Testing
testing
September 2026
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.