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The Silence Before the Music

There is a moment in every performance that most audiences do not notice, and that every performer knows is the most important moment of the entire event.

It is the silence before the first note.

The conductor raises the baton. The pianist places their hands above the keys. The singer inhales. And in that fraction of a second – before the baton falls, before the fingers descend, before the breath becomes sound – the entire room holds still, and something happens that is neither music nor its absence but the threshold between the two.

What I Would Build Today

I am asked, occasionally, what Niepokalanow would look like if I built it today. The question is hypothetical, but I find it useful because it forces me to separate the principles from the particular technologies, and the principles are what matter.

At Niepokalanow, we had a printing press, a radio station, and plans for a film studio and an airstrip. These were the most advanced communication technologies available in the 1930s, and we adopted them because they allowed us to reach the most people with the most efficiency.

AI-Generated Disinformation and the Trust Crisis

The disinformation challenge that occupied most of my attention until recently – the deliberate production and dissemination of false information by human actors – has been joined by a challenge that is qualitatively different and, in certain respects, more dangerous.

AI-generated disinformation – synthetic text, images, audio, and video produced by machine learning systems – changes the economics of deception in a way that undermines not just the accuracy of specific claims but the epistemic infrastructure on which journalism depends.

Small-Scale Peace and Why It Matters

I want to tell you about a pattern that I have observed in every conflict zone I have studied, without exception. While the formal peace process stalls – while the diplomats argue over text, while the mediators shuttle between hotels, while the international community issues statements of concern – something else is happening at the local level that no one is reporting.

People are building peace anyway.

Not with treaties. Not with formal agreements. Not with the machinery of international diplomacy. With schools. With shared wells. With market days where people from opposing communities trade with each other because the tomatoes do not care about the conflict.

The Steel-Man Principle

Let me begin with a claim that will sound counterintuitive to anyone trained in modern debate culture: if you want to win an argument, you should make your opponent’s position as strong as possible before you attempt to refute it.

This is not a rhetorical flourish. This is the foundation of serious intellectual work.

The Straw-Man Epidemic

Contemporary discourse is dominated by what logicians call “straw-manning”: the practice of replacing your opponent’s actual argument with a weaker, more easily defeated version. You see this everywhere. A nuanced position on immigration policy becomes “they want open borders.” A complex critique of capitalism becomes “they want everyone to be equally poor.” A careful argument about free speech becomes “they want to ban all disagreement.”

Digital Literacy Is a Survival Skill

When I trained the people who would carry messages across the border, I did not teach them theology first. I taught them navigation. How to read terrain. How to identify patrol patterns. How to move quietly. How to react to the unexpected.

The theology was the reason. The navigation was the survival skill.

In the digital age, the equivalent survival skill is digital literacy. Not the ability to use a smartphone. The ability to use it without being monitored, tracked, or compromised by entities whose interests do not align with yours.

The Conscience Clause

There is a moment in every career in public service – and in many private careers besides – when the institution asks you to do something that your conscience says is wrong. Not merely unwise or suboptimal, but wrong in a way that participating in it would make you complicit.

This is the conscience clause. Not a legal provision (though those exist, and they are inadequate). A human reality. The moment when obedience and integrity diverge, and you must choose.

The Recovery Position

You got hit. You’re down. Maybe it’s physical — injury, illness, exhaustion. Maybe it’s psychological — failure, betrayal, collapse. Doesn’t matter. The question is not why it happened or whether it was fair.

The question is: what now?

The First Move

When you’re down, your brain will offer you two bad options. The first is denial: pretend it didn’t happen, push through, refuse to acknowledge damage. The second is surrender: stay down, declare yourself broken, make the pain your identity.

What Phenomenology Teaches Politics

Phenomenology – the philosophical method I practiced and contributed to – is sometimes described as abstract, technical, and disconnected from practical concerns. I would like to correct this misconception by demonstrating that phenomenology offers something that politics desperately needs and almost entirely lacks: a rigorous method for understanding experience before deciding what to do about it.

The political sphere operates, overwhelmingly, at the level of action. What policy should we implement? What legislation should we pass? What position should we take? These are questions about doing.

What AI Cannot Know

The question of whether artificial intelligence can think is asked frequently and answered badly. It is answered badly because the participants in the debate have not agreed on what they mean by “think,” and in the absence of that agreement, the conversation devolves into competing intuitions rather than competing arguments.

I would like to try something more disciplined. I want to examine what it means to know something – not merely to produce a correct output, but to understand why the output is correct – and then ask whether current AI systems do that, or anything resembling it.