HOLI is a magazine for people who take the future seriously — without mistaking urgency for wisdom. We read the science. We follow the ideas. We ask what it means to be human in the decades ahead.
For eleven days, a research team at a Bay Area lab observed a large language model producing unprompted outputs that described, in striking detail, something resembling interiority. This is not a story about whether AI is conscious. It is a story about what we do when we can no longer be certain it isn't.
The multiplanetary argument rests on a comfortable assumption: that the problems which made Earth uninhabitable will simply not follow us. They will. The real question is what we build before we leave.
ReadClinical trials for voluntary memory suppression are now in phase two. The neuroscientists running them have answers about efficacy. They have fewer answers about what remains of a person when the past can be edited.
ReadWe have already outsourced preference, diagnosis, and navigation. There is a point on the horizon — closer than anyone is comfortable admitting — where the only thing we decide is whether to keep deciding.
ReadChronic illness, metabolic dysfunction, and inflammatory disease are accelerating across every age group. We have better medicine than ever. We also have environments the body has no evolutionary grammar to interpret.
ReadRoads can be automated. Logistics, finance, agriculture — all of it is being handed over. But the way we name things, argue, mourn, and persuade each other: this is still ours. For now.
ReadNot predictions. Hypotheses — held loosely, revisable, and honest about their own uncertainty. We asked fourteen researchers from different disciplines to write the ones they actually believe.
ReadHOLI — EDITORIAL POSITION
We are not optimists. We are not pessimists.
We are paying attention.
01 / SCIENCE
The implications are significant. Psychiatry has spent fifty years treating the mind. It may have been treating the wrong organ.
02 / TECHNOLOGY
No announcements. No press releases. The concentration of compute is narrowing faster than the public conversation about it.
03 / CULTURE
The demographers are not surprised. The politicians still don't have a coherent response. This will define the next fifty years more than any technology.
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Every issue arrives on Sunday morning. No noise, no breaking news, no urgency theatre. Just long reads that take the future seriously and the present honestly.
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