As Chief Executive Function Officer it's time to sound the alarm-- if I don't do something useful with this draft I'm going to lose psychic permission to keep drinking coffee.

Fallacy? I'm embarrassed for you, child. It's called vibearguing.

"I Who Have Never Known Men," like Isaac Babel's stories, manages to drain what you thought was life's meaning at the exact same rate as your will to put the book down.

This wasn’t an easy one to record: on the murder of Renee Nicole Good, Gestapo comparisons, and the gendered dimensions of both the murder and the right’s defense of it podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i...

The fact I am enjoying Ducks, Newburyport, the fact holy-moly is it long, Faulkner's like enough already, Faulkner if lived on North Shore, Benji's whole chapter just on fried oysters...

"Hi Carol. Our feelings for you poets haven't changed, the republic just needs a little space." #philsky

The day they introduce ethics into what we do, they might as well shut us down. — Slow Horses S2, E3

Are you a student passionate about computing research? Spend your summer with the CRA-WP DREU program. Don’t wait - learn more and apply today: https://cra.org/cra-wp/dreu/

‘Death remains my intimate shadow partner. It has been with me since birth, always hovering close by. I understand one day we will finally waltz together into the ether. I hope when that time comes, I die with the satisfaction of a life well-lived, unapologetic, joyful, & full of love.’ —Alice Wong

Massholes can be difficult, painful, yet necessary channels of care, like asbestos remediation (a good frame of AI critique, btw, as the podcast bros come and go/talking of abundance and AlphaGo).

November in Boston is here, changing my username to a clever seasonal affective disorder nickname (just my username).

I Saw Satan's Gradient Descent

Very disappointed to learn xenobots are named after a frog genus and not the host-guest relationship. Step it up, computational biologists.

It is hard not to think about posthumous baptism, taking over the dead's identity to bolster one's tradition (in the name of saving them)-- reanimating them in media for a different kind of canon-formation attains another level of perversity.

Adrienne Mayor's "Gods and Robots" discusses this myth and many other ancient robot legends across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Now I can't wait to read this book as follow up.

This is Boston coffee nerd excellence

Liaising between religious studies and computer science has only become more fraught as tech claims religious connossieurship with the unblinking assuredness of Zuckerberg with Sweet Baby Ray's, making me all the more grateful for pieces like this.

Build It Or Not, You Are Still Going To Die: Ernest Becker's Chaplaincy To AI Ethics

Mr. Murdoch said he would take care of the flowers himself.

Reviewers keep asking how well @lioneltrolling.bsky.social's "When The Clock Broke" explains Trumpism. They almost all miss how deftly it denudes H. Ross Perot's corrupt, conspiracy-addled, balcony-seeking fraudulence, revealing a Musk avant la twittre.

Excellent! In the same spirit, here's a piece on AI hype I wrote in....1985 🤯 melaniemitchell.me/EssaysConten...

Helen exemplified so much of what philosophy (or living well together) desperately needs: honesty, vulnerability, integrity, wonder-sharing, courage, determination, decency.

April is a real bummer of a month

New England and Boston writers-friends: Join us at 2 p.m. tomorrow in Concord, MA at the Concord Free Public Library for a writing event featuring the wonderful @cindyhouse.bsky.social @demisty.bsky.social & Alysia Abbott. Come say hi! Come write! (& pass the word along!)

April is a real bummer of a month

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has died.

Folk might want to read my @dallasnews.com op-ed related to Hegseth & Wilson: www.dallasnews.com/opinion/comm...

Really looking forward to this book.

In the midst of Boston spring I found there was, within me, still another Boston spring.

Since this has prompted a few references to the split-flap, here are my talk and article about that most charismatic and functional of technologies :) wordsinspace.net/2020/12/03/f... wordsinspace.net/fluttering-c...

In philosophy you can just make up an argument to get mad at, you don’t even need to make up a person convinced by it.

Soft undercaffeinated animal just try to get one wild and precious cup

This @moiraweigel.bsky.social essay shows Karp's dissociated froideur toward the effects of aggression, resembling not so much the Thiel of The Diversity Myth as the latter's answer to why one shouldn't assassinate CEO's-- "you have to make the argument." www.boundary2.org/2020/07/moir...

"Do we know what causes preeclampsia? Why do they call it an 'incompetent cervix?' Why is natality scarier than mortality? Why is text so awesome compared to organisms?"

your last day to download @andytobo.bsky.social's element "Israel and Its Heirs in Late Antiquity"! You don't even need to read it today, just download that PDF and save it for a special treat! @cambridgeup.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Another reason this is the best $3 of subscription money I spend each month.

Outputting “outside chatGPT,” i.e. LLM’s essentially deceptive indexical #philsky xcancel.com/transluceai/...

When you read this alongside Ruha Benjamin’s “Imagination Manifesto,” it is clear how AI is also, for these folks, a desecration and extermination of any prospect of human intelligence that disturbs or scares them. So rhetorically it can weaponize secularity as well.

Digitality is pure sequence of signs: when its control is extended to everything we no longer know what earth supports us... We continue experiencing the analog pole, we no longer know what to call it: it is mute emotion that overwhelms us... Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, p.21.

If you are a university researcher NOT paid on soft money, and federal grant cancellations or disruptions are impacting your personal income (e.g., via summer salary losses or other direct-compensation disruptions), I would like to speak with you: [email protected] or Signal ibogost.47.

Message me for a coupon code if interested, looking forward to this @interintellect.bsky.social salon this Sunday. interintellect.com/salons/what-...

Adolescence 2 (Netflix, 2026)

These days you have to pick your dystopic art carefully. Couldn't make it past S1E3 of Severance (I've already seen Black Mirror?), but I am enjoying the novel "One" by David Karp. Some mid-20C "academic spying on colleagues for the state" stuff that thankfully in 21C has no relevance.

The Digital Ethics Center @yaledec.bsky.social is hiring! If you're looking for a postdoc in an exciting, fast-moving research center with brilliant colleagues, look no further. Info link ⬇️ #academia #sts #philtech

From Lisa Maurizio (2001): “Delphi's renowned ambiguity evolved in response to the spiri­tual, practical, and conceptual needs of oikists ("colonial founders"), tyrants, and their respective constituents… The Pythias responded to colonists’ needs by mirroring them.”

Are you a US scientist thinking of quitting the States for Europe? Would you be willing to talk about it — anonymity is possible? Send me a DM. (Please reskeet if you have US contacts!)

Calasso in “The Unnamable Present:” To understand the transformations that sacrifice has undergone in the secular age, *sacrifice* has to be swapped for *experiment.* Frames Thielist destruction of NIH and universities as reinstituting “natural” sacrifice of subhumans against DEI “experiment.”

You can’t solve a concept problem with more data. If you want to recognize a human right you don’t wait until enough data comes in to deem a person a human. The whole statistical power of LLM’s is to elide sourcing, it’s never a citational authority.

Had to have a Gen X/Gen Z slang summit over “lowkey” because when you text me “lowkey soo tired” that does not adequately convey to me “I’m about to faint and need to be picked up from school.” For you philosophers of language it can be “more like a filler word [Dad 🙄].”