by Scott Samuelson

I’ve noticed something peculiar when I’m at an academic talk. While the paper is being read, I tend to become increasingly skeptical of it. Sometimes I dismiss it because I can’t track its jargon or follow its argument. But even when I do follow its every twist and turn, I often experience a strange resistance to it.
In the Q and A after the talk, the audience seems in a similar boat. They raise objections of their own and are rarely enthusiastic about the consequent rebuttals. When they’re not making objections, they end up asking one of two questions. How does this relate to my work? Or: why doesn’t this relate to my work?
In short, a paper that’s meant to win over its audience tends to have the exact opposite effect. This is especially true at philosophy talks.
Here’s the really curious thing. When I happen to have drinks or dinner afterwards with the speakers, they become way more fascinating, way more winning. They tell the story of how they got into their subject. They joke around. They confess their nagging doubts. They relate their ideas to their personal lives and to contemporary events. I see the value in the very points that had me dreaming up objections a short while ago. Now I’m enjoying myself and having new ideas of my own. When they stop trying to convince me they’re right, I start to come around to their ideas.
I’ve experienced a related phenomenon at poetry readings. A poet will recite a poem full of references to, say, up-to-date hospital equipment and mid-century European train commerce. After intoning the last bewildering line, the poet will start talking like a normal person and tell the backstory of writing the poem by a dying grandpa’s bedside, listening to the bleeping EKG and thinking about tales of his escape from Nazi Germany hidden among boxcar freight. I’ll go from being completely baffled to being immensely moved.
What I’ve long wondered is why thinkers and writers don’t think and write the interesting stuff, the stuff that actually convinces us and moves us. Read more »




Sughra Raza. Under the Bridge at Deception Pass, Washington. April 2026.
Donald Trump has famously called climate change and global warming a hoax. Ignorant and benighted as he is, he is far from alone. Skepticism about global warming and its causes is widespread. One overly kind reading of this skepticism is that it is, to an extent, a consequence of the general problem of dealing with very big numbers and very small numbers. Such numbers fall outside people’s familiar mid-size range, and so intuition about them isn’t well-developed. Also unfamiliar to most are the effects of exponential growth or decline.
I had meant to read Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription, but in a process I don’t understand, all the e-books were in use at the library; I borrowed his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), instead. I’d never read Lerner, this despite having written a long essay defending autofiction in The Republic of Letters (Lerner is considered one of the genre’s main exemplars), focusing instead on the non-American writers of autofiction (Knausgaard, Cusk, Ferrante). I’ve always preferred European literature to American literature, the one exception being Americans who write about Europe, like Henry James or James Baldwin, but when I opened Leaving the Atocha Station, I discovered that Lerner also writes about Americans in Europe; in this case, the American is Adam Gordon, a version of Lerner who is on a poetry fellowship in Madrid, much like Lerner was a Fulbright scholar in Madrid in 2004, the year the book takes place.
The AI market continues to evolve and surprise. In recent months, Anthropic withheld their latest model Mythos, OpenAI made a U-turn and started experimenting with ads, and Meta bought a “social network for AIs”. This could point to increased divergence in AI companies’ business models. While this might increase AI risk to society in the short term, it is likely a good thing for managing risks in the longer term. It should be encouraged.
In the early 1990s, I began listening to qawwali in a serious way. In 1994 I happened upon a recording of one of the great performances of the Pakistani maestro, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. He must have been addressing an audience outside South Asia because he began the concert with a sentence in English (of sorts). “Now we are singing,” he announced in his gravelly voice and thick Punjabi accent, “a poetry in the Persian.” Without further preamble he and his troupe began to sing. For many years now I’ve tried to correct the sentence in my mind. Poetry in the Persian. Poetry in Persian. A poem in the Persian. A poem in Persian. But it never sounds quite right, except in Nusrat’s idiosyncratic grammar: Now we are singing a poetry in the Persian.

