AI stole Corrine Bailey Rae’s voice and made a song. I heard it in the background of a YouTube Shorts video where someone was making an overly meticulous spaghetti dinner. Google could not match the lyrics to a song so I tried Shazam and Shazam could not find it either. A heavy dredging feeling arose from the bottom of my stomach as it occurred to me what Artificial Intelligence really is. Artificial Intelligence is the legal name of plagiarism. It is the permission to recreate an original idea without attributing that idea to the person who made it. It is being able to steal intellectual property from creators and churn it out in a mass overproduction. It can also be described as TikTok. Is AI the ultimate culmination of everybody getting a gold medal even for coming last or is it just a well dressed disfigurement of creative human thought? The equivalent of deep state for the human mind?

@amk

As I approach 35, I have noticed two more things recently, the passage of time as it interacts with exertion, both inward and outward, leaving evidence of fleeting youth and; an endless observation, contemplation and interest in having a say in how the world, our world, any world, first or third is run. Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York has probably faced both, I imagine; the weight of American political office is visible in the strain in his smile and the droop in his eyes, less lean but emboldened by the audaciousness of hope, the dream of changing the world, reimagining the world, as if it had never been attempted before.

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Earthquakes are going door to door, coast to coast. The weather forecast says El Nino is coming, again; and this time, we are grown up enough to notice.

@amk

Succession and Estate Planning once again fails in Africa. The most outspoken critic of holding onto power is dealing with his own power crisis. Once a ‘revolutionary’, he is now, just ‘an old man’, among many other old men, hoping that what he did was enough, hoping that he maneuvered a lasting inheritance, or in this case, a dynasty, for his own.

How easy it is, to walk past with someone of shared origin, partly shared origin, because of how different they look. Only for them to approach you in a crowd, where you stand as an outsider, counting how many look like you, speaking a language that nobody there would know, and say, Hey! Are you guys speaking this language?”How did we find our bearings and somehow manage to have a flow of conversation within our confusion?  I guess skin colour and hair is not all that makes a person. Such a concept is unfathomable to America, surprisingly even more in California than it was in Texas.

In the same crowd that day where we were sticking out a little too visibly, I was afraid when our four year old run and embraced his brother’s principal’s legs. I didn’t think she had ever been that close to a brown child with furry hair. I wanted to pull him away before she could, but he had his little smile on, pausing and holding her tightly like she was an oft-visited grandmother. She looked up surprised. I said a polite high and looked for a shelter from the sun. I suddenly could feel the sun burning my forehead. That was the day of the ribbon cutting for the new community school.

World Cup ended about a month ago. It was the best fun of summer, besides the day we all went to the pool. Perhaps it was the most consistent one. Anyway, it lit me up. Because of World Cup and because of this picture below, I will be wearing my hair in its most original state, a little more.

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Bad black was on social media broadcasting the worldwide pandemic of body dysmorphia fueled by Instagram; a world of filters existing within a wider generational identity crisis. Years ago, she changed her nose and colour. It will take her half a year before she can sit again, but this time, she will finally become most attractive. As voluntary body changing surgeries became common place all over the world, weight loss drugs have also began their ascent, from a former tennis star, a former first lady to other women all around the world.