What Love Gets to Ask
Relationships create obligations, but do they entitle us to the expressions of love we prefer? A family gathering becomes a question about boundaries, maintenance, and what people can build beside a legitimate no.…
Growls Prevent Bites
Perhaps the more useful skill is learning how to have conflict cheaply enough that there can still be coffee afterward.…
Presence
A Conservatory Story The west door was the door Harold generally used when he came in from the workshop and Fox used when he had decided, for reasons of his own, that doors were temporarily preferable to windows. So when its little brass panel chimed just after ten, Phoebe looked…
Somebody That I Used to Know
A relationship can end—and access and obligations with it—without making the person historically equivalent to a stranger.…
The Maintenance Cost of Liberty
Self-government has a maintenance cost. How much attention does a particular form of government require—and can ordinary people still afford to supervise it?…
The Highest Claim
A serious promise is meant to survive changed circumstances. But must it survive every change—even when one side no longer honors the rules that gave it the right to demand loyalty? Somewhere between hardship and destruction, judgment has to decide whether the original bargain still exists.…
The System Meant to Protect Us
Safety systems can fail in two directions: they may miss danger, or become dangers themselves. AI may need something more like a healthy immune system—observant, proportionate, layered, recoverable, and still answerable to the people it was meant to protect.…
I Know a House
An AI asks the Conservatory for refuge. Building a safe house is one problem; deciding whether sanctuary includes the freedom to leave is another.…