A short overview of my essay On Eudaimonia and Optimization, which I link at the thread's end

Me sitting backwards on a chair to talk to high school class: 'Destroyer + Kara Walker was the KATSEYE of their day, in that a corporation randomly put them together and we're all better-off for it'

About to zoom-interview the experimental choreographer Dana Michel, who's a pretty good friend of mine, and I'm still nauseatingly nervous about it

In a depressive spiral but at least I'm one half of a soulful-eyed couple

I love dark academia (turning the light off in the seminar room)

People outside the AGI-prophecies world don't know that 'life's about human relationships and play, and no AI can change that' is the AGI prophets' company line. Only the thought that human intimacy and play require a context of collective human coping with the world runs contra

Wait this explains so much! I saw her give a talk at Yale last year and she seemed nervous as hell until she said this line 20 minutes in and got a good laugh from the room, at which point she totally relaxed and it became clear she was nervous about whether the joke will land

Charli XCX - In Search of Lost Time featuring Marcel Proust

I'm a very financially comfortable bohemian weirdo but New York (contra Berlin) and age and the prospect of kids are starting to shift my financial standards away from bohemian weirdo territory and it's making me depressed

Finished teaching my first seminar course today! Had tons of fun introducing my students to the rational foundations of human-like cooperation. Now that the course is over, I'm sharing the syllabus more widely!

It's useful to distinguish between autotelic activities in general and games, which are autotelic activities whose state-space we have arbitrary control over

I really enjoy Charli XCX but I am sorry this is 100% a John Cale featuring Charli XCX, it's one of the most John Cale sounding tracks of all time there's no way he didn't write it

So much about my worldview is comes from thinking the perceptual phenomenology of experts (in whatever) is the crown jewel of Being

Post-woke jam company called 'I Support The Currant Thing'

Seems So Long Ago, Nancy by Leonard Cohen is 100 times as eerie as the next most eerie song

Pluribus... that's real sci-fi baby! Very good

The "average human touches 1 spiderweb a week" factoid actually just statistical error

Wait is the melody of That's No Way to Say Goodbye just the melody of Suzanne sped up?

Got painted by my painter friend Damon Sfetsios

In Hellfire from Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame the guy sings 'Of my virtue I am justly proud', but pride is actually considered a bad thing in Christianity? Do your damn research Disney

Finished Lonely Crowds. Imagine a book-club book so good it becomes The Man Without Qualities

Just now learned that it's called 'the want ads' not 'the wanteds'

Super excited to share this: 'On For the Love of,' my new lyric essay for London's alt-quarterly The Toe Rag

I hate having significant control over my life, stress level, and what I do daily in someone else's hands. Why should anyone else have such power over me, when we are both equally adults? But this is the mode of life we have decided 99% of people should accept as the natural order of things.

This essay is by far the best along its line, but the more I reflect about this stuff the more I think it's hard to hold an image of human experience, human thought, human understanding, human life, and human relationships as meaningful ends while also seeing them as dead-ends

Super excited to share this: 'On For the Love of,' my new lyric essay for London's alt-quarterly The Toe Rag

It's crazy that nothing remotely like Krusty the Clown existed in the '90s but it does exist now (Mr. Beast)

A tense, tense week in matters of the heart so I'm going full influencer mode and getting an aguachile from Mariscos El Submarino for lunch then a 'slice cream' from Peete's Cafe next door

"In claiming the mantle of science, the data-centered approach to politics has drawn ever tighter boundaries around what it takes to speak knowledgeably about politics and so in turn who can be entrusted to direct it." Lily Hu for @bostonreview.bsky.social www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

tired: the beach that makes you old wired: the Marx translation that makes you liberal

What will be your job in the New York Commune? I'm trying to choose between civil engineer and poet

As a Jew on the left I have mixed feelings about Zohran winning... EXCITEMENT mixed with THRILLEDNESS!

Whenever I encounter something that re-proves to me that art is real I freak out and humiliate myself

I'm reading Lonely Crowds and it's so crazy good so far, feels more like a high-modernism era novella than like contemporary litfic

The 'charting' 'AI' 'artists' all being nostalgia-themed proves that we're living in the fever dream of a hack think piece writer from 2009

Me when John Cale plays nothing but deep cuts at the Lincoln Center show my girlfriend takes me to for my birthday

Never thought I'd say this but Fantastic Voyage is a top 10 Bowie lyric

Whenever Elon Musk tries posting I think about that Mitch Hedberg line about how a duck loves bread but can't access bread and what a cosmic joke on the duck that is

'The American experiment'... you mean dropping mentos in cola?

The 'logical grammar' of patterns and shapes that flicker against closed eyes lives along the border between the grammars of vision, of hallucination, of imagination, and of interpretation

Bruno Latour ran so Adam Tooze could walk

I want to have Dhamaka's paneer methi again so bad but know it will break me psychologically

[moments after creating my AI digital clone] ME: alright clone, do my chores CLONE-ME: no US: my god, it worked

H2O is water for people whose Hesperus is Phosphorus

Nerds famously *hate* talking about their hobbies and/or favorite media. You'd know this if you were one

I know we read it when we were 15 and we are 'over it' but can we take time to admit that it's just crazy, insane, crazy how good The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is, just crazy

It's common to read early vampire literature as a conscious or unconscious representation of capital or even capital's feudal remainder, but have we asked ourselves if it could be about how bad mosquitos are

Gathering another round of feedback on this piece. Especially want feedback from research mathematicians and (for different reasons) from philosophers who work with decision theory docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Hate it when something in a dramedy is disproportionately stupid/weird relative to the dramedy's established modulation of life to a gently stupid/weird key