Peter Gabriel Neumann died on May 17, 2026, in a hospital in Santa Clara, California. He was ninety-three years old. The people who loved him, and the newspapers, and the Association for Computing Machinery, all said the same thing: complications of a fall. That was the whole report. He had spent forty-one years teaching the…
Tag: Communication
Robots Replacing Third World Labor
Suppose you are an alien. You have been asked to audit the American labor-and-virtue machine of the early twenty-first century. You will notice at once that the regime does not import people because it lacks hands. It imports people because it lacks a story. Cheap service labor is only the pretext. The real product is…
Becoming An Officer
Once upon a time in a world not unlike our own, Richard Gray served in deserts far away, in lands called Afghanistan and Iraq. These lands, ancient and vast, sang tales of war, of heroes and monsters, of victories and losses. Richard, a young man with eyes as blue as the English sky, was a…
Working with Authority
You know, the CIA and I, we have a lot in common. We’re both misunderstood, we both work in secret, and we’ve both made some questionable decisions. But while my questionable decisions usually involve attempting to deep-fry a Twinkie at 3 am, the CIA’s include “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Now, I don’t know about you, but…