Journalism is very valuable data. AI companies should be paying a premium for it. If they do not, journalism venues should data-poison the well, in a way that does not affect readers and watchers, but does the training models.

The tech companies started monopolizing pathways to media, then monopolized advertising revenue, and have now monopolized the flow of investment capital. They can now pick winners and losers in media, business, even education.

The end of an era. I need a regular Culture podcast now, please let me know which ones to audition. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/a...

Oh my, Anthony Jeselnik on his book club wearing an @ologies.bsky.social t-shirt! youtu.be/qPAzG-GCfeM?...

Harry Frankfurt is the Steve Kerr of 20th century analytic philosophers.

Handing over $300 billion without the war probably would have saved taxpayers 50%.

Substack is OnlyFans for people who work with words.

The daughter and mother wanted to spend $143,000 in 1991 for that wedding in Father of the Bride. That’s $351,000 in today’s dollars. George Banks is then depicted as the crazy cheap dad.

If we don't start teaching our elementary school kids Workday, how will they know how to use it when they are on-boarded for their first job at 26?

History lesson, well known to analytic philosophers. The president of Rockefeller University wanted a report on the research quality of its philosophy dept. The report said a faculty member was researching the meaning of proper names. The President closed the whole program.

Higher-ed administrators spend money on software as though it is durable infrastructure, like a building, when it is in fact a perishable long term liability. Meanwhile, tenure-stream teaching staff is a long term liability, when it is in fact durable infrastructure.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. Great writing, acting, a big achievement.

Hopefully in five years, not fifty, we will realize that social media is the cigarettes for this generation of children. These companies literally paid PTAs to market its shit at schools. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/u...

Say it ain’t so @thehighsign.bsky.social ! This is like losing three of your best friends all at once 😭!

People who are expecting a blue wave in the fall should take a look at the quality of the Republicans in deep blue California and the number of votes they are getting. The rage at blue state executive governance has not gone away, if anything its been amplified.

Imagine claiming for real estate what people claim for college. "Buying that house is not worth it, it costs $200,000 and you have to take $100,000 in debt." The median debt for college is $35,000 and average ROI over a lifetime is between $500000 and $1m.

It just occurred to me that young people might not know what a dial tone sounds like.

College students & their parents: "There aren't going to be any jobs left for me in the future." Me: We've had a chronic shortage of physicians, engineers, STEM teachers, skilled trades, aviation and maritime workers. Them: I don't mean those jobs.

“Finally...an introductory reader with a distinctively 21st-century orientation towards philosophy...These original essays are... philosophy at its best and most engaging.” Barry Lam, host of @hiphination.bsky.social on Too Weird To Believe, Too Plausible To Deny

The paradox of AI-writing detectors: Any detector reliable enough to determine a paper wasn't AI-written serves as reliable data to train AI to write papers that do not sound like AI.

I just watched the Anna Stubblefield documentary on Netflix with my wife, who didn’t know anything about the case, and one of our best friends from college, who is in criminal defense. That was quite a wild time in our profession (philosophy) wasn’t it?

Strategic voting in the California primary is wracking my brain. The ideal scenario for progressives is for the general election to be between Becerra and Steyer. The worst case scenario is it is between Hilton and Bianco. The polling is now 22% Hilton, 21% Beccerra, 15% Steyer, 10% Bianco.

This is a pan-Asian staging of King Lear in Singapore, 1997. Lear was, famously, a pre-Roman Celtic monarch in Britain. Its beautiful.

I want to normalize saying complimentary things after “It’s not personal, but…” “It’s not personal, but your writing is amongst the best I’ve read.”

This would be my exact list of the four greatest women in tennis history. The list crosses four eras.Anyone's list would need three. Makes it all the more amazing that any list of four greatest men would have three from a single era, and the fourth a tossup. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO25...

How funny. If you program them not to take up parking spaces, and not to jam up already filled city streets, the only alternative is circular smooth flowing empty suburban streets!

The primary for the Governor of California consists in ad after ad comparing some Dem to Trump. “Xavier Becerra is just like Trump for separating children from parents.” “Tom Steyer is just a billionaire like Trump, he even invested in Trump’s casinos.” Makes me despise electoral politics.

Besides for doctors, veterinarians, engineers, scientists, nurses, pharmacists, accountants, lawyers, judges, architects, quantitative analysts, teachers, military officers, forestry and land management, historians and museum archivists, what is the practical value of college?

I’m thinking about the few dozen civil servants left at the NEH after 2/3rds of their colleagues were purged, with executive orders they have to comply with, the right calling for their elimination, the left calling them enforcers of white supremacist studies, with a budget that makes no dent.

Is enjoying Beaches for the first time as a 47-year-old man non-toxic masculinity?

I've been getting fed an ad for this concert in my area that is so expensive, they are now feeding me an ad for credit-financing of this concert. I guess this is where we are in the American economy. www.darkerwavesfest.com

Besides the lawsuits and insurance payouts, the likeliest thing to come out of this hack is that Unis will hire a consulting firm to audit, and they will recommend some expensive intervention for faculty to create redundant course material, and there will be new training videos to watch annually.

Canvas, tech admin, every cybercrime consultant company that took Uni $, every provost that made instructors sit thru “phishing” training, should be made to pay every college student identity theft insurance, as well as compensate student and faculty for their extra time having to navigate this bs.

This couldn't be more wrong. What Caplan says is clearly what graduate school is about.

An under-discussed fact in public discourse, but something historians have known for a long time, is that war debt is directly responsible for the downfall of many countries and large global empires. Spain, pre-revolutionary France, The Ottoman Empire; addiction to war kills countries.

Academics have, often for virtuous reasons, shot themselves in the foot. They want book deals, their physical books to sell, and be assigned, but then they photocopy everyone else's work and distribute it for free, or assign e-books, undermining the entire business structure of publishing.

"Christian Miller provides a crisp analysis of the many faces of dishonesty in modern life, from cheating to lying and fakery, so that we can confront them wisely and effectively. An honest book for dishonest times." Barry Lam, host of Slate's Hi-Phi Nation podcast @hiphination.bsky.social

The Critique of Pure Raisins

The tech industry spent 20 years structuring things on screens to addict everyone from toddlers to grandparents. Now they’re putting AI tools everywhere and creating friction to using tech without AI. And we, teachers, are supposed to be tasked with teaching "responsible AI use"? Fuck off.

The problem with idea is that it will get a lot of good submissions, published really good things, and will be read and assigned much more widely than 95%of stuff published in your run-of-the-mill, for-profit philosophy journal. And this means it will never get done.

In 25 years the US will look to the world like a technological backwater l, in their big loud trucks and smokestack power plants while everywhere else will have cheap solar electric economies and $10k cars that make no noise.

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.