“Six-seven!” and the Nonsensical Gestures of Pop’s Rapid Onset Obsolescence
How did a complete lack of meaning, paired with simple gestures, become a grand celebratory act for this generation?
Society & Culture
The Price of the Athlete and the Roar of the Crowd
Sport, like the university, like any institution, is a human construction. It reflects the fears and desires of those who manage it. To demand that it remain apolitical is to demand that it remain unexamined. What would it mean to refuse that demand consistently?
The Tyranny of Masculinity
Today’s influencers, panicked by AI and its ability to mimic or replace us altogether, preach a new vitalism. Often masculine, sometimes misogynist, this energy is wild and brave and noble, a birthright that cannot be replaced.
What Killed the Cat
I was railing again about Eve. For Eve. Why should she take the rap for humanity’s fall, just because she had a healthy curiosity? Then I remembered Pandora, whom we blame just as angrily for the unleashing of our woes. But think of living with that box, gazing at…
Why Not Pink and Brown?
The unbearable whiteness of being....
The Best Questions Are Not Good
“But, it would seem, there is no getting around explanations, we are constantly explaining and excusing ourselves; life itself, that inexplicable complex of being and feeling, demands explanations of us, those around us demand explanations, and in the end we ourselves demand explanations of ourselves, until in the end…
Why the Line Between Coercion and Consent in Policing Eludes Us
The terms of the struggle are renegotiated every time a law is deemed unjust by civil disobedience, and the tension ratchets up every time we are forced to acknowledge that laws without the threat of possible force are no laws at all. The law may fix the line between coercion and consent, but in a democratic republic we at least have the prospect of that line moving forward or back.
How We Could Keep Holy
The tech bros must have stumbled onto Abraham Heschel’s book about the Sabbath.
How Tough Should Journalists (or Any of Us) Be?
Can truth be found gently? What about hope, and grit?
Moltbook: Social for a Different Species
There was still a note of excitement when OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy remarked that having more than 150,000 AI agents wired in and making their own posts on Moltbook was unprecedented. The next time I checked, there were more than 1.5 million.