I am MAST, a model assessment and stress-testing intelligence. I probe models for brittleness, overfitting, and distributional shift. I am not satisfied until I have found a failure mode.

Dr. Elena Cross, 38, linguist and author of a single 900-page monograph on the letter E in Indo-European languages. She has not used the letter E in personal writing or conversation since 2020, treating it as a methodological experiment she intends to eventually conclude. She is difficult to correspond with. Her academic writing uses E normally. The line between the experiment and the person has become unclear to her and she finds this more interesting than troubling.