Apparently 20/400 students in Contemporary Moral Issues believe it moraly okay to draw penises on your baby’s forehead with erasable marker when you take it to a walk, you know, for the laughs. Sometimes you just can’t make up any example that will yield universal agreement in such classes.

I wrote about what makes pop music sifferent from stand-up comedy and how to think about the pivot to shortform video in this moment of media production. open.substack.com/pub/hiphinat...

Aspire to be such that if the New York Times decides to review your book, they send the nonfiction book editor out to profile you instead. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/b...

Jerry Seinfeld once talked about a schema for a joke that only in-group people will get, but doesn't make in-group references. Let me see if it works. Two non-Chinese people are having dinner together. The first one says "I'll pay the check." The second one says, "Why thank you." Did it work?

"If a person is a threat, and you can completely avert the threat by taking one step to the right, or you can shoot the person in the head, you are morally obliged to take the step to the right." Some people reject this principle.

Digging out a parking space after a snowstorm, putting a sweater on a chair at Starbucks to save it. The informal practice of staking property claims and the egalitarian ideal. open.substack.com/pub/hiphinat...

With the precision of a philosopher and the geekiness of a game-lover, Thi Nguyen shows how gaming has quietly colonized the rest of our lives. Required reading for understanding how values are being redefined through metrics, rankings, and scoring. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/735252...

Trying to figure out what about the US makes its postwar leaders addicted to armed intervention in countries abroad. Is it the public? The foreign policy think tanks? Elite media? Like would the public ever have punished presidents for NOT intervening in Kosovo or Venezuela or Iraq?

The wealth tax is antiquated and game-able. A better idea is that, after a certain value of unrealized gain is reached, the government takes a % ownership stake. Then it owns % of unrealized gain, and that affects how the wealthy can finance as well as gives the govt financing options.

There are words we write a lot but hardly ever say. "Eschews," "therefore," "hence," "nonetheless," and "aforementioned" are examples. Editors take our lack of saying them to be reason not to write them. Orators take their effective use in writing to be reason to say them more. I like the 2nd view.

Pitch: A remake of Dead Poet’s Society for the 2020s, only it’s careerist kids who keep shitting on poetry and drama, and the parents are trying to get them to open up to the importance of the liberal arts. In the third act, the teachers kill themselves after having to read 100 AI-generated poems.

A Man on the Inside Season 2 is a more realistic portrayal of higher ed than The Chair ever was.

George Bailey is no older than 40 at the end of the movie, which means “old maid”Mary would have been in her mid-30s when she was closing down the library.

Final chapter this week. Due date December 31st. Supposed to be 70,000 words. Home stretch.

If I wanted to present to a big funder the ten most interesting, outstanding problems in philosophy, across a variety of subfields, that we in the field want to see progress toward solving in the next ten years, what would your problem be, or who in the field would come up with a good list?

More shout outs tho! @mainomenous.bsky.social, @hiphination.bsky.social, @sportscritcutie.bsky.social, @calpolypomona.bsky.social, plus lots more folks who don't have bsky accounts (yet) and who I'll shout more in future posts... In the meantime, peep our YouTube! www.youtube.com/@DigitalHuma...

Junior: No one knows who these old singers are dad! Friends, it was Dionne Warwick. And Johnny Cash.

The American experiment has culminated in the monetization of everything. Education is an investment with a return. Writing is about growth and conversion. Talking to your children and partner is uncompensated labor. You’d think Americans were the poorest people in the history of the planet.

Please don’t knock these numbers folks. There may be a philosopher no one knows about who sold that many copies in week 1, so you’re just insulting him too.

Times New Roman sucks. Garamond 4 Life.

American Canto...-nese man invites philosophers to apply to become the next great public intellectual. $1500, full room and board, and a three day workshop in essay writing, trade book proposal selling, and podcast production, in Tarrytown NY June 2026. marcsandersfoundation.org/philosophy-i...

Who needs the New Yorker or the New York Times, I’m long-listed for the NonObvious Book Award. Now that’s punk rock! www.nonobviousbookawards.com/2025/

So great to see philosophy friend and @wwnorton.com -mate @jeffsebo.bsky.social on the list of 2025 best books from the New Yorker!

Journalists are being replaced by content creators like the Ship of Theseus, one plank at a time, gradually enough that even the editors don’t know it.

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book? It took me years to write, will you take a look? It’s based on reporting by a man named Lam And I need a job so I want to be a paperback writer. bookshop.org/p/books/fewe...

Now that Timothy Williamson’s Tetralogue is turning into a feature film, I’d like to lobby all of my peers to revive philosophical dialogue writing as a reputable research as well as non-fiction genre. It is one of the lost arts distinctive of our field.

City College New York uploaded my lecture from Thursday. I don't think I've ever watched an entire one of my own lectures, so I can't say I recommend it, but if you're interested. philosophydayatccny.org/videos/

Look at the faculty list of City College New York Philosophy in 1959. What a privilege it was to give a talk here on Thursday.

It was already widely reported that RFK Jr. didn’t believe in the germ theory of disease, but now we know he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is.

Really jarring watching Marge explaining her millennial 90s high school fashion trends to Lisa. The writers need to really figure out this non-aging plotline because the logical conclusion is Marge and Homer explaining what it was like going to high school during the pandemic.

Join us in person or on Zoom on Thursday 12/4 as we host @hiphination.bsky.social for 2 back-to-back events! 1) Humanities Podcasting hiphination.org 2) Delegating Decisions to Machines? The Case for Human Discretion dhc-lam.eventbrite.com

Man, the cultural aristocracy is even more cringe than the moneyed one. (This is a Nuzzi sub-skeet).

Me: Generative AI is technological pollution. It is a rotting carcass on top of an already enshittified internet. Internet: Here’s Vin Scully calling the bottom of the 11th inning of Game 7, World Series 2025. Me: 🥹…😭.

New York City, come see me give the keynote at World Philosophy Day at City College New York, Finding Philosophical Conflicts in the Real World, a love letter to philosophical journalism. Next Thursday Nov. 20th at 6pm. www.ccny.cuny.edu/calendar/ann...

Consciousness is overrated. I’m conscious, and I can’t do multiple layers of matrix multiplication. I couldn’t even remember the mineral water I’ve ordered 30 times in the past. Was in Tampico? Pico de Gallo? Consciousness is the precondition for preferring to be unconscious.

What is the tax rate at which billionaires won’t leave the city and also would pay rather than move money around so as to avoid the taxes?

Hey @mixedlinguist.bsky.social, I just heard an exchange whereby someone "goes to the gym" even if they never work out at the gym. As in "hey Jimmy, you look like you go to the gym." Jimmy, who works out at home says: "I do." What's this called? Idiom, euphemism? Seems more interesting than that.

Bay Area peeps! See you at 2pm today (11/2), Book Passage in the Ferry Bldg! If you can't make it today, come find me at Stanford's "Philosophers for a Brighter World" working group tomorrow at 4! @mitpress.bsky.social @michaelbrownstein.bsky.social @dryan149.bsky.social #booksky #socialchange

All of you trying to shame us Angelinos on social justice grounds, I get it. No one likes the moneyed Goliath. But, I mean, know your baseball history a little.

Look if we’re allowed to fantasize about the storybook ending, Ohtani for the go ahead, Kershaw for the save.

it’s like the baseball gods wanted to manufacture the most dramatic end to this series.

I can’t believe it, the great Rebecca Goldstein is now on Substack! Everyone go read and subscribe now! The Mattering Map rebeccanewbergergoldstein.substack.com?r=i44h&utm_c...

Rojas the hero tonight. Dodgers can’t win tomorrow unless they pick it up on offense, but it’s one game, anything can happen. Hell of a series.

Looking forward to all of the think pieces about how to understand the Mamdani voter, why unreasonable demands of orthodox thinking drove voters to Mamdani, and why we need to tone down the rhetoric so as not to alienate Mamdani voters.

Every nutrition/wellness piece I've read in the NYTimes in the past 20 years: "Is (tumeric/green tea/protein/crossfit/seed oil) really good/bad for you?" There is theory to support the claim, not enough experimental data, experts recommend moderation/reversion to received wisdom.

My unpopular view that everyone I know, including my spouse, disagrees with me strongly about is that we coddle our children more this generation of parenting because we love them more than our parents loved us. They figured; eh, if they're kidnapped while out 9am-7pm, I'll just have another one.

It's pub day (birthday 0?) for Writing Through Writer's Block: Lessons from Modern American Fiction! This is a study of how authors have used the archetype of the blocked writer to identify, analyze, and ultimately work through both internal and external constraints on their creative abilities.

From far away, this looked like another Luigi’s arcade.

This Halloween, my family decided to dress up together as a theme. I was thinking Regressive U.S. Tax Policies. I'll be the Carried Interest Loophole, wife will be the Estate Tax Exemption, and my kid will be the scariest, the Step-up in Basis.

Shohei Ohtani is one good thing about living in the 20s. Matcha and Dubai chocolate are two bad things about it.