Pedro González

3 weeks ago | chroniclesmagazine.org | Pedro Gonzalez |Pedro González

Dario Amodei thinks there’s a bloodbath for American workers on the horizon. He should know. His company, Anthropic, a leader in artificial intelligence, is building the tools that will be used in the bloodletting. Earlier this month, Anthropic introduced the next generation of its AI-powered coding model. It’s named Claude, after Claude E.

1 month ago | chroniclesmagazine.org | Pedro Gonzalez |Pedro González

There was a woman I used to know who was a fan of Pat Benatar and looked like her, too. We would often talk about Benatar’s music, but I no longer remember how we became acquainted. She was one of those people who you are just meant to know for a season of life. A human waypoint. She said I had an “old soul.” That I never forgot. I also remember that she didn’t have any kids. This was the pre-social media days and therefore antedated “childless cat ladies” memes.

2 months ago | chroniclesmagazine.org | Pedro Gonzalez |Pedro González

In Peter Farrelly’s Dumb and Dumber (1994), the titular dummy, Harry Dunne, relates a still-raw heartache to his similarly dimwitted buddy Lloyd Christmas while the two are sitting in a heart-shaped hot tub. Lloyd wants him to get back on the horse, but Harry isn’t over being dumped. “I thought we were going to be together forever,” he laments. “About a week later, right out of the blue, she sends me a John Deere letter.” Lloyd asks if she gave him cause.

2 months ago | chroniclesmagazine.org | Pedro Gonzalez |Pedro González

Writing a novel is hard. Writing one in a month is insane. Unless you are William Faulkner, who wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks, between the hours of midnight and four in the morning. Indeed, the author himself claimed, “I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall.” Faulker said he did not change a word in the end.

2 months ago | chroniclesmagazine.org | Pedro Gonzalez |Pedro González

Writing about politics these days is a challenge because things move nearly at the speed of social media. One day, the Trump administration announces some move that generates outrage on the left and cheers on the right, only for that decision to be reversed by tweet and then revived temporarily before it goes into cardiac arrest again for good. Max Weber called politics “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” Today, it’s forceful and fast banging of one’s head against the timeline.