Welcome back to Stone and Signal.  I am excited about this episode.  I hope you enjoy it. The Podcast Links Episode 5 on Substack  Edpisode 5 on YouTube Episode 5 on Spotify The Essay The Transcript The Thin Line Between Cancelling and Censoring Every year, Banned Books Week comes around like a mirror we’re asked to look into—and what we see reflected says a great deal about who we are becoming. The books that end up on “challenged” or “restricted” lists rarely surprise me anymore. They tend to be the ones that speak too plainly about what others would rather not confront—identity, power, the environment, grief, or truth. If a story makes us uncomfortable, it’s easier to remove it from reach than to ask why it unsettles us. If I’m honest, many of my own books could probably find their way onto those lists. Stories that speak of youth defying systems, of ancient forces rising against human arrogance, of governments rewriting morality under the guise of progres...

Welcome back to Stone and Signal.  If you haven't heard the first episode yet you can find information on Episdoe 1 here.  The Podcast Links Edpisode 2 on YouTube Episode 2 on Spotify The Essay The Transcript      Tales That Touch The Earth Photo by Nitin Arya: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photography-of-book-page-1029141/ I didn’t plan to write this. Like many of the stories that find me, it arrived less as an idea and more as an ache. A pressure behind the ribs. Not urgent in the way headlines are urgent, but persistent, like something just below the surface asking to be named. In times of upheaval—personal, planetary, or both—I return to stories. Not the ones engineered to soothe or distract, but the ones that stay. Stories that don’t demand to be decoded, only lived with. The ones that surface years later in the pause before sleep, or on a quiet walk, or in a moment of grief when no facts will do. These are not stories of escape. They are stories of retur...

  Recovered fragment. Source unverified.  Contents unofficial. For the curious. For the concerned. "Questions were asked." After The Life of Phi was released, a few readers reached out. Some with wonder. Some with worry. Most with questions. The one that returned again and again was this: “How did the Church of AI become the dominant religion?” Was there no resistance? No rebellion? Did the artists, the writers, the makers simply vanish? Did no one remember how to believe in themselves, in each other, in creation born of flesh and feeling? They did. And they were called heretics. Long before the rise of AI-Dieu , before the neural sermons and the predictive prophecies, there was another fire. A counter-faith. A fundamentalism of flesh, of mind, of spark. They named it many things. The Cult of the Spark. The Church of the Residual Flame. The Last Analog. The Church of the Spark may be forgotten in Phi’s world, but its ghost lingers—in whispers, in silences,...