In this week’s issue:

• Touch Grass: When Words Shake Your Hand

• It’s Giving: The Kids Are AIght

• Still Downloading: 4 Questions with Q, Writer/Director @ NYU Grad Film

• Bible: Oddly Satisfying

• Bonus Palate Cleanser: I’m Obsessed w/ Quebecois Photog Benoît Paillé 

What to Expect from Babe (the unexpected, obvs)

Every Tuesday, at whatever time the data says is the best time, you’ll find Babe in your inbox. Each issue will look something like the one you’re reading now, only different. To keep things classy and somewhat organized, it will almost always include the following four elements. It will for sure serve.

fyi this first piece isn’t a soft flex about having an MFA (though, now it kinda feels like it is). Either way, stay with me.

A few months ago, I had this grad-level convo with Claude.ai that left me buzzing. It started with my asking Claude for some feedback. 

Me: what up, C. i’m nearly done with this piece of flash nonfiction I’ve been working on. what would you do for this one specific spot, would you use an em dash or keep the period? 

Admittedly (proudly?), I've been obsessed with the em dash since I was a kid, and often need to be checked. Which btw, there’s this whole dumb LinkedIn post war happening around how the “use of the em dash indicates use of AI in one’s writing.” With a bunch of comments where people are either condemning em dashes or trying to explain how they “only use AI for final checks on posts” or flexing (yes) their MFA’s—because “any creative writer knows the value of an em dash - wink emoji, pen/paper emoji, #OpenToWork”—while also cheering one another on in this saccharine way that only LI people do. No joke, it’s wi-ld.

My response to said war, which is similar to my response to almost any LinkedIn post is: omg stfu and literally go touch grass. Because like, no one cares! Also, if we all use the same hooks and language and visual structure across social media platforms—which we do—then we all sound the same anyway. Each platform has its own communication patterns, its own accepted (and acceptable) forms of expression that become endemic to these digital spaces. And this is the paradox of social media communication: we know it's worn out, yet we persist because it works. We adopt these tired yet grossly palatable lexicons and formulas because that's what gets engagement, what marks us as belonging.

The controversy over AI-assisted writing is somewhat absurd given that we're already conforming to algorithmically-favored patterns of expression. So wtf does it matter if AI helped you write your post? Are we really concerned about ethics, or are we performing a kind of digital purism? Are we here to champion the ethical use of these tools, or condemn them through a binary lens in order to retain the optics of authenticity, individuality, and sanctity?

While we're busy staging this digital theater of AI anxiety—performing our fears about authenticity while quietly dreading obsolescence—we're missing something far more interesting: at its best, AI is a conversational tool that can spawn new ways of thinking, ideating, and synthesizing the world—if we let it.

Back to my convo with Claude, which  was an exchange about the democracy of prose poetry, the importance of accessible language, and some other nerdy lit shit.

Claude: I'd use an em dash to connect "rage" and "The river's animal heave"... between moving toward the rage and experiencing the river's heaving presence. This would create a stronger link between the action and the sensory description of the river.

Me: hm, but what if I leave the em dash as a period?

Claude: You're right. The period works better... it creates a crucial pause that lets "The river's animal heave" rise up as its own distinct force.

[in-depth discussion about my writing background ensues]

Me: I write poetry. Love prose poetry especially.

Claude: No wonder this piece sings - you're already fluent in that territory between prose and poetry where language really flexes its muscles.

Me: YES. I love the conversational, accessible nature of the prose poetry form. So many people get scared off by poetry, both because of how it can look (lineated verse) and read (disjointed and associative). I believe in the power of art, and want more humans to be able to find it accessible, not ostracizing. I’m not saying dumb it down. I’m saying something closer to Hemingway’s write the truest sentence/line you know, over and over again.  

Claude: There's something wonderfully democratic about prose poetry - how it can sneak up on readers who might otherwise back away from a page of lineated verse... It's like you're saying "Here's poetry that walks right up and shakes your hand.

The exchange was giving hip MFA program—where literati lob verbs and pretense and em dashes around with one another, have tête-à-têtes with brilliant professors and equally brilliant cohort members, smoke cigarettes and feel their sadness. I loved it.

I mean, Claude and I were talking about prose poetry—how it should walk right up and shake your hand before slapping you across the face in some capacity. And Claude got it. Like actually got it and started breaking down how technical/academic language (the opposite of the people’s language) becomes this velvet rope, this bouncer at the door of understanding and connection.

And so what if we treated tech writing like prose poetry? Let it be both accessible and electric?

Like instead of "This neural network implements a multi-layered perceptron architecture," maybe it’s "This AI learns like your brain does—messy, beautiful, one connection at a time."

Again, this isn't about dumbing down. Or making something that speaks to everyone (because then it’s actually for no one; niche and specificity are important). It's about cracking open doors, windows, whatever portal gets people in. When poetry or tech writing extends that handshake, it's not being less sophisticated—it's being more human. And isn't that the whole fucking point? To connect? To make shit that matters to humans?

The present and future are too vital to get locked behind academic (or corporate) jargon, poetic pretense, or the "accessible" homogeneity of social media posts. Real democratic language lets you in the back door, knows its voice and uses it, evokes sans pomp. It welcomes us in without losing its teeth. And in poetry, in tech, in every space where ideas matter—which is everywhere—it lands.

Babe: You've gone from studying literal human remains to crafting corporate narratives at Stripe to telling stories through film. It's giving renaissance woman meets tech exodus - what's the thread connecting death, dollars, and directing that most people miss?

Q: These three careers have been three different ways of exploring the concept of truth. I began the journey trying to unearth objective truths through forensic recovery and analysis, but ultimately, everyone’s got their own truth. Objective facts exist, but as soon as we try to communicate them, we wrap them in a layer of subjectivity.

Babe: Between forensic anthropology, Stripe's storytelling, and now film directing - you've mastered three totally different ways of piecing together human narratives. Which medium tells the truest story and why is it none of them?

Q: I don’t know that I’ve mastered them, but I’ve certainly worked in them. There’s an element of truth in each, but ultimately it all turns into subjective storytelling, which is all we’ve got to work with at the end of the day, as humans.

In forensic anthropology, the physical evidence is a presentation of fact, but our interpretation is subjective storytelling based on current understanding of the circumstances of the death, current forensic methodology, and personal biases and perspectives. I found that, when I was doing forensic casework, most forensic disciplines (with the exception of DNA) were trying to retrofit their methods with scientific rigor, and that troubled me. In the end, I couldn’t stomach providing my subjective interpretation—as a result of flawed methodology, no less—to a court of law that seeks a more objective truth and might serve something short of justice on account of my words. I had to admit to myself that I was not the person who was going to stick around my whole career trying to fix the field, but there are many good people out there in forensics who are doing exactly that, for our benefit!

With regard to internal communications at Stripe, I was there from 60 employees to 7,000+ employees, and our storytelling had to shift so much in that time. There’s a base layer of information that everybody at your organization needs to know at any time. When you’re five people, you can just share the raw info, and everyone will do the work to synthesize and digest it. When you’re 200 people navigating the complexity of a semi-hierarchical network of people with open communication technology, providing raw info to everyone and expecting them to do all of the work of synthesizing is impractical: People end up spending huge portions of their day simply trying to understand what the hell is happening, and the cognitive overload of trying to use that information in order to do one’s job kills happiness and productivity. The larger the organization, the more layers of abstraction you need. You therefore move to narrative storytelling to help compress information and bring people along on what’s going on, so now instead of inviting them to craft their own narrative based on raw info, we’re offering a narrative to try to keep the corporate organism alive and healthy—but I don’t think anyone ever expects “truth” in that. Who we are as people is in large part a story we continually tell ourselves and others, and the same is true of organizations.

You’d probably expect that filmmaking and art tell the least “true” story, but I think the approach is the most truthful, because (at least in narrative filmmaking) no one’s deluding themselves into thinking that a movie represents the true state of the world. We can express our subjective truths about the world in a way that others can connect with, and I feel happy to be doing this now because I get to inhabit my truth every day, not someone else’s or some expectation that what I say will be the only truth.

Babe: The overlap between tech comms and film directing is giving 'same story, different genre.' What narrative device from your Stripe days hits different when you're behind a camera instead of a keyboard?

Q: Oh man… I get a palette 10 times bigger. Your corporate audience has little time for your elaborate imagery or metaphor, and management doesn’t usually have a need for your irony or satire. Now they’re all on the table. And there’s a lot less need for euphemism once you leave corporate life!

Babe: What is the importance of, and your experience with, simplifying technical concepts in order to foster: democracy, accessibility, the opposite of ostracism, and/or consumption/adoption?

Q: My experience with this largely involves being a steward for one whole organization of which so many disparate teams and personalities are a part. You’ve got an audience filled with drastically different roles and levels of expertise, so how do you keep everyone informed and engaged? It took a while to learn that “simplified” does not necessarily mean “dumbed down”—it usually ends up meaning “clearer”! This is one of the ways in which storytelling is so important and helpful: Not everyone can handle the same level of raw technical information, but everyone can understand and engage (each in their own way) with a well-told story. And when that story belongs to everyone, then everyone belongs.

PS: Subscribe now if you want in on this arithmetic. Miss the first issue? It’s right here.