# The Late Thinker > Philosophy, science, cinema & society explored by an unfitted mind. A newsletter for readers who prefer thinking to taking sides Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### The Author, or Who Is Ivo Silvestro URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/the-author/ Last updated: 2025-12-02T13:31:40.000Z My name is Ivo Silvestro and I am – not necessarily in this order – a husband and father, a journalist, a teacher, and a philosopher. Mainly, I like thinking and writing things that help me think better. For those who are interested in more details, I was born in 1978 in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. I studied philosophy at the University of Milan: a degree in theoretical philosophy, with a thesis on "seeing as" in Wittgenstein, and a PhD in philosophy of law with a dissertation on the role of conceptual metaphors in the debate on gene patents. About 20 years ago I started writing professionally and I'm now a scientific and cultural journalist at a Swiss local newspaper ([*laRegione*](https://www.laregione.ch/?ref=thelatethinker.com)). I'm also a lecturer at the [Università della Svizzera italiana](https://www.usi.ch/?ref=thelatethinker.com), where I try to teach second-year students how to write. I read widely, watch films, eat ice cream and drink tea (both in any season). I'm not very active on social media, but at least I have a presence, so here are some links: [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivosilvestro/?ref=thelatethinker.com), [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/ivosilvestro), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/ivosilvestro/?ref=thelatethinker.com), [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/ivosilvestro.bsky.social?ref=thelatethinker.com). ### The Late Thinker's Manifesto URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/the-late-thinkers-manifesto/ Last updated: 2026-06-15T17:44:05.000Z Welcome to my newsletter about philosophy, science, cinema, technology, politics, society, and everything that captures my curiosity and desire to know. *The Late Thinker* is the English version of my Italian [blog](https://www.lestinto.ch/?ref=thelatethinker.com) and [newsletter](https://lestinto.substack.com/) *L'estinto*, which I've been writing since 2005\. Both publications share the same aim: to be space of reflection where we wrestle with ideas, not with the people who bear them. ## Ok, but why *The Late Thinker*? The original project in Italian was called something like *The Extinct One*, but I don't like the English sound of a direct translation. So I searched for something similar and came to *The Late Thinker*, pointing to the ambiguity of "late" which means "not on time" but also "dead". I identify myself as a late thinker not (only) because I'm lazy and often behind schedule. The idea is that what (and how) I think is out of time or, borrowing an evolutionary framework, unfit for the contemporary intellectual environment. Like the dodo that serves as this newsletter's mascot and logo, certain approaches to thinking have become beautifully maladapted to their environment. Evolutionarily speaking, if an organism is unfit it goes extinct (that's the original Italian title of this project) or it needs to construct a niche. This newsletter is exactly this: a niche protected from a hostile environment where intellectual confrontation aims to defeat opponents and gain status from allies, not to clarify (or maybe change) our opinions. ## Ok, but what are you writing about? This newsletter hasn't a specific or well-defined focus, such as the ethics of climate change, philosophical implications of artificial intelligence, the values of Enlightenment, how to dismantle cultural wars, or comments on recent scientific achievements. But I can write on all of these topics and many others. The aim of this newsletter is to explore the ideas that challenge my mind, mostly about philosophy, science, culture, technology, politics, and society. What I hope is to prioritize understanding over judgment, resisting the contemporary demand for immediate opinions. I don't want to argue in order to win debates or gain approval from ideological allies. I want to argue in order to better understand the world – and maybe, in the process, change my own mind. ### **A Note on Language an AI** English isn't my mother tongue, so I use an AI assistant ([Claude](https://www.anthropic.com/claude?ref=thelatethinker.com)) to refine my writing and ensure clarity. I'm quite sure that even powerful artificial intelligence cannot eliminate all awkwardness in expression, so I apologize in advance and ask for your understanding. Please feel free to write and point out any errors. More info in the [AI policy page](https://www.thelatethinker.com/p-i-make-wide-use-of-llms-and-generative-ai-for-this-newsletter-but-everything-you-read-here-is-crafted-by-my-mind-and-reflects-what-i-think-for-transparency-i-believe-its-better-to-pro/). ### AI Policy, or How I Use Generative AI URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/p-i-make-wide-use-of-llms-and-generative-ai-for-this-newsletter-but-everything-you-read-here-is-crafted-by-my-mind-and-reflects-what-i-think-for-transparency-i-believe-its-better-to-pro/ Last updated: 2025-12-02T13:30:52.000Z I make wide use of LLMs and generative AI for this newsletter – but everything you read here is crafted by my mind and reflects what I think. For transparency, I believe it's better to provide a list of what I do with AI (and also what I refuse to do). ### **What AI do I use?** - [NotebookLM](https://notebooklm.google.com/?ref=thelatethinker.com) – for information retrieval in large documents, audio or video, and transcripts of audio files such as interviews - [Claude](https://claude.ai/?ref=thelatethinker.com) – for more intensive tasks (see next section for details) - [Perplexity](https://www.perplexity.ai/?ref=thelatethinker.com) – for research - [ChatGPT](https://chatgpt.com/?ref=thelatethinker.com) and [Google Gemini](https://gemini.google.com/?ref=thelatethinker.com) – for easy tasks like thesaurus, reformulating phrases, etc. ### **How do I use them?** - Better understand what I think through meaningful questions posed by AI - Provide summaries of documents that I have read - Find information in books or other materials - Transcribe interviews and conversations - Proofreading (English is not my primary language!) - Improve text with suggestions: alternative phrasings, better word choices, clearer sentence structures, and style refinements - Tagging, excerpts - Translating ### **How I don't use AIs:** - Produce more text: I invest in quality, not quantity and I don't want to improve the [enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification?ref=thelatethinker.com) of the web with more [AI alop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI%5Fslop?ref=thelatethinker.com) - Write entire articles from scratch - Publish text without supervision - Bypass fact-checking In short, AI is an assistant and, in rare cases, a co-creator – but even in these situations I remain the principal author. ## Posts ### An AI Watermark Won't Tell You What to Trust URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/an-ai-watermark-wont-tell-you-what-to-trust/ Last updated: 2026-09-07T07:39:00.000Z 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. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Nobody Was Really Paranoid — Hollywood, the Blacklist, and the Machinery of Fear URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/nobody-was-really-paranoid-hollywood-the-blacklist-and-the-machinery-of-fear/ Last updated: 2026-08-25T19:57:11.000Z Another newsletter from the Locarno Film Festival. August, for me, is a month devoted to cinema. But this second Locarno newsletter [isn't about the Pardo d'oro winner Florin Șerban](https://www.thelatethinker.com/in-greek-tragedy-we-have-the-gods-now-we-have-society-a-conversation-with-director-florin-serban/). It's about the political weight of cinema—with an interview with Ehsan Khoshbakht, curator of this year's retrospective: [*Red & Black: Hollywood Left and the Blacklist*](https://www.locarnofestival.ch/festival/film-sections/retrospettiva/retrospettiva79.html?ref=thelatethinker.com). Politics is a powerful lens through which to read cinema in general, and film festivals in particular. The idea of a film festival wasn't born out of love for cinema as an art form. It was born as political propaganda. The first film festival in the world opened in Venice in 1932, and it was an instrument of Fascist cultural policy, with a side benefit for the hotels—tourism is still a main force behind festivals, only now propaganda has been replaced by diplomacy. In 1938 the main prizes, both named "Coppa Mussolini," went to [*Luciano Serra, Pilot*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luciano%5FSerra%2C%5FPilot?ref=thelatethinker.com), an Italian war film produced under the supervision of Mussolini's son, and to [*Olympia*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia%5F%281938%5Ffilm%29?ref=thelatethinker.com), Leni Riefenstahl's documentary on the 1936 Berlin Olympics, made in association with the Nazi propaganda ministry—a masterpiece of cinema, but also an apologia for Nazi values. The French delegation walked out and started planning a rival event in Cannes, conceived as the democratic answer to a festival with a clear totalitarian aim (the jury's decisions are widely suspected of having been directly influenced by the Duce and the Führer). The war postponed this new festival, and Cannes finally opened in 1946—the same year Venice returned, in a liberated Italy. Karlovy Vary, in what was then Czechoslovakia, began that year too, and would become the socialist bloc's shop window. But the most explicitly political festival was Berlin, which came in 1951, launched with American backing near the Soviet sector to show East Germany how wonderful the American way of life was. Locarno's first steps follow the Venetian track—a story reconstructed by the historian Cyril Cordoba in [*Désaccords à Locarno*](https://www.alphil.com/livres/1520-desaccords-a-locarno-.html?ref=thelatethinker.com), a political history of the festival from 1946 to 1991, on which I rely for what follows. In September 1941 a festival of Italian films opened in Lugano, picking up the Venice selection, run by a distributor the federal police would later file as a fascist sympathizer. The tone faded in 1944, but in 1946 the event was given up because the townspeople voted down the open-air arena planned in the lakeside park, and without a venue the organizers handed it to Locarno. Here a tourist board improvised a festival in a few weeks, with the aim of stretching the tourist season into late August. Like Venice and Cannes, the first Locarno Film Festival stood for the reconstruction of Europe and the reconciliation of peoples. But the paths of Venice and Locarno would separate very soon. Locarno faced the highly cartelized film distribution system present in Switzerland and the lack of support by a Swiss government that didn't want to upset other countries by giving the impression it was trying to compete with their festivals. So Locarno couldn't invite foreign producers through diplomatic channels, and it had no official competition, which the Swiss distributors and exhibitors didn't want anyway. Both gaps counted against it when the FIAPF, the international federation that ranked festivals, came to judge. In 1954 the federation put Cannes and Venice at the top, Berlin and San Sebastián just below, and relegated Locarno to the bottom category, the one reserved for festivals of merely national scope. And when the Swiss importers quarreled with international producers over rental prices, the producers boycotted Locarno: Hollywood, which had supplied about a fifth of the program in the festival's early years, largely stopped sending anything worth showing. The 1956 edition was canceled and, in order to continue, Locarno turned to the films it could actually get, which came from the other side of the Iron Curtain. We can read this repositioning in two ways. Locarno as a place of freedom, where in neutral Switzerland you can watch movies that for political reasons are not distributed in the West. Or Locarno as a place where cinephiles were blind to the propaganda risks of eastern cinema. That second reading is the interpretation of the German-speaking Swiss press, which began accusing the festival of having been sold to the East and threatened a campaign against it. The campaign worked: in 1960 the jury, unanimous in favor of a Soviet film—[*Foma Gordeev*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foma%5FGordeyev%5F%28film%29?ref=thelatethinker.com) by Mark Donskoy—was "convinced" to award it only the Silver Sail instead of the Golden Sail. The film found no Swiss distributor until 1965. The critics' frame was simple: eastern films were mainly ideology and only secondarily art, while western films were cinema driven by artistic intentions or by commercial evaluations, but in any case not propaganda. That assumption was naive, and the retrospective of this year's Locarno Film Festival shows how problematic it was: politics was a main ingredient in both western and eastern cinema, but with different flavors. After the war, both cinemas were pushed by state policy. For western countries the policy changed once the war was over, because the Soviets were no longer a useful ally against Germany. So in 1943 Hollywood made [*The North Star*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FNorth%5FStar%5F%281943%5Ffilm%29?ref=thelatethinker.com), a film sympathetic to the Soviet ally, encouraged by the Roosevelt administration—and a few years later that same film had become a problem. The American embassy in Tehran asked a local cinema to drop its *North Star* retrospective and screen something with a less dated message instead. In the East, cinema had to hold the line of communism and Soviet values. In the West, after the war, films had to be a shop window for the magnificence of the free market economy. And this was a problem for the many progressive impulses that wanted to improve American society—because if you need to improve something, it means there are flaws. And admitting those flaws was collaboration with the Soviet enemy. The instrument of this offensive was the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which in October 1947 summoned a group of Hollywood writers and directors to Washington and asked them whether they were or had ever been members of the Communist Party. Ten of them refused to answer. They were convicted of contempt of Congress and went to prison, and they have been known ever since as the Hollywood Ten. Within weeks the studio heads met at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and announced they would not employ them, or anyone else who refused to answer. That announcement is where the blacklist begins—a blacklist that was never a written document. Writers kept working under pen names, or through colleagues who agreed to sign scripts they hadn't written. Some of the films in the Locarno retrospective have only recently had the right name restored to their credits. What follows is my conversation with Ehsan Khoshbakht. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### In Greek Tragedy We Have the Gods. Now We Have Society — A Conversation with Director Florin Șerban URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/in-greek-tragedy-we-have-the-gods-now-we-have-society-a-conversation-with-director-florin-serban/ Last updated: 2026-08-16T11:14:22.000Z I've spent the past eleven days at the Locarno Film Festival watching films—some entertaining and amusing, others profound and challenging, and of course a few terrible ones I hope to forget—meeting people, attending social events, and so on. On Saturday I had the opportunity to spend a few minutes with Florin Șerban, the Romanian director of the film that won the main competition's top prize, the Pardo d'oro (Golden Leopard). His *Nu e locul tău aici* (*You Don't Belong Here*) sits squarely in the profound and challenging category. It's the story of Marius Călimănescu (Adrian Văncică), the chief medical officer of a hospital in a small Romanian town, a man raised in the post-communist era and committed to the values of a society built on excellence and merit. A widower, he lives alone with his son Ioan (Teodor Butănescu, who received a special mention for his performance). Ioan is his opposite: lazy, apathetic, without ambition. At night Ioan cycles through town with a gang of masked far-right vigilantes, and during one of their expeditions the group beats an old Roma man to death. When the police begin to suspect his son and the group plans to get the boy out of the country, Marius has to work out what to do to help him, what his wife would have done, and whether he bears some responsibility for what happened. Here is our conversation. **Florin Șerban, congratulations on the prize. Let me start with the directing style of the film. I found it very theatrical: long shots, very static. Why did you choose this style, and how do you think it serves the story you wanted to tell?** I really don't think I have a style. My visual style and directorial style, if you want, change from one movie to another. If you see my previous movies, they are very different one from another, and I take pride in thinking that I adapt to the story. I don't adapt the stories to my style. So I think this was the right style for this movie, to let you have like a peek into the life of these people, and to engage you in a very—how should I say—humbling way. It's like I'm talking to the spectator and telling him: I really believe that you're going to stay, and you don't need me to grab you by the neck with fast cuts and make you go "Okay, look here! Look here! Look here! And now you look here! And now you stop! And now you breathe! And now listen to the music, because something bad is going to happen." So I invest a lot in this relationship with the spectator, because the things I'm saying are very soft, are very discreet, and they require a certain patience from the viewer. I think the movie itself selects its viewers. That's why the premieres—and this premiere especially—are very taxing for me. I know that for the first hour and 12 or 15 minutes I might lose the spectator (*Editor's note: the film runs 154 minutes, so this is roughly the halfway mark*). But then, if he sticks around, he's going to be happy. He's going to enjoy it, and he's going to be rewarded, you know? _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Cicero, Skepticism, and the Limits of Human Nature URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/cicero-skepticism-and-the-limits-of-human-nature/ Last updated: 2026-09-07T07:39:34.000Z I have been following Massimo Pigliucci's work for a long time and I consider his thoughts very valuable. Indeed, we share the same interests and the same approach: philosophy, science, and rationality with a non-dogmatic flavour. What differs is the role (not necessarily the commitment): he's a professor and writes books; I am "only" a journalist and a newsletter author, which means I write short and trivial articles — sometimes, like this one, about his work. What also differs is the order in which we came to those interests. I started out studying philosophy and moved later toward science, ending up as a science journalist. He started out as an evolutionary biologist and became a philosopher afterwards. Then, in 2017, he published *How to Be a Stoic*, and he surprised me. Philosophy, as I had learned it, was an academic discipline — or, more accurately, a bundle of academic disciplines. It was not something a layperson could go to in order to find out how to improve their life. That book showed me that I was wrong. So I settled into a division that seemed clean enough. There is a philosophy that analyzes and challenges our concepts and our thinking — and asks questions like what knowledge is and how we might get it — and does so as a specific and sophisticated discipline. And there is a philosophy that helps you live. Two different creatures with a common ancestor and some traits in common, but that live in different territories. Now he has proved me wrong a second time. *How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic* takes an epistemological tradition and shows its relevance for a philosophy of life. Because Stoicism is a "complete" system, with physics, logic, and ethics — but the most relevant part (at least for us, but also in the Hellenistic period) is the ethics. Skepticism is the other way around: the core is the logic, i.e. the answers to the questions of how I must think and what I can know. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/77/7a/777a3281-8a7b-4a01-8605-fccfa3dca1d1/content/images/2026/07/Separatore_mini.png) First of all, some housekeeping on the terminology, because the modern meaning of "skepticism" is quite different from the ancient one, and quite derogatory. Today a skeptic is someone who simply doesn't believe: the climate skeptic doesn't believe in human-made global warming despite scientific evidence, the vaccine skeptic doesn't believe in the effectiveness of vaccines, again despite scientific evidence, and so on. But the Greek *skeptikos* meant inquirer. A skeptic was not someone who had decided in advance to withhold assent, but someone who kept looking, on the assumption that the answers already in hand may be useful but are not the final ones. Pigliucci wants that word back, and he wants it for a specific reason. He had practiced and recommended Stoicism, but as we said Stoicism is a system, and like any system it presents a risk. This risk is named by Simone de Beauvoir in her memoirs, in a passage Pigliucci quotes: that from a philosophical system people derive an obsessional attitude, endowing their provisional patterns with universal reach. The risk is to stop asking whether it is right. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Everything the Engineers Build, a Heretic Dreamed First — An Interview With Eric Davis URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/everything-the-engineers-build-a-heretic-dreamed-first-an-interview-with-eric-davis/ Last updated: 2026-09-07T07:39:24.000Z Erik Davis wrote *TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information* in 1998, and I interviewed him in the spring of 2025, a bit more than a year ago. But editing the full version of the long conversation we had, the interview feels further away in time than the book. AI was less scary than it is today, Elon Musk had not yet become the first trillionaire in history, and thinking about everything that has happened in those sixteen months gives me a little vertigo. The 1998 of his book, on the other hand, feels far more familiar. Yes, as he pointed out during our conversation, he missed smartphones and social media—he didn't anticipate them, and he says so himself. But he did highlight an aspect that is still routinely overlooked: technology is never only a technical question. It is fully entrenched in human aspirations, fears, myths, dreams of salvation and of damnation. In order to understand the role of some cutting-edge technologies in our lives and our society, we need to consider all these aspects and put these novelties in the right perspective. How far back does that perspective go? Davis looks at ancient Gnosticism, the movements of the first Christian centuries that saw salvation in a secret spiritual knowledge about the true nature of the world — a world that, together with our body, is a trap. There is a problem, of course: if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. A theory this powerful risks ceasing to be useful, because once you know what to look for, you find traces of gnosis everywhere — and gnosis is not the only possible interpretation. But it is interesting that we can find these traces at all: that the most rational, most secular, most engineering-minded project of our time keeps rhyming with a second-century heresy. What follows is the full transcription of the conversation, with minor editing. If you are interested in the work of Erik Davis, you can read him directly in his newsletter, [*Burning Shore*](https://www.burningshore.com/?ref=thelatethinker.com). **What do you mean by “Techgnosis”? We usually think of technology as something very rational, very technical — a very different means than spirituality. So where does this idea come from?** Well, it was definitely a provocative term, and it was a way of arguing, just with the title of my book, my main thesis: despite the fact that technology, and particularly media technology, which is what I was focusing on, are products of reason and a modern mindframe based on progress and development and industrial application and markets and capitalism — despite this, from a number of angles you could see the way that technologies are imagined, the way that they function, and the way that they offer what you could call ideologies, or ways of understanding the world, that have to be seen in relationship with the much longer history of religion, of mythology, and of a kind of esoteric or magical mysticism. So that was the big project. The word “Techgnosis” is a kind of provocative term to say: hey, we think we’re dealing with reason and science and capitalism and markets alone, but actually we’re still on the field of wrestling with these deeper, older, and more ambiguous kinds of questions. And I also had a specific argument embedded in the same title about gnosticism proper. And while gnosticism is a big term — you can think about it in many different ways, and scholars argue about whether it’s even a valid term, at least historically — it’s played an enormously important role both in Christianity and in modern esoteric and mystical thought and modern Christian thought. So it has a wide range of meanings, but some associations with gnosis I wanted to suggest are being picked up and transformed by technology, particularly digital technology — in particular the association that not all gnostics, but many gnostics, have with a kind of radical dualism about the world: the world was fallen, the world was a trap, the world was not created by a benevolent deity but was actually a problem, a mistake, a prison, and that the work of the religious imagination is to escape. That escapist logic and that dualism about matter and spirit, I believe, gets reproduced quite obviously inside of technological culture. So even if they’re no longer using mystical terminology, they’re no longer thinking about the Pleroma (a term indicating the totality of divine powers — ed.), they’re no longer worried about how to interpret Genesis — the pattern is essentially the same. I wrote that before the *Matrix* movie came out. So when the first *Matrix* movie came out, I was like, yeah, that’s it. That’s what I mean. This is a model: you’re trapped in an illusion, you have to escape, all of the delusions of desire are bound up with this, and it’s all technologically generated, and we’re actually being abused, and so you need to wake up and red-pill and get out of the illusion. That’s a very gnostic mythos. And so what I was seeing were the ways in which modern technoculture was reproducing those same patterns. I wrote this book a quarter century ago now, and what’s kind of amazing, if not altogether pleasant, is that a lot of the things I talked about are even more visible now. They’re even more obvious. With the collapse of ideas of progress, with problems in the progressive ideas on the left, with a kind of reactionary and populist mood on the right — all bets are off now about your worldview — some of these patterns I identified decades ago are even more visible. They’re more visible with AI. They’re more visible with certain ideas of using technology to escape the earth and populate other planets. And that’s also, to some extent, obviously a Christian story as well. So there’s all sorts of ways that we haven’t escaped this basic situation — which is that even though our scientists, and many philosophers, and many technologists are still very physicalist and materialist, they don’t believe in spirits, they’re not interested in God, they don’t think religion is valuable — they’re increasingly in the minority in general. And even in that context, the things that they do, and the way it gets taken up in society, and even to some extent their own motivations, I believe have to be seen against this larger, longer story about our inevitable embeddedness in religious stories — stories of transformation, of salvation, of damnation. We are fundamentally religious in the broad sense of the term, I believe. So that’s a lot of what I was trying to get at with the term. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### How to Boil a Continent URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/how-to-boil-a-continent/ Last updated: 2026-09-07T07:39:15.000Z I don't know when and where you, my dear reader, will enjoy this newsletter. But in Western Europe, at the end of June 2026 — when and where I'm writing these words — the temperatures are very high, breaking many historical records. We have many direct victims of this heatwave, people whose deaths are directly attributed or linked to the extreme heat: these are tragic stories, [small children left in a car or people who drowned](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/27/decades-climate-warnings-why-europe-so-unprepared-rising-heat?ref=thelatethinker.com). But the real impact is more widespread and less obvious, and it is measured by excess deaths — a statistic that compares the number of deaths during a heatwave with the "normal background" of deaths. And a preliminary analysis — I'm writing in the middle of this heatwave — has put the toll at [at least 1,000 deaths in France alone](https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/france-records-1000-excess-deaths-during-record-breaking-heatwave-2026-06-28/?ref=thelatethinker.com). Were those deaths preventable? I suspect this is the only question that gets the same answer from nearly everybody: climate activists, concerned scientists, public-health and civil-protection officials, the adaptation-first crowd who would rather we cope than cut emissions, ordinary skeptics, and even the self-styled deniers of the human origin of climate change. They all answer "yes," albeit for incompatible reasons — only the full deniers are left out, those who deny there is any global warming at all and insist that summer is always this hot. Before we look at the different reasons why these deaths are, in one way or another, preventable, let's pause on these "full deniers." I'm not referring to people who don't believe that human-made emissions are altering the climate and who think global warming is due to other factors like the sun, volcanoes and so on; nor am I referring to people who believe it's not such a big problem after all and that we can keep polluting as ever. I'm speaking of people who claim that global temperatures are not increasing, and that heatwaves like this one had already happened in the past. To substantiate this thesis they offer up some memories of incredibly hot summers, generally in the seventies or the eighties; some newspaper front pages with apocalyptic headlines; in some cases, old TV weather forecasts, useful to show not only that we already had elevated temperatures, but also that in the good old days they were greeted without alarmist tones. In some cases these relics are doctored — nowadays it's trivial with generative AI — but even when they're authentic, the comparison is nonsensical. First of all, we cannot directly compare different sources, like the value appraised with due diligence by an official weather service and the thermometer used by a journalist to justify a headline in the slow news season. There is another problem: the shifting baseline. The phenomenon is similar to the one captured by the (zoologically dubious but rhetorically perfect) image of the boiling frog: drop a frog into hot water and it leaps out; place it in cool water and raise the temperature slowly enough, and it never registers the moment things turned lethal. We are this hypothetical boiling frog not only because the warming is gradual, but also because each of us takes the climate we grew up with as the natural state of things and measures every later summer against that, not against a fixed reference. We don't remember the stable, sunny weather of the summers governed by the Azores High that dominated until — sometime in the eighties — the African anticyclone began to muscle in, dragging air that is several degrees hotter than the identical pattern would have delivered fifty years ago. But we don't compare the present with fifty years ago, because in these fifty years we have shifted the baseline many times. So it's possible, and perhaps even easy, for deniers to say that this summer is nothing special, that we've already had hot — maybe hotter — summers. To rebut them we have to start talking about the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature index, about medians and averages and anomalies relative to a reference climate, about return periods and exceedance probabilities and the multiplier by which a given heat extreme has become more likely (for this June, attribution scientists put it at [tens to hundreds of times more likely than in 2003, and virtually impossible fifty years ago](https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/fossil-fuel-emissions-have-rapidly-worsened-european-heatwaves-in-just-a-few-decades/?ref=thelatethinker.com)). And this is a problem, because we perceive whether it's warm or cold; we do not perceive a linear regression. But we are lucky, because we do have a solution: [warming stripes](https://showyourstripes.info/?ref=thelatethinker.com). Conceived in 2018 by climate scientist Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, they reduce more than a century of temperature data to a single barcode: one vertical band per year, running from deep blue for the coldest years to dark red for the hottest, with no axes, no numbers, no labels. Their effectiveness rests on a kind of visual force — they work the way certain color-field paintings work — and on their radical simplicity. You look, and the warming is self-evident; the argument is over before it begins. Yes, those strengths are also their limits: we cannot directly compare local versions of the stripes, because the colors have different reference points, and once you understand the mechanism, you can try to manipulate it by picking a location and period where the trend is less obvious. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Ethics Is Not a Feeling — An Interview With Julian Savulescu URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/ethics-is-not-a-feeling-an-interview-with-julian-savulescu/ Last updated: 2026-08-16T11:15:08.000Z Today's newsletter is a little treasure in the vault of my career as a journalist: an interview with the philosopher Julian Savulescu, recorded in 2021 on the occasion of his *lectio magistralis* to nursing students at SUPSI, a Swiss university of applied sciences. Savulescu is known for being the ‘bad boy’ of practical ethics and by ‘bad boy’ I mean that he upholds views that contrast with our ethical intuitions or the general opinion. For example, he argues that parents have a moral obligation to select the best embryo when using assisted reproduction — what he calls «procreative beneficence.» He defends paying people for donating organs or blood, and allowing a market for kidneys. He supports research challenge studies in which healthy volunteers are deliberately infected with pathogens in exchange for financial compensation. And he believes that moral bioenhancement — improving our moral dispositions through drugs, gene editing, or other biological interventions — is not only permissible but something we should actively explore. These are not provocations for *épater la bourgeoisie*. These are authentic ethical positions, backed by rational arguments. On procreative beneficence, Savulescu's reasoning starts from a premise most parents would accept: we want the best life possible for our children — so if we can reduce the probability of serious disease or suffering by selecting among embryos, why would we not? The argument for organ markets rests on a distinction between coercion — which removes options — and exploitation, which offers new ones: a poor person who sells a kidney is not being coerced but exercising a choice they wouldn't otherwise have, and the real question is whether the price is fair. On moral bioenhancement, the argument is almost Darwinian: our moral psychology evolved for small groups on the African savannah, not for a globalized world where a single individual can trigger a mass casualty event, so exploring biological tools to close that gap is at least worth serious consideration. So even if you don't agree with him — or maybe in particular if you don't agree with him — it's worth listening to his arguments: if they are good, you change your opinion to a better one; if they are limited or partial, you have a better understanding of your prior opinion. «Ethics is like physics,» Savulescu said during the Q&A of his lecture. «In physics you have forces which can be represented as vectors — arrows with a direction and a strength. Which way the ball goes depends on all these different vectors. You sum them, you weigh them. In ethics, the vectors are reasons.» As I said, we were in 2021: not so long ago, but times are changing faster than ever, and I think we need a little bit of context. We were during the second or third phase of the COVID pandemic. There were still restrictions but no more full lockdowns. We had more accurate information on the transmission mechanism of the virus, a better understanding of how to treat patients and, above all, vaccines. But we also had doubts on how to better conduct the vaccine campaigns, which categories should be prioritized, and which vaccine types were more efficient and better suited for specific groups. And a growing distrust in health and political institutions, with a scattered, but never prevailing, doubt on vaccine safety and efficacy. Savulescu started his lecture with the core ethical problem that the pandemic presented us with: how to distribute harm and benefit within a society? This problem did not start with COVID-19, but the pandemic presented it in an urgent and dramatic way. So what are the options? Savulescu identified three broad frameworks. *Utilitarianism* says we should maximize aggregate wellbeing: save the greatest number, give priority to those with better prognoses, take age and life expectancy into account. *Egalitarianism*, by contrast, treats all lives as equally valuable and holds that when resources are scarce, the only defensible procedure is a random one — a coin toss, with no preference for the young over the old or the healthy over the disabled. *Prioritarianism* takes a different angle: it gives extra weight to the worst-off, arguing that our moral obligations are stronger toward those in the most dire circumstances. None of these frameworks alone is sufficient. Savulescu's own proposal, based on the political philosopher John Rawls, is called *collective reflective equilibrium*: holding in tension ethical theories and principles on one side, and people's actual intuitions on the other — gathered through surveys, behavioral data, and large-scale experiments like the "Moral Machine" study, which collected the preferences of 40 million people on life-or-death decisions for autonomous vehicles. The task is not to simply follow intuitions — some are clearly biased or historically discredited — nor to apply theories in a vacuum, but to bring the two into dialogue, adjusting each in light of the other, seeking a coherent equilibrium. This approach is now deepened in an article published in the [*Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics*](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-quarterly-of-healthcare-ethics/article/collective-reflective-equilibrium-algorithmic-bioethics-and-complex-ethics/E74F24C1A48271D9A9E67B360179ABC5?ref=thelatethinker.com). One interesting point that Savulescu stressed in his lecture is the abuse of ethics. In order to advance, humans need to improve their moral reasoning (maybe with some drugs or other enhancement, but leave this topic alone now). But what we saw during the pandemic — and we continue to see now — is an abuse of ethics for positioning purposes and to signal allegiance. The mayor of New York declared that «every life is of infinite value» — a statement that sounds morally unimpeachable, but if taken seriously would require spending infinite resources to save any single life, which obviously never happens. What the statement actually does is foreclose discussion. As Savulescu put it during the lecture, much of what passes for public ethics during a crisis is really social signaling: «a way of saying 'I am such a good person'» rather than an attempt to think carefully about difficult tradeoffs. We are reluctant to seriously discuss topics like the value of life, the allocation of vaccines, the balance between freedom and public health. There was instead, in his words, «no ethical discussion», but just a daily body count treated as the one morally relevant metric, with no attention to quality-adjusted life years, differential impact by age group, or lives lost as an indirect consequence of lockdowns. What follows is an interview with Savulescu after the lecture — due to a glitch in the recording, I had to reconstruct my questions, which were lost, but the answers are reliably transcribed and lightly edited. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### A Terrific Encyclical Letter — The Most Widely Read AI Text of the Year URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/a-terrific-encyclical-letter-the-most-widely-read-ai-text-of-the-year/ Last updated: 2026-07-30T07:05:32.000Z I'm in a complicated relationship with Christianity. The best label for me is probably "Christian atheist." I grew up in a Catholic environment, and Christianity is part of my cultural background — my landscape, metaphorically and literally, is full of the traces and testaments of the faith. But I don't believe in God. Rationally I'm agnostic: I can't prove there's no deity, no metaphysical force binding the universe together, yet I find that hypothesis deeply unrealistic. I think of religion as a "byproduct" of a cognitive system that evolution shaped to keep us alive. Maybe we'd be better off outgrowing all of it — but I'm skeptical of the idea that, without religion, humankind would suddenly live in peace and harmony. Yes, in many parts of the world people of different faiths are killing each other; but I suspect that without religion humanity would just find other reasons to go to war. And at this particular moment in history, at least some faiths carry a powerful message of peace and respect. None of this matters much for what follows. It's a foreword, no more, meant to explain where I stand toward [*Magnifica Humanitas*](https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html?ref=thelatethinker.com), the encyclical letter on artificial intelligence by His Holiness Pope Leo XIV — a text that has been praised well beyond the ranks of the faithful. From my point of view there's nothing holy in this letter — but it's an influential work, and it's worth a close look. Let's begin. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/77/7a/777a3281-8a7b-4a01-8605-fccfa3dca1d1/content/images/2026/06/Separatore_mini-2.png) The encyclical opens with a sentence that is both engaging and clear about the nature of the text: > Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. "Created by God," "God and humanity together": this is an encyclical, a text for the Catholic community. In other words, it's not a manual to help society at large figure out how to live with artificial intelligence. It's a call for Catholics to contribute a Christian voice to the AI debate. The alternative it sets up — Babel or the City of God — is addressed to the faithful. It's also a false dichotomy, but I'll come back to that. That's why I don't think this is the most important text on AI of the last few years, whatever some commentators have claimed. But it will almost certainly be the most widely read. The Pope has a following well beyond the Catholic world, and the encyclical is built for circulation — full of quotable lines ready to serve as an epigraph in an essay or to be dropped into a slide deck. Some are genuinely sharp — I may use a few myself — and some carry the faint aftertaste of a fortune cookie: humanity "must never be replaced or surpassed" (§126), progress should advance "without allowing the heart to regress" (§126), shared knowledge should become "a true common good rather than an instrument of dominance" (§178). But I want to be honest on this point: *Magnifica Humanitas* isn't badly written — for an encyclical, that is, an institutional text addressed to bishops and, through them, to the whole Church. Inevitably a bit tedious in places, occasionally over-rhetorical, but it would be terrific if all official documents read this well. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### The Doctor Who Decided Suffering Was Not Part of the Deal — An Interview With Karin Jordan URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/the-doctor-who-decided-suffering-was-not-part-of-the-deal-an-interview-with-karin-jordan/ Last updated: 2026-07-13T22:03:22.000Z She corrected me immediately: I had used the phrase "palliative care" and Professor Karin Jordan, politely but precisely, pushed back: «Palliative care does not exactly reflect what my research field is.» The distinction matters to her, and it turned out to be the perfect way to open a conversation about a medical discipline most people — including, apparently, journalists who should know better — still don't fully understand. Palliative care, in common usage, means end-of-life care: what happens when medicine has run out of options. Supportive care is something broader. It runs alongside cancer treatment from day one, managing side effects, protecting quality of life, keeping patients functional enough to tolerate the therapies that might actually save them. The fact that these two are routinely confused is part of the problem Jordan has spent her career trying to fix. Jordan is Professor of Medicine and Director of the Department of Hematology, Oncology and Palliative Medicine at the Ernst von Bergmann Hospital in Potsdam, Germany. On May 16 she received the Fondazione San Salvatore Prize, a significant Swiss oncology award. The prize, awarded annually since 1980, recognized her exceptional contributions to supportive care in oncology: over 200 peer-reviewed publications, landmark clinical guidelines running to more than 1,300 pages, and decades of work convincing a field that was slow to listen. I had the chance to ask her about all of it. About the cultural shift in how oncologists think about suffering. About the war metaphors and what that language does to how doctors weigh collateral damage. About the gender dynamics of a field where "caring" has long been treated as less serious than "curing." _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### It's Not About His Mind — Why the Psychiatric Framing Gets Trump Wrong URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/its-not-about-his-mind-why-the-psychiatric-framing-gets-trump-wrong/ Last updated: 2026-06-29T22:25:07.000Z I think it's highly likely that Donald Trump has serious mental health problems. But I don't think we should talk about it — or at least, not in the way most people talk about it. Sure, the judgment of someone in a position of power — and what a position, what power — is a legitimate public concern. But there are some "buts" worth working through. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/77/7a/777a3281-8a7b-4a01-8605-fccfa3dca1d1/content/images/2026/05/Separatore_mini.png) The first "but" is simple: right now, pointing at the insanity of Donald Trump wouldn't change anything. A psychiatric diagnosis might carry some political weight — it could theoretically justify impeachment proceedings or trigger the 25th Amendment, which allows for the removal of a president deemed unable to perform their duties. But I'm fairly confident any diagnosis would be contested and ultimately ignored at the institutional level, where Trump and the Republican Party have put very loyal and faithful people. And I'm speaking of a psychiatric diagnosis, imagine the weight of indirect evidence. Which we already have in abundance: half-hour speeches that meander nowhere near the announced topic, confused names of people he's known for decades, calling Greenland "Iceland" four times in a row at Davos. None of that has moved the needle so far: supporters would keep supporting him, critics would keep criticizing him. I genuinely can't picture an undecided voter changing their mind right now because of a psychiatric assessment. That's not a situation I'm happy about. I'd prefer a world where conversations about the mental fitness of leaders — or about minority rights, or any number of topics considered "divisive" — were possible in a real way, with genuine openness to being persuaded by strong arguments. That's not what we have, at least not in the broader public discourse. And pretending otherwise doesn't help — not for the specific discussion about Trump's mental health, which risks becoming a loop of mutual confirmation rather than genuine inquiry, and not for the project of building a public space where arguments actually land. Performing openness we don't have makes it harder to notice we've lost it. I said it's unlikely anyone changes their mind about Trump's mental health *right now* — and that "right now" matters. It's not exactly a secret that Trump is who he is: not a man who says what he thinks, but a man who says and does things *without* thinking, driven by instinct and the mood of the moment. He was elected by voters who knew this. And probably he was voted *because* of this. Journalist Ezra Klein made this argument in the [*New York Times*](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/opinion/donald-trump-ezra-klein-podcast.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.eFA.2iWq.wMBuRLvSXmcn&smid=url-share&ref=thelatethinker.com) in October 2024\. Trump, Klein argued, embodies an authentic reaction — and for many people an attractive one — against the carefully calibrated, politically correct register of mainstream politics. In a climate where any misplaced word can become a scandal, a candidate who talks without a filter comes across as paradoxically credible. You feel like you're finally hearing what someone actually thinks, not what's convenient to say. Politically correct ends up being perceived as politically *corrupt*: the language appears to be built not to communicate but to conceal. Which explains why every Trump gaffe registered, for a chunk of the electorate, not as evidence of incompetence but as confirmation of authenticity. There's a difference, of course, between someone who lacks a filter — which you may or may not find appealing depending on the circumstances — and a president who has genuinely lost the plot and makes decisions without considering causes and consequences. But even if Trump's mental balance has deteriorated — and it probably has — the problem was already visible before. It was always a character problem, not a clinical one. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### The Driver and the Dolly — On AI, Plagiarism, and the Imaginary Pact Between Writer and Reader URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/the-driver-and-the-dolly-on-ai-plagiarism-and-the-imaginary-pact-between-writer-and-reader/ Last updated: 2026-06-01T14:09:17.000Z Imagine a sober person gets in theyr car and hit badly a pedestrian on a crosswalk. Wouldn't it be weird if a newspaper ran the headline "Man arrested for driving a car"? I think we can all agree that the problem wasn't getting behind the wheel: it was hitting the person. Sure, if he hadn't driven he wouldn't have hit anyone, but that's not why the cops showed up. The *Guardian* ran basically that strange headline, and nobody blinked because it involves an embarrassing case of plagiarism and artificial intelligence: [The New York Times drops freelance journalist who used AI to write book review](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/mar/31/the-new-york-times-drops-freelance-journalist-who-used-ai-to-write-book-review?ref=thelatethinker.com). The freelancer — named and shamed as if this were some major public safety issue — did use an LLM (large language model, the kind of AI behind ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc.) to write the review. But the actual problem is different: parts of his text are identical to a review of the same book previously published by the *Guardian*. Plagiarism, plain and simple. If he hadn't used AI, he probably wouldn't have included those passages — or he would've noticed and cited them properly. It’s also possible the contrary: sometimes phrases lodge in your brain and you genuinely can't remember whether you read them somewhere or came up with them yourself. There's no way to know. But I think we can — and should — acknowledge that AI use is relevant here. But it’s like driving in the car accident example: the problem is the plagiarism, not the use of AI. And in fact it's not the reason the *New York Times* ended the collaboration. The paper doesn't ban AI: their [ethics code](https://www.nytimes.com/editorial-standards/ethical-journalism.html?ref=thelatethinker.com) only requires that *substantial use* be disclosed for transparency. And indeed the paper [issued a correction](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/pageoneplus/editors-note-april-1-2026.html?ref=thelatethinker.com), adding a link to the original *Guardian* review and faulting the freelancer not for using AI, but for his “*reliance”* on it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/77/7a/777a3281-8a7b-4a01-8605-fccfa3dca1d1/content/images/2026/04/Separatore_mini-1.png) The *New York Times* ethics code is the closest thing I can imagine to a "pact" between publisher/writer and reader. But it'd be naive to think readers' expectations stop at that code. So it's legitimate that — plagiarism aside — a review written with AI assistance might feel like a betrayal. Because for many people, the pact includes the expectation of reading the product of honest, maybe even painstaking, intellectual work. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### All Quiet on the Knowledge Front. Why Epistemia, the Illusion of Knowledge, is Nothing New URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/all-quiet-on-the-knowledge-front-why-epistemia-the-illusion-of-knowledge-is-nothing-new/ Last updated: 2026-04-21T13:56:47.000Z I find myself using generative AI quite a bit these days. However, I am hesitant to call myself an enthusiast. To be a fan implies a kind of uncritical enthusiasm that I just cannot muster, mostly because I am acutely aware of the limits of these instruments. An LLM—and while there are other technologies that qualify as artificial intelligence, we are all currently fixated on large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude—does not possess an understanding of what it is saying. [I have written about this before](https://www.thelatethinker.com/concerns-about-chatgpts-moral-status-are-greatly-exaggerated/), but it bears repeating: these models manipulate text in incredible ways, doing things only humans could do before (and, obviously, doing things humans cannot do, like reading a book in seconds). But they don't understand what they are writing—let alone possess a conscience. They are statistical engines, predicting the next likely token in a sequence, not minds contemplating meaning. I have previously explored these limits from a moral perspective, asking what we owe to—or fear from—a machine without agency. But a recent research paper conducted by the team of Professor Walter Quattrociocchi has convinced me to return to the topic, this time on an epistemic level. The paper in question is titled [*The simulation of judgment in LLMs*](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2518443122?ref=thelatethinker.com). The researchers set up a fascinating confrontation between human and artificial evaluations of news articles. They benchmarked six different LLMs against expert human ratings (from NewsGuard and Media Bias/Fact Check) and against a group of non-expert human participants. The goal wasn't just to see if the AI got the right answer regarding a site's reliability, but to understand how it got there. They used a structured framework where both the models and the humans had to select criteria, retrieve content, and produce justifications. The results were noteworthy. The models’ outputs often aligned with expert ratings—in fact, they were quite good at flagging unreliable sources. However, the way they reached those conclusions was fundamentally different. The study found that LLMs rely heavily on lexical associations and statistical priors rather than the contextual reasoning humans use. In other words, they look for the shape of a reliable text, not the truth of it. I fully agree with the authors’ conclusion that we need more public awareness of how LLMs think (or, if that verb annoys you as much as it sometimes annoys me, how they elaborate their outputs). We need this awareness not to avoid using them, but to properly integrate them into our epistemic system. Nevertheless, I have a problem with a single, perhaps marginal, aspect of this paper. It may be marginal to the data, but I suspect it is crucial to Quattrociocchi’s intentions, given his specific focus on the concept of epistemia itself. I am speaking about the concept of epistemia. In the paper, epistemia is defined as the tendency to confuse linguistic form with epistemic reliability. It describes a condition where the appearance of coherent and authoritative judgment arises from statistical patterning alone, producing the illusion of knowledge when surface plausibility substitutes for evidence-based reasoning. Essentially, it is the trap of believing the machine because it sounds smart. Why does this concept leave me cold? For two reasons: there is little new in it, and I fear there is little useful in it. To understand why, we need to take a step back. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Beyond True and False — How AI Rewrites the Language Games of Images URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/beyond-true-and-false-how-ai-rewrites-the-language-games-of-images/ Last updated: 2026-05-12T07:58:45.000Z Here we are: another newsletter about images—after the [interview with the photographer Rhiannon Adam](https://www.thelatethinker.com/utopian-and-dystopian-dreams-an-interview-with-photographer-rhiannon-adam/) and a piece on [how news photos depict heat waves](https://www.thelatethinker.com/how-we-turned-deadly-heatwaves-into-vacation-brochures/). It’s odd, for me, to have this interest in images: I express my thoughts in words, not pictures. Of course I take photos, as everyone does, but mainly for "personal use" (happy memories in the form of mediocre images stored on my phone) and my drawing skills are rather poor. Still, I'm interested in how public knowledge is made, and images are a core part of it. So, I think it is important to understand the place of pictures in our shared knowledge, what role they can play in the great game of public discourse. And whether AI-generated images can serve the same role, work differently, or completely overturn the existing rules. The cornerstone of this topic is that AI-generated images are at least changing the level of the game. A terrific, and perhaps terrifying, example is the AI propaganda used in particular [by far-right movements](https://edmo.eu/publications/how-the-european-far-right-is-using-ai-generated-content-to-engage-voters/?ref=thelatethinker.com). President Trump has posted AI-generated content dozens of times on his Truth Social account: [Stuart A. Thompson](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/21/business/media/trump-ai-truth-social-no-kings.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.zU8.X%5Fny.2NX4qVDeZJ3O&smid=url-share&ref=thelatethinker.com) has analyzed this AI bonanza: cosplaying as the pope in one fake image, watching agents arrest Barack Obama in another, standing atop a mountain having "conquered" Canada in a third (observing a mountain that strikingly recalls the iconic Matterhorn, a peak that has nothing to do with Canada or America). Political experts note that even the most anodyne uses of AI by the president normalize these tools as a new type of political propaganda. "It's designed to go viral, it's clearly fake, it's got this absurdist kind of tone to it", says Henry Ajder, who runs an AI consultancy. "But there's often still some kind of messaging in there". It redefines – or in some cases discards – the idea of being "presidential". But in this newsletter I’m interested in a more general reasoning: trying to understand if, and why, AI-generated images—or “images generated using AI”, because AI is an instrument in the hand of a human being that has decided to make or share them—are false and what count as a “true” image. ## What We Talk About When We Talk About Image Truth So, the starting point is the truth of images. But facing this question is like opening two Pandora's boxes full of philosophical troubles. The first box concerns the concept of truth itself: what makes some of the things we say or think true and others not? Long story short, you'll find theories of correspondence (a statement is true if it corresponds to reality or facts), epistemic theories (which study how we obtain or justify statements we consider true) or deflationist ones (according to which truth isn't a real property of propositions, but just a linguistic way to emphasize what we're asserting). Very important, and interesting, are also all the analyses on lying and how it's possible to deceive even by saying something true. The second Pandora’s box concerns images: even ignoring the question of the nature of these objects—and also setting aside the complicated status of mental images that a significant part of the population [can't even form](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia?ref=thelatethinker.com)—there remains the question of whether images can be bearers of truth. In other words: are images one of those "things" that can legitimately be true or false? Ernst Gombrich, the great art historian, was certainly right when he said that images aren't propositions and therefore can't be true or false, just as a statement can't be blue or green (he wrote that in an essay contained in [*Art and Illusion*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art%5Fand%5FIllusion?ref=thelatethinker.com)). Traditionally, being true or false concerns declarative (apophantic) statements and their propositions, excluding linguistic expressions like commands or questions; it would be strange to include images instead. However, we commonly speak of true images and false images and it's important to understand why (and whether it's a legitimate use or one of the many "imperfections" of our natural language). _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Should Journalism Take Sides? URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/should-journalism-take-sides/ Last updated: 2026-04-21T13:55:49.000Z In recent weeks, in Italy there has been quite a bit of debate about neutrality in journalism. This debate stems from the Gaza war — and I'm deliberately using [the definition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza%5Fwar?ref=thelatethinker.com) from Wikipedia, because I don't want this newsletter to become yet another place where people divide over which side to condemn and which to absolve or defend (especially since there aren't just "two sides": beyond Israel, meaning Netanyahu's Israeli government, and Hamas, there are Palestinian and Israeli civilians, settlers, opposition movements, and so on). This debate emerged in Italy through a public exchange between two prominent figures in digital journalism. Francesco Costa, editor-in-chief of *Il Post* (Italy's leading digital-first newspaper that insists on clear explanation, fact‐checking and providing context), dedicated [an episode](https://www.ilpost.it/podcasts/wilson/da-che-parte-stanno-i-giornali/?ref=thelatethinker.com) of his podcast *Wilson* to explaining why, if news organizations want to do their job properly, they shouldn't take sides. Costa argues that a newspaper shouldn't take positions — it should report facts as accurately as possible, give voice to diverse viewpoints, and let readers form their own opinions. The goal is objectivity, and taking sides means abandoning that ambition, turning journalism into propaganda (even when it's propaganda for a just cause), and above all losing credibility with anyone who doesn't share that position. Alberto Puliafito, a journalist and media consultant, responded in his newsletter [*The Slow Journalist*](https://theslowjournalist.substack.com/p/fare-un-giornale-e-un-atto-politico) that this is an illusion. Creating a newspaper is inherently a political act: you choose what goes on the front page and what doesn't, which sources to trust, how to write headlines, how much space to give a story. The idea of being neutral risks becoming a convenient alibi for not having to explicitly justify your editorial choices. Better to be honest: declare where you stand, make your criteria transparent, and allow readers to evaluate information knowing from which perspective it's being presented. Of course this debate is not limited to Italy or Europe. The question of journalistic neutrality has become particularly fraught in recent years across all the media landscape. Perhaps the most striking recent example came in October 2024, when *The Washington Post* declined to endorse either candidate in the US presidential race, breaking with decades of tradition. The decision, reportedly made by owner Jeff Bezos over the objections of the editorial board, sparked massive subscriber cancellations and staff resignations. The stated reason was a return to "neutrality" — and that brings back to our topics. Now, I'm a journalist myself. I cover culture, which doesn't completely shield me from dealing with delicate topics, though not as systematically as political reporters. But this isn't just professional interest: I studied philosophy, and the question of objective knowledge is central to epistemology (the branch of philosophy that investigates knowledge itself). My impression is that the debate about neutrality and objectivity in journalism is often poorly framed — it uses categories that don't work well for understanding what actually happens when we produce or consume news. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Beauty and the Neuroscientist — A Conversation on Neuroaesthetics with Semir Zeki URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/beauty-and-the-neuroscientist-a-conversation-on-neuroaesthetics-with-semir-zeki/ Last updated: 2026-05-12T07:59:03.000Z I remember that, when I was a child, I had this big book about the human body. It was a fascinating read: I read how fresh air goes to the lungs and then there, in the alveoli with the surface of a football field—I don't know why they thought an early teenager would understand pulmonary and systemic circulation but not square meters—exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide with the blood, I read how the heart pumps blood, how white blood cells attack viruses and bacteria and sometimes they misfire producing allergies, where the salty or sweet receptors in my tongue were, and so on. By the end of each chapter, I could see that the things I feel—my breathing and heartbeat, the taste and cold of ice cream—come from tiny processes in cells and molecules. It was obviously an illusion—but that's not the point. The point is that there was a notable exception, in this understanding. The chapter devoted to the brain explained how neurons transmit chemical and electrical signals and wow, it's amazing, but what does this have to do with my mind? I mean: I have to pee because my bladder is full of filtered blood because my body has to get rid of the waste of cells' operations, the passage from nephrons to the urge to find a restroom is crystal clear. But what is the link between some neurons that receive and send signals and the thought "I must find a restroom"? I read that chapter several times and at first I thought it was my fault: like all other chapters, the answer was there but it was too difficult for me to understand. After maybe six or seven times I started to realize that I wasn't missing anything: there was no answer, in that book, on how the brain, a bunch of neurons, can think. It was a mystery, at least for me but I started to think that it was a mystery also for scientists. Years later this suspicion was confirmed many times. Yes, I studied philosophy, so my approach to these topics is maybe biased, but I'm quite sure—I have no certainty here, as anyone else—that we can link certain mental phenomena to certain brain parts, but the properties of the two levels will remain different. You can try to grasp the idea with an analogy introduced by Spinoza: a curved surface is convex on one side and concave on the other; just as the same surface is both convex and concave depending on perspective, mental phenomena and brain activity might be two aspects of the same underlying reality. That's why, the first time I heard of "neuroaesthetics" I was curious but also a little suspicious: wow, a science that puts together neuroscience and the experience in front of an art piece—but in order to do what? To try to reduce our aesthetic experience to brain circuits, to find a neurological explanation of why Michelangelo was a greater artist than Pietro Torrigiani, following my childish dream of understanding the mind starting from neurons? Or to gain some insight of both the brain and the aesthetic experience? The answer to this question is nearer to the latter than to the first, as we can read in scientific articles and books written by Semir Zeki, the neurobiologist who started this field of research; I cite here the most famous: *Splendours and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness*, published in 2009. When, in 2024, Zeki was invited to Lugano for a [public lecture about how art changes our brain](https://www.ibsafoundation.org/en/projects/cultura-e-salute/university-course-2024?ref=thelatethinker.com#lesson-2)—part of a course at the Università della Svizzera italiana in collaboration with IBSA foundation for scientific research—, I met him for a long interview. The full interview is available to paid subscribers (there’s a 7-day free trial) – subscribe to read the complete conversation. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### I Don’t Want to Vote on My Smartphone. And You Shouldn’t Either URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/i-dont-want-to-vote-on-my-smartphone-and-you-shouldnt-either/ Last updated: 2026-05-12T07:59:17.000Z People are voting these days. In Moldova, a small country of about 3 million between Romania and Ukraine, the next election is unusually important—both for domestic politics and for its tug-of-war between Russia and the European Union. Closer to home (for me), Switzerland is also voting. That happens a lot here: nationwide and cantonal ballots come several times a year: it’s “[direct democracy](https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/political-system?ref=thelatethinker.com)”, an important aspect of Swiss identity. We have executive cabinets, we have parliaments but it’s relatively easy to put issues to a popular vote. So Swiss citizens often go to say "yes" or "no" to many proposals, but this time the popular vote is particularly relevant: the results will have important economic implications—for public finances and for household budgets. Voters are weighing changes to how homes are taxed and, at local (cantonal) level, how the mandatory health-insurance system is financed. Of course the impact of a law is not limited to its economic effect, but the results of the Sunday ballots will shift real money around. But it's not really Sunday. That's because many people vote early from home using postal ballots that arrive weeks in advance. On Sunday all the closed and anonymous envelopes will be opened and the ballot papers will be counted, with those from the minority that still prefer to cast their vote in person. So Sunday is officially voting day, but everything actually happens earlier: you can read the official booklet at your kitchen table, mark your yes/no, and drop it in the mail. Quite convenient. And lately there’s been talk of making it even more convenient by letting people vote from their phones. ## The temptation of e-voting From a certain point of view the idea is not absurd: if we already bank, manage health data and sensitive information from a smartphone, why not cast a ballot too? The promise of secure, simple, cost-effective e-voting systems doesn't sound like wishful thinking, if we trust our smartphone for our checking account. We must consider that security is where the trade-offs bite. My online banking doesn't need to be perfect, but robust enough to resist hackers motivated by my economic resources. I resist the temptation to joke that a ‘12345’ password would be sufficient for my bank account (the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage, according to Space Balls), but the main point remains: Influencing the outcome of a vote can be far more profitable than just logging into an online bank account. More importantly, user’s carelessness—which is the weakest point of all security measures—compromises only the money of the careless users but for voting procedures it can have an impact on collective decisions. That’s why it’s considered acceptable to digitalize some processes (registration, delivery of blank ballots, counting of paper ballots) but not the returning of marked ballots: a [U.S. National Academies’ report](https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/25120/securing-the-vote-protecting-american-democracy?ref=thelatethinker.com) says that no current tech can guarantee secrecy, security and verifiability for Internet ballot return—the report is from 2018, but I don’t think the situation has significantly changed. But let’s assume the best case: suppose we had solved all the technical difficulties, we had unbreakable cryptography and had made the servers airtight. Would that end our worries? Not entirely. Complex systems create perceived opacity that disinformation can exploit. A paper ballot has an “epistemic advantage,” as [Casati and Tonello](https://hal.science/hal-03862847v1/file/Casati%5FTonello%5F2018.pdf?ref=thelatethinker.com) put it: anyone can grasp how a paper ballot preserves universality (any eligible person can vote), secrecy (no one knows how you voted) and integrity (each ballot really counts). It’s so clear and plain that I feel stupid to try to describe the process—explaining how an e-voting system functions, on the contrary, requires some time and requires some expertise. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Concerns About ChatGPT's Moral Status Are Greatly Exaggerated URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/concerns-about-chatgpts-moral-status-are-greatly-exaggerated/ Last updated: 2026-05-12T08:01:33.000Z I grew up consuming enough science fiction to believe that machines can have sentience, consciousness, and deserve moral consideration beyond what we'd give a toaster – which, unless we're crossing from sci-fi [to fantasy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FBrave%5FLittle%5FToaster?ref=thelatethinker.com), is and remains an object. Here's what I'm convinced of: you don't need a biological brain with electrical impulses and neurotransmitters to have consciousness. But I'm also convinced that's not the case for Large Language Models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or DeepSeek. Look, they're intelligent. They manipulate text in incredible ways, doing things only humans could do before (and obviously doing things humans cannot do, like reading a book in seconds). But they don't understand what they're writing – never mind having a conscience. I know it sounds cliché – "they write but don't think" – like Heidegger's observation about technology that doesn't think. But that's how LLMs work. They don't have a world model. They don't know words point to things in the world – just how words relate to each other. Which is enough to do plenty of things in our text-based society. As philosopher Maurizio Ferraris wrote, "nothing social exists outside the text". Our social worlds require registration (written traces, memory), but these registrations can construct our social world because they have a relationship with reality. The words – or more correctly *tokens* (word fragments) – that an LLM manipulates have only connections with other words or tokens. It's like a student who learns the textbook by heart before an exam: they can rephrase what they've read, but when the professor asks about connections between theories not explicitly covered in the book – as I experienced during my studies – the lack of deeper understanding becomes evident. Aaron Rabinowitz, in [a piece](https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2025/09/evaluating-the-ethics-of-ai-requires-seeing-through-the-never-ending-hype/?ref=thelatethinker.com) for *The Skeptics* published when I had already written most of this newsletter, puts it in terms of external and internal understanding: his definition is a little circular (external understanding is the mimicry of internal understanding which is the "true" understanding) but I agree with his conclusion: > The most advanced AI currently in existence possess increasing amounts of external understanding while likely not developing anything like internal understanding. This is why it is correct to say they display adult human levels of external understanding while lacking the internal understanding possessed by preschoolers. An LLM predicts the next token based on statistical patterns from billions of texts. Type "the cat climbs on the" and it'll say "roof" or "couch" – not because it knows what a cat or roof is, but because it's seen that sequence thousands of times. We can add information that changes the output: maybe the roof is made of gold or chocolate if we specify that the cat is a fairy tale character. It could be powerful and useful, but it remains a statistical approach without any knowledge of cats and roofs. We see the limits when text alone isn't enough to handle reality. There are plenty of examples of LLMs that fail in astonishing ways – astonishing if we assume LLMs have what Rabinowitz calls "internal understanding". Sure, most of the time they talk as well as – or better than – people. They seem to have inner lives. But they don't. They can say they're suffering, they can show signs of suffering, but they're not suffering. They're choosing the most probable word given the starting parameters. It makes no sense to treat them as moral subjects. Maybe other machines someday, but not LLMs. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Utopian and Dystopian Dreams – An Interview with Photographer Rhiannon Adam URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/utopian-and-dystopian-dreams-an-interview-with-photographer-rhiannon-adam/ Last updated: 2026-04-27T14:28:10.000Z I'll start with a confession – not a particularly embarrassing one, I think. Sometimes I dream about going into space: floating in microgravity, watching a thunderstorm from above, maybe seeing the hidden face of the Moon. I'm not talking about the dreams you have while sleeping, or even dreams you want to realize someday. I'm not a scientist or an astronaut, and space tourism will probably remain too expensive for me. This dream is more like "internal fiction" – both entertainment for lazy moments and a kind of mental workout for exploring alternative realities that might help me evaluate our actual reality. It's a fragment of utopia (or dystopia) that humanity has always used to reflect on our society from another perspective. The first person to write about "utopia" – which means "no place" – was Thomas More in the sixteenth century, though Plato's *Republic* is also a utopia, or maybe a dystopia. These elements – space, but mainly fiction and reality, utopia and dystopia – were at the center of a fascinating and enriching conversation I had with photographer Rhiannon Adam, who won the [Verzasca Foto Festival](https://www.verzascafoto.com/2025?ref=thelatethinker.com) for her project [*Rhi-Entry*](https://www.rhiannonadam.com/rhi-entry?ref=thelatethinker.com). For Adam, going to space wasn't just a daydream. She was selected for a private space mission designed to fly around the Moon. We're talking about the dearMoon project organized by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. The goal was to take Maezawa and eight civilian artists on a journey meant to inspire creativity and foster global unity and peace. I'm using the past tense because the project was abruptly canceled – officially due to delays in developing the SpaceX Starship that Maezawa wanted to use. When the cancellation happened, Adam hadn't yet signed the contract – with its confidentiality and non-defamation clauses. Free to speak, she created the project Rhi-Entry. This isn't just a personal project for coping with what I can only imagine was a crushing disappointment. As you'll see in the interview, it's a more complex discussion about space as both utopian symbol and dystopian reality – about technology, truth, photography, and what's real. Here’s a lightly edited transcription of my conversation with Adam. The full interview is available to paid subscribers (there’s a 7-day free trial) – subscribe to read the complete conversation. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### How We Turned Deadly Heatwaves Into Vacation Brochures URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/how-we-turned-deadly-heatwaves-into-vacation-brochures/ Last updated: 2026-05-12T08:01:24.000Z Look, here's a thought experiment for you. Imagine if we covered earthquakes exclusively with photos of families having picnics in the park. Or if every story about devastating floods featured kids splashing in puddles. During COVID, we all remember those haunting images – empty Times Square, mass graves in Brazil, refrigerated trucks outside hospitals. What if instead we'd only shown families baking sourdough? Sounds insane, right? Yet that's exactly what we're doing with extreme heat. We're talking about half a million deaths annually from heat – 178,000 in Europe alone, according to [Lancet Planetary Health](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196%2821%2900081-4/fulltext?ref=thelatethinker.com). Stress on livestock and wildlife, plants that can't just migrate to cooler spots like animals can. Major crops like wheat, corn, and rice producing less. And what do we show? Tourists dipping their toes in fountains. Kids eating ice cream. Young women in bikinis, shot from behind (definitely not for privacy reasons). ## The story we're not telling I covered last summer's European heatwave like many other journalists. I followed all the best practices: avoided apocalyptic tones that make people give up, steered clear of the "everything's fine" narrative that normalizes disaster. Found experts, wrote the piece, calibrated the message. Nothing heroic, just responsible reporting of an important and delicate topic – but not so common, at least in Italy, judging by [this report](https://www.greenpeace.org/italy/comunicato-stampa/28569/ondate-di-calore-report-greenpeace-osservatorio-pavia-tre-quarti-delle-notizie-non-citano-la-crisi-climatica-come-elemento-esplicativo/?ref=thelatethinker.com) from Greenpeace and the Osservatorio di Pavia. Then came time to pick the images. Usually it's simple: type in keywords, browse the photo libraries, pick something that works. Not this time. Search "heatwave" or "extreme heat" on any stock photo site. You'll find: gelato lines, fountain fun, river jumps, and those spray fountains that shoot up from the pavement – perfect for kids and, apparently, photographers. The images could double as tourism ads or the world's worst postcard collection. They tell a completely different story than the one I'd just spent hours writing. Here's the thing: most climate journalism guidelines say nothing about images. The ones that do – like [Covering Climate Now](https://coveringclimatenow.org/resource/climate-reporting-best-practices/?ref=thelatethinker.com) – mention it as an afterthought. Only the [European Broadcasting Union's report](https://www.ebu.ch/news/2023/03/ebu-news-report-shows-how-to-deliver-climate-journalism-that-works?ref=thelatethinker.com) actually dedicates real space to visual choices. Perhaps they assume someone else will handle it – a picture editor, maybe. But most newsrooms don't have those anymore. It's usually the writer, exhausted and ready to publish, or someone else without training who picks the image. Even dedicated picture editors follow newsroom culture, which often means: make it eye-catching. For every Guardian article ([they revised ](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/18/guardian-climate-pledge-2019-images-pictures-guidelines?ref=thelatethinker.com)their image guidelines in 2019), we get thousands of ice creams and pool parties. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Can We Save Universalism from the Culture Wars? URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/can-we-save-universalism-from-the-culture-wars/ Last updated: 2026-04-21T13:53:55.000Z I'm going to talk about "woke" and "wokism". And I'm going to do it as a privileged person: on the Wheel of Privilege and Power (if you're unfamiliar with this concept, [here](https://kb.wisc.edu/instructional-resources/119380?ref=thelatethinker.com) you can find more information), I'm quite near the center, or at least in the middle section. But perhaps the real difficulty in talking about wokeness is that there is no such thing as a singular "woke", because this word has many different, and sometimes opposing, meanings. It's an "umbrella term", as it's often called: a word that covers many concepts and ideas not necessarily related, like an umbrella that covers me, the groceries I've bought, and my backpack. In particular, "woke" is often used as a catch-all term to identify everything and everyone we don't like. In particular, "woke" is what doesn't fit into an imaginary traditional society that we can approximately locate at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. A society where men were men, women were women, LGBTQ+ people didn't exist (or accepted their "unnatural" nature), marginalized people didn't complain, et cetera, et cetera. Given this definition – where 'woke' simply means rejecting an imaginary traditional society of rigid roles and exclusions – I have no choice but to embrace being woke. I unquestionably prefer a society where everyone is as free as possible to find their place while resisting imposed social obligations. But that's not the only "woke" in town. Next to the social movement that asks for a society where everyone is welcome and demands vigilance against all forms of injustice and discrimination, there is the "woke ideology". And again, while "ideology" is often used as a derogatory term, by "ideology" I mean the philosophical framework of an idea. And here it becomes difficult for me to consider myself "woke". There are of course many other flavors of woke, one of which is particularly disturbing to me: "woke capitalism", where diversity and inclusion are instrumentalized to increase profits without any genuine interest in social change. This is a degeneration that I hope no one will defend. What follows is a personal reasoning, but it's important to highlight three books that played a role in developing my opinion. Two of them are recent essays that address wokism directly: [*The Identity Trap*](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/456408/the-identity-trap-by-mounk-yascha/9781802062861?ref=thelatethinker.com) by Yascha Mounk and [*Left Is Not Woke*](https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book%5Fslug=left-is-not-woke--9781509558308&ref=thelatethinker.com) by Susan Neiman. The third one apparently addresses another topic: [*In Defence of the Enlightenment*](https://atlantic-books.co.uk/book/in-defence-of-the-enlightenment/?ref=thelatethinker.com) by Tzvetan Todorov. I also want to cite [an issue](https://figsinwintertime.substack.com/p/so-what-exactly-is-wrong-with-the) of Massimo Pigliucci's newsletter about the Enlightenment – which, as you've probably guessed, is central to my argument. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Words Are Bullshit — an Interview with Israeli Filmmaker Eran Kolirin URL: https://www.thelatethinker.com/words-are-bullshit-interview-with-israeli-filmmaker-eran-kolirin/ Last updated: 2026-05-12T07:59:34.000Z I had the opportunity to meet Israeli director Eran Kolirin. For those who don't know him, he's the author of two terrific films that I loved (he has made many other things, of course, but I want to keep this introduction short). The first one is *The Band's Visit* (2007). The film tells the story of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, a band of eight Egyptian classical musicians who travel to Israel to perform at the Arab Cultural Center in Petah Tiqva, but take the wrong bus because of a language miscommunication and wind up in a small town named Bet Hatikva, in the middle of the desert. With no transportation out of town and no hotels to stay at, the band settles at a restaurant owned by Dina, who offers them lodging. The second one is *Let It Be Morning* (2021). The film centers on Sami, a Palestinian Israeli citizen who works at a tech company in Jerusalem and is living a double life with his Jewish Israeli mistress. When he heads to his family's village for his brother's wedding, he wakes up to find it encircled by Israeli soldiers and isolated from the world due to an arbitrary blockade. Kolirin was at the Locarno Film Festival to present a quite peculiar film: *Some Notes on the Current Situation*. With this title you might expect – as I did when a friend had signaled this movie in the rich program of the festival – a film that confronts explicitly the war in Gaza or the state of democracy in Israel. Not at all. Presented as a "philosophical tragicomedy," this film is very close to Dada and Theater of the Absurd. This project was started by chance when a friend of Kolirin's told him about a class of very talented young actors, asking him to write something for their final project. This happened shortly before October 7th. *Some Notes on the Current Situation* is composed of six episodes: "A Wall", with four people involved in a strange ritual for rebooting Earth; "A Formation III", with a platoon of soldiers preparing to film a movie for an international streaming service; "A Road", where a bride attempting to push a car that won't start; "A Pit", where the life of a woman who moved to the countryside changes unexpectedly during an encounter with municipality workers digging in her garden; "Snow", with a young, disoriented couple of time traveler is attempting to deliver a truckload of snow to a movie set in the desert; "A Hasidic Tale", a traditional fable about an Inuit woman, a yeshiva student and his nose. Here's a transcription of the conversation with Kolirin, with minor editing. The full interview is available to paid subscribers (there’s a 7-day free trial) – subscribe to read the complete conversation. ## Sign up for The Late Thinker Thoughts unfit for contemporary survival Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. _This post is for paying subscribers only._