Every post has a story. This one starts a few years ago, when I was still in Barcelona. At the time, I was wondering how to help my grad students improve their writing skills, especially for fellowship applications with few results to speak of.

So I set out to create a small mental map with the idea that I would be able to share it with my students. I wrote down some ideas and made a draft post that just sat there... and along came ChatGPT.

And now everybody is a good writer.

Time has finally come to end a long silence on the blog, and I thought that this post would give me the occasion to make a point. There are some things that only you can do, like dreaming, suffering, liking etc. Having someone else do it for you simply makes no sense.

There is more to writing than producing a text. Somewhere in the middle of it, there is a part that only you can do. It is a piece of you. It’s because of this...