Pull-Up Diary theparisreview.org

Going to the gym is mostly a slog, drudgery in service of vanity. It is stultifying to lift objects surrounded by mirrored walls. In my earbuds a vapid podcast plays and beyond that, on the gym’s speakers, Pitbull.

Some scientists think diagrammonkey.wordpress.com

When an article says “some scientists think” then remember this: I, a scientist, once thought I could fit a whole orange in my mouth. I could, it turns out, get it in there, but I hadn’t given sufficient thought to the reverse operation.

A unified theory of fucks aworkinglibrary.com

This is one of my answers to the question of, why give a fuck about work? Why love your work? It won’t, of course, love you back. It can’t. Work isn’t a thing that can love. It isn’t alive, it isn’t and won’t ever be living. And my answer is: don’t. Don’t give a fuck about your work. Give all your fucks to the living. Give a fuck about the people you work with, and the people who receive your work—the people who use the tools and products and systems or, more often than not, are used by them. Give a fuck about the land and the sea, all the living things that are used or used up by the work, that are abandoned or displaced by it, or—if we’re lucky, if we’re persistent and brave and willing—are cared for through the work.

Potsdam Giants en.wikipedia.org

The king trained and drilled his own regiment every day. He liked to paint their portraits from memory. He tried to show them to foreign visitors and dignitaries to impress them. At times he would try to cheer himself up by ordering them to march before him, even if he was in his sickbed. This procession, which included the entire regiment, was led by their mascot, a bear. He once confided to the French ambassador that "The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me, but tall soldiers—they are my weakness".

The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates nymag.com

“I have a deep-seated fear,” he told me, “that the Black struggle will ultimately, at its root, really just be about narrow Black interest. And I don’t think that is in the tradition of what our most celebrated thinkers have told the world. I don’t think that’s how Martin Luther King thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Du Bois thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Baldwin thought about the Black struggle. Should it turn out that we have our first Black woman president, and our first South Asian president, and we continue to export 2,000-pound bombs to perpetrate a genocide, in defense of a state that is practicing apartheid, I won’t be able to just sit here and shake my head and say, ‘Well, that is unfortunate.’ I’m going to do what I can in the time that remains, and the writing that I have, to not allow that to be, because that is existential death for the Black struggle, and for Black people, as far as I’m concerned.”

I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is theatlantic.com

The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Literature Without Literature granta.com

These warped views of literature reflect a shared tendency to explain art with minimal reference to the art itself. Novels are instead considered as commodities and demographic specimens, the products of structures, systems, and historical forces. They become expressions of brands, their authors threadbare entrepreneurs. Fiction recedes behind the chatter it generates and is judged according not to its intrinsic qualities but to the sort of reader whose existence it implies. Authors are turned into role models and style icons, mythologized for their virtues, and crucified for their sins. The numbers, as if they have meaning, are counted. The dream is of literature that can be quantified rather than read.

How to Know What’s Really Propaganda theatlantic.com

Being super cynical doesn’t make you free. It actually makes you more dependent on propaganda.

Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing syllabusproject.org

This syllabus explores the concept of fake objects, defined as material replicas of originals that are absent, fictional, immaterial, or otherwise unobtainable. Fake objects are created to satisfy the desire for things that never were. Their worth is not necessarily tied to the rarity of the original or the fidelity of reproduction. Value is found through fakeness, not in spite of it, giving the fake object the potential to be even better than the real thing.

The War on Genius rosselliotbarkan.com

I’ve been mulling, of late, actions and reactions, the trope of the lone genius and the trope of systems. One held very long in the culture before being defenestrated, in academia at least, over the last several decades. The other is now dominant—at least, among those in the know, those who still analyze literature. In a systems conception, the genius of creation is disregarded and dismissed; no lone spark could truly emerge, no individual could labor, by herself, to write the novels, poems, or plays that endure across the ages, or even get remembered a decade after publication. [...] The primary change in publishing, I’d argue, that has come in the new century is the diminishment of risk-taking on the side of literary fiction, the abandonment of the concept of a publishing house propping up and nurturing a young literary career, and the end of a certain trust that was invested in individual editors—Sonny Mehta, Gordon Lish, Gary Fisketjon, and a young Toni Morrison come to mind—to curate lists to their taste.

How to Spot Corporate Bullshit currentaffairs.org

Over the past century and a half, on a broad range of issues including the minimum wage, workplace safety, environmental regulations, consumer protection—even on morally indisputable issues like child labor and racial segregation—the people and corporations who profited from the status quo have effectively wielded a familiar litany of groundless ‘economic’ claims and fear mongering rhetoric in their efforts to slow or quash necessary reforms. As even a cursory examination of the quotes we’ve included in this book will show, the wealthy and powerful are willing to say anything—even the worst things imaginable—to retain their wealth and power. But while there is simply no bottom to this well of shamelessness, there is a pattern.

The Fight For Free Time thequietus.com

There’s no pointing in reforming work or creating better jobs then: an oppressive system of total domination remains an oppressive system of total domination no matter how much you ameliorate it. As Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek put it: “Beyond the personal domination exhibited by managers and bosses, wage labour is also unfree by virtue of this impersonal domination of capitalism’s imperatives. For the vast majority of humanity this translates to the fact that subjecting ourselves to wage labour is necessary for survival […] Contemporary post-work positions […] represent a proactive response to this imagined end of job-based cultures; they eschew a celebration of work, emphasizing instead the possibilities that are opened up when we no longer centre our lives and societies around wage labour”.

On Chicken factoryinternational.org

The modern domestic chicken is descended from a jungle fowl, a territorial, ground-dwelling, non-migratory bird. Powerful short-range flyers, they roosted in trees to escape predators at night, but they were themselves omnivorous, and perhaps might look to us more like dinosaurs than fat, pillowy hens. Our own chickens, loving and affectionate to us, were capable of violence, too. When a rat tried to steal their corn, they hunted it down, killed it, and devoured it. The Ancient Romans began to take chicken out of its habitat: no more jungles, but sacrificial altars. In the imperial Roman army, the worship of Mithras was the most popular religion, and cocks were sacrificed and eaten as part of his worship, because of their association with the dawn and that of Mithras with the sun. To eat a chicken is to eat light.

Why We’re Turning Psychiatric Labels Into Identities newyorker.com

There’s a broader issue here. People’s symptoms frequently evolve according to the labels they’ve been given.

The Katsuification of Britain vittlesmagazine.com

The katsu curry craze is a specifically British phenomenon; it isn’t derived from a larger international trend. American supermarket shelves are not laden with katsu curry products. Burger King never sold their Katsu Range in Canada or Australia, and McDonald’s didn’t release their katsu curry nuggets anywhere else either. The trend is also a recent one – the ubiquity of katsu curry feels sudden and unprecedented. Unlike chicken tikka masala, it does not derive from a major wave of immigration to the country; unlike burgers, it is not inspired by a country that wields global cultural hegemony. But while the trend seems to have come out of nowhere, perhaps it should come as no surprise. After all, katsu curry is British food. Or, at least, it was.

Boundary Issues parapraxismagazine.com

People use the language of boundaries first and foremost to communicate hurt: the word shows up after something painful has happened, usually as a retroactive narrative to make sense of the damage: a boundary was crossed. Renaming the event this way redescribes the hurt as a violation, a form of emotional trespassing. This lets me off the hook, in some ways: “there is a boundary here” gives me something to say to the offender without having to describe my woundedness. And then, if they respect it, the two of us get to bask in our new, shared optimism that changing our relationship is as simple as drawing a line.

No good alone internetprincess.substack.com

The relationship between you and your therapist is transactional and safe, free of the messiness of attachment or stakes or love. And there are times, to be sure, when that can be a very useful relationship to have. But a serious issue arises when professional, unattached relationships are positioned as a replacement (or a requirement) for fulfilling, challenging, passionate ones. When people say that one ought to go to therapy to become a perfectly stable, functional, “healed” individual before they dare try to experience love or community, they are imagining a world in which a fundamental purpose of human connection has been replaced with a capital exchange.

You don’t have a right to believe whatever you want to aeon.co

Such judgments can imply that believing is a voluntary act. But beliefs are often more like states of mind or attitudes than decisive actions. Some beliefs, such as personal values, are not deliberately chosen; they are ‘inherited’ from parents and ‘acquired’ from peers, acquired inadvertently, inculcated by institutions and authorities, or assumed from hearsay. For this reason, I think, it is not always the coming-to-hold-this-belief that is problematic; it is rather the sustaining of such beliefs, the refusal to disbelieve or discard them that can be voluntary and ethically wrong.

Unhooking: On the Gigification of Intimacy lareviewofbooks.org

The philosophy of gig work—in which people move from situation to situation, in which short-term gains are more important than long-term investments, and in which individuals are disposable the moment they’re no longer useful—has seeped deep into the pores of human relationships both inside and outside of “work.” [...] Today, we’re not only free but also encouraged to remove ourselves from relationships that, albeit often only temporarily, are taxing or unpleasant.

Work Sucks. What Could Salvage It? newyorker.com

Anderson argued that Americans have essentially outsourced totalitarianism to the private sector. For all our talk about the sacrosanct values of freedom and democracy, she pointed out, most of us spend our days toiling in subordination to bosses who wield control over many aspects of our lives.

101 Additional Advices kk.org

What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important. To get the important stuff done, avoid the demands of the urgent.

Nasciamo Vannacci, è il dopo che conta wittgenstein.it

Cosa diavolo sto farfugliando? Sto farfugliando che la regressione civile a cui assistiamo, e di cui una parte di noi si duole, deriva da un’inversione di valori che ha portato a screditare la conoscenza, l’informazione, la cultura, a favore dell’ignoranza e della sua rivendicazione. Le persone – noi – diventano rispettose e amanti del prossimo, con tutte le sue differenze, man mano che si allontanano dall’ignoranza: ignoranza che oggi è fatta di due cose, non è più l’ignoranza vuota di analfabetismi e di assenze di informazioni di un tempo. È fatta 1) di riempire la propria conoscenza di cazzate, e 2) di disprezzare la conoscenza che ci manca per non sentirsene umiliati.

Shibboleth newyorker.com

The person who says "We must eliminate Hamas" says this not necessarily because she thinks this is a possible outcome on this earth but because this sentence is the shibboleth that marks her membership in the community that says that. The person who uses the word "Zionist" as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith, meaning exactly the same thing in 2024 and 1948 as it meant in 1890 or 1901 or 1920 — that person does not so much bring definitive clarity to the entangled history of Jews and Palestinians as they successfully and soothingly draw a line to mark their own zone of interest and where it ends. And while we all talk, carefully curating our shibboleths, presenting them to others and waiting for them to reveal themselves as with us or against us — while we do all that, bloody murder. And now here we are, almost at the end of this little stream of words. We’ve arrived at the point at which I must state clearly “where I stand on the issue,” that is, which particular political settlement should, in my own, personal view, occur on the other side of a ceasefire. This is the point wherein — by my stating of a position — you are at once liberated into the simple pleasure of placing me firmly on one side or the other, putting me over there with those who lisp or those who don’t, with the Ephraimites, or with the people of Gilead. Yes, this is the point at which I stake my rhetorical flag in that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place — built with words — where rapes are minimized as needs be, and the definition of genocide quibbled over, where the killing of babies is denied, and the precision of drones glorified, where histories are reconsidered or rewritten or analogized or simply ignored, and “Jew” and “colonialist” are synonymous, and “Palestinian” and “terrorist” are synonymous, and language is your accomplice and alibi in all of it. Language euphemized, instrumentalized, and abused, put to work for your cause and only for your cause, so that it does exactly and only what you want it to do. Let me make it easy for you. Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward. It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead.

Artisans of Words hedgehogreview.com

Complexity should not make us give up on words or reality; it should help us see that both are contested. [...] Clichés, stale metaphors, and repeating what everyone else already says is a great way of avoiding thinking. Surrounded by unthinking language, students select the least thinking option for writing.

Restoring the past won’t liberate Palestine nytimes.com

A good deal of the antipathy toward Israeli Jews today is undergirded and enabled, I believe, by something that to some ears sounds progressive: the idea that people and lands that have been colonized must be returned to their indigenous peoples and original state. But that belief, when taken literally, is, at best, a kind of left-wing originalism, a utopian politics that believes the past answers all the questions of the present. At worst, it is a left-wing echo to the ancestral fantasies of the far right, in which who is allowed to live in which places is a question of the connection of one’s blood to a particular patch of soil.

Settler colonialism is not distinctly Western or European aeon.co

If we define settler colonialism as the coercive displacement of Indigenous peoples by settlers, then a wide range of cases fit this bill. To list just a few in Asia: China settled millions of Han Chinese to Xinjiang and Tibet in the 1960s and ’70s; Sri Lanka resettled hundreds of thousands of Sinhalese to formerly Tamil areas in the 1960s and ’70s; Thailand resettled more than 100,000 Buddhists to its southern Malay areas in the 1960s and ’70s; Bangladesh settled 400,000 Bengalis to the Chittagong Hills in the 1970s and ’80s; and Iraq resettled tens of thousands of Arabs to Kurdish areas in the 1980s and ’90s. More recently, in 2018 Myanmar began to attract Buddhists to formerly Muslim Rohingya areas, and in 2019 India controversially made it much easier for Hindus to emigrate to Kashmir. [...] Yet, settler colonialism in the Global South fails to attract international attention. Maps circulating online depicting where settler colonialism is ‘still a reality’, for instance, almost exclusively depict areas settled by Europeans. Colonised peoples in the Global South have experienced a double erasure: first by settlers and second by settler colonial studies.

How to comment on social media lithub.com

Anything not declared in the post is something O.P. does not care about/is complicit with. Every expression of concern is in fact an expression of unconcern about something else.

Slow change can be radical change lithub.com

Most truths are like that, easy to hear or recite, hard to live in the sense that slowness is hard for most of us, requiring commitment, perseverance, and return after you stray. Because the job is not to know; it’s to become. A sociopath knows what kindness is and how to weaponize it; a saint becomes it. [...] Describing the slowness of change is often confused with acceptance of the status quo. It’s really the opposite: an argument that the status quo must be changed, and it will take steadfast commitment to see the job through. It’s not accepting defeat; it’s accepting the terms of possible victory. Distance runners pace themselves; activists and movements often need to do the same, and to learn from the timelines of earlier campaigns to change the world that have succeeded.

Notes on nationalism orwellfoundation.com

By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

You can’t fact check propaganda hedgehogreview.com

Note the absence of any mention of truth or falsehood. Instead, these classic definitions place propaganda within the airier realm of rumor, report, picture, suggestion, and symbol. A baldfaced lie would theoretically be open to falsification, which would leave the speaker exposed and discredited. So the skillful propagandist instead works by insinuation, by spinning the significance of events in one way or another, by bringing the reader, listener, or viewer around to a particular point of view. Propaganda creates a general atmosphere in which a particular conclusion seems undeniable, even though it is suggested rather than stated. What matters is not the facts, but their significance.

How China is tearing down Islam ig.ft.com

What happened to their communities has been repeated across China, with hundreds of mosques modified over the past five years. Satellite imagery shows at least 1,714 buildings have been altered, stripped or destroyed. The government says the changes are to modernise the mosques and “harmonise” them with Chinese culture.

People reluctant to kill for an abstraction, a movement slate.com

Since the world began, we have gone about our work quietly, resisting the urge to generalize, valuing the individual over the group, the actual over the conceptual, the inherent sweetness of the present moment over the theoretically peaceful future to be obtained via murder. Many of us have trouble sleeping and lie awake at night, worrying about something catastrophic befalling someone we love. We rise in the morning with no plans to convert anyone via beating, humiliation, or invasion. To tell the truth, we are tired. We work. We would just like some peace and quiet. When wrong, we think about it awhile, then apologize.

The extreme ambitions of West Bank settlers newyorker.com

For decades, Daniella Weiss has been one of the leaders of Israel’s settlement movement. [...] Weiss and I recently spoke by phone. [...] I wanted to talk to Weiss to understand the extremism of the settler movement, and her ultimate intentions for the West Bank.

Up in Arms lrb.co.uk

Reports of global rearmament earlier this year were described in the press as a ‘shot in the arm’ for the British economy, but increasing sales have not prompted increased scrutiny. In 2008, the IDF general Gadi Eizenkot outlined the Dahiya doctrine, named for the neighbourhood of Beirut where Hizbullah was based during the 2006 Lebanon War and which was flattened by the IDF. ‘What happened in the Dahiya quarter ... will happen in every village,’ Eizenkot told an Israeli newspaper. ‘We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel ... From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases ... This is not a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorised.’ Eizenkot became head of the IDF in 2015; he now sits in the Knesset and joined the war cabinet following the 7 October attacks. It shouldn’t take the images coming daily from Gaza to prove that the risk is more than ‘purely theoretical’.

Secularism in Iran is not just a form of Western imperialism aeon.co

One initial concern about this narrative surrounds the legitimacy of the sharp ‘East v West’ dichotomy central to it. The Islamic Republic thrives on this dichotomy. Indeed, it is its entire ideological foundation. One issue is that it is ambiguous who or what ‘the West’ is supposed to be in this context. It is evident that ‘the West’ is considered more than a mere geographical designation. But is it a specific socioeconomic system (ie, capitalism)? A level of development in science and technology? A confederacy of states with shared political interests? A moral framework? At times, Khomeini equated ‘the West’ with colonialism, but at other times he emphasised its essential nature as one of decadence or a lack of morality. This point is important because, without a credible definition of ‘the West’ (and ‘the East’, for that matter), the narrative threatens to make superficial any political analysis involving it. This is evident, for instance, in the fact that many Muslim-majority countries, such as Malaysia and Indonesia, and other countries with histories of colonial subjection, such as Japan, have moved beyond the dichotomy, adopting some typically ‘Western’ values without sacrificing their own cultural identity.

Your services as guidance counselor are no longer required, Mr. Vonnegut mcsweeneys.net

In fact, you have at times seemed to question the very concept of a career. On September 28, you told senior Barry Platowski, “We are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” As a result, Barry declined to write his SATs and is now talking about taking the year off to “focus on my DJing.”

The agony of waiting for a ceasefire that never comes newyorker.com

My mother does not like it when we visit home. In one of her dreams, our house was destroyed, and she was collecting rubble. But my father couldn’t not go back, because he had to feed his birds and rabbits.

Iran's secular shift: new survey reveals huge changes in religious beliefs theconversation.com

Our results reveal dramatic changes in Iranian religiosity, with an increase in secularisation and a diversity of faiths and beliefs. Compared with Iran’s 99.5% census figure, we found that only 40% identified as Muslim.

Israele, il Sudafrica, l’Algeria e noi rivistailmulino.it

Tornando ai giorni nostri, è evidente che una fetta, piccola ma non trascurabile, della sinistra occidentale legge la realtà israeliana secondo il paradigma algerino. L’oppressione palestinese si risolve perseguitando la popolazione israeliana al punto da convincerla a fare le valige: è la decolonizzazione, bellezza. Quello che sfugge è che c’è una differenza, fondamentale, tra Israele e l’Algérie française: a differenza dei pieds-noirs, gli israeliani non hanno una “Francia” a cui tornare. Si ha un bel dire “rimandiamoli da dove vengono”, ignorando che molti israeliani discendono da luoghi – il Marocco, lo Yemen, la Polonia – dove sarebbe impensabile ritornare. Più seriamente, poi, la popolazione israeliana è radicata lì, ormai esiste una realtà normalizzata, una nazione, un’identità israeliana, che magari a qualcuno può non piacere ma è un dato di fatto.

Israelis now face the consequences of a long occupation newlinesmag.com

I turned to Katia and asked what would become of this place of radical contrasts and deep uncertainty. In Tel Aviv, gay married couples lived happily in a sunny Mediterranean city full of fashionable people, artists, intellectuals and rich tech bros who divided their time among Silicon Valley, Europe’s capital cities and multimillion-dollar apartments in the neighborhood where, 20 years earlier, I had paid monthly rent of just $500 for an unrenovated but spacious, light-filled, Bauhaus-style apartment. Now, the construction of luxury apartment complexes could barely keep up with demand. [...] And yet, the West Bank and Gaza are less than one hour’s drive, in opposite directions, from the salubrious delights of Tel Aviv’s cafes, art galleries, clubs and beaches.

The burden of the humanities newcriterion.com

Why should we study the past? If the state of our present discourse is any indication, the point of doing so is simply to provide us with ever better weapons to use in our present battles. [...] The distinctive task of the humanities, unlike the natural sciences and social sciences, is to grasp human things in human terms, without converting or reducing or translating them into something else—as into physical laws, mechanical systems, biological drives, psychological disorders, social structures, and so on. The humanities attempt to understand the human condition from the inside, as it were, treating the human person as subject as well as object, the agent as well as the acted upon.

I can eat glass, it does not hurt me en.wikipedia.org

I Can Eat Glass was a linguistic project. [...] The objective was to provide speakers with translations of the phrase "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me" from a wide variety of languages. [...] Visitors to a foreign country have "an irresistible urge" to say something in that language, and whatever they say (a cited example being along the lines of "Where is the bathroom?") usually marks them as tourists immediately. Saying "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me", however, ensures that the speaker "will be viewed as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect".

Reading Well map.simonsarris.com

I also tend to stress fiction because I think, especially among my professional peers in the industry of software, that there is too great a fondness for non-fiction. I think this arises from a belief that superior knowledge of the world comes from non-fiction. This thought is attractive to people who build systems, but over-systematizing and seeing systems in everything can be a failure mode. Careful descriptions and summaries miss too much of the world. Hard distinctions make bad philosophy. Reading fiction helps you become an unsystematic thinker, something that is equally valuable but more elided by some engineers. It is easy to maintain an intellectual rigidity. It takes more care to maintain a loose poeticism of thought.

Anti-Racist Reading Lists: What Are They For? vulture.com

For such a list to do good, something keener than “anti-racism” must be sought. The word and its nominal equivalent, “anti-racist,” suggests something of a vanity project, where the goal is no longer to learn more about race, power, and capital, but to spring closer to the enlightened order of the antiracist. [...] It is unfair to beg other literature and other authors, many of them dead, to do this sort of work for someone. If you want to read a novel, read a damn novel, like it’s a novel.

Reading Ourselves to Death thenewatlantis.com

If an alien landed on Earth today, it might assume that reading and writing are our species’ main function, second only to sleeping and well ahead of eating and reproducing.

Has Self-Awareness Gone Too Far in Fiction? newyorker.com

Rooney, like her characters, seems content to perform awareness of inequality, even to exploit it as a device, but not to engage with it as a profound and messy reality.

Whataboutism en.wikipedia.org

Whataboutism denotes in a pejorative sense a procedure in which a critical question or argument is not answered or discussed, but retorted with a critical counter-question which expresses a counter-accusation.

Toward a Leisure Ethic hedgehogreview.com

How people spend their time is a fundamental mark of civilization, but it is a category that tends to be lost beneath a society’s scientific, technological, military, and material attainments. Rarely do we notice that, temporally speaking, the scope of human freedom is as circumscribed as it ever was—and in some respects, much more so. In the rich societies of the twenty-first century, most people spend their prime years locked in meaningless, unessential, work punctuated by meaningless entertainment. [...] How one fills one’s discretionary time is heavily determined by the mentally and physically depleting effects of work, and by the imminent return to work after some invariably short period of respite. Leisure today exists for work, which means that it is not actually leisure at all. The more appropriate term is recreation, a mere means of recovery—re-creating the body—for the sake of doing more work.

How to text, tip, ghost, host, and generally exist in polite society today thecut.com

Never ask anyone what their job is. It’s classist and boring. Try three other topics first.

A life of splendid uselessness is a life well lived psyche.co

‘Throughout the whole history of science,’ wrote Abraham Flexner in 1939, ‘most of the really great discoveries which had ultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind had been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity.’

The Case Against Travel newyorker.com

One is forced to conclude that maybe it isn’t so easy to do nothing—and this suggests a solution to the puzzle. Imagine how your life would look if you discovered that you would never again travel. If you aren’t planning a major life change, the prospect looms, terrifyingly, as “More and more of this, and then I die.” Travel splits this expanse of time into the chunk that happens before the trip, and the chunk that happens after it, obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation. And it does so in the cleverest possible way: by giving you a foretaste of it. You don’t like to think about the fact that someday you will do nothing and be nobody. You will only allow yourself to preview this experience when you can disguise it in a narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it. Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For everyone else, there’s travel.

La storia di Berlusconi con i se wittgenstein.it

Un altro modo di metterla è: tolti i disastri, il berlusconismo ha lasciato eredità solide e durature da rinfacciargli? O la sua leggerezza inconsistente di articolazione progettuale e politica ha limitato al suo periodo di potere i disastri, e poi fine? In questo senso, se chiedeste a me, gli italiani sono stati peggiorati molto di più dalle predicazioni e propagande leghiste, fasciste, grilline: sono queste, molto di più della vacuità ottimista berlusconiana, ad aver creato un popolo di risentiti rancorosi desiderosi di capri espiatori e di legittimazioni ai propri vittimismi.

Hating Everyone Everywhere All At Once At Stanford popehat.substack.com

When it comes to rights, deserve’s got nothing to do with it. [...] Rights protect awful totalitarian people all the time. There are many philosophical reasons for this; one is the recognition that we can’t be trusted to decide who should or shouldn’t get rights, and that arrogating such power to ourselves will inevitably favor the powerful and popular over the powerless and unpopular.

All the nerds are dead samkriss.substack.com

The hipster was an information-sorting algorithm: its job was to always have good taste. The hipster listened to bands you’d never heard of. The hipster drank beers brewed by Paraguayan Jesuits in the 1750s. The hipster thought Tarkovsky was for posers, and the only truly great late-Soviet filmmaker was Ali Khamraev. The hipster bought all his toilet paper from a small-batch paper factory in Abkhazia that included small fragments of tree bark in the pulp. The hipster swam deep into the vastness of human data, and always surfaced with pearls. Through its powers of snobbery and disdain, the hipster could effortlessly filter out what was good. [...] The nerd doesn’t like bad things because of their actual qualities; the nerd likes bad things simply because they’re there. What counts is collecting, itemising, consuming.

wisdom.md github.com

These are ideas that I have believed to be true for myself at the time of composition. They are not immutable truths about The Universe, and I am open to changing my mind about any of them at any time.