Great comedy actors are a lot more likely to get called 'a genius' than great drama actors, wonder why

Always on My Mind (Pet Shop Boys) music video has a vibe I can't really pin down. BBC teleplay of Orton/Pinter vibe maybe?

If you ask somebody to do a Bartleby impression they can't really turn you down

There Exists a Non-Trivial Partial Order on Battles (2025), dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

Happy Birthday to TS Eliot, who I consider more of a witch than a poet

Thinking about the greatest trick-post of all time, when @lastpositivist.bsky.social posted 'The existence of a ghost bourgeois in Molly Malone implies the existence of ghost proletariats' and I replied 'Wait what how is Molly Malone bourgeois' and Liam replied 'That wheelbarrow is fixed capital'

I think we overestimate how tradition-centric cultures and societies in general used to be because of how tradition-centric cultures and societies that stayed traditional for thousands of years are

[clears throat]...I have another book coming out in the near future if you'd like to read a bit about LYRIC LOGIC, there are some very generous blurbs over at @columbiaup.bsky.social (my thanks to Marjorie Levinson, Oren Izenberg, Theo Davis, Nan Z. Da, and also @philipleventhal.bsky.social)

I'm sometimes moved to tears thinking about how, like, 'physician' or 'satirist' as continuous institutions have outlasted empires

Terry Tao continues to be our most powerful spontaneous Neo-Aristotelian

You could probably write a decent fake Sianne Ngai chapter about the economy in John Wick movies as a parody of finance

Did people on here like I, Tonya? Watched it on plane today and kind of loved it. Got a soft spot for thematically focussed, content-first films borrowing playful/experimental/formalist techniques for concrete ends

I feel so bad for people with 'x-er of ys' in bio. You gotta believe they're suffering on some level

"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply." me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

Probably only endured for this long in anglophone philosophy because 'carving' has lots of non-violent connotations in English so the word itself doesn't feel glaring. 'Butchering at the joints' probably wouldn't have had as good of an anglophone run

"we keep things quiet, have an explicit code of behavior that we follow, and wear the same simple, comfortable clothing every day. we haven't noticed that anyone is autistic"

A little Sunday puzzler. In response to [email protected] post about about Bolzano I recalled Husserl discovering Bolzano in a bookstore. @gregorboes.bsky.social then noted that Brentano introduced Husserl to Bolazano's work, which also sounded right. So I went back to Husserl Chronik...

Didn't know there was a guy named Bernad Bolzano that did today-style analytic philosophy in 1830 (and also gave the first rigorous definition of a limit)

It's time to hear my theory about how There Will Be Blood is a movie about a talking dog

i used to want to write about like justice and living a good life and doing communism or whatever but now i just really want to understand how counterfactuals work

Something very 1830s wacky-slang about the kick we get from saying GOAT

It's wild to find out Cora Diamond hates trans people more than she likes being a Wittgensteinian

This is virulently anti-trans: not simply arguing that there's a reasonably natural concept of transition-independent biological sex (fine) but also that there is no reasonably natural biological or social concept whose extensions is trans and cis women dailynous.com/2025/09/19/p...

Speaking as an idiot, I feel like Sino-German vs. Indo-British is a more natural philosophical division that Eastern vs. Western

I've worked in writing -- academic, belle-lettrist, journalistic, technical -- all of my life and I still have no clue how paragraph transitions work. Every succesful paragraph transition is a gift that God grants in His mercy

LLMs becoming superhuman at all games & competitions but not even normal-expert good at anything that's not a game or competition continues to raise deep questions about whether games & competitions are a secret natural kind

at what point will people miss the good parts of "good taste"? bc I feel like the elephant in the room is how "AI" remixed images provide content that does something impressive for people who have always felt diminished, locked out, w/r/t taste. and this trumps labor concerns for many

I love how when you actually read the classics of continental philosophy the first chapter is always like 'I am quite fond of asking whether the ground's grounding of the grounded grounds the ground's grounding of the grounded'

It's crazy how little I get from Derrida, I just can't for the life of me get what the stake are

Did anybody write about how while liberals like comparing leftists to teenagers leftists like comparing liberals to babies

Love how in England 'cafe' doesn't mean 'place that serves coffee' but 'a restaurant by people who cook worse than you'

Good news everyone! My long overdue second book - The Revenge of Reason - is currently at the printer and is now available for pre-order on the Urbanomic website (estimated to be sent out mid-October). Link here: www.urbanomic.com/book/the-rev...

This by @gabrielwinant.bsky.social reminds me of a thought I'm always struggling to crystalize: it's central to the Marxist pov that even if everyone had the same money to spend on consumer goods, the way investment capital works still means that markets would be nothing like democracy

Had to tell two English friends who Dennis Potter was... open the schools!

Tristes Tropiques is a beautiful name for a cat

Kazuo Ishiguro has to be one of the most respected 'easy' writers since the 19th century, no?

It's weird how much I didn't realize in real time that my grad department hating my work was doing a number on my psyche

We're not ready for the allergy-based identity politics of the 2030s. 'Peanut allergy is the cis white men of allergies' and stuff like that

Only good salts are Morton kosher salt and Maldon sea salt flakes, everything either more or less fancy than those makes food taste awful

The mystery of the poster's heart is in the coexistence of burning desire for attention and a Buddha-like indifference to whether the attention's positive or negative

I think Phenomenology is footnotes to the A-Deduction and Pittsburgh School is footnotes to the B-Deduction and bringing the two together is the hardest and most interesting problem in philosophy

Aristotelianism with a Phenomenological face and a computational ass

I'm convinced that Charles Travis's The Silence of the Senses is the nonsensical ramblings of a crazy person disguised by the calm tone of Austinian philosophy

If we stop using 'performative' the wrong way we could make 'affected' a star

The people I don't personally know I think about the most are David Bowie, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and Madeline Kahn

I have a friend who used to think that Steven Pinker and Terry Pinkard were the same guy and was like 'what went wrong, I liked his work on Hegel'

I know nobody else liked it that much but memories of Kinds of Kindness still make me laugh almost every day

Mathematicians keep the story of Grothendieck from the public because they're afraid you'll know that mad Romantic genius stuff is real

Remember the Curb birthday page episode? Feels topical...

I was right when I was 15 and decided that Derrida's not worth the time unless you take Husserl extremely seriously, but I've been taking Husserl pretty seriously lately so I worry