Thoughts unfit for contemporary survival
A newsletter about philosophy, ethics, science, and whatever else demands a second thought. Subscribe for free to read new posts — full archives are for paid members
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An interview from my archive with Gaia Vince, author of Nomad Century, on climate migration, artificial borders, and why cities are places of hope. But first, a blanket we all share, and what happens when everyone pulls it toward themselves.
We like to say we're all in the same boat. But who's at the helm, who decides the course, who rides in the hold? From Plato's ship of state to the Swiss «boat is full» and Hardin's lifeboat: what nautical metaphors show and hide about climate justice.
A ten-minute car ride, a twelve-year-old, and the problem of qualia: from Wittgenstein's beetle to Russian blues, a question with no answer, just a clearer one
Anthropic now marks everything Claude writes. But a positive match tells you a machine was involved, not what it did — and the harder question was never authorship. It's when to believe an answer, from a model or from anyone else.
Film festivals were invented as propaganda, not out of love for cinema. Ehsan Khoshbakht, curator of Locarno's retrospective on the Hollywood blacklist, on how a small lie becomes a spectacle — and why nobody involved was actually paranoid.
What happens to a man raised on excellence and merit when they stop being enough? Florin Șerban's film won the Golden Leopard at Locarno with a story about a father, a son, and a murder nobody wants to call one. We talked about tragedy without gods, and about what our times lack.
A review of Massimo Pigliucci's How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic: an excellent introduction to Cicero and skeptical Stoicism, with some pushback on where 'human nature' falls short as an ethical foundation.
Technolibertarians want to plug cords into your brain. Christian nationalists want to build a kingdom for Christ. They don't match — and yet, as Erik Davis explains, they are fusing. A conversation about gnosticism, Musk, Thiel, Mars, and the fear of dying.
Everyone agrees the heatwave deaths were preventable. The disagreement is over how: air conditioning, greener cities, emergency plans, or cutting emissions. The answer is all of them. The trap is letting the emergency crowd out the work that determines whether future summers are survivable.
Should you pay people to get vaccinated? Can organ markets be ethical? Is there a drug that could make us morally better? Julian Savulescu doesn't ask these questions to provoke. He asks them because he thinks the answers matter — and because most people are too uncomfortable to try.
