<p>“STET” is a 2018 short story by Sarah Gailey. Through the use layout and interactivity, the story provides a brief glimpse into the mourning process through the frame of a portion of an academic paper. The paper itself remains objective and to the point, discussing conscience in the (near) AIs that power autonomous vehicles and the morality that goes into their choices. The meat of the story, however, takes place in the footnotes and editorial comments. Scattered liberally throughout, the footnotes begin by illuminating the body text, but slowly begin to incorporate more personal aspects, describing how an autonomous car struck and killed the author’s daughter in an attempt to avoid an endangered species of woodpecker, which was deemed of greater importance than the child. Toward the end, the footnotes question the guilt of the AIs powering these vehicles (e.g: manslaughter versus homicide).</p>
<p>The footnotes are peppered with editorial comments calling into question the objectivity of the text, with the editor growing increasingly concerned for the well-being of the author. Although the author occasionally expands on the editorial comments (at one point even calling into question the short duration of bereavement leave that she was provided), all are marked STET, indicating that there is to be no change made.</p>
title Annotation: Leonard Bernstein - Symphony 3: Kaddish
Leonard Bernstein's third symphony, "Kaddish", is a 1963 choral/orchestral work with a narrator. The text for the narrator is by Bernstein himself, while that of the choir is the Jewish prayer the Kaddish, an Aramaic text recited by and for the bereaved after someone passes.
The narrator's text was later revised in 1977, and it's that version that I was working with. Originally, the narrator was originally intended to be Bernstein's wife, Felicia Montealegre, and recordings of this version are out there, but I first listened to the piece with the revision in place, and enjoy that text quite a bit more. This is relevant because the narration in the first version was intended to be for a female narrator in order to emphasize aspects of duality, and the version that I'm used to has a male narrator (Michael Wagar). From LeonardBernstein.com: *"In the original version, the choice of a woman as the Speaker and as vocal soloist (singing sacred words traditionally reserved for men in the synagogue) was in itself a dualistic decision. The woman represented in the Symphony, that aspect of humankind which know God through intuition, and can come closest to Divinity, a concept at odds with the male principal of organized rationality."*
Interleaved with the Kaddish prayer, the narrator struggles with
