We walk like them

My Kindle's recent suggestion to revisit Clifford Simak's "They Walked Like Men" feels eerily prescient—whether it's an algorithmic response to our recent economic turbulence or a digital oracle's warning of impending upheaval.

For the uninitiated, the novel presents an ingenious alien invasion plot, thwarted by an unlikely trio: a determined journalist, his female companion, and a talking dog. Reading it today, one can't help but reflect on our current media landscape. While journalism may have evolved from its golden age, today's news outlets maintain their power through different means: stark partisan divisions, strategic hit pieces against opposing candidates, and an insatiable appetite for sensationalism. It's through this lens that the Washington Post's recent decision to abstain from presidential endorsements becomes particularly intriguing—perhaps suggesting they're sitting on explosive revelations that could detonate across party lines, requiring carefully calibrated neutrality.

My first encounter with Simak's work remains indelibly etched in my memory: a twelve-year-old boy alone in a room at Hotel Ani in Yerevan, where the gathering dusk transformed ordinary shadows into potential threats. The novel's more unsettling passages took root in my young imagination, spawning an enduring wariness of both Armenia's capital and, peculiarly specific, any air vent large enough to accommodate a billiard ball.

These personal fears might seem irrational decades later, but they resonate differently in our current climate of uncertainty. In an era where reality often rivals fiction in its capacity to unsettle, perhaps those childhood apprehensions were just premature preparation for the world we now inhabit—where the familiar can transform into the threatening, and vigilance feels less like paranoia and more like prudence.