Casey Rae - Casey Rae’s Apocrypha

Casey Rae’s Apocrypha

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Casey Rae

Author, Buddhist / interfaith chaplain. Books: William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n’ Roll (UT Press); Music Copyright: An Essential Guide for the Digital Age (Bloomsbury); Dead Dharma (Oxford, 2026). Certified trauma-focused IFS and DBT.

Cosmic Medicine

Cosmic Medicine

Questlove’s new documentary on Earth, Wind & Fire explores the band's radical attempt to heal a broken society with universal funk.

Rush, Revitalized

Rush, Revitalized

German drummer Anika Nilles shows Canadian legends how to rock without a wedgie.

Presence Over Pattern Matching

Presence Over Pattern Matching

Machines only know suffering by concept. Humans know it by condition. The distinction is crucial for care.

Getting Soft in Hard Times

Getting Soft in Hard Times

The antidote to a bruising world isn't a tougher shell, but a softer heart.

Backroom Obsessions

Backroom Obsessions

Zoomers are agog over two new horror movies from generational peers that are doing big box office on baby budgets. Is it cinematic vaporware or a changing of the guard?

Bury the Dead Internet

Bury the Dead Internet

The internet is broken. We can’t fix it. Time to plant new seeds.

Last Call, First Listen

Last Call, First Listen

The hauntingly serene film Last and First Men phones home from two billion years into the future. Don’t let it go to voicemail.

Always a Bride

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! has spark but variable voltage.

An ouroboros (snake) made of computer code consumes its own tail.

Superintelligence or Ouroboros?

AI can optimize forever. That doesn't mean it will ever wake up.

Sparing the Repair

Sparing the Repair

The urge to fix or solve is deeply human. It can also obscure more than it eases.

On the Sonny Side

On the Sonny Side

The colossus is gone, but his music is part of the vibratory fabric of the universe.

Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) gives Ronnie Quaife (Geena Davis) a bite of teleported steak. From David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986).

AI Writing is Teleported Steak

Why does everything I read taste synthetic?

Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931. Oil on canvas.

Mind Out of Time, Time Out of Mind

Some say we should live in the present, but try to pin it down and it vanishes. So do ideas about past and future. Might as well take that long lunch break.

Street performer Moondog in homemade Viking gear.

American history

The Other American Exceptionalism

Cynical conformity wasn’t an option for these visionary outsiders.

The Transference Machine

The Transference Machine

Human beings can’t help but anthropomorphize. Are we merely foolish, or the captives of our own hard wiring?

Political Unease as Spiritual Crisis

Political Unease as Spiritual Crisis

Anxiety over the state of the world is driving many to seek psychotherapy. Is it enough?

Parks and Invocation: The Cozy Horrors of “Widow’s Bay”

Parks and Invocation: The Cozy Horrors of “Widow’s Bay”

Apple’s new horror-comedy makes cringe creepy.

The Last Mile to the Stars

The Last Mile to the Stars

Putting all our eggs in the AGI basket seems unwise. It may also be impossible. Is resource-depleting superintelligence a Great Filter?

A cracked plaster face mask rests on a wooden office desk, surrounded by an open laptop displaying a spreadsheet, a coffee mug, notebooks, and a pen.

Unmasking the Impostor

The term “impostor syndrome” was coined to describe a misreading of experience, but has become another self-improvement project. What does it mean to reclaim doubt in an era of performative confidence?

Asha Bhosle smiling, holding a microphone, in a red and gold sari.

Asha, Avatar

Twelve thousand songs across eight decades. Three generations of Bollywood stars mouthed her music onscreen. Asha Bhosle was a multiverse.

Possession, Precisely

Possession, Precisely

Attackers are seeding the open web with hidden commands that AI agents execute with full credentials. An older diagnostic tradition has tracked similar—and no less spooky—intrusions for millennia.

dark ceramic vessel cracked open, warm golden light pouring through the breaks, against a weathered blue-green background.

spiritual trauma

Beyond Belief: Spiritual Rupture and Post Traumatic Growth

When a belief system breaks, the grief is real and the conflict runs deep. But rupture can also be the beginning of something more authentic.

Director Jim Jarmusch holds his Golden Lion award from the Venice Film Festival.

No Country for Weird Old Men

Jim Jarmusch is applying for French citizenship. David Cronenberg clings to Canadian funding. David Lynch saw the writing on the wall twenty years ago. Are the dinosaurs of indie cinema going extinct?

Roy Batty in his final moments, rain and blood on his face, eyes open. The replicant who feared forgetting more than death. From Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, 1982.

Do Silicon Gods Dream of Open Systems?

AI has a problem called catastrophic forgetting—new learning destroys old knowledge. The engineers trying to fix it are working from the wrong premise. So are the oligarchs who need it to work. On systems, identity, and why the data centers won’t last.

The Empathy-Compassion Distinction

The Empathy-Compassion Distinction

“Compassion fatigue” is one of those phrases that sounds right—but it may miss the mark. What most caregivers and clinicians are actually experiencing is empathy fatigue, and the distinction matters.