Its arrival a great pleasure: cc @sfreviewofwhatever.bsky.social @elisabethnicula.bsky.social

I first got to learn from Rebecca during my research into lab-grown meat, because of her work as a dairy farmer, but I did not know about her blog, and I really recommend this wise post about how to inhabit the Internet:

This is very moving, and then you get to the last paragraph 😭 which is THAT paragraph

That great line from Marwan Markhoul about needing to hear the birds to write poetry, and thus the warplanes must be silent, but it applies to my desire to share the most banal, silly, imaginative jests with you here; in order to write puns, I must hear the birds too.

La honte

it's useful that I'm writing about Cratylism at precisely the moment when an irate customer is complaining to this cafe about how her macchiato wasn't exactly what she would have got at Starbucks, like yes, this is the emergency for which I am a doctor.

Perhaps matzoh has little taste, but Catholics must cope with the fact that their savior has been a wafer so long.

in my role as food historian I hereby allow you to treat alphabetically labeled "regions" as having "foods" (despite human migration and crop/animal dispersal patterns and the impossibility of authentic origins) so that you can choose a "region" and have "fun."

Sadly, "Iron Shirt," written on my to-do list, refers not to an esoteric kung fu technique I will master, but simply to garment care.

This summer I brought @nathankhensley.bsky.social's Action Without Hope to one of the most naturally beautiful places I go each year, on the intuition that this is where you should read books in the environmental humanities. This is about Nathan’s excellent book and my questionable intuition.

a bespoke phone-free academic environment in which we read the Symposium while paying little attention to current publishing trends is already available [Ben looks meaningfully at the space around him, in his office].

Yes I'm sure the tech billionaire who once said "young people are just smarter" will have a lot to tell us about "cognitive disadvantage."

Worth remembering that, while the Free Speech Movement took place at Berkeley, this was not a university-sponsored effort reflective of the institution's priorities, shall we say.

Adorno & Horkheimer on the stupidity of cleverness

whenever they shut down streets in downtown new haven, the city mobilizes its only culinary resource to pacify the population; they call this their "apizzament strategy."

UC Berkeley has given the Trump administration the names of 160 students, faculty, and staff as part of an investigation into antisemitism on campus. One of them is Judith Butler. www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti...

Cute felt, might delete later

James Murphy, singing his default mode, like a Waldorf teacher at a rave throughout the set.

never am I more happy to live in a little world of my own than when the Wirecutter sends me Subject Line: For "Glazed Donut" Skin.

If I were an ogre/senex figure in a myth or animated cartoon and a plucky young protagonist needed to get a magic key or gem or other boon from me to continue on their quest by appealing to my well-known appetites, they could definitely get their magic key by giving me coffee.

There is a level of constant media opinion-sharing that will cause a person, however bright, however qualified as an expert in a particular field or fields, to start saying idiotic things.

Many apt comparisons to make between the challenges of painting and those of writing, for instance, I am always struggling to create for my readers the illusion of (my) depth.

So using AI is a radical act of feminism? Soon you'll be telling me that we need to recapture pronatalism for the feminist left.

Man with "don't tread on me" flag found to have secret "crushed by giantess" fetish, news at eleven.

The stories you have heard are correct: you can very easily get a covid-19 vaccine in Cambridge, MA, as I did on Sunday, by walking into a CVS. Even when the side effects had me vexxed I was glad to be vaxxed once more.

I am a pedant, so the misuse of "performative" in "performative male" competitions annoys me, but is it the case that the very idea of the performative male is a piece of cynicism, suggesting that when men seem to care about women, or feminism, it is because they want to get laid?

I gaze at this gloss on Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves performing Beckett with a combination of envy, delight, and wild surmise.

slightly diminish a book Micromicrographia

It was the Dunning of tymes. It was the Kruger of tymes.

How to make the journey from cup of coffee to cup of coffee as easeful as possible? This is my question.

"The Department of History invites applications for an assistant professor who will make enough leftist remarks to annoy conservative talk radio hosts but whose politics will ultimately support the neoliberal mission of the university." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/hon...

But is it a family dinner if I haven’t been accused of being too cynical about the Aspen Institute?

Aye, an if Polyphemos was the son of Thoosa, and Thoosa the daughter of Phorkys, could we not indeed call Polyphemos‘ rage “Phorkys Revenge”?

"everyday give yourself a present" can mean writing a footnote like "'Childe Roland to the Dork Tower Came,' as it were."

GORN WITH THE WIND

if i needed a reminder that I live in a bubble with regards to developments in publishing, the arts, literature, and so forth, my agent just wrote a super-smart newsletter about the Matthew Effect, taking as her example an amazingly successful self-help book I never heard of.

today would be a great day to give me an award.

out: "performative male" competitions in: performative Ishmael competitions

"Judge Burroughs wrote that it was 'difficult to conclude anything other than that defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.'” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...

against fear, against hate, against the apparent groundless of all values beneath the level of sheer play, I advocate for applying the phrase "had carnal knowledge" to eating meat versions of foods that also have vegetarian versions - thus "I had carnal knowledge of a burrito yesterday."

I caught a recent performance of John Cage’s “4′33″” and thought it was perfect: no notes.

If the premise of "the intellectual" as a social type, beginning in France in the 1890s, was that scholarship and wisdom could legitimate public statements about politics, then the premise of tech billionaires opining in public seems to be that _sheer wealth_ legitimates public statements.

I have no idea who that person complaining about sourdough is, but the white loaf that they claim sourdough displaces is a recent arrival, historically speaking, not much more than a hundred years old, not very good for us, and - whatever you think of technology - utterly industrial.

OK, so Midsummer Night's Dream seems like a really intuitive Shakespeare to do Bollywood-style. What Shakespeare plays seem intuitively _unsuited_ to Bollywood adaptation?

Just saw a video of Bill Maher calling Mamdani a “straight up communist” and I continue to be struck by the depiction of policies associated with the New Deal Order as far-left extremism, which goes along with a refusal to depict Trump’s unprecedented authoritarian actions as far-right extremism.

NYT Wirecutter takes on the Schlegels' Athenaeum Fragments: "These Incredibly Comfy Brief(insights into the relationship between fragment and whole, spirit and form, intention and work) are Also Sort of Sexy."

absolute epidemic of people walking up to registers and saying "I'll do a [X]" as if they did not receive my encyclical on the matter.

presumably, when they found themselves without a leader, the inhabitants of Star Wars' Cloud City said something like "urbs nubium de-Lando est"

When you get a PhD, the applications* of your work will be endless. * job applications