Culture
Arts, society, and contemporary cultural analysis
๐ 38 publications
๐ 131 articles
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- The Most Influential Guitarist You've Never Heard Of: Trini Lopez
- A Duel or a Duet: On Graham Greene
- Zadie Smith, Michael Rosen, Irvine Welsh and Jeanette Winterson sign letter calling for Israel boycott
I had to look up arcane (it means mysterious or secret). This typographic retrospective feels like a significant piece i...
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Welcome back to The Spark, our monthly newsletter thatโs all about how people just like you are creating positive change...
- The Spark: Bringing Biodiversity to Your Own Backyard
- How Fresh Fish From Monterey Bay Reaches School Lunch Trays
- Can Citizen Scientists Avert Australia's Biodiversity Crisis?
The central critical question about Rear Window is: what makes it so compelling? For the first part of the film, nothing...
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This essay originally appeared in The Tearoom by .I've never liked doctors. As a writer, I am both overly sensitive to m...
- Tertius Lydgate and the Birth of the Modern Doctor
- Vintage Lovers
- No, Cartman, Wokeness Isnโt Dead
Alekseyevich Bunin was renowned for his romantic poems and sensual prose. He was also a peerless insult artist...
- Alekseyevich Bunin was renowned for his romantic poems and sensual prose. He was also a peerless insult artist
- F. Scott Fitzgerald:ย the most foolish of American writers. He was foolish in his successes, and no less foolish in his many failures
- In 1829, Thomas Carlyle declared the "age of machinery." Nearly 200 years later, we don't simply use machines; we inhabit them
A friend who travels regularly on Amtrak trains, told me about the Quiet Car. The rules are simple:"Guests are asked to ...
- Why Are Quiet Spaces Disappearing?
- Why Do Children Hate Music Lessons?
- What Is Happening to Music Criticism?
NewsNation's Chris Cuomo wants you to know he's a serious journalist. He's a former CNN anchor, which makes it extra spe...
- Chris Cuomo Fell for an AI Video Labeled "100% Fake" and It Gets Worse From There
- Oh No, What is Jim Acosta Doing?
- There's Now a Report Card for Media Capitulation, and It's Full of Chickens
Hello all, Well, here's to another relentless week of (mostly bad) AI news. Between the AI bubble discourseโmy contribut...
- AI disagreements
- Automating the mass shooting victim
- On AGI, mass automation, and what the Luddites really fought against
There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladne...
- Kiss: Ellen Bass's Stunning Ode to the Courage of Tenderness as an Antidote to Helplessness
- How to Be a Happier Creature
- The Paradox of Knowing Who You Are and What You Want: Cristina Campo on Fairy Tales, Time, and the Meaning of Maturity
The rules for the contest are here, but the summary is that entries to the Samuel Richardson Prize should be longer than...
- Samuel Richardson Prize deadline is July 31 + open thread
- One fiction journal has left me stumped. I can't get a handle on it.
- The good guy always wins. Because he's so good. That's why he wins.
Majorie Kinnan Rawlings at her Florida home. (Photo: Getty)Every now and then I'll come across a letter that feels start...
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Greetings from Read Max! In todays's newsletter, two items:An exploration of "Elara Voss," a mysterious figure haunting ...
- Who is Elara Voss?
- A terrific, paranoid Irish serial-killer noir set in Northern Ireland, a wild Hong Kong action-comedy classic, and some excellent Balearic jazz
- The "cracked coder" fetish
Hello everyone! Thanks for your patience with my quiet here while I was away trying to get some focused time working on ...
- Writing Without a Routine
- On AI and the Writerโs Mind
- How to Edit Yourself, Weave Timelines, and Keep Going When You're Lost in the Middle
William Golding's Lord of the Flies is one of the best-selling novels of the 20th century. It depicts the rapid descent ...
- Is Man Inherently Evil?
- The Best Books Youโve Never Read
- Why โThe Godfatherโ Is a Greek Tragedy
For every person mareveling at the ease of creation, there is another grieveing what feels like the death of the process...
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Thank you for being a regular reader of An Africanist Perspective. If you haven't done so yet, please hit subscribe to r...
- How Ethiopia avoided colonization in the late 19th century but then lagged behind in the 20th century
- A Historical Political Economy of Kenya
Things lately have been, you know, pretty bad. That feels like an understatement but I don't know what else to say. I've...
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The single biggest question facing higher education in the AI era, when students everywhere are logging on to pro AI mod...
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Last month, on the Daily Beast podcast, journalists Joanna Coles and Michael Wolff took turns reeling off a list of famo...
- Why Was The Dalai Lama At Jeffrey Epstein's House?
- Unsolicited Advice for Surviving a Journalism Industry In Terminal Decline
]]><![CDATA[For at least a year, the mail room in Penguinโs New York headquarters utilized a bomb-sniffing dogโnamed, fo...
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"Do you have anything you would recommend on...?" It is a question I get asked regularly by readers and those interested...
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Illustration by Alexander NaughtonIf you seek advice from people at the very top of competitive domains, you'll probably...
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Gala "Flowers and Butterflies", Salle des Ambassadeurs du Casino, Cannes, Jacques Henri Lartigue, 1935Above my writing d...
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This week marks the one-year anniversary of Gisnep, the daily puzzle I made initially just because I liked the name. So ...
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"To think of a satirist as a person who angrily turns against a gale-force wind and sprays liquefied shit at a group of ...
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"Study Mode," a new educational feature released yesterday by OpenAI to much fanfare, was inevitable. The roadblocks wer...
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The first time I went out to Silicon Valley, or California for that matter, or anywhere at all west of New York state, w...
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Politics
Governance, policy analysis, and democratic discourse
๐ 17 publications
๐ 70 articles
Google is following OpenAI, Anthropic and Amazon, and Microsoft to promote AI in education. Yesterday's conversation bet...
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Phillips's Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a f...
- Zelensky As A War Leader
- Phil and Minna on the USA and Europe
- Weekend Update #143: A Week Which Demonstrates Why Ukraine Is So Important
fucking gorgeous coverTwo months from today, my first novel will be published by Coffee House Press. I'm very excited an...
- Why I Need Your Help with My Novel
- Preseason Sunday: I'm Afraid That Justin Fields is Not a Very Good Quarterback
- The Rage of the AI Guy
With the recent firing of Colbert and the coming end of The Late Show, the right has gone with the story that late night...
- The Colbert Cancellation and Why Comedy Must Now Be Political
- What Really Happened in the 2016 Election
- High-Skill Immigration as the Ultimate Progress Issue
On Monday, Hilary Allen explained how Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists turned “innovation” into a smokescr...
- Weekly Roundup: Aug. 1
- How the Trump Administration is Constructing Jewishness
- The Economics of Sanctions: Why the U.S. Targeted Francesca Albanese
๏ The latest on Trump's approval ratingUpdated August 7, 2025Donald Trump's approval rating has been holding relatively ...
- How popular is Donald Trump?
- Who has the brightest future in the NBA?
- Is Epstein the new Russiagate?
Next week, maybe, there might be a meeting between President Putin and President Trump. Once again, many people are spec...
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"One of the most notable characteristics of any group developing towards domination is its struggle to assimilate and id...
- Silicon Valley's Organic Intellectuals
- Dictatorships & Data Standards, Revisited
- The Quiet Power Behind Policy: How Think Tanks Shape the Possible
[Adapted from this bluesky review thread]The world's population is still growing. Today there are over 8 billion people ...
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For most of us, our identity โ and our loyalty โ is clear. We belong to our families, our local communities, and our cou...
- We need to take on clan culture, before it destroys our way of life
- The state is not just failing us โ it is actively working against us
Matsyanyaaya: Trump2.0 and India - the Avengers editionBig fish eating small fish = Foreign Policy in actionโPranay Kota...
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Economics
Markets, financial systems, and economic thinking
๐ 17 publications
๐ 106 articles
Thank you for your support of Chartbook. Your generosity keeps this show on the road.Vladimir Orlovskyโฃ Storm Cloudsโฃ 18...
- Top Links 817 GM eats Trump's tariffs. Traders rule. Who will buy, Indonesia's "Kangaroo" bond? And, โgoods beyond earthโ.
- Chartbook 399: Columbia University, the Trump administration and "ad hoc governance": Iterations of the "Unstate".
- Chartbook 400: Murder not crisis - Why Israel's starvation of Gaza is exceptional in a global context.
A very busy day yesterday, so a less comprehensive post than usual. Before I get there, a note: two more of my inequalit...
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Can Google sustain itself this way, as it makes a very high stakes bet on transforming itself from gateway to gatekeeper...
- Notes on Google's Attempt at Self-Disruption
- NOTE TO SELF: On Katie Martin's "Magnificent Seven" Today
- The Engineer-Dictator Temptation: Lawrence Dennis, the Great Depression, & the Fascist Road Not Taken
In this episode of *The Intentional Investor*, Matt Zeigler sits down with Rupert Mitchellโglobal capital markets vetera...
- The Intentional Investor #34: Rupert Mitchell
- Grow Your Network: Kevin Alexander Is A Music Discovery Engine Disguised As A Human Being
- The Day The Music Died Vs. The Days The Music Lives: Laurie Kaye and Kevin Alexander on JUST PRESS RECORD
How China was hollowing out Germany's manufacturers before the loss of cheap Russian energy made matters worse....
- The China Shock Hits Germany
- Coffee Break: Grifter as Greek God, Palmer Luckey of Anduril
- Satyajit Das: Book Essay โ Understanding Iran
Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on UnsplashI think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that the MAGA movement is the most ...
- MAGA doesn't build anything
- What can India do to industrialize?
- Xi Jinping is the main thing holding China back
The meteoric rise of the S&P 500 since the Great Financial Crisis has dominated financial headlines and sparked a provoc...
- The Value Premium: Reports of Its Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
- Weak Job Numbers Contain Some Good News
- The Active Management Paradox: Why Skill Improvements Haven't Translated to Better Returns
Many people use GDP to make claims about changes in people's welfare over time. This is entirely reasonable, and would l...
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Welcome to the first book wrap-up of this publication! Every month, I will be sharing my thoughts and reflections about ...
- Books I spent July with
- Media to consume this week instead of doomscrolling - 03.08.25
- A new chapter begins
Hi friends ๏ ,Happy Friday and welcome back to our 155th Weekly Dose of Optimism. This marks one hundred and schfifty-fi...
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A few weeks ago, I started receiving a stream of message about an Instagram post that I was allegedly starring in, where...
- The Imitation Game: Defending against AI's Dark Side!
- Country Risk 2025: The Story behind the Numbers!
In my last Substack I discussed the concept of homoploutia. In brief, for those who do not feel like (re)reading my enti...
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In June, 1,200 scholars and activists from around the world gathered in Norway for a historic convergence of two movemen...
- The Doughnut and the Divide: Can Norway Confront Its Imperial Mode of Living?
- The geopolitics of China in Chileโs lithium strategy and the trouble with critical minerals
Mike Green, Chief Strategist at Simplify, has been kicking around the active-passive debate with me for years now, and I...
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Note: I started this newsletter way back in 2022, after leaving Scroll.in to take up a post as diplomatic spouse and ful...
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Pei-Shen Qian was a talented street painter who found no success โ until he began to forge the works of his idols...
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Philosophy
Big ideas, ethics, and human nature
๐ 16 publications
๐ 99 articles
There are crazy people on both the left and the right. On the left you have people who work in Universities and sometime...
- There Are Crazy People On Both The Left And Right: On The Right, They're The Heads of Government
- Tom Lehrer Dies At 97
- The Federal War On Animal Welfare
Growing up in countercultural California, โenlightenmentโ had real glamour. But decades of practice have changed my mind...
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Francis Fukuyama is on Substack; last month he wrote Liberalism Needs Community. As always, read the whole thing and don...
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This time around I'm going to write to you about a problematic approach that a person might easily think will contribute...
- Letters To A Young Philosopher 5: Getting Caught Up In Abstractions About Philosophy
- How We Shape Our Character: Epictetus on Reason, Reasons, and Prohairesis (part 2)
- Short Videos On Stoicism, The Cardinal Virtues, and the Subordinate Virtues
I wrote a post about what action is while also attempting to convey some general lessons about analyzing concepts; one o...
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Democracy, by Midjourney.These days there is a large volume of writings, podcasts, and what not being put out concerning...
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In May I read and posted on the 2008 book Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. I've since r...
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Subscribe now1.For eons there were only the Ancestors. They wore fedoras, called women "dames", and lived out their live...
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After a busy day at work as a prompt engineer for a marketing agency โ working from your laptop in your own living room ...
- The Urgent Need For Revolutionizing Economic Statistics
- Introducing Noema VI: Paradigm Shifts
- The Gulf World That Air Conditioning Wrought
This August at The Portal we host philosopher Dylan Shaul for a series of reflections under the theme of "Metaphysics Re...
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PAN IV, 2023, by Ross SimoniniLast year, I developed the unexpected habit of blessing my phone. I now do this ritual any...
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Lots of people think that a few people controlling a very large share of a society's economic power is a bad thing. It i...
- Inheritance Tax Is Largely Irrelevant to the Problem of Economic Inequality
- Unconventional Ways To Contribute To Climate Care: World Peace, Ozempic, Economic Growth
Author: Nathan Nobis Categories: Epistemology, Logic and Reasoning, Ethics, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, Philosophy...
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[This article has a 3/10 Woo Rating].If the purpose of our existence is the evolution of our consciousness, then maps of...
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Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)"Why is there only one possible exit from modern philosophy? Because modern philosophy lives an...
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Psychology
Mind, behavior, and human cognition
๐ 5 publications
๐ 29 articles
When an investment tanked and buried us in debt, we had to face the truth of how weโd gotten there- by Carol BerkowerRea...
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In most wealthy nations, women have steadily closed the gap with men in education, income, and professional achievement....
- Sex Differences Don't Go Away Just Because You Want Them To
- Marriage Markets, Rage Bait, Life-lies
- The Coldplay Kiss Cam and the Crushing Weight of Reputational Loss Aversion
A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to Ross Douthat interview Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative Christian writer and...
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I've been working recently on a project with Henry Farrell about possible futures and reactions to the USA's weaponisati...
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photo cred: my dadLook, I don't know if AI is gonna kill us or make us all rich or whatever, but I do know we've got the...
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Science
Research breakthroughs and scientific understanding
๐ 11 publications
๐ 25 articles
Four thousand years ago, a woman had a very fancy arti๏ฌcial eye that she probably wore while she was alive. It was possi...
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Every time data travels — from smartphones to the cloud, or across the vacuum of space — it relies on a sile...
- How Can Math Protect Our Data?
- What can a cell remember? More than we once thought, a revelation that's altering the meaning of memory
- New Method Is the Fastest Way To Find the Best Routes
As of 2023, the US has around 142.3 million housing units: roughly one home for every 2.4 people in the country. The vas...
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In the next section of Chapter 3, Communities of Practice, Steward Brand writes about history's great stewards of mainte...
- Least Village Has Its Blacksmith
- We're hiring a daily newsletter writer
- How Henry VIII accidentally started the Industrial Revolution, with Anton Howes
<p>So I went down to the beach. "Kinda nice", I thought. The sky had a particularly vibrant blue color, the waves had &a...
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Humanity's ability to produce enough food for 8 billion people is impressive.1 In fact, we could produce enough calories...
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Technology
Innovation, digital culture, and the future of computing
๐ 16 publications
๐ 40 articles
Today's links Mattie Lubchansky's 'Simplicity': A tale of walled cities, omnisexual communes, and Cthulhoid horrors. Hey...
- Pluralistic: Mattie Lubchansky's 'Simplicity' (01 Aug 2025)
- Pluralistic: Which jobs can be replaced with AI? (06 Aug 2025)
- Pluralistic: You can't fight enshittification (31 Jul 2025)
Welcome to a ๏ subscriber-only deep-dive edition ๏ of my weekly newsletter. Each week, I help investors, professionals a...
- A Primer on Transformer Architecture: Model Parameter Calculations, Estimating GPT-5 Architecture
- The Decline of MATLAB: What Engineers Should Learn Instead
- Why the Future of RF Amplification in Satellites is Solid-State Devices on GaN
Derivative AI art is, by, definition. AI slop.I have been writing here about AI-induced enshittification (extending a te...
- Slopocalypse Now
- What to Expect When Youโre Expecting โฆ GPT-5
- AI Agents have, so far, mostly been a dud
["One Third of a Nation," by O. Louis Gugliemi, from the Met Collection]A few months back, I argued that political scien...
- The old Democratic party doesn't fit new media
- The AI democracy debate is weirdly narrow
- The Rich Are Not Like You and Me
In this issue: we reflect on the conclusion of our first protocol fiction serial The Librarians, and we are live for a G...
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Today provides one of the most beautiful, delicate feelings that I know and wait for, and first I have to provide some b...
- It all matters and none of it matters
- Filtered for bottom-up global monitoring
- Copyright your faults
Made with a mysterious new AI modelGPT-5, OpenAI's new flagship model, is coming out anytime now. Before it does, I want...
- GPT-5: OpenAIโs Flagship Model Faces Great Expectations
- A โShocking Numberโ of Top AI Researchers Don't Use AI
- GPT-5 Is Here: There's Only One Feature Worth Writing About
"The Reading Lesson," by Leon Basile Perrault (1866)What is literacy lag?Children today grow up under a tyrannical asymm...
- Literacy lag: We start reading too late
- GPT-5's debut is slop; Will AI cause the next depression? Harvard prof warns of alien invasion; Alpha School & homeschool heroes
Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on lattes, ramen, and feedback from readers. If you...
- Import AI 423: Multilingual CLIP; anti-drone tracking; and Huawei kernel design
- Import AI 422: LLM bias; China cares about the same safety risks as us; AI persuasion
On chatbot sycophancy, passivity, and the case for more intellectually challenging companions...
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Note: Logpodge posts are a break from my usual long-form writing and book reviews, presenting short, topical essays. If ...
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