My grandmother could read a pot of jollof rice the way a doctor reads an X-ray. I've been thinking about what that kind of knowing actually is.

My drawing teacher used to say 'just feel it.' As a neuroscientist, I now know why that's terrible advice.

I gave up on writing because I wasn't a genius. It took years of studying creativity to realise that was exactly the wrong test.

I have chosen to live near the sea without running water, to surround myself with simple beauty.

I didn't know any women adventurers apart from Amelia Earhart. Then I started Googling.

The same molecule that bonds a mother to her infant also primes us to fear strangers. That's the human condition in one sentence.

What does a memory even look like? And what happens to it every time you replay it?

Every proposed divider between humans and animals has fallen — tools, culture, empathy. I think there's one left.

I've been wondering whether the way we pay for things changes how we pay attention to them.

There's a Yoruba word that carries more than English can hold. I've been thinking about what that means for how we read online.

I have three names. The one my parents gave me, the one the world decided I should use, and the one I chose for myself. My parents named me Amarachukwu. It means "God's grace" in Igbo, and it is beautiful and specific and mine. It contains a theology and a hope and a sound that, when my mother says it, carries the particular melody of someone who chose every syllable deliberately. The world decided I should use Amara. This happened gradually, the way a river rounds a stone. Teachers shortened it. Friends shortened it. Immigration forms didn't have enough boxes. At some point I stopped correcting people, and the truncation became my public name — the version of myself that fits in the space allotted. The name I chose for myself is the one I sign my work with: A. Obi. Not because I'm hiding anything, but because initials create a small privacy — a membrane between the person and the public. When someone reads an essay by A. Obi, they bring fewer assumptions than they would to Amarachukwu Obi.

I started publishing my failures three years ago. This essay is about why I haven't stopped.

I've been wondering whether the way we pay for things changes how we pay attention to them.

There's a Yoruba word that carries more than English can hold. I've been thinking about what that means for how we read online.

Corporations exist because they minimise costs. What happens when software can do that better?

My co-author's grandfather fled Vienna in 1938 and saved every document he ever touched. Fifty years later, they built a chatbot from his words.

What does a memory even look like? And what happens to it every time you replay it?

The same molecule that bonds a mother to her infant also primes us to fear strangers. That's the human condition in one sentence.

My mother was born out of the back of a '39 Ford on a Montana ranch. The land question starts there.

My drawing teacher used to say 'just feel it.' As a neuroscientist, I now know why that's terrible advice.

We've never had a philosophical dialogue with another species. What does that say about our chances with the rest of the universe?