The Late Thinker

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 and newsletter L'estinto (The Extinct One), 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.