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In the prologue to The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), the first half of what became Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges wrote that composing vast books is “a laborious and impoverishing madness”: setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be told perfectly well in a few minutes. “The better course of procedure,” he went on, “is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary.” Several of the stories that follow do exactly that. They review novels nobody wrote, annotate encyclopedias that were never printed, and give a bibliography for an author who never lived. …

For years, learning English meant having words and sentences arrive before their meanings did. I could recognize kernel and shell as parts of an operating system, and switch, gateway, and bridge as pieces of a network. The same words belonged to ordinary life, but that second world did not come with them. A sentence could be grammatically sound and still feel like a building whose rooms I had never entered. …

On February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 was about six billion kilometres from the Sun, beyond the orbit of Neptune and leaving the planets behind, when its camera was turned around for one last series of pictures. Carl Sagan had pushed for the shot for years, against engineers who saw no scientific value in it and some risk to a camera pointed so close to the Sun. In the frame that came back, Earth occupies less than a pixel: a point of pale light caught in a scattered sunbeam. Nothing could be measured in the Pale Blue Dot that had not been measured better from closer up. The picture existed to be seen, and then to be shown. …

On Monday, January 27, 2025, Nvidia lost close to six hundred billion dollars of market value in a single session, the largest one-day loss any company had ever recorded. The cause was not a failed product or a scandal. It was good news about efficiency: a Chinese laboratory, DeepSeek, had published a model that matched the frontier while reporting a fraction of the usual training compute. If intelligence could be had for less hardware, the reasoning went, the world would need less hardware. Within hours Satya Nadella, whose company was spending tens of billions a year on GPUs, had posted a two-word diagnosis with a nineteenth-century name attached: “Jevons paradox strikes again!” …

Anyone who has learned a piece from the page knows the stage where every note is right and nothing is happening. The fingers find the keys in order. The rhythm is counted, the rests observed, the dynamics marked in pencil and obeyed. A teacher listening from the next room would hear no mistake. And the player knows, with an embarrassment hard to name, that the piece has not yet arrived. The sequence is correct. Something else is missing. …

Some questions arrive late at night and in bad shape. This one came out roughly as: if the universe began at all, why did it begin with anything left to happen? It sounds like the kind of thing one says after the second glass, and I was ready to drop it. Then I found that physicists ask a sharper version of it in print, and that the sharper version is still open. …

Every few years there is a night that feels like the hinge of history. A wall comes down, a dictator flies out of the capital, a vote is counted and the crowd in the square starts singing. In the summer of 1989, a few months before the Berlin Wall fell, Francis Fukuyama published an essay asking whether we had reached “the end of history”: not the end of events, but the end of the argument about how people should be governed. The question mark was dropped in the book three years later. …

First, the torch. It burns pine, it smokes, and it never holds still, so the wall never holds still either. The chamber is deep in a limestone cliff above the Ardèche gorge, in the south of France, and the wall bulges and folds like a hide. On it, in charcoal, a pride of lions moves from left to right. Their heads overlap, one behind another, as if the same animal had been caught at several points of a turn. Nearby a horse has too many legs. A bison has eight. …

In Borges’s story “The Theologians”, collected in The Aleph in 1949, two churchmen of the early Middle Ages spend their lives refuting heresies. Aurelian, coadjutor of Aquileia, writes against a sect that believes history repeats in cycles. His rival, John of Pannonia, writes against the same sect more briefly and more brilliantly, and Aurelian never forgives him. Years later, when a new heresy appears, Aurelian recognizes in its doctrine a sentence John once wrote in good faith. He reports it. John is burned at the stake. Aurelian dies some time later in a fire set by lightning, and in paradise he learns that, for the unfathomable divinity, he and John of Pannonia formed a single person. …

In the schoolbooks I grew up with, Simón Bolívar was not a man. He was a sequence. He swore an oath on the Monte Sacro in Rome, crossed the Andes with a ragged army in 1819, won at Boyacá, freed five nations, and died betrayed. Every town had a plaza with his name and a bronze version of him on a horse. He had no body except the statue, and no doubts except the ones history had already resolved in his favor. …