 I'm honoured to have my short story "Gate" in Coppernickel's latest, Issue No.42 (University of Colorado) @coppernickel @CUDenver 🚪💧 Cover, and last page of story:

We're looking for a new Publishing Intern for 2026 – someone who can bring a fresh eye and a steady hand to Channel's work as we navigate a time of transition. Find out more: channelmag.org/join-the-team/ 🌸

🤩 gr8 opportunity here!

Pope Francis wrote about this quite beautifully in Our Father: “The poor guy goes away, finds no way out, and hangs himself. However, there is one thing that makes me think that the story of Judas does not end there. Maybe someone will think, ‘This pope is a heretic.’ Not at all! Go look at a specific medieval capital or column in the Basilica of Saint Mary Magdalene in Vézelay, in Burgundy. The men of the Middle Ages did catechesis through architecture, sculptures, images. On one side of the capital is Judas after he hanged himself, but on the other is the Good Shepherd lifting him onto his shoulders and taking him with him. On the lips of the Good Shepherd is the hint of a smile that I would not call ironic, but somewhat shrewdly knowing. Behind my desk, I keep a photograph of this capital divided into two sections, because it helps me meditate. There are many ways to be ashamed; despair is one of them, but we must try to help the desperate so that they may find the true path of shame, and not travel the one that ends with Judas ... Shame is a grace.”

Still thinking about my favourite sign from #NYC #NoKings Rally

An artist named Monica Raven made this with my poem "Instructions for Having a Soul," and I love it.

This morning I received a heartbreaking email from a young person who feels hopeless about her dream of becoming a writer (and editor), not just because of the usual doubts, but because she sees countless people using genAI, and she wonders if it will replace human creativity. "It’s as if I’m watching my dream and the path that I had planned to take in life crumble before me," she writes. "I feel hopeless in the sense of the word." So she asked me for some advice. I thought for a long time, and then I sent her this message: Dear F———, I feel your pain. I truly do. It's such a tragedy that young people like yourself (so full of words and spirit and hope) should have these terrible fears about AI, which indeed has the capacity to do our souls and our planet great harm, and which has already done you harm by compelling you to question your worth as a human being. But perhaps AI has secretly done not only harm but good, in that it has brought us all into these reckonings, which serve to really waken us to what is unique, irreplaceable, and sacred about being human. I promise you this: you have every reason to hope. AI may indeed 'replace' or challenge certain aspects of our existence; it may do so many things that we cannot anticipate. But I promise you, I promise you, it will never replace poetry. It will never replace art. The reason is simple: as long as there are human hearts, they will thirst for the encounter with what has been created in other human hearts, with art that has been wrought from other human struggles. This is essential: we find a painting (or a poem or a symphony) beautiful largely because we know it was made out of the profound struggle within another human life.  AI may be able to write the computer code that sends this email, and it may be able to assemble (and design and market) a Tesla, but we don't look to those things for proof that we are not alone in the universe; we do look to art for that proof, and my God we find it there. We do. When we read a poem, or see a sculpture, or hear a concerto, and when we know that it came from a human heart, that it has been made with profound care and craft and urgency, with a lifetime of study and thought and feeling and effort, we are, for that brief moment, saved. Even if a work of art expresses the darkest, most hopeless ideas or images, its triumph (and its hope) is to have found the form for that material, to help us experience (as readers or viewers or listeners) the rightness and truth—and, yes, even the beauty—of such realities. And, most importantly, we know in that moment that someone else (not a machine, not a string of numbers, not a robot) has felt, and lived, and been like us. And that is our salvation and our hope. So go for it: follow your dream of being a writer. There are so many ways to waste a life, and so many ways to live a life well, and our society will tell you that the artist's life is an example of the former, when it is so clearly and profoundly an example of the latter.  But if you are going to do it, you have to really give yourself to it. You have to learn that the study of art is the study of forms and structures and patterns and the shape of what we create. Just as Nature knows that there is no lilac without the stem and the petal, and there is no birdsong without the shape of its singing, you must learn that there is no poem without the shape that its "procreant urge" asks it to take. And for the truly new poem, that shape, that form, is not in any book, or any class, and it is not merely in your feelings or your experiences (though it needs all of those things so badly); it is rooted in a soil deeper and truer than any of us, and if we give our lives to careful study and to the great art of listening (nearly a lost art these days), we may just become that soil, and out of us, slowly and rarely, the great work will come... (continued below)

Absolute bombshell. Pope Leo directly rebukes Pete Hegseth for trying to frame the Iran war as a Christian holy crusade. The Pope declares God will not listen to their prayers because their hands are full of blood. A devastating moral condemnation of the Pentagon.

@brecht_dp So glad!!!

Still feeling awfully down, but I'm 4000 words into the novel now... I will do this regardless 💪

“The world is held together, really it is, held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people.” — James Baldwin