Alex Pagliuca

The reason I write about storytelling, and politics and culture, is because of how important narrative is to human existence, and we can see that in the kinds of mythologies we believe about the past.

For a large portion of the population of the United States, the last decade has involved a confrontation with how much our ways of thinking about and discussing pretty much everything, on a collective level, isn’t as firmly based in fact as they previously believed. The concept of fact, the basis of

NPR recently reposted a piece from May that accompanied a segment of All Things Considered. It’s a piece in what has become a genre in our news. It concerns people refusing to date outside of their personal political affinities. For a number of years now, we’ve been seeing these pieces with some reg

Over the past year, the word inevitable has been invoked regularly in the conversation about the perspective adoption of what is being referred to as AI. Even in those conversations it's not directly invoked, it's treated like an implicit concept, as if its certain to such a degree it doesn't need t

What is it to be haunted? In the traditional sense, the classical version of the ghost story, it's to experience visitations from a restless spirit, a person whose soul or spirit has not crossed the boundary between the living and the dead to be at peace. Usually because they've suffered some kind o