How Do You Know Your Red Is the Same as Mine?
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
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Latest posts
An AI Watermark Won't Tell You What to Trust
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.
Nobody Was Really Paranoid — Hollywood, the Blacklist, and the Machinery of Fear
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.
In Greek Tragedy We Have the Gods. Now We Have Society — A Conversation with Director Florin Șerban
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.
Cicero, Skepticism, and the Limits of Human Nature
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.
Everything the Engineers Build, a Heretic Dreamed First — An Interview With Eric Davis
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.
How to Boil a Continent
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.
Ethics Is Not a Feeling — An Interview With Julian Savulescu
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.
A Terrific Encyclical Letter — The Most Widely Read AI Text of the Year
Leo XIV's encyclical on AI skips the two great distractions — the conscious machine and the apocalypse — and focuses on the slow, unglamorous damage to information, work, and freedom happening right now.
The Doctor Who Decided Suffering Was Not Part of the Deal — An Interview With Karin Jordan
Karin Jordan has spent decades arguing that managing suffering isn't a soft add-on to cancer treatment — it's the whole point. A conversation about war metaphors, invisible medicine, and why "fighting cancer" may be doing patients a disservice.