Very excited about the sporting event that is currently ongoing: England’s Test match against New Zealand. 🏏

Ted Chiang on AI: www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...

My crankiest old man take is that referring to all art/entertainment/journalism/criticism/comedy/advertising as “content” helped pave the way for broad-ish acceptance of AI slop.

I'm excited to announce that today we have filed to take Magic Beans, Inc. public. This is an important milestone for our team, our investors, and our customers. We expect to list in the coming weeks, hopefully before the general public discovers the Terrible True Cost of our beans.

Two ways in which DC is clearl superior to New York: (1) Ethiopian food everywhere (and I didn’t even get to have any this trip); and (2) all door boarding on buses.

From this month’s Harper’s Index.

I know these images are often auto-generated, but it's unfortunate that the news update says three Indian-American spellers are left but has a picture of a blond kid named Logan who is not one of them. This is one *wholesome* part of American public life where Indian-Americans are very prominent.

Nor me!

I resisted the urge to pontificate about Magnifica Humanitas and wrote an essay about Hannah Arendt, Plato, Aristotle, and the examined life instead: culturedopinion.substack.com/p/on-the-exa...

The basic message of Pope Leo's new encyclical Magnifica Humanitas is summed up in a remark in it that he highlighted at the promulgation event: "AI must be disarmed".

Pope Leo: "I've heard the silence of those who have no voice when decisions are made [...] Artificial Intelligence needs to be disarmed." www.vatican.va/content/leo-...

I don’t see it anywhere on my feed so I am delighted to tell you that MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS, Pope Leo’s encyclical on staying human in the face of AI, has been published! www.vatican.va/content/leo-...

Okay, so I haven't gotten any sleep on my overnight flight to Prague, but I have now pared my lingering work tasks list all the way down to zero. No dissertations to read, no exams to grade. All I have left is: write a book proposal for my next book and then start writing that book.

Mamdani: I cannot help but think of the words of our 40th president, Ronald Reagan. He famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the govt & I'm here to help'" I think nine more terrifying words are actually, "I worked all day and can't feed my family"

At first I was completely at a loss

Abolish ICE.

UP DOWN TOP BOTTOM CHARM STRANGE

No one who uses the phrase "Thucydides trap" earnestly has ever actually read the History of the Peloponnesian War.

Current feeling

this truly is the thing that makes the united states exceptional, and right wingers hate it so much they want to destroy it

New idea to deal with the epidemic of people blasting nonsense from their phones on the subway: Handing out cards that encourage people to turn the sound off and be mindful of others; on the reverse, a QR code that functions as a raffle ticket for Bluetooth headphones.

personally I think it's a very big deal that the Canada bureau chief for the @nytimes.com — certainly one of the highest-paid journalists in the country — asked an unspecified "AI tool" what Poilievre said & published its AI-hallucinated quotes in her reporting.

“Balls and strikes” said John Roberts somberly, sitting atop the moldering ruins of the Republic.

There is no NYC without unions. A people united and organized cannot be defeated. Together, we're showing the world what solidarity means.

Mine too (as a member of a recognized union, anyway)! Happy May Day!

What a day to be teaching King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in my political philosophy class. I was already planning to explain how those protests in Birmingham and others like them led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. I didn’t realize how relevant it would be.

Please ask that Janno Lieber and the MTA moves ahead with all-door boarding for local buses. We now have mobile fare enforcement. OMNY readers are at the back door of every bus already. Let’s switch them on!

Embarrassingly, it’s “embarrass” and all its cognates. I don’t think I misspell any other word regularly.

I spent my first two nights in America in Wylie, just to the East and not unlike what is being described here. It’s a monstrous place, inhospitable to the social form of human life.

On Twitter I once shared that transport accounts for only 3-6% of food-related emissions, and the vast bulk of food emissions are from land use & ag production, and WHAT (eg beef) matters way more than WHERE. I woke up to hundreds of angry responses from people in the UK who produce or eat meat.

Good. Distracted driving is deeply antisocial and if new tech helps us prevent it, good.

I quit biking after the pandemic: too many close shaves. I was almost run over in front of Lincoln Center on Thursday by a driver who was looking at his phone while he tailed an ambulance closely. I caught up to him at the next block (lo, Manhattan driving speeds..) and told him. He looked shocked.

If we’re doing nuclear airport takes: if you’re going there for less than six months, you’re not going to be doing anything requiring specialized equipment, and you’re not going to an extremely austere or remote place, which is >90% of most people’s travel, checking baggage is a skill issue.

Following the news these days

In the past few weeks I've had remarkable amount of engagement with my book Aristotle's Practical Epistemology. There was a panel at the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, sadly held on Zoom, but with two excellent commentators. Two new reviews are also out in NDPR and Mind!

personally I agree that we should indeed reject the hollow pluralism of pretending that we shouldn't judge Klan, Nazi, and sparkling eugenicist subcultures according to what they have historically produced, and would enthusiastically endorse rejecting inclusion of them in public life

I’ve given two of the three talks I am due to give in a 26-hour span (beginning 2pm today and running to 4pm tomorrow). Brain is mush. But it was great fun to discuss ancient philosophy and AI this afternoon at Hunter College and Pyrrhonian skepticism this evening at the Morningside Institute.

Widespread unresolved collective trauma (plague, insurrection, war) combined with a toxic information environment.

Luxury goods, for example, are both more expensive—their prices have far outpaced general inflation—and much more broadly marketed than they were 20 years ago. If you get sucked into the wrong algorithmic feed, it can feel like you’re the only person without whatever fancy thing it is you desire

Ground Control to Magyar Tamás: you're on your course, direction's a smash.

It’s almost like WE ALL SAID THIS WOULD HAPPEN fortune.com/2026/04/10/a...

It is absolutely possible to live outside the algorithmic world. Read books. Have dinner parties. Enjoy the natural world. It matters a lot less what other people are doing if you can't see it online.

Okay CTA. This is a good sign.

Absolutely remarkable statement from Pope Leo today. One for the history books www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

What do you mean the rules of society don't apply because it's a dog!? www.curbed.com/article/dogs...

BREAKING: Following the American threat of an “Avignon Papacy,” Robert Kennedy has begun a Diet of Worms

Excellent image. It’s easy enough to see these heads as masks, but a subtle interpreter will recognize the depiction of Altman as the ten-headed Ravana, the diabolical antagonist of the Ramayana.

E la chiamano vittoria... Per chi? La risposta è semplice #criminalidiguerra