I used to think that one way to respond to imaginative resistance to analytic philosophers using thought experiments is to stick to real life cases from the world, so I became a documentarian of them. Tonight I learned that some people will resist the existence and significance of those too.

I've been up for six hours with jet lag, so I wrote a post lobbying political philosophers to invent and develop a new genre of fiction. If you get a Netflix deal, I want residuals. open.substack.com/pub/hiphinat...

The story of the Trump years decades from now will be that the US spent lot of money, energy, and suffering to work their way back to a zero because idiots have no face-saving way out of idiocy except escalation.

Everything I know about the US tax code and US tax policy I learned from Ray Madoff and here she is on Ezra Klein explaining it, and what she thinks about it. This is really great stuff. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/o...

Pretty sure the report says that American universities that are like Yale bear significant responsibility,. It also says that Yale is not at all representative of what American colleges are actually like, only what American colleges are portrayed to be like in national media outlets.

This is tragic. If the school-age population is shrinking, then by necessity schools will close. Since the college-attending % of the total population has been steady for decades, there's just no avoiding this outcome except w/ far more student immigration. www.wwlp.com/news/local-n...

If you want to destroy AI, every academic traveler just needs create an AI agent designed to get you your travel reimbursement come what may, and it will go up against the procurement department’s AI agent set on denying you, and the two will fight in endless epicycles until the cloud melts down.

Someone please write a piece about the co-opting of the language of "accommodations" and "disability rights" to market and sell and guilt instructors into using edtech and AI products that actually decrease student learning and attention overall.

My department took part in a virtual open house. We were thrown into Gather, where you walk around using keyboard arrows to approach other characters to start a conversation. It was awkward. I kept trying to buy heal potions and dragon swords, hoping to level up before conquering the Marsh Cave.

The manliest media has been, and will continue to be, This Old House.

I guess Lindy West is the latest Olivia Nuzzi to have Elizabeth Gilberted her way into our hearts.

My surname in Chinese is 林. You take a pictogram for a tree 木 and double it, yielding a word pronounced “Lam” in Cantonese and Vietnamese, “Lin” in Mandarin, and “Lim” in Hokkein, which means “the woods.” So I am “Barry Woods” if you were to go with semantics rather than phonology in translation.

We will one day discover thru extensive data analysis that Homestar Runner had a bigger influence on culture than all of reality TV, Dane Cook, and the Avatar franchise combined.

Oh no, Chuck Norris I could stomach, but not Xander.

Unity of the virtues taking a hard hit this week.

LA should rename the street Dolores Huerta Ave., as should every other city.

Maybe when the dust settles, it will turn out that waiting until you’re 25, and educated by way of books, pen, paper, hand tools, hand programming, solving equations, and then presented with AI, will be better than the 25 years olds who started outsourcing tasks to AI in elementary school.

One thing we need to tell our kids is that, in the 90s, you’d take a bus for three hours to find a $25 Japanese release of Siamese Dream that had two extra tracks on it at some record store in North Hollywood, which you’d then tape and pass around and be cool for like a week in high school.

Yo, screw the 90s, if you want to see how I looked when I was three decades younger, just rewind to 2019.

Laptop materialism-the values of materialistic people who consume and displays their material values entirely over the internet. A compulsive shopper of Amazon, showing and reviewing their products on Instagram, Youtube, for the purpose of status in virtual spaces only is a laptop materialist.

Its been over 15 years but I think I get the grift. Manufacture radical skepticism about all institutional knowledge, making atomized individuals with no knowledge seek expertise from a sea of random individuals most of whom falsely exhibit knowledge. Then monetize all the random individuals.

According to traditional just war theory, if whatever originally motivated you to engage in war is unjust, any bonus good things that result from the war don’t thereby make it just.

Me, teaching ethics of war this quarter: Imagine, a group of five Nazis decide to terrorize a Jewish family of ten in their home. Five men in the home decide to take up arms to defend it. Students: Okay, so which side is the just side, and which the unjust side? Me: 😡

Anyone approaching 50 and turning into their mother? I’m living in her house, listening to the Carpenters, and even ordering the Filet-o-Fish.

This week I put piles of Lao Ga Ma spicy chili crisp on a chicken parm, a shwarma with tabbouleh wrap, and on guacamole. This is a culinary travesty and I need help.

If I had to cut out all the passages in my manuscript that made me cringe, I'd be left with very little.

“If there is no one there to smelt it, there can be no one who dealt it.” -Bishop George Berkeley.

Spill the beans now, who is this? It isn't me. www.reddit.com/r/askphiloso...

Most people think the future of academia consists of robots doing all the teaching, when we all know it is going to be administrators adopting ten new pieces of management software yearly, then making everyone watch endless streams of training videos about how to work it.

Best piece I've read in awhile.

If you tally up the direct costs of the wars and military adventures of the US from Vietnam through Iraq and Afghanistan, along with all of the downstream costs including veterans health care and interests on the debts incurred, you get about 35% of total US debt.

The promise of paying for stuff, newspapers, magazines, apps, games, streaming, was so they wouldn’t have to sell our data and sell us ads. Now everything I pay for also bombards me with ads and sells my data. Is there any point at which companies will stop trying to squeeze this lemon?

The people selling a virtual world where the machine thinks, lives, talks, and fucks for you keep telling all the people who aren’t buying they’re wasting their time thinking, living, and fucking with other people.

The framing of this by Tyler Austin Harper is that the problem with Mellon is social justice orientation. I disagree. All grantmaking with top-down constraints skews research in unhealthy directions. We need lots of foundations funding research of all kinds. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Just want to express two completely unrelated opinions, because it’s what I think about on commutes. 1. If only one 60s American rocker gets the Nobel in poetry, it should have been Paul Simon. 2. The older I get, the more I think When Harry Met Sally isn’t just good, but a masterpiece.

I feel like "most outstanding peer reviewer" is an award that you want to get, but not one you want to announce.

I was born to make this video. 1991 is when America peaked. (sound on.) youtu.be/dW6JlPnP33o?...

I wonder if the right lost their shit when Ricky Ricardo performed every 10 episodes of I Love Lucy.

With all due respect to Substack, it is parasitic on good journalism, not a replacement for it. Substack is the place where people consume news and research and provide commentary on it. I haven’t seen any evidence that Substack can pay to do rigorous, fact-checked reporting on newsworthy events.

When I feel sorry for myself about current events, I remind myself of my mom and her siblings escaping the cultural revolution, and being 4’9” tall because they were starved during adolescence. But then I realized that what kept them going was escaping to America, and I feel sorry for myself again.

I’m getting fed a lot of “Infinite Jest” content lately. I’ve long avoided it, maybe because of all the hype, the commitment, it sounded exhausting. I haven’t seen Game of Thrones or The Sopranos for the same reasons. But 30 years is long enough. Should I read it?

How important is exercising the philosopher’s virtue of charitable understanding, attribution, and judiciousness in a room full of dipshits?

LinkedIn is full of jobs from AI companies looking for writers. It'd be funny if these companies shot themselves in the groin by making the internet a trash pile of their own slop, which suddenly increased the value of artisanally produced human work they have to now quarantine and pay for in house.

What is your over under that Trump will read the room (especially his dissenting 2A supporters) and do a reversal, talk about how horrible the shooting was but it was a one-off, a mistake, throwing both Bovino and Noem under the bus? That would be an interesting day at the fascist site.

I stand with our Governor Janet Mills in calling for an end to these operations immediately. People are dying and law enforcement pitted against each other. This is dangerous for both civilians and law enforcement. There is no winning, end this.

Dear Southern California. We took your Wienershchnitzels. We're coming for your Bob's Big Boys.

I have been getting a disproportionately large number of “I wrote a philosophical manifesto, check it out” emails and attachments in the last few weeks. Its up to daily now. Is this a symptom of the LLM rabbit holes that crackpots are attracted to?

I don’t watch a lot of television I feel compelled to share, so take this in that spirit. I just watched Cover-Up, a documentary about the career of Seymour Hersch. It is on Netflix, made by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus. It is very compelling, and saddening. www.netflix.com/title/82145211

Pitch: The FBI is on the hunt for a Wall Street serial killer who donates $100k to effective charities right before he murders his next victim. The FBI profiler has identified the suspect, but do they bust him? open.substack.com/pub/hiphinat...