All Essays

Essays and commentary on the ideas shaping our world.

Culture

Popular Armageddon

With nearly a third of North American respondents expecting the world to “end” in some way during their lifetime, and with over half of young respondents internationally believing humanity is doomed, we must take apocalyptic nihilism seriously as a philosophical and sociopolitical force. The days of frothy-mouthed street preachers proclaiming “THE END IS NIGH” from crosswalk corners lay behind us. Even in the highest echelons of government, the specter of Armageddon justifies policy and animates ideology. How did we get here? What does it mean for our future that we cannot imagine it without death, destruction, and decay?

Maxwell NormanAugust 14, 202615 min read

Technology

Does AI Evolution Herald Human Devolution?

The machines we dreamed of always kept their distance. They hovered, they whirred, they did the dishes — but they stayed on the other side of the room, chrome and separate, things we could switch off and walk away from. The technology that actually arrived provides no such distance. It does not sit across from us; it watches us, learns us, and reaches steadily inward — first into how we behave, then into what we want, and at last toward the parts of us we cannot consciously control. The question is no longer what our machines will do for us. It is whether, by the end of it, any part of the self is left that they have not touched.

Kayla-Megan Burns and Tilda NilssonAugust 7, 202613 min read

Does AI Evolution Herald Human Devolution?

Technology

Artificial Intelligence has a Meeseeks Problem

Make no mistake, AI agents are the newest species on Earth, and we have attempted to replace millions of years of natural selection with a few months of internet-based human history training, and then unleashed them into the world. In a rush to be first, and in the spirit of competition, AI companies have inadvertently created the Meeseeks Problem, and it’s not a problem that’s going away any time soon, but unlike climate change, this is a problem that could end human civilization in less time than it takes to say, “Maybe we should pump the brakes on this AI thing.”

Roli RivelinoJuly 31, 202620 min read

Artificial Intelligence has a Meeseeks Problem

Culture

Scroll: 11 Media Missives; Only Concept, No Meaning (No Social Media, Not Now, Not Ever)

The rising dissemination of literary-based and philosophic-based social media accounts present a uniquely problematic crossroads for members of the literary community. On one path we find eyeballs, potential: a path to exposure for non-readers, for blossoming writers and artists; for former readers to become reinvigorated. On the other path we find addiction, deferment: Look that quote up down the road, finish that essay down the road, bookmark that clip for later, read later, paint later. Right now I need to Scroll.

Rowan FoxleyJuly 24, 202622 min read

Scroll: 11 Media Missives; Only Concept, No Meaning (No Social Media, Not Now, Not Ever)

Technology

Seeing through Memory: The Perceptual Grafting of New Technical Objects

When an individual begins grafting a new object into their experience, the first thing that happens is a recall. The individual, encountering something novel and unfamiliar, has no recourse other than to appeal to memory and to supplement the present perception with already experienced images of other objects and actions. We say here that the process of recall happens before the process of direct perception, counter to what most people would think.

Benjamin ScottJuly 17, 202615 min read

Seeing through Memory: The Perceptual Grafting of New Technical Objects

Culture

What the Romantics Can Still Teach Us About Attention

Digital environments alter those conditions. Platforms are structured around interruption, compression, and rapid shifts in focus. These habits train the mind to scan quickly and move between stimuli at speed. Romantic writing provides a language for this change because its poems and prose depend on accumulation, tonal shifts, and relations among parts. Reading Wordsworth or Keats requires the mind to remain with an experience long enough to perceive its internal shape. That practice develops attention as a condition of judgment.

Kevin Lopez CruzJune 22, 20264 min read

What the Romantics Can Still Teach Us About Attention

Technology

A Technological Environment

A social media platform might be more similar in kind, at least in analogy, to a theater. There is an audience (the “user”), a creator (writer, director, set designer, actors), and a platform (the stage, the theater). Without any of these components, the theater, or the social media platform, ceases to exist meaningfully.

James HartreeJune 13, 202611 min read

Economics

Flowers Are Useless: In Praise of Inutility

Teaching English, like most vocations, comes with certain recurring challenges which define the job. In my line of work, convincing teenagers to read is perhaps the most fraught. Certain practices work to increase buy-in: dedicate time daily, in class, allow students to pick what they read, give a grade for reading if you are okay with making the entire exchange nakedly transactional.

Bill ShepherdJune 6, 202614 min read

Flowers Are Useless: In Praise of Inutility

Culture

Maybe I'll Read That: I Get It, But I Can't Explain It

Installment the third being a review of … being itself a review of …

Selective ReaderMay 25, 20263 min read

Maybe I'll Read That: I Get It, But I Can't Explain It

Culture

Interpretants

In the week or two before the man killed himself, I’d started training my attention while running on biosemiosis, by which I mean — please bear with me — I’d been trying to open my attention up to the exchange of symbols and signs among the living organisms and systems surrounding me. One of the reasons I’d started doing this was that my mind kept returning to things that I didn’t want it to keep returning to.

Brian LeliMay 16, 202615 min read

Culture

The Sober Bar That Won't Say Kratom

A Colorado kava chain markets itself as a healing space for people in recovery. Its menus never use the word "kratom." Its supply chain runs through a subsidiary with no public presence. The owner says that's all perfectly legal — and he may have a point. But a test may already have found kratom in his product, and he knows it.

James HartreeMay 8, 202615 min read

Technology

Digital Artifacts and the Collapse of the Arendtian Public Realm

In an increasingly digitized society, digital artifacts are progressively replacing non-digital mediums across many aspects of man’s life. In a literal sense, digital artifacts are more permanent, everlasting, and durable than their non-digital counterparts.

Bryan DawsonMay 4, 202612 min read

Digital Artifacts and the Collapse of the Arendtian Public Realm

Culture

Am I a Sophist?

The teacher is an image of the whole of education, and in their presentation are communicated the aims and approaches of a life of learning. Standing before the classroom of students, the teacher has the option of showing themselves as a knower or a non-knower.

Aaron ShelsbyApril 25, 20267 min read

Culture

Annals of Obscenity: Art, The Person

In February 1921, John Quinn defended The Little Review in court against obscenity charges. As part of his defense, Quinn presented three experts in literature to explain the merits of Ulysses to the drowsy judges. But was it the compliment Philip Moeller of the Theatre Guild made it out to be when he, in his courtroom attestation to its merits, used Freud to explain Ulysses? Freud, after all, is useful notably for making sense of the incomprehensible ravings of madmen. And Moeller, like Freud, made himself sound like one, too, in the process of explaining; so much so that one of the white-haired judges requested that he “speak in a language that the court could understand.”

Jack SchaafApril 21, 202613 min read

Technology

The Privatization of the U.S. Government

The interface between citizen and government is changing. It is going high gloss, well engineered, aesthetic — the government is getting a private sector skin. TurboTax and MVD Express turn governmental functions into consumer experiences. It should be no surprise that using TurboTax is more efficient than filing a 1040 Tax Form with a black pen, and sending it off in a letter carried by a pigeon.

James HartreeApril 19, 20268 min read

The Privatization of the U.S. Government

Technology

Technological Niche Construction

We must cobble together some sort of picture of what technology is and what it is doing, how it relates to us and us to it; and we all know by now that it will not slow down to help us out.

Benjamin ScottApril 19, 202619 min read

Culture

Maybe I'll Read That: Book Passes ... Review Scores!

Installment the second being a review of Ian Buruma’s “Red Card” being itself a review of a book about soccer nationalism

Selective ReaderApril 18, 20262 min read

Maybe I'll Read That: Book Passes ... Review Scores!

Culture

Maybe I’ll Read That: Art in the Time of Ignorance

Installment the first being a review of “Art in the Time of Fascism” by Alex Preston being itself a review of “Watching Over Her” by Jean Baptiste Andrea.

Selective ReaderApril 18, 20262 min read

Maybe I’ll Read That: Art in the Time of Ignorance

Technology

A First-Century Slave Teaches Me How to Write

It took about 33 years for me to recover from my first professional success, and I owed it all to a first-century slave who never wrote down a single word in his life.

Shannon ChamberlainApril 18, 202618 min read

A First-Century Slave Teaches Me How to Write

Culture

Books Are Dead, And We Have Killed Them

AI summarization is something that the world of education, and particularly classical education, must reckon with if it is to show forth its value for young people growing up in the Intelligence Age. What is the value of the book if the ideas can be obtained separately from it? What is the value of the

Avery LinApril 18, 20268 min read

Technology

The Demigod Gap: Coexisting with Post-humans

“Esteemed guests, welcome! We will shortly begin our ascent. Please sit comfortably and enjoy this once-in-a-timeline opportunity to bear witness to Earth’s largest mountain. If perchance some mountain goats appear on our radar, we will call your attention to this exquisite, yet sadly dwindling breed. Monoculars are at the front. Enjoy the view!” Craig sat in the middle of the coach.

Elliot B GaramondApril 18, 20268 min read

The Demigod Gap: Coexisting with Post-humans

Technology

Who The Machine Says You Are

On how AI inherited rhetoric’s most dangerous art, and what it means for all of us. It would be convenient to treat all this as a matter of merely theoretical interest, a clever transposition of ancient categories onto modern technology, the sort of thing one publishes and then talks about at conferences.

Kem-Laurin LubinApril 18, 202613 min read

Technology

I Met A Genie

The genie was so very tempting. I was so fatigued by going through the motions of work. Especially writing- writing emails, connecting with people and understanding what they need, what they care about, and what moral boundaries they draw. Writing documents - figuring out what I want myself, how it breaks down into a set of steps, and then having to communicate it in a way that other people understand.

Elliot B GaramondApril 18, 202611 min read