The dog-cat relation in a nutshell

Seems like holding elites to account for illegal wars might have been a good idea, you know, in the 2000s or the 1980s or the 1970s or....

Spotting a really funny contradiction in higher ed talk about AI: 1) "All your students are using it and it's so good you can't tell." and 2) "AI will be so important students need you to teach them how to use it." Maybe we need to focus on specifics, not generalizations?

This is nonsense. He’s conflating 1) whether a technology is able to do X, and 2) whether consumers want X. This makes no sense for ”AI.” The technological ability to do what? The consumer demand for what? It’s magical thinking. “One day, it will do everything and everyone will want it.” Sure

When I wrote about Great Expectations, I thought the novel might suggest a political difference between shame and contempt. Where contempt seems to rely on hierarchy, shame may be democratizing. You see something shameful and you feel shame. And if shame spreads, it can push us to consequences

If someone who claims to have the same name as me reaches out on social media, I’m going to assume it’s a William Wilson situation and not respond

Boy howdy. nobaddaysinla.substack.com/p/how-the-la...

Found myself in the institutional AI survey

I mocked the mailman in Dead of Night for whistling “Camptown Races,” but look who’s now wandering around singing it like I need to fill space with something out of copyright

He thought, I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

New Children of Men origin story

After years of staring at Sami Tamimi’s pulled lamb shawarma recipe, I broke down and made it

Exactly. The supposed demand from students (and parents) to teach AI comes more from fear of job loss than deep interest

*If* the hype is true, the left program probably looks like Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread, at least in broad strokes

Very cool to see an ad for a GLP-1 with strong The Substance vibes

Listening to the complete Plugged Nickle set and it's wild how everything seems to click by the third set on the second night

Canvas loves to tell me about new assignments that *I* created. Pretty sure I know about those!

Asking the kid to explain “lore” in relation to story/narrative

According to the kid, Amon Düül II is scary, and Unsane is not?

This court opinion captures what writing instructors have been dealing with for years now

When is McArdle going to suggest children should “hang rush” pedos

Gothic and gauche, is that a thing?

Cat: I eat dog food now. Me: Get out of there! Cat: Dog food is delicious. Me: It’s for dogs, dude! Stop it. Cat: I love i — (vomits everywhere)

Democrats want commonsense reform for ICE: Strip all the copper out of the walls Burn the buildings down Nuremberg trials for every official

Probably the best way to describe the last decade in the US, from This Modern World in 2008

Four layer coconut cake, about 6 1/2 inches tall

If I were to guess why Gen X is so politically regressive, it might have something to do with a wildly arrested political imagination. You’re fucked if you stopped at the two examples of progressive thought my 90s high school gave us, Dworkin/Mackinnon feminism and Chomsky’s political critique.

Friday after 4pm still counts as getting the book to the publisher, right

I used to hate awkward, confused undergraduate prose, but now I cherish it—and gobble it up with glee. For this gift, I would like to say thank you to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. That half a trillion or so spent towards building data centers was totally 100% worth it!

The ten year old wandered into the house yesterday singing the first song off the new Joyce Manor album

I’m enjoying John Bellamy Foster’s book on Epicurus and Marx. Very much about thinking and living through social collapse

Lady in the Lake (1946)

Got my copy of @tomtomorrow.bsky.social Our Long National Nightmare, and the ten year old immediately seized it from me because “the visor penguin is funny”

Do not—and I cannot stress this enough —figure out the best way to clarify your book’s argument a week before it’s due

Ten days until the manuscript is due and thinking maybe I read it through one more time, just to torture myself

Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy

Black metal cover of "Love Shack" as "Blood Shack"

Used leftover cooked steel cut oats in something called porridge bread. Smells good, at least

I keep thinking about Kristin Ross’s argument in The Commune Form that people come together to defend what they value. The great question is how these defensive social movements can become durable political power

If capitalist realism is a renunciation of the possibility of a society free from domination, what happens to it as people recognize the violence of state domination?

Mrs. Dalloway said she would dismantle ICE herself.

One day, someone has to write a history of the rise and fall of the American weirdos—how contradictory consciousness eventually collapsed into political reaction (or via Reich, the interrelation thereof)

we should want to make it undeniable that there is no choice but to end ICE, prosecute its officers for lawbreaking, and fundamentally rethink immigration enforcement.

Tried Bravetart’s butterscotch white chocolate blondies recipe for the first time. The almost imperceptible swirls on the back half are peanut butter

Gotta say, Wilhelm Reich describes fascism with more clarity than Adorno

It's easy to forget how much better good wired headphones and FLAC sound

Less news, more coconut marble cake

Reclassifying horror films by everyday annoyances: Guitar at campsite Shoes on the bed Aggressive chewing

Very cool to learn in real time what imperialist running dog means

In a surprise to absolutely no one, my top Letterboxd results for 2025