Really wonderful essay.

one thing us men need to be more willing to sit with is just how common this kind of behavior is among not only the people we code as bastards to begin with but also folks we would otherwise regard as good guys

New post worrying about AI and how it shapes our conceptions of meaning.

Pouring a moderate amount of malt liquor on the kerb for one of the all-time great Basically Pleasant Bureaucrats.

Active shooter on my campus right now in the next building over. I don’t think I’m in particular danger, I’m in a very secure place and there are people increasingly reporting the shooter has been ‘subdued’. Fairly surreal and deeply sad experience. How did we get here?

whether war, vaccines, or critical infrastructure there is contingent of the right that seems to believe that their security from the worst things that happen is some kind of metaphysical principle rather than the result of specific historical processes that could've gone otherwise and still could

Wrote down some thoughts about AI and 'the meaning of meaning'.

For the 2026 primary elections, NPR has collected deadlines and information on how to register to vote — online, in person or by mail — in every U.S. state and territory. n.pr/4ayRPUJ

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

This is something the Nazis used to do to Jewish children in the camps. It happened to a man I knew when he was a child in Auschwitz. The camp guards thought it was funny as hell.

I mostly agree with this, but from my vantage point, it doesn't seem that students are now 'totally dependent on AI.' Maybe it's because I'm in music, but my students generally seem surprisingly technologically inept and largely uninterested in AI.

The Heritage Foundation has released a 250-year roadmap to “save America.” The document is a how-to guide for subjugating girls & young women: a detailed plan to push them out of college, funnel them into early marriage and motherhood, and then trap them there. jessica.substack.com/p/theyre-com...

“Let us be clear: we want the power of the state. We wish to hold the criminals of the regime accountable. We wish to seize back the public funds looted by Trump and his cronies. We wish to undo the damage he has done to the government. More than any of that we wish to rebuild.”

I don’t think we should be confident about psychologizing. But! My own view is that it’s not so complicated - uncertainty about who you are, where you stand, what you should do is very scary. If your world is sufficiently small/thin, flipping over the monopoly board is an attractive salve.

You know things are bad when I have to root for Don Lemon.

There are 3,800 kids in ICE custody.

My instinct is to be pessimistic about what kind of difference it will make if people in this administration are pushed out, moved around, whatever. But I think that's wrong. How many people can maintain the constant self-debasement and cartoonish straight-faced performative villainy of a Noem?

“Hundreds of immigrant mothers” in Texas concentration camp uprising

Your HHS tax dollars at work:

Again it is something that people in previous eras have commented on but I still find it just astonishing to witness in my own: fascism is somehow the natural ideology of loser men, just all of our most pathetic and contemptible instincts rendered into a worldview.

if you havent cancelled spotify yet and this isnt the final nail in the coffin for you, i really dont know what else to say other than i hope some introspection finds you soon

:(

Predicting that some universities will soon pledge to provide AI-free instruction, and that this will be an advantage in recruiting and training top students

The RFK, jr effect.

Wrote some things trying to make sense of one of the strangest shows on television.

Dull sublunary lovers love. (whose soul is sense) cannot admit. Absence, for it doth remove. Those things which elemented it.

The first school to market itself as AI free is going to corner the market on people interested in actually learning. And I would not be surprised if rich families and the children of people creating this tech were the first movers.

They are beating people who maybe once had a broken taillight and sending them to foreign slave prisons while freeing the worst fraudsters and every corrupt pol. The juxtaposition is so stark and appalling.

Does anyone out there know of any organizations/non-profits that are building educational resources/materials/infrastructure explicitly to combat the push for AI-based learning?

I think you could be forgiven for naively thinking that eugenics beliefs and being a paedophile are unrelated so be surprised that one chap had both vices. But I do think there is some inner link due to a shared preference for natural hierarchy. "It should be enforced, and when enforced exploited."

Border Patrol officers stand outside their vehicles at a gas station near Bridgeport Tuesday in Chicago. Earlier in the day students from Little Village Lawndale High School held a walk out to protest recent immigration enforcement actions in the area.

The government of Jamaica has set up a portal for contributing to official relief efforts. I will update this thread if anything analogous opens up for Haiti, Cuba, or the DR supportjamaica.gov.jm

Good thread. We all have political blindspots, and many of mine are connected to my being white, male, straight, etc. But I also think my upbringing was atypically disdainful of/perplexed by status-seeking. I'm sure I misunderstand much in contemporary politics because of this.

A Naperville man was hauled away by federal immigration agents Thursday morning as his two sons watched, the older boy begging them not to hurt his father and tearfully asking for a chance to speak to him before they left.

16 days left: hundreds of elections will be decided, and my guide walks you through 180+ that matter—and why. for the weekend crowd: take time to explore what's on the ballot, beyond NYC, Virginia, and Jersey. here: boltsmag.org/whats-on-the...

I wrote some thoughts about the 'shame' discourse from last week.

Define your music taste with 8 artists Th. Yorke H. Lachenmann G. Kurtag M. Feldman M. Hollis J. des Prez S. Cooke A. Lenker

I want to think more about this, but the pro-shame perspective doesn’t quite cohere for me, and I think the use of ‘bullying’ here may be indicative of why. Bullying is such a reductive/flattening thing - the greatest tool of the bully is blind, unreflective confidence.

‘Especially young boys’ is a nice pithy example of how gender essentialism fits snuggly into MAGA fascism. It’s not a fuzzy question for these people who they think the law should protect but not bind, whose boots belong on whose necks.

I agree! But I think it remains under-appreciated that this isn’t something that appears at some pagecount threshold - it’s true of all communicated meaning. AI summaries aren’t meaningless because they’re incomplete/short, but because they aren’t *meant* - they don’t come from a holistic pov.

Nick Clegg can fuck all the way off and then some

Trump's worldview is really unusual. The guy just doesn't live in a world wofith reasons -- it's just causes, causes, causes. His need to see himself on TV or in a newspaper is, I suspect, intensely profound -- he must feel as if he doesn't exist otherwise. In that light, this isn't so strange.

"More professors in the United States have been fired for controversial views in the past week than any other week in all of American history." www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

"So in the end it is not about listening to a kind of music that laments the sorry course of world events through scratching sounds; but neither is it about music that flees before this world into some kind of sound-exoticism.

I keep asking my students at ODU and get the same overwhelming negative perspectives.

i. don't. know. why i. feel. so. tongue. . tied.

I don’t think this is right. Elite units have crazy resources and predominantly serve students who grew up w more and better educational training than poorer ones. Buying into the narrative that higher ed is just about ‘connections’ and ‘signaling’ contributes to the devaluation of education itself.