Interintellect Hosts Wrote: Bruce Springsteen, AI, Ambition, Tragedy, Memory, Architecture, Desire, Innovation -- and Limericks
It is officially back-to-school weather, and I want to kick off this Interintellect season with a recap of the freshest pieces written by our hosts, guests, and ecosystem.
Our Hosts
Interintellect Hosts Wrote: Bruce Springsteen, AI, Ambition, Tragedy, Memory, Architecture, Desire, Innovation -- and Limericks
Interintellect
and
Anna Gát
Sep 04, 2026
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It is officially back-to-school weather, and I want to kick off this Interintellect season with a recap of the freshest pieces written by our hosts, guests, and ecosystem. Just so much genius to celebrate in our “city of minds”. Let’s see what they wrote these past weeks…!
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A hub for fearless, interdisciplinary conversations,
Interintellect
has been welcoming the world’s favorite thinkers as hosts and special guests at our signature salons for the past seven years. If you want to get started on your own hosting journey, set up your first discussion
here
!
This past summer, we launched a regular digest for the best writing by Interintellect people. Philosophy, science, politics, religion, technology, and the arts: Interintellect’s hosts cover as many important topics in their essays as they do at their salons.
We believe that all good writing is conversation, and that lives are changed one conversation at a time.
We hope you will enjoy —
Anna
“The last time I returned home from war, I returned alone. I left a week before my team so that I could be there to help arrange medical care for my son, who had a neurological event and stopped talking…and learning while I was gone.”
Sean Patrick Hughes
Reasonable Essays
The Odyssey
The last time I returned home from war, I returned alone. I left a week before my team so that I could be there to help arrange medical care for my son, who had a neurological event and stopped talking…and learning while I was gone…
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3 months ago · 44 likes · 8 comments · Sean Patrick Hughes
“This all means that my own work has never just been a job to me, or a salary. It’s meant strength, independence. It’s meant legitimacy. It’s meant that I could carve my own story separate from my family shame. It’s meant a respite from that constant, nagging worry that I got to know so well growing up. It’s meant that I could move if I wanted to, but I wouldn’t be forced to leave my life behind.”
Irina Dumitrescu
the process
Money, shame, and the creative life
There are a few truisms about being an artist that you’ve probably heard. One: you have to take risks. Two: you can’t expect to make money at it…
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a month ago · 21 likes · 6 comments · Irina Dumitrescu
“There is a tension between thinking that we evolve through adaptation and wondering whether we have become captive to a dynamic in which we willingly, although reluctantly, participate. During our race to adopt innovation, we are allowing ourselves to become commoditised in an increasingly surveilled and highly financialised process of keeping the illusion of permanent growth.
Our adaptation becomes the very engine the resource-extracting machine runs on.”
Ana-Maria Ignat-Berget
Ana-Maria’s Substack
Adaptation as Choice
“Descent with modification”: this is what Darwin first called the process by which living species change over generations. More individuals are born than can survive and, through their struggle for existence, those with variations better suited to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce…
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2 months ago · 5 likes · Ana-Maria Ignat-Berget
“Sometimes the doors of opportunities really do open because you kept knocking. Unwavering persistence is not always a delusion. Perhaps the cliche advice to “release attachment” when used too casually, can be seen as a form of cowardice in disguise, a prettier way of avoiding rejection, effort, and the possibility of discovering that we were not ready.
There are pursuits I believe worth chasing, and if detachment is our guide, then where does satisfaction reside?”
Stephanie Louie
Notes By SL
The Strange Problem of Desire: When Pursuit Becomes Sabotage
My Interintellect friend Shahid and …
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2 months ago · 4 likes · 10 comments · Stephanie Louie
“Monumental architecture is one way I’ve been able to experience awe. The first building that made my soul tremble was the Duomo in Florence. I remember how it suddenly popped into view as the narrow, tourist-clogged streets opened up into the piazza, so massive that it seemed like an optical illusion. It was the largest dome in the world when Filippo Brunelleschi built it in 1436. His engineering feat reminds me of businessmen and their architects competing to build the tallest skyscrapers, and I wish New York was still in the game.”
Megan Gafford
Fashionably Late Takes
New York Needs New Ornamental Architecture
Last week, my latest essay “New York Needs New Ornamental Architecture” came out in Vital City, a journal based in New York seeking to improve civic life. In it, I argue that architectural ornament is part of the human condition, and that New York in particular needs …
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2 months ago · 10 likes · 3 comments · Megan Gafford
“His notes gained him many subscribers
They loved him for witty one-liners
But on publishing prose
The chart no longer rose—
And subscribers became unsubscribers.”
a. natasha joukovsky
quite useless
How to write a limerick
Hello friends…
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3 months ago · 36 likes · 18 comments · a. natasha joukovsky
“Memory helps us understand the present and anticipate what comes next. Our survival once depended on it. An animal that remembers where the berries grew, and where the fox waited, lives longer. The past, and the feelings attached to it, becomes something we use to find our way forward.
Much of the rest falls away, and quickly.”
Brigitte Kratz
&
Rachel Parker
Fragments of Humanity
Is memory true?
Wonder Waves, written by Brigitte Kratz, reads literature, philosophy, and art for what they can tell us about the inner life. Fragments of Humanity, written by Rachel Parker, reads literature alongside psychology and neuroscience for the same reason. We keep arriving at the same questions from opposite doors, which is how the two of us came to write together…
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a month ago · 5 likes · 10 comments · Rachel Parker and Brigitte Kratz
“The best technology expands your sense of what it could mean to be human and makes the universe feel a little more alive.”
shahid h n
shahid's riffs
Thinker, Builder, Artist, Trickster
This is a scribbly attempt at articulating what I want my long-term career to look like — and maybe, a bit more ambitiously, what a holistic, intentional career in technology could look like for others as well. It's incomplete, and I feel pulled in many directions, but writing it out is how I clarify my own thinking. I'm putting it here in the hope that…
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2 months ago · 7 likes · shahid h n
“Close to a perfect song. Bruce opens by setting the stage.
“The screen door slams. Mary’s dress sways.”
OK, we have the visuals, but what’s the action?
“Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays.”
OK, but what are the stakes?
“Roy Orbison’s singing for the lonely. Hey, that’s me, and I want you only.”
This is short-story songwriting that gives you a universe in four and a half minutes.”
Sarah Hepola
Love Anyway
The Ten Best Love Songs, According to Me
Tom Waits did not make this list. No Beatles, no ELO, no Old 97’s. You have no idea how painful this was for me, and all I can say is that some artists write so many classic love songs that ONE never quite rises to the top. I tried to be thorough, but of course this list is arbitrary…
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2 months ago · 43 likes · 69 comments · Sarah Hepola
“I have lately been reflecting on ancient Greek tragedy as a resource for analyzing, narrating, and reimagining what life means with and against current AI systems.”
By Thomas Arnold.
Read here.
“We should think of conversation as a lump of Play-Doh which doesn’t exist unless we, together, simultaneously all decide to create something out of it. Its form will be ephemeral, its effect is forever. It’s the original, purest act of genesis, of generation. (Logos becomes reality, the word becomes world.)
LLMs are such conjurers too: whatever they will say doesn’t *exist* until the words of a human make it coalesce out of the Collective Information of humanity. It comes out of nothingness for us.
But can LLM language take a shape, the way human language does when we use it with each other?”
Anna Gát
American Innocence by Anna Gát
Mortal Limits, Human Minds
Having worked on dialogue since I was basically five years old (I wrote my first play in kindergarten, you can imagine!) — linguistics, theater, screenplays, discourse institutions, now Interintellect and conversation AI — it still feels crazy to me that we invented LLMs before we could fully understand how humans communicate…
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2 months ago · 19 likes · 2 comments · Anna Gát
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