The illustration on the Pioneer 10 plaque. Designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. Artwork prepared by Linda Salzman Sagan. Photograph by NASA Ames Research Center (NASA-ARC) A World Speaks Its Technology by Phil Hall The search for alien techno-signatures requires a deep understanding of what is technology itself. The central contention of this essay is that particular technologies…

The cover of Praeterita. On the left are drawings of John Ruskin’s two aunts by Phil Hall It took me years to read Crime and Punishment. I first tried when I was 14, then tried again at 15 and finally completed it at 16. What world do we enter, when we open a book?…

Michael Schmidt. With kind permission by Yogesh Patel In the prefatory statement Michael Schmidt opens Here They Are (2026) with a declaration: “Poetry sometimes goes its own way, abandoning storytelling and lyric and following instead ‘the way of language’, discovering for a change what it has to say – more interesting than what the ‘I’ intended.” This claim…

My carrier on the day the Vietnam War ended. Photograph courtesy of Dave Blazer A navy operates on real timelines—not television timelines. by Dave Blazer I was a sailor. When a carrier crew is pushed past 200 continuous days at sea with, essentially, no liberty, that is not proof of national strength. It is…

Amazon Web Services Data Center in the U.S. Photograph Tedder, Wikimedia Commons by Phil Hall It was a family joke. Once we asked a friend about her son. How was he doing at school? And her reply was. He is very intelligent! He associates! Now this made us laugh, because the ability to associate…

US Atom Bomb Test, Photograph US Army OK, maybe I am a coward, but I want my children, grandchildren, family, friends, community, nation and world to survive Open the door Lay on the floor, you’ve been robbed Wake up Wake your ass up Take off your jewels You fuckin fools, you’ve been robbed —…

The Scots Guardsman Photograph IDMacpherson1964 Scottish independence is an opportunistic distraction, not a solution rooted in ethnic or historical victimhood by Richard Steinhardt Around 430 million years ago, the piece of land that would be Scotland slammed into the land that would be England, stitching the British main island together. The join is called…

Ars Notoria. Is arsnotoria.com an ugly duckling? Photograph Phil Hall Dear Friends, I’m writing to share where Ars Notoria, the online Humane Socialist magazine, stands as we approach the next issue—and the next phase. We’ve been running this magazine for six and a half years. In that time, we’ve built something with genuine prestige…

Slaughter of the suitors of Penelope by Odysseus and Telemachus, assisted by Eumaeus and Philoetius. 2nd Century. Photograph Ixion Painte Wikimedia Commons by Phil Hall I can’t help thinking the Coen brothers would have made a better, more honest job of filming the Odyssey and that Cormac McCarthy, or Brecht, had either of them been alive,…

City of London street. Photograph Andy Hall by Phil Hall The London Stone is a block of Clipsham limestone, roughly 53cm by 43cm by 30cm, now housed behind a grille in Cannon Street. It is unremarkable—a lump of weathered oolite, It is a stone that has a history, but it has no inscription and…