People often confuse having options with having control. In dating, neither side gets every person they want. You can choose whom you approach, pursue, accept, or reject but the other person still has a vote. So perhaps the real game isn’t Who gets to choose? It’s “Who is willing to choose wisely and accept that the other person gets to choose too? Case closed.

They didn't burn the books. They fed them to a scanner and called it fair use. Somewhere in a warehouse, a hydraulic press is guillotining the spine off a 1962 first edition. A scanner eats the loose pages. What's left goes to recycling. This isn't a dystopian short story — it's Anthropic's actual training pipeline, and it had a code name: Project Panama. The internal memo was blunt: "Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world... we don't want it to be known that we are working on this." A judge looked at millions of shredded books and said: perfectly legal. Why? Because the physical copy died the moment the digital one was born — one copy in, one copy out, no duplication, no distribution. Fair use, case closed. So now there's a quiet industry of it — bulk buyers, anonymous orders, rare pre-2022 editions getting scooped up specifically *because* they're scarce and untrained-on. Books that survived library purges, fires, and a couple hundred years of neglect are meeting their end in a sheet-feed scanner in an industrial park. Preservation or incineration? Depends whether you think the text is the book, or the book is the book.