monthly reads

This, to me, is the deeply human centerpiece of Anora: the idea that people in difficult situations take bad deals. ...You’re going to be exploited anyway. So why not believe in love?

What we get now are exhibitions of frames themselves without paintings; exhibitions featuring dead cows and their excrements; videos showing the inside of the human body (gastroscopy and colonoscopy); inclusion of smell into exhibitions; etc. Here again, as in sexuality, perversion is no longer subversive: shocking excesses are part of the system itself—the system feeds on them in order to reproduce itself.

AI flattens out all the fascinating architecture of thought that makes the internet hum.

corpses walk among us. they might look like you and i but in truth, they are contaminated by a disease that has turned them into empty shells, mannequins masquerading as people. richard hofstadter had a word for this sickness- anti-intellectualism- but i call it the death of our nafsaad. of our person-hoods.

Humans don’t change. In the 80s and 90s we had the Satanic abuse panic which broke apart thousands of households based on false confabulations. Such cases require an initial cause which prompts mimicry. It was Frau Troffea in 1518, and it was psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder who created the satanic panic with his discredited book Michelle Remembers in 1980, and now this entire phenomenon of “drones are attacking!” and blurry iPhone videos is a result of a 2017 New York Times article announcing that the government spent years secretly hunting unexplainable UFOs which buzz military bases and dance like Tinkerbell away from pilots.

If it feels like Congress is out of touch, it probably doesn’t help that some of its most prominent leaders like Pelosi and McConnell were born before the widespread availability of the ballpoint pen. That these two leaders are members of opposing parties shows how bipartisan America’s gerontocracy problem is.

These practices have surely led to the death of millions from avoidable conditions, not to mention the suffering it caused in general to patients and their families. What do we call these sorts of crimes? What distinguishes it from the kind of murder we typically think of?

With the reopening of the Syrian civil war and the likely collapse of the Assad regime, it may quickly become clear how much of a linchpin Syria was to a delicate political balance of power in West Asia. Since the same government ruled since 1963, many people have likely mistaken continuity for stability.

Where are we with Surrealism, then? Quite possibly in the same plain little room where we began. The lighting is clear, the walls straight, the corners decorously right-angled. Something is off, but psychoanalysis won’t help us.

H P Lovecraft, the master of cosmic horror stories, was a philosopher who believed in the total insignificance of humanity.

Flattening Lolita into a look didn’t stop at lollipops. Since the publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel in 1955, beauty culture has repeatedly taken the story of its unreliable narrator, 38-year-old pedophile Humbert Humbert, at face value in order to give his victim, 12-year-old Dolores Haze (Lolita), a more marketable face.

Strong straightforward criticism is reserved for the relatively small (and increasingly globally isolated) state of Israel. The US, on the other hand – which supplies about 80% of Israel’s weapons imports, as well as billions of dollars in aid – is treated as a kind of neutral third party, and of course as a “very good friend”. This way, our Government can bask in the moral glow of condemning the bombers, while preserving a cosy relationship with those supplying the bombs.

The point is not to ignore the author’s life or pretend it doesn’t exist. Even if that were possible, it wouldn’t accomplish anything. Rather, the point is that the author doesn’t get any special authority over the work...Chinatown is as much Dederer’s as it is Polanski’s; classic albums like 808s & Heartbreak are as much mine, or yours, as they are Ye’s. It’s a lovely, anarchistic idea. In practice, though, the idea has limits. There’s a certain category of art that defies any attempt at separation: namely, the cases where the horrible thing about the artist is present in the art itself.

Life is so long, I keep thinking to myself. I live to experience the consequences of my every act. Life is so long and so short. One day it will end, I won’t be allowed to see things through.

If each bout of depression, bipolar disorder or PTSD makes another more likely, should sufferers stay on medication for life?

But cannibalism can also be a funerary ritual. Instead of burying or cremating the bodies of loved ones, as is now common in Western society, perhaps in some prehistoric societies they chose to eat them.

...if you take stock of the progress in neuroscience since 2000, it's noticeable that the most popular papers are more aptly described as “cool” rather than fundamental. If you look at, say, Scientific American's 2022 list of “This year's most thought-provoking brain discoveries,” the results are firmly in the cool category, not the fundamental.

And, unfortunately, it has become endemic, infecting every space of discourse, and ensuring that actual progress, actual mutual understanding between people and cultures, never happens. We have sacrificed a focus on material betterment for moral purity.

We don't have precedents to tell us how to think about whether or not it is plagiarism to take every book ever written and use it to teach a neural network how to talk ... Our new tools are available to both good-faith and bad-faith actors, and that means we are at the beginning of a very messy new era indeed.

When we discover scary new things, we try to think of them as inventions first because inventions seem to embody a contingent optionality and afford us more agency than discoveries. It feels like we don't have to use them if we don't like them, and that we have some sort of god-like creator-agency over their very existence.

How rich we are is beginning to determine how quickly and how well we get treated, a violation of the core ideals at the foundation of the NHS.

To use verdigris was to accept that your lovingly rendered scene would one day sour. The bright cloaks would turn dark, the soft grass would fade, the foliage turn. But such is the nature of cloth and plants and paint. Such is the nature of beauty.

...interesting things that don't have to justify themselves in terms of profits or even the interest of the public. So that when someone asks, as the reviewer above did, "Not sure what the point is?", the answer can come: "There is no point. And isn't that a beautiful thing?

It is not a cultural inability to seriously engage with complicated art, but a cultural unwillingness to do so that exemplifies the true depths of our unquestioned individualism.

Techno-optimism is a dangerous philosophy whose adherents espouse the blind faith that market capitalism and technology will solve the world's problems. In reality, this kind of optimism simply justifies elite power and promotes indifference to human suffering.

It turns out sitting in the stands drunk watching people die was popular, and has always been popular, because it really is titillating, thrilling, dramatic, an infinite jest, to watch other people in life and death situations. Left to our own devices, bloodsport is a global minimum we humans fall into unless some specific ideology or religion acts as a barrier for our fall.

how billionaire-funded right-wing “think tanks” such as the Heritage Foundation, Adam Smith Institute, Manhattan Institute and Adam Smith Institute manipulate the news to spread their propaganda.

You cannot subversively, satirically, or ironically produce and consume things. The idea that you can is solipsistic and conservative. Production and consumption have collective consequences, whether you adopt Barbie-inspired beauty behaviors with a knowing wink or not! ...Awareness is magic. It's also a clever way for the filmmakers to absolve themselves of responsibility.

And, unfortunately, it has become endemic, infecting every space of discourse, and ensuring that actual progress, actual mutual understanding between people and cultures, never happens. We have sacrificed a focus on material betterment for moral purity.

the aesthetics of consumption have, in turn, become a conduit to make the self more easily consumable: your existence as a Type of Girl has almost nothing to do with whether you actually read joan didion or wear miu miu, and everything to do with whether you want to be seen as the type of person who would.

Whatever it means in theory, in practice capital punishment means killing innocent people.