The weather hasn’t been great, but the other day the sun came out for a bit so I could get the long lens out. These characters came out to feed. Long-tailed tits (Aegithalos caudatus):
Academia
There is a great gap between the overthrow of authority and the creation of a substitute. That gap is called liberalism: a period of drift and doubt. We are in it today. I think that the pace of technological change is intolerable, that it denies humans the dignity of continuity, states the competence to govern, […]
One structural source of weakness in contemporary liberal democracy is that it does not seem to be able to solve some important, even bread and butter, policy challenges. That it does not do so with the threat that global warning involves is, while highly regrettable, no mystery. It’s very difficult for democracies to take non-existing […]
One source of the Global Academic Gap is that many universities and academic resources in the Global South are underresourced (sometimes massively so). If there is no money to pay for a generator to deal with electricity blackouts, or in case there is no money to hire scholars, then it’s hard to even start doing […]
When I first published on what I call ‘synthetic philosophy’ back in 2019, I presented the two key components of the view in such a way that it caused confusion about the position I was trying to describe as a sociological phenomenon within philosophy of science. I developed the idea of ‘synthetic philosophy’ in order to give […]
As I say in my TED Talk about Vilem Flusser, the most pressing cultural question is: “why are things so weird?” Or as Anna Shechtman describes it: “that feeling—floating somewhere between mania and motion sickness—that everything has changed.” It seems like everyone really fucking wants the answer to be “The Algorithm.” The New Yorker internet and culture columnist Kyle […]
I’ve been reading Maylis de Kerangal’s Réparer les vivants (oddly available in two different English translations as Heart (US) and Mending the Living (UK)), which I highly recommend. De Kerangal’s speciality is writing about people at work and this is the saga of a heart transplant over 24h, from the beginning of the donor’s day […]