Truly one of the greatest films ever made.

“Balls and strikes” shrieked the Harvard law professor as masked soldiers roamed the streets rounding up people for speaking Spanish too publicly.

For a decade Trump has talked about asylum seekers as if they were inhabitants of mental asylums and not a single journalist has asked him on the record on video why he believes such a patently stupid thing.

Happy Feast of Opinion to all who celebrate

This essay fills a gap in the one I wrote about angels and AI last year, and is also my response to the increasingly shrill (and somehow simultaneously boosterish) cries of worry about evil artificial super-intelligence from the Eliezer Yudkowsky’s of the world. Our real worries should be elsewhere.

I finally wrote about demons and AI: open.substack.com/pub/cultured...

Showing this to my students so they understand why I told them, on the first day of class, "Just say no to the bullshit machines".

Sometimes it's nice to remember that even Marcus Aurelius was like "you don't have to comment on everything bro"

It occurs to me that I’ve never seen a place selling Greek wraps that was called Gyro Worship.

Guys would rather spend six hours a day trying to turn back the clock than read Plato’s Symposium and turn themselves to begetting beauty in virtue and laws.

We're witnessing the most aggressive, fanatical crackdown on free speech in my lifetime. The speed and breadth of government censorship and private sector and nonprofit capitulation has been astonishing. As has the lack of urgency/silence from people who've long claimed to care about this stuff.

He also begins to misspell it a few lines down. Fatigue? Or perhaps simply a lack of skill reflected in the very need to practice in this way.

This *from last week* by Charlie Warzel is really good. Don’t fall for the shooter’s trap. There’s nothing there in his life history, most likely, other than memes and nihilism. I would like to print this out and mail it to everyone who works at WSJ…

Can someone show this to Jerusalem Demsas, please?

Immigrants are a social good, anti-immigrant propaganda is basically all lies, and any approach to the "problem" that doesn't start form those two points is worthless

This is an actual exchange from a VP who took an oath to defend the constitution and, as a citizen, is expected to abide by the law. May we one day have accountability for the grotesque lawlessness of this regime.

I guess I’m now a little sad that my book isn’t on libgen — indeed hadn’t yet been published when this piracy occurred — because I would take this money and throw a Dune / Butlerian Jihad themed party.

Conceding in advance to the argument that immigrants are economic leeches is ridiculous and will simply reinforce the mistaken views that the author hopes we will eventually overcome. This is what “policy” looks like when you do not have the faintest grasp on persuasion, the soul of politics.

Summer is, in one sense, over. (I’m now teaching again, so it certainly feels that way.) I wrote about travel, leisure, and attention for Cultured Opinion, and would love to hear what you think, looking back on any summer travel you yourself may have done: open.substack.com/pub/cultured...

This firefighter arrived in the US at age 4, has been here for 19 years, was on track to legal status, and was on a crew trying to contain a major blaze (in Washington state, vs Oregon, fwiw.) h/t @joshuajfriedman.com www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

The torrent of absolute rubbish this is going to release is likely beyond reckoning.

Genocidaires

What’s the proper diminutive of Bretbug? Bretbuglet, I suppose?

It would be so easy to just check the actual Latin verse by Algernon Sidney – it's "haec manus inimica tyrannis". The current motto quotes the second half of the passage, leaving these words out. This is also how people end up with linguistically absurd tattoos.

if you're not from or have never been to new york i cannot stress enough how normal the subway is 99% of the time. kids take it to school. everyone is basically chill. you learn to be in proximity with harmless weirdos or minor irritations pretty quick. for all its issues it's an incredible thing

RIP, Dame Stephanie. I had the honor of helping to commission a portrait of her — the first of a woman — to hang in the Hall of Balliol College, Oxford, to which she was a generous benefactor.

What is particularly breathtaking about the corruption of Eric Adams and so many of his cronies is that they do it for peanuts. They could just enjoy their sinecure city salaries — but they want petty cash under the table too!

It is so depressing that we are ruled by small-time crooks like these.

You can accept that Biden’s policies (other than not being an unpredictable maniac) had little to do with this outcome, but I also find it dispiriting that people deny the facts because 🤷 🥚.

Just-in-time (life) manufacturing process

Donald Trump’s ideal museum was nicely described back in the 1980s: m.youtube.com/watch?v=8JN1...

You want to know the truth about Q-Anon? Well, to really assess the two-source hypothesis for the synoptic gospels, we need to consider the relationship between orality and literacy in the 1st century context as well as reasons why Jerome might have omitted a written text of such importance from ,,,

Notable that AI tools could not even generate accurate meeting summaries beyond “a couple hundred words.” That’s useless for minutes. And for lit review they *completely* shit the bed. But these aren’t people’s favorite tasks & AI is way quicker, so many will keep using them, truth be damned.

I’m writing about this wonderful phenomenon of diaspora cuisine. My star example is Indo-Chinese Hakka cuisine, which I grew up eating at restaurants and at home. The dishes are basically Chinese but use Indian ingredients or spices. I recently enjoyed a couple such dishes at Simha in Providence RI.

Simple: Bela (Béla) is a Hungarian who sells insurance covfefe. His company is called Force Magyar.

Thinking about this motet and its remarkable history ended up intersecting with my start-of-semester ruminations about the decline of literacy: culturedopinion.substack.com/p/on-literacy

Artificial intelligence, all-natural stupidity.

I've said this before, but: We need a blue-state model of higher education that is not "treat it like a business" "focus on ROI for students" "collect credits in gen eds in high school so you can do important stuff as a college student" "means test everything"

Anyway, these coding assistants are probably fine for simple or cosmetic tasks: tweaking how your plotting function looks, making a website, etc. I am not convinced they will be ready for more any time soon. Giving up intellectual agency to a program is fundamentally problematic.

I organized a choral Compline service tonight that concluded with Jean Mouton’s beautiful Celeste Beneficium, a hymn to St Ann, mother of the Virgin Mary, and written for her namesake Anne of Brittany. Here’s a lovely contemplative rendering of it in live performance: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNoC...

The amazing is that you can *smell* it when you arrive in Kennett Square, PA. Oof.

Goorge W Bush

Didn’t want to believe this was true. It’s true.

A terrible anniversary. Eighty years since once of the worst war crimes ever committed.

We’d have to convince the poetasters first.

Hey y'all, I've launched a newsletter focused on culture and identity. I'll be writing about food, travel, music, religion, politics, and other topics, as I work toward my first trade book CULTURE AS CONVERSATION, to be published by Penguin Press in 2026. Subscribe here: culturedopinion.substack.com

In the past ten days, I have given a 90 minute lecture and run a 90 minute seminar following up on that lecture at a summer institute for graduate students and early career scholars; and, in another country, taught four sessions (of 2.5 hours each) of an intensive graduate seminar. I love teaching!

Whenever these LLM guys say they think AGI/artificial superintelligence is in the works it's like hearing someone say that their next toaster is going to break the land speed record