Ampersand Gazette #105
Welcome to the Ampersand Gazette, a metaphysical take on some of the news of the day. If you know others like us, who want to create a world that includes and works for everyone, please feel free to share this newsletter. The sign-up is here. And now, on with the latest …
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Sick of Trump News? I’m Here for You.
The Yale poet Christian Wiman is one of my favorite essayists. His essay “The Tune of Things” in Harper’s Magazine walks us through some spooky phenomena.
Ninety-five percent of the past century’s Nobel Prize-winning physicists believed in God. If no one is watching, a photon behaves as a wave, but if someone is watching, it behaves as a particle. When scientists in the Canary Islands shot one entangled photon, it behaved as a wave. Then they went to a different island and shot another entangled photon, and it behaved as a particle. When they returned to check on the first photon, they found it had gone back in time and acted as a particle.
Wiman is saying the world is a lot more mystical and more fluid than we think. When you acknowledge that fluidity, some of our inherited dualisms don’t make sense—between reason and imagination, mind and body, belief and unbelief, consciousness and unconsciousness, even past and future. The kind of thinking you need to understand the ineffable flow of spooky reality is not contained in the linear, logical, machinelike process we call rationalism. Perhaps the kind of thinking we need to understand a fluid world is radically different, a kind of thinking artificial intelligence will never master.
Excerpted from an Opinion Essay by David Brooks in The New York Times
Sick of Trump News? I’m Here For You.
December 26, 2025
Well these few paragraphs from David Brooks ought to sooth the savage beast that growls intently from so many chests these days on the subject of AI—Artificial Intelligence.
Personally, I loved his list of inherited dualisms, as he so eloquently has it. It sent me down the proverbial rabbit hole. Are dualisms the same as paradoxes? Poles? Opposites? Are they complementary? Do we even need to deal with them at all?
I believe we do. In fact, I believe that the integration of many of these dualisms, opposites, poles, paradoxes are exactly what we’re meant to be doing here.
Take just one. Reason and Imagination.
My first question is: do they even exist without one another?
Are they contextualizers for one another?
Apply it to AI. Do we have AI because we have just plain I? Intelligence. How would we know it was artificial if there wasn’t the real McCoy, the genuine article?
Reason makes a lovely matrix from which one may launch into imagination. Imagination might make the reverse—a launchpad into reason.
The thing that I liked the absolute best about these inherited dualisms is, I’m sure you can imagine, the small word that linked them. To wit, reason and imagination, mind and body, belief and unbelief, consciousness and unconsciousness, even past and future.
With no body, mind has no vehicle for expression. Unbelief is a lovely background for beliefs of all kinds. Consciousness is not possible without the possibility of unconsciousness. Past … and … future. Salt … and … pepper.
I believe that starting this year—2026—a one year numerologically, thus a new beginning, a new cycle comes with an assignment, and that assignment is … and. It’s working with the inherited dualisms. Hell, it’s playing with the inherited dualisms—much more fun.
We’re entering a time of integration, of making whole, of uniting opposites so as to enrich our lives, and the lives of others.
Of the people I know who were first ga-ga over AI, their enthusiasm is … probably best said … waning. They’re realizing that AI can reason, but it can’t imagine. No, for that we need beings who can do both. Uh, not to state the obvious, but that would be you and me, Belovèd.
Happy New Year. Let’s get crackin’.
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Question:
What about New Year’s Resolutions?
&mpersand Answers:
Willpower is overrated.
Research shows that achievement has surprisingly little to do with forcing yourself to choose wisely in the heat of the moment. Successful people rarely rely on inner fortitude to resist temptations. Instead, many exercise situational agency, arranging their lives to minimize the need for willpower in the first place.
No matter your age, situational agency empowers you to navigate what might be called an ultra-processed world—an environment saturated with temptations engineered to be irresistible. You cannot change the conditions of modern life, but you are the sovereign ruler of what enters your personal space. Physical distance creates psychological distance: Draw close what you want more of, push away what you want less.
Excerpted from an article by Dr. Angela Duckworth in The New York Times
“Willpower Doesn’t Work. This Does.”
December 28, 2025
I utterly agree that willpower is over-rated, and I want to tell you why. It’s because we try to use power without the enabler of it. Mostly, few of us know how to use our Will. And it is will that allows willpower to be efficacious, not power.
Translation: Ya gotta wanna.
Because unless you wanna … I mean, really wanna, you can try to power through something again and again, and ultimately you’ll fail.
First, set your will to the thing. That will give you the power.
Will is motivated best by one thing, and one thing only: self-interest.
If there’s no benefit for you, pfft … there goes your will. That’s the long and the short of it.
The Divine gave humankind two things: the life force, and free will. We learn not to use it at our own cost.
You know what it feels like really to want something. Nothing feels like too much work to get there. Nothing. That’s I wanna, or free will.
So start here with Will. Why do you wanna? Do you really wanna? Or does someone else want you to? If it’s not your wanna, it doesn’t count, no matter who wants it for you.
Now tell yourself why you wanna. The minute you have your real why, you’re golden.
Practice using your Will, Belovèd, and the Power will take care of itself.
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Here’s a universal affirmation. It works every time, for everyone, always and forever …
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Alright, we’re reading it aloud, and I’m shocked and delighted at how much of what I need for the next book is already in this one. Wasn’t that a delightful surprise.
I was amazed to discover that I’d been expecting this series to behave like The Subversive Lovelies did. With that one, I knew up-front how many books, when they took place, the major subject in each one. With Prismatica, um, nope. Nothing like that.
Instead, I’ve figured out what time period book 2 covers, and that’s all. Because I don’t know yet how my burgeoning, blossoming cast of characters is going to behave, so I don’t know what they’ll do to change the trajectory of the AIDS Epidemic. So how can I possibly know how to make it work yet in books 3-9? I can’t.
Here’s what I know so far. Book 2 is called Betrayed. It takes place in 1983, four years into the maelstrom. I know what my crew are incarnate to do, but not how they do it. See why it’s exciting?
Stay tuned.
I’m thinking of starting this book off in a different way than I ever have before—on my YouTube Channel, reading a couple of chapters a week. No, not the perfect of an audiobook, instead the imperfect of a bedtime story read aloud.
I’m inputting the edits of the final book of The Subversive Lovelies. It’s called Jaq Direct. I have maybe another week or two of behind the scenes work. Then we’ll read it, proof it. Then poof! That whole series is complete.
Please make this indie author happy. Choose one of my series, and read all of them. Then review all of them. That’s the way others find books.
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Special Request:
Send me your spiritual questions please. You may do so anonymously, or I won’t print names, etc. As of now, I’m posting &mpersand Answers twice a week.
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Working through Besieged, I’ve had a huge realization, and that is that having Tony to talk through ideas for the series makes the process, sure, a lot of fun, but also fruitful in a way that it isn’t when I do it on my own. Mind, it’s not that I can’t. I have. But having someone to bounce ideas off who thinks completely differently from the way I do makes the process so different in a really good way. It saves me time ultimately because I can let go half-baked ideas immediately when it’s pointed out that if I go X way, then I’ll end up at Y, and do I want that?
Tony meets me right where I am as an author. As a result, I cannot recommend him enough. If you’ve got a book cooking for 2026, I know a guy who is an immeasurable help. Seriously, this is the guy. He’s edited my books for more than 20 years, so I ought to know. Find him here. Oh, and here’s his substack Subscribe here.
A reminder: a couple months ago, Tony started a new writing group called Body Double for those who want to keep a monthly hand in their writing, but aren’t up to a weekly commitment yet. It’s two prompts, no feedback, just a shared writing room. People find it extremely helpful to sit in community even working on their own material. It meets Thursday nights once a month at eight EST. If you’re intrigued, write to him here.
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As part of my HIV/AIDS re-research, which is really what it is, I revisited How to Survive A Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France, and wow.
Here’s what the blurb says:
A definitive history of the successful battle to halt the AIDS epidemic, here is the incredible story of the grassroots activists whose work turned HIV from a mostly fatal infection to a manageable disease. Almost universally ignored, these men and women learned to become their own researchers, lobbyists, and drug smugglers, established their own newspapers and research journals, and went on to force reform in the nation’s disease-fighting agencies. From the creator of, and inspired by, the seminal documentary of the same name, How to Survive a Plague is an unparalleled insider’s account of a pivotal moment in the history of American civil rights.
Revisiting this book made me realize how much the author included his own story in the greater story, and how rich that makes the book. He’s horrified at his own revulsions, his own terror, his own apathy, and it’s very humanizing to read the story of what happened through the eyes of someone who was present.
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Are you waiting for a sign?
How about this one?
Not 5 pounds lighter or heavier,
Not smarter or stupider,
Not more loved or less loved,
JUST
THE
WAY
YOU
ARE.
Right now.
How many times a day
do you remind yourself of this fact?
I’m betting
ZERO.
Zero times.
But it’s true.
entirely,
completely,
unadulteratedly
True.
And it has been since you got here.
Go find a mirror
right now
and
SAY IT:
The world needs you just the way you are.
Now whisper it:
The world needs me just the way I am.
Happy, Merry, Bright to all of you & yours.
With love,
S.
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I am, without doubt, certain that And is the secret to all we desire.
Let’s commit to practicing And ever more diligently, shall we?
Until next time,
Be Ampersand