Testing
testing
Weekly Readings #238 (08/30/26-09/06/26)
mise en abyme, they say
I sat down to write about love, but I wrote about death instead.
Women and their true-crime obsession.
Ghost Stories, No. 3
August in lunacy.
Anthropomorphism is built into the DNA of AI
Some have accused the safety advocates in the Hugging Face hack debates of anthropomorphism and thereby exaggeration. But this is an old, old debate. It must be fought on other grounds.
Am I Really a Liberal?
Confusing times prompt difficult questions
Just one more thing....
What Columbo might say about the Hugging Face postmortems...
Paglia’s Exaggerations
“modesty of demeanor DID NOT WORK”
Will this college dropout be Alaska’s youngest governor?
Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, my former student, may turn the purple state bluer
Manufactured charges of ‘plagiarism’ will destroy many more writers
The results are in — Barkan’s accuser ‘plagiarized’ too — Was this decision outsourced to AI?
An Increase of Comprehension
On the Roles and Responsibilities of the Intellectual
Lindsay Clancy’s Madness, and Ours (in Compact)
on a bad national fantasy life
Reading history sideways
There is a peculiar comfort in reading history sideways — not for the verdict it renders on the present, but for the sense that the present, too, will eventually be read this way: strange, contingent, already receding.
Is AI good for religion?
Plus: my new book jacket; surf movie discovered; and more!
What Is the Ethics of Our Society?
And Is It Neoliberalism?
‘Nipples Are In Vogue This Summer’
Andrew Holleran's novel of gossip.
What is public opposition to data centers “about”?
Contra Andy Masley, I think it *is* about *progressives’ disenchantment with big tech* which began long before AI and goes back to the 2010s.
Why I Kicked Technology Out of My Classroom
And joined a number of my colleagues in doing so
THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives
a story of lost poets
The ten best rom-coms (that might not be rom-coms)
Love is the greatest story ever told.
Woman of Letters meetup, featuring Henry Begler, in SF (Sept 29)
You are cordially invited to the first of what I’m hoping will be a regular Woman of Letters event series in San Francisco, where I invite interesting speakers to discuss their relationship to books.
Teaching the Ocean to Swim
Why LLMs keep failing their Big Five personality tests
Are Languages Finished?
(English as an International Language May Well Be)
Market Nights
Menace in Chicago.
The Way We Live Now
"a fine critic, a sharp thinker, just look at her hair"
Authorship After the Internet
Aarthi Vadde's We the Platform
These Fragments Zwei
even defeat is not death for an idea
Discourse!
interventions in the debates of the day, hot takes, devastating ripostes and so forth
At the Foot of the Peak
Why do I spend so much of my one and only God-given sacred animal life writing these stupid essays?
Some Great Books of the 20th century
Or: mimetic desire in list making
Why, This Is Hell: The Faust Myth
From Marlowe to Knausgaard
Social Shadows and Social Light
Figures for collective inattention and exposure
The Ages of Schmeason
A light intro to Vico’s “barbarism of reflection”