An apophany is defined as a moment where someone sees a connection that doesn’t literally exist. This is a column about the connections between literality.  I’ll give you the facts first. On 4/21/2025, my partner made a post about rock band Twenty-One…

This is the closest I will get to a public anti-AI screed. Here it goes: generative artificial intelligence could never come up with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Hollywood Africans. You would ask it to make a picture that depicts three black men thinking about…

Spoilers will follow for Red Rooms, which you should see before or after reading this. Has Pascal Plante seen The Scary of Sixty-First? That was my first question after finishing his great Red Rooms. This isn’t to diminish his achievement, his depiction…

An apophany is a singular instance of stumbling onto one of these meaningless connections between interconnected things, as opposed to an epiphany, where the connection is meaningful.