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.

Learning to hate polyester. My gym clothes eternally stink, requiring vinegar soakings. It accounts for 35% of microplastic pollution because you launder it and the fibers just wash into the ocean and never break down.

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...

Watching Pat Rafter and Lleyton Hewitt play doubles against Roger Federer and Andre Agassi. Roger looks like he could still be on tour, Andre is fit and trim. Pat and Lleyton make me feel better about letting myself go a bit.

Two books by philosophers came out this week that I think are contenders for the big prizes, Pulitzer, National Book Award, Critic’s Choice. This one is written by the most decorated literary philosopher living today, and I’m ecstatic to start digging in. bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

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/