### Introduction The most amazing drummer on the internet. My daughter introduced me to El Estepario Siberiano’s YouTube channel a few months back, and I have been obsessed ever since. The Spanish drummer (real name: Jorge Garrido) posts videos of himself playing supercharged cover versions of popular tracks, hitting his drums with such jaw-dropping speed and technique that he makes other pro drummers shake their heads in disbelief. The dozens of reaction videos posted by other musicians are a joy in themselves. ### The passion of the drummer Garrido is up-front about the countless hours that it took to get this good. He says he sat behind his kit almost all day, every day for years. At a time when machines appear to do it all, there’s a kind of defiance in that level of human effort. It’s why my favorites are Garrido’s covers of electronic music, where he out-drums the drum machine. Check out his version of Skrillex and Missy Elliot’s “Ra Ta Ta” and tell me it doesn’t put happiness in your heart. ### Signs of life in the uncanny valley Watching Sora videos of Michael Jackson stealing a box of chicken nuggets or Sam Altman biting into the pink meat of a flame-grilled Pikachu has given me flashbacks to an Ed Atkins exhibition at Tate Britain I saw a few months ago. Atkins is one of the most influential and unsettling British artists of his generation. He is best known for hyper-detailed CG animations of himself (pore-perfect skin, janky movement) that play with the virtual representation of human emotions. ### CGI Animations In The Worm we see a CGI Atkins make a long-distance call to his mother during a covid lockdown. The audio is from a recording of an actual conversation. Are we watching Atkins cry or his avatar? Our attention flickers between two realities. “When an actor breaks character during a scene, it’s known as corpsing,” Atkins has said. “I want everything I make to corpse.” Next to Atkins’s work, generative videos look like cardboard cutouts: lifelike but not alive. ### A dark and dirty book about a talking dingo What’s it like to be a pet? Australian author Laura Jean McKay’s debut novel, The Animals in That Country, will make you wish you’d never asked. A flu-like pandemic leaves people with the ability to hear what animals are saying. If that sounds too Dr. Dolittle for your tastes, rest assured: These animals are weird and nasty. A lot of the time they don’t even make any sense. ### A world without anthropomorphism But if everyone now talks to their computers, McKay’s book resets the anthropomorphic trap we’ve all fallen into. It’s a brilliant evocation of what a nonhuman mind might contain— and a meditation on the hard limits of communication. ### End t