By Sam Guss We often use the term “Dark Ages” as a metaphor. We think it refers to a lack of books, or a decline in philosophy, or the fall of Rome. We imagine it as a “dimming” of the intellect. But new climate archaeology proves that the darkness wasn’t a metaphor. It was literal….
By Sam Guss We think of history as something written in books or carved into stone. We trust the physical evidence: the pot shard, the arrowhead, the femur bone found in a cave. If we can’t hold it, we assume it didn’t exist. But biology is a stricter historian than archaeology. While the bones dissolve…
By Sam Guss We have a romantic hallucination about the jungle. We imagine it as the “Pristine Wilderness.” We see the dense green canopy of the Yucatán or the Amazon as a place where nature reigns supreme, untouched by the hand of man. When we imagine an archaeologist, we imagine a rugged figure with a…
By Sam Guss In the late 19th century, Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists introduced the West to a concept borrowed from Hindu philosophy: the Akashic Records. They described it as an etheric library—a non-physical plane of existence where every thought, word, and deed of every human being who has ever lived is recorded. It is…
By Sam Guss In 2014, two 12-year-old girls lured their friend into the woods of Waukesha, Wisconsin, and stabbed her 19 times. When asked why, they did not cite hatred, or jealousy, or money. They said they did it to please “Slenderman.” Slenderman does not exist. He is not a mythological demon from the Bronze…
By Sam Guss We suffer from a chronological arrogance. We believe that “Globalization” was invented in the 20th century. We think the concept of a complex, international supply chain—where a component made in China is assembled in Vietnam and sold in New York—is a uniquely modern miracle enabled by container ships and fiber optics. We…
For the last decade, we have labeled this phenomenon the Mandela Effect—named after the collective false memory that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s (he actually died in 2013). Psychologists dismiss it as “confabulation”—a mass failure of memory, a social contagion where we reinforce each other’s errors. They say the human brain is a faulty hard drive that corrupts files.
By Sam Guss Imagine a farmer. It is a humid night. He is walking home through a field. Suddenly, he sees a bright, unnatural light. Time seems to stop. The sounds of the crickets vanish (the “Oz Factor”). Small entities appear—humanoid, but not human. They are pale, with large black eyes and spindly limbs. They…
Why You Are Haunting Yourself By Sam Guss There is a recurring scene in therapy offices around the world. A patient sits down, shaking, and says, “I don’t know why I am afraid. I have a good life. I have never been to war. I have never starved. But I feel… hunted.” For a century,…
By Sam Guss In April 2022, a Swedish artist known as “Supercomposite” sat down at her computer to explore the edges of a new AI image generation model. She wasn’t trying to summon a demon. She was trying to test a technical parameter called “negative prompting.” She typed a prompt. She asked the AI to…