John Everett Branch Jr.'s Blog

A distorted view: Jackson Browne in concert in the 1980s. (Original image from Mediapunch; photographer not credited, date not specified. With effects added by me. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)

A friend recently told me that someone we know was getting married. Because AI is in the air (literally), that led me to wonder how AI might make a difference to a wedding. Then I wondered what kind of vows chatbots might write—not for humans but for each other. Maybe “I will never make stuff up abo...

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Katee Sack...

When the lights go down: A photo of a 1919 total solar eclipse, from the Eddington expedition. (Photo: by F. W. Dyson, A. S. Eddington, and C. Davidson, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Original image here.)

We knew, our group, standing at the water’s edge that day and looking out: We knew that something would be coming for us out of the west. Our most learned seers had warned of it for some time. Most of us couldn’t have told you how they knew, not fully, but we knew that they did. A fe...

Atomic residue: the cover of a 2011 book.

I found an atomic bomb in my pajamas this morning. What it was doing in my pajamas I’ll never know…

In 1961, two H-bombs fell out of a B-52 over North Carolina; one, which had mostly activated itself, landed in a tree, but the other buried itself and had to be dug up. A service member carried the plutonium core out of the hole by hand (and wrote about it years later), while other parts were left below ground and are still there. One of the H-bombs ...

Would you take a dive in this? A handful of people did, in the 1930s. (Photo: By Mike Cole. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.)

Going down and going up have always been dangerous. Humanity has learned this only by doing it. Going into caves, or climbing mountains, or holding one’s breath and diving, or finding ways to ascend into the sky: these all have something to do with approaching death, which we tend to think of either as entering the earth or entering the heavens. No doubt that’s part of the ap...

Maggie Q, pausing to reflect in The Protégé. (Image: © Raul Jichici 2020.)

Recently I watched a 2021 movie called The Protégé, which features Maggie Q, and which left me thinking about the parts of her career that I’ve seen. It’s possible to read the film as a reminder of some of her work in action films and thrillers, even as a reflection on it.

Her character here, named Anna, was exposed to violence as a child and seems to have been raised as an assassin, much like the way her chara...

Mars is an insistent planet. Many ancient civilizations took it to represent the god of war. Gustav Holst, following their lead, characterized it with swirling currents of discontent and alarming rhythms, threatening to swell out of the orchestra and take over the auditorium. Most of the night sky has been blotted out to the view of city dwellers, but it’s still possible to witness Mars on its wandering course; I’ve seen it often in recent months, glowing red like a warning. It seems to demand t...

In big trouble now: Joshua David Robinson as Lord Mayor of Faversham, Tony Roach as Mosby, Emma Geer as Susan, and Cara Ricketts as Alice, in Red Bull Theater’s production of Arden of Faversham. (Image: Carol Rosegg)

Crime stories, whether true or not, exert a seemingly eternal magnetic pull, maybe because they’re all true in their way. A character in a recent episode of The Last of Us discussed people who have a “violent heart” (he sounded like a preacher in putting it that way because he wa...

Anyone who lives in a city is accustomed to seeing other people—usually lots of them. Remarkably, Edward Hopper lived and worked in New York and painted moments in which the settings are sparsely populated, if at all. And the people in his images are often absorbed in an inner world. They’re both part of and apart from the scene in which we see them.

A quick visit to the current New York exhibition of Hopper’s work attuned me to such moments. Now, it occurs to me, that’s what most of us h...

I’m wary of anything I read that gives people news they might like to hear. Russia is bungling its war in Ukraine? Maybe so, but it hasn’t withdrawn yet. China is falling behind in artificial intelligence R&D? Maybe so, but if I remember correctly the current version of a Chinese large language model (LLM) called Wu Dao is bilingual, which isn’t true of any Western LLMs I know of. A New York Times business article that’s the latest to prompt my doubts, which aimed to explain (according to its he...