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I had to look up arcane (it means mysterious or secret). This typographic retrospective feels like a significant piece i...

Welcome back to The Spark, our monthly newsletter that’s all about how people just like you are creating positive change...

The central critical question about Rear Window is: what makes it so compelling? For the first part of the film, nothing...

This essay originally appeared in The Tearoom by .I've never liked doctors. As a writer, I am both overly sensitive to m...

Alekseyevich Bunin was renowned for his romantic poems and sensual prose. He was also a peerless insult artist...

A friend who travels regularly on Amtrak trains, told me about the Quiet Car. The rules are simple:"Guests are asked to ...

NewsNation's Chris Cuomo wants you to know he's a serious journalist. He's a former CNN anchor, which makes it extra spe...

Hello all, Well, here's to another relentless week of (mostly bad) AI news. Between the AI bubble discourse—my contribut...

There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladne...

The rules for the contest are here, but the summary is that entries to the Samuel Richardson Prize should be longer than...

Majorie Kinnan Rawlings at her Florida home. (Photo: Getty)Every now and then I'll come across a letter that feels start...

Greetings from Read Max! In todays's newsletter, two items:An exploration of "Elara Voss," a mysterious figure haunting ...

Hello everyone! Thanks for your patience with my quiet here while I was away trying to get some focused time working on ...

William Golding's Lord of the Flies is one of the best-selling novels of the 20th century. It depicts the rapid descent ...

For every person mareveling at the ease of creation, there is another grieveing what feels like the death of the process...

Thank you for being a regular reader of An Africanist Perspective. If you haven't done so yet, please hit subscribe to r...

Things lately have been, you know, pretty bad. That feels like an understatement but I don't know what else to say. I've...

The single biggest question facing higher education in the AI era, when students everywhere are logging on to pro AI mod...

Last month, on the Daily Beast podcast, journalists Joanna Coles and Michael Wolff took turns reeling off a list of famo...

]]><![CDATA[For at least a year, the mail room in Penguin’s New York headquarters utilized a bomb-sniffing dog—named, fo...

"Do you have anything you would recommend on...?" It is a question I get asked regularly by readers and those interested...

Illustration by Alexander NaughtonIf you seek advice from people at the very top of competitive domains, you'll probably...

Gala "Flowers and Butterflies", Salle des Ambassadeurs du Casino, Cannes, Jacques Henri Lartigue, 1935Above my writing d...

This week marks the one-year anniversary of Gisnep, the daily puzzle I made initially just because I liked the name. So ...

"To think of a satirist as a person who angrily turns against a gale-force wind and sprays liquefied shit at a group of ...

"Study Mode," a new educational feature released yesterday by OpenAI to much fanfare, was inevitable. The roadblocks wer...

The first time I went out to Silicon Valley, or California for that matter, or anywhere at all west of New York state, w...

Google is following OpenAI, Anthropic and Amazon, and Microsoft to promote AI in education. Yesterday's conversation bet...

Phillips's Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a f...

fucking gorgeous coverTwo months from today, my first novel will be published by Coffee House Press. I'm very excited an...

With the recent firing of Colbert and the coming end of The Late Show, the right has gone with the story that late night...

On Monday, Hilary Allen explained how Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists turned &ldquo;innovation&rdquo; into a smokescr...

 The latest on Trump's approval ratingUpdated August 7, 2025Donald Trump's approval rating has been holding relatively ...

Next week, maybe, there might be a meeting between President Putin and President Trump. Once again, many people are spec...

"One of the most notable characteristics of any group developing towards domination is its struggle to assimilate and id...

[Adapted from this bluesky review thread]The world's population is still growing. Today there are over 8 billion people ...

For most of us, our identity – and our loyalty – is clear. We belong to our families, our local communities, and our cou...

Matsyanyaaya: Trump2.0 and India - the Avengers editionBig fish eating small fish = Foreign Policy in action—Pranay Kota...

Thank you for your support of Chartbook. Your generosity keeps this show on the road.Vladimir Orlovsky⁣ Storm Clouds⁣ 18...

A very busy day yesterday, so a less comprehensive post than usual. Before I get there, a note: two more of my inequalit...

Can Google sustain itself this way, as it makes a very high stakes bet on transforming itself from gateway to gatekeeper...

In this episode of *The Intentional Investor*, Matt Zeigler sits down with Rupert Mitchell—global capital markets vetera...

How China was hollowing out Germany's manufacturers before the loss of cheap Russian energy made matters worse....

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on UnsplashI think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that the MAGA movement is the most ...

The meteoric rise of the S&P 500 since the Great Financial Crisis has dominated financial headlines and sparked a provoc...

Many people use GDP to make claims about changes in people's welfare over time. This is entirely reasonable, and would l...

Welcome to the first book wrap-up of this publication! Every month, I will be sharing my thoughts and reflections about ...

Hi friends  ,Happy Friday and welcome back to our 155th Weekly Dose of Optimism. This marks one hundred and schfifty-fi...

A few weeks ago, I started receiving a stream of message about an Instagram post that I was allegedly starring in, where...

In my last Substack I discussed the concept of homoploutia. In brief, for those who do not feel like (re)reading my enti...

In June, 1,200 scholars and activists from around the world gathered in Norway for a historic convergence of two movemen...

Mike Green, Chief Strategist at Simplify, has been kicking around the active-passive debate with me for years now, and I...

Note: I started this newsletter way back in 2022, after leaving Scroll.in to take up a post as diplomatic spouse and ful...

Pei-Shen Qian was a talented street painter who found no success – until he began to forge the works of his idols...

There are crazy people on both the left and the right. On the left you have people who work in Universities and sometime...

Growing up in countercultural California, ‘enlightenment’ had real glamour. But decades of practice have changed my mind...

Francis Fukuyama is on Substack; last month he wrote Liberalism Needs Community. As always, read the whole thing and don...

This time around I'm going to write to you about a problematic approach that a person might easily think will contribute...

I wrote a post about what action is while also attempting to convey some general lessons about analyzing concepts; one o...

Democracy, by Midjourney.These days there is a large volume of writings, podcasts, and what not being put out concerning...

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...

Subscribe now1.For eons there were only the Ancestors. They wore fedoras, called women "dames", and lived out their live...

After a busy day at work as a prompt engineer for a marketing agency — working from your laptop in your own living room ...

This August at The Portal we host philosopher Dylan Shaul for a series of reflections under the theme of "Metaphysics Re...

PAN IV, 2023, by Ross SimoniniLast year, I developed the unexpected habit of blessing my phone. I now do this ritual any...

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...

Author: Nathan Nobis Categories: Epistemology, Logic and Reasoning, Ethics, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, Philosophy...

[This article has a 3/10 Woo Rating].If the purpose of our existence is the evolution of our consciousness, then maps of...

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)"Why is there only one possible exit from modern philosophy? Because modern philosophy lives an...

When an investment tanked and buried us in debt, we had to face the truth of how we’d gotten there- by Carol BerkowerRea...

In most wealthy nations, women have steadily closed the gap with men in education, income, and professional achievement....

A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to Ross Douthat interview Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative Christian writer and...

I've been working recently on a project with Henry Farrell about possible futures and reactions to the USA's weaponisati...

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...

Four thousand years ago, a woman had a very fancy artificial eye that she probably wore while she was alive. It was possi...

Every time data travels &mdash; from smartphones to the cloud, or across the vacuum of space &mdash; it relies on a sile...

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...

In the next section of Chapter 3, Communities of Practice, Steward Brand writes about history's great stewards of mainte...

<p>So I went down to the beach. "Kinda nice", I thought. The sky had a particularly vibrant blue color, the waves had &a...

Humanity's ability to produce enough food for 8 billion people is impressive.1 In fact, we could produce enough calories...

Today's links Mattie Lubchansky's 'Simplicity': A tale of walled cities, omnisexual communes, and Cthulhoid horrors. Hey...

Welcome to a  subscriber-only deep-dive edition  of my weekly newsletter. Each week, I help investors, professionals a...

Derivative AI art is, by, definition. AI slop.I have been writing here about AI-induced enshittification (extending a te...

["One Third of a Nation," by O. Louis Gugliemi, from the Met Collection]A few months back, I argued that political scien...

In this issue: we reflect on the conclusion of our first protocol fiction serial The Librarians, and we are live for a G...

Today provides one of the most beautiful, delicate feelings that I know and wait for, and first I have to provide some b...

Made with a mysterious new AI modelGPT-5, OpenAI's new flagship model, is coming out anytime now. Before it does, I want...

"The Reading Lesson," by Leon Basile Perrault (1866)What is literacy lag?Children today grow up under a tyrannical asymm...

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on lattes, ramen, and feedback from readers. If you...

On chatbot sycophancy, passivity, and the case for more intellectually challenging companions...

Note: Logpodge posts are a break from my usual long-form writing and book reviews, presenting short, topical essays. If ...