It’s been my experience that the best forms of intellectual life aren’t passive, they’re energetic. Plenty of people can memorize and quote lines from Plato. We could, as a nation, recite them in unison. That would be creepy though!

Cass Sunstein was pushing prediction markets as a fairer alternative to deliberation (e.g. committees, juries) back in 2008. (This and "nudging" in lieu of policy.) The quant asshole revolution of the Obama era laid the groundwork for the gambling, scams, and bullshit vibes paradigm of today.

JOB ALERT 📜📚 Librarian & executive director of Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library (Farmington, CT) •Research center for 18th-century Britain •You’d report to the fabulous Michelle Light careers.yale.edu/us/en/job/13...

You know, there is a strong argument that the most meaningful form of regime change would begin at home.

Klingon police drama but their foreheads make it a "Prosthedural" send tweet

👇

RFK Jr. is about to learn that the American people are not to be tripe filled with.

MAHA's meat advice is riddled with ironies. For one, meat - whether the "expensive" cuts or offal - is already artificially inexpensive due to subsidy and the cost-cutting measures that produce "cheap" meat. For another, they promote a diet rich in animal foods like meat, when we eat so much that -

There are always good reminders that universities are not monoliths; one part of Yale hires David Brooks while another, the Yale Review, cancels its annual lit fest due to budgetary concerns.

the AIs are attractive because of what education has become in the US

This is a great read on a new WB bio I'm on the way to purchase as I type. Especially enjoyed this gloss on One-Way Street as literary montage

OK, so bear with me, I have been waiting to use the phrase "School's Out for Summers" for a long time

Of course, had the New Yorker consulted me about the title for a review of a book on Walter Benjamin, I would have said “Your Swag too Different.” So.

Television programs about high school students can be divided into two types: shows in which everyone seems aware that they are theater kids (Buffy, Veronica Mars) and shows in which not everyone is aware that they are theater kids (Stranger Things).

It is very, very good to see Peter Gordon's new book on Walter Benjamin covered in the New Yorker, in this review by Anahid Nersessian: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

The dramatic possibilities of "little libraries" are seriously under-explored

Harpo and Chico on a train. Harpo pokes Chico repeatedly] Chico: whatsamatta with you? you gotta problem? Harpo: [honks horn, shows Chico a copy of Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station] Chico: [laughs] that'sa good one, leaving the a-touch-ya station!

good morning from biosphere 3

In your eyes/the salt fat acid heat/in your eyes/I am complete/in your eyes/I want to touch the salt fat acid heat I see in your eyes

I feel this so strongly. Covid was a test of our moral integrity & decency -- *not just elites, but all of us* -- and we failed. I genuinely think one reason Covid has been memory-holed so hard, & so crusted w/ myths & conspiracy theories, is that on some level we know this & are ashamed.

part of brain: "Linguistic skepticism triumphs in some arenas of life and not others or, as William James put it in a philosophical lecture of 1907, 'life laughs at logic’s veto.' other part of brain: "you know, 'gyoza' sounds like a monster from Ghost Busters"

hey it's our Little Red Book

I just took count and I have written for LARB 17 times as reviewer, essayist, or interviewer. I am very proud of my connection to the magazine; they provided a home for some of my best work, and I've met people I really admire through them. To be clear, I have learned -

I have become wary of requests for readings that sound like an author trying to plug a hole in their argument, and more excited when someone simply says “This moved me; here’s why.”

Hey if you recently tuned into this channel I’m a writer, independent scholar, and editor, but you will find far more puns about specialty coffee/Frankfurt school critical theory/Japanese whisky here than professional business.

[my neighbors, watching me shovel snow] I wonder what he's thinking [me, shoveling] ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny

My childhood‘s timing made me an easy audience for the Star Wars films but we were only allowed the director’s cut focused on the Theatre of Cruelty on Tatooine - featuring Artaud D2.

I haven't seen anyone point this out as clearly:

[sighs into the sigh jar] Unpopular opinion: every graduate student choosing their topics of study by Imagining their fortunes on a job market is contributing to a systemic problem.

actual fn I just wrote "I paraphrase Emily Dickinson’s “The Brain—is Wider than the Sky” because that line always sounded surreal and grotesque to me, like a landscape covered by cerebrum."

Roses are redde Noble are the manatees For a bettir future Teach artes and humanityes

I'm at the deeper descent into fascism, I'm at the NYT asking "Should We All be 'House Burping?'" I'm at the combination -

I have great confidence in @bdralyuk.bsky.social who does the coolest stuff

Pretty remarkable that the people trying to create lab-grown meat, a network of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, did not embrace my scholarly book setting their efforts in cultural, scientific, and philosophical context while suggesting that capitalism was the real problem behind "cheap meat."

Caught a snippet of an interview with Wiseman - army, living in Paris, then coming back to the States to start a career, ”defaulting” into teaching at BU law - I am having generational vertigo just thinking about it.

highly educated, deeply concerned about politics, one part of my mind always on the question of how words "hook into" the objects they describe, and yet preoccupied by working the word "cloaca" into Indigo Girls songs, as in "cloaca I am to fine."

The biggest mistake of omission I have ever made as a researcher is not interviewing filmmaker Frederick Wiseman (Williams '51) for my book on Jews, admissions, and class at that particular liberal arts college. His films transfix me.

One instance where less is moa

We'll miss you, Frederick Wiseman—one of the great documentary filmmakers of the past century, who lived to be nearly a century old (via @alissawilkinson.bsky.social)

European intellectual history? In this economy? Here is @joncatlin.bsky.social's excellent treatment of what has been happening in (I would say, to) European intellectual history, particularly in what my teacher Martin Jay would insist is not his "school." www.jhiblog.org/2026/02/16/t...

utterly disgraceful behavior

Excited for this one 😊

I really love it when my mother uses the “-not!” negation to indicate sarcasm after a claim, because it makes me feel young again.

happy Gallentine's Day! Today we celebrate writing with ink made from oak galls, often mixed with iron sulfate.

Orhan Orville Pamuk Peck can't unsee

The Art of Luge-ing Isnt Hard to Master send tweet

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