by Mike O’Brien

I take a long time read things. Especially books, which often have far too many pages. I recently finished an anthology of works by Soren Kierkegaard which I had been picking away at for the last two or three years. That’s not so long by my standards. But it had been sitting on various bookshelves of mine since the early 2000s, being purchased for an undergrad Existentialism class, and now I feel the deep relief of finally doing my assigned homework, twenty-odd years late. I think my comprehension of Kierkegaard’s work is better for having waited so long, as I doubt the subtler points of his thought would have had penetrated my younger brain. My older brain is softer, and less hurried.

While I chose this collection as an antidote to topicality and political news, my contemporary anxieties and concerns still found some purchase on these one-and-three-quarter-centuries-old essays of literary indulgence and Christian Existentialism. (Some say Kierkegaard was a proto-Existentialist, or a pseudo-Existentialist, but I don’t think there’s any reason to define such a profligate genre of philosophy so narrowly). As a critic of the press and “the present age”, of course, he has many sharp quips that occasion a smile and a nod, as if to say “you get me, Soren, and I get you”. But that’s the low-hanging fruit, the things that are obvious enough to state unequivocally, like the aphorisms of Nietzsche that sound snappy but do not by themselves reveal anything philosophically significant. The more philosophically meaty works of Kierkegaard’s are more contentious, harder to swallow (especially from a secular standpoint), and sometimes quite baffling on the first encounter (or second, or third).

Of particular interest was “The Sickness Unto Death”, published in 1849, in which he elaborates a spiritual psychology of despair (despair being “The Sickness”, and in the end identified with sin). Being perpetually worried about ecological issues, and about the political and economic conditions mediating humanity’s impact on the planet, despair is always hanging around. It used to be anxiety (another topic of Kierkegaard’s, particularly in 1844’s “The Concept of Anxiety”), when the data on climate change was looking worse and worse. Now that the consensus on global warming is so thick and so dire, the inherent openness of anxiety seems no longer apt to the situation (in Kierkegaard’s conception, anxiety is “the possibility of possibility”, among other formulations). You feel anxious about things that could happen, or things that could go badly. You feel despair about things that will happen, or will go badly. The accumulation of confirming data builds a great wall of probability that seems impenetrable by the merely possible, however desperately you might hold to the abstract truth that the possible still can happen. A despairing state of mind cannot sustain hope for possibility against the weight of probability. This is why Kierkegaard identified God as the only source of a possibility that could provide salvation from despair. I have a hard time seeing the difference between an impossibility which becomes actual through a miracle, and a possibility which is only possible through divine intervention. In either case, the secular situation remains hopeless. Read more »

by Derek Neal

The writer is the enemy in Robert Altman’s 1992 film, The Player. The person movie studios can’t do without, because they need scripts to make movies, but whom they also can’t stand, because writers are insufferable and insist upon unreasonable things, like being paid for their work and not having their stories changed beyond recognition. Griffin Mill, a movie executive played by Tim Robbins, is known as “the writer’s executive,” but a new executive, named Larry Levy and played by Peter Gallagher, threatens to usurp Mill partly by suggesting that writers are unnecessary. In a meeting introducing Levy to the studio’s team, he explains his idea:

I’ve yet to meet a writer who could change water into wine, and we have a tendency to treat them like that…A million, a million and a half for these scripts. It’s nuts. And I think avoidable…All I’m saying is I think there’s a lot of time and money to be saved if we came up with these stories on our own.

Writers are slow and they cost money. They get writer’s block. They miss deadlines. They are an impediment to efficiency and progress, and if they are ignored, they might get angry, as Mill finds out when he starts receiving threatening postcards from an anonymous scriptwriter that say things like, “I TOLD YOU MY IDEA AND YOU SAID YOU’D GET BACK TO ME. WELL?” and “YOU ARE THE WRITERS ENEMY! I HATE YOU.”

Writers may be Mill’s “long suit,” as a lawyer at a party tells him, but as Mill himself notes, he hears thousands of pitches a year, and he can only pick twelve. The perennial losers are bound to become resentful, disillusioned—even dangerous. After receiving one particularly disturbing postcard (IN THE NAME OF ALL WRITERS IM GOING TO KILL YOU!), Mill decides to go through his call logs to discover who could be sending him such messages. He thinks it must be a man named David Kahane, and after learning that he’s at a cinema in Pasadena, Mill drives out to meet him, hoping to placate him with a scriptwriting offer for a film that will likely never be made. Read more »

In the past year or so, I have started taking a lot of photos of the ground as I take my usual walk along the same route every day. This recent photo of the cobblestones of Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, showered with flower petals from nearby trees, is one of them.

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by Dick Edelstein

The visit by Pope Francis to Ireland in 2018 as part of the World Meeting of Families was important since it was the first one since the historic visit by Pope John Paul II in 1979, an event that drew around one and a quarter million people to a mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, the biggest crowd ever seen in the country, amounting to almost one-third of the population. Since then, religious feeling in Ireland had been on the wane, along with the Church’s authority over those who considered themselves Catholics, which was in a near-fatal slump. The Church was facing an uncertain future with the number of new seminarians dropping to record lows for several years.

Still, that visit in 2018 had generated certain expectations. First, a turnout of half a million people was expected in Phoenix Park, a figure that proved to be overestimated by around 400 percent. The actual turnout—some 130,000 people—was much smaller. However, that was nothing compared to the other expectation. On account of widespread cases of sexual molestation by clergy and a generalized public dissatisfaction over the failure of the church to recognise its history of abuse and make suitable reparations to the victims, many Irish people were expecting Pope Francis, given his reputation as a liberal, to issue a detailed and lengthy apology. In recent decades, public outrage about sexual abuse by clergy had been a worldwide occurrence, but the issue had special significance in Ireland, where the moral tone of the entire country since independence had been set by the Catholic church, despite its longstanding record of abuse.

Other factors affected Irish people’s expectations of a full apology from the Pope. One of these was the Magdalene laundries scandal. Throughout much of the twentieth century, thousands of Irish women had been incarcerated in Magdalene institutions, most of which were run by Catholic religious orders. The women were forced to work without pay or benefits. Despite the outrageous violation of the women’s human rights, the Irish government colluded with their detention and was complicit in their treatment. In 2011, a group called Justice for Magdalenes made a submission to the U.N. Committee Against Torture, arguing that the Irish government’s failure to deal with the abuse amounted to continuing degrading treatment in violation of the Convention Against Torture and that the state had failed to promptly investigate “a more than 70-year system of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of women and girls in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries”.

The story of the Magdalene Laundries was still reverberating in the public consciousness when in March 2017 Ireland was shocked by the discovery that, between 1925 and 1961, the bodies of 796 babies and young children had been interred in the grounds of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, many in a septic tank. Catherine Corless, the local historian who exposed the scandal, complained to Irish legislators that nothing had been done to exhume the bodies after her research came to light despite expressions of “shock and horror” from the Government and the President. Instead, the site had been returned to its original condition. As with the Magdalene scandal, the authorities initially showed unimaginable insensitivity and cruelty towards affected families.

Thus, when Pope Francis came to visit in August 2018, Irish people expected a full and sincere apology because of his reputation for sympathy towards a number of liberal causes, his commitment to the protection of vulnerable people, and on account of a series of special circumstances in Ireland. But surprisingly, no sufficiently firm apology was forthcoming. Read more »

by Rachel Robison-Greene

In my youth I used to play in the wooded area behind my parent’s house in a space that seemed, from the vantage point of a child, to be vast. Those areas exist now only in precious cloudy corners of my memory. In the external world, they have long been replaced by housing developments and strip malls. Then, rain or snow may have threatened to keep me indoors. Now the children are kept inside by fire season, when the air is toxic, the sun is some new color, and the nearby mountains disappear from view. “Fire season has always existed”, I am told, and some people believe it.

I was taught that the structure of the government of the United States would prevent any one branch from exerting tyrannical power over the people. Elected officials craft legislation and well-qualified, appointed judges protect against the tyranny of the majority. “Judges can’t stand in the way of the will of the President” and “this country has never been a democracy”, I am told, and some people believe it.

The political climate is changing faster than many of us can absorb, and we are left wandering the woods during fire season without any visible and reliable points of reference to guide us home. We can only hope that we leave the fog resembling the people we were when we entered it.  I find myself wondering which changes I’ll be willing to accept. Will I come to regard some of my values as relics of a bygone era and will I be forced into that position by a sheer will to survive? Is this change in myself something to be feared?

It is a painful but common feature of the human experience to be afraid of our own capacity for change. As Jean Paul Sartre puts the point, “if nothing compels me to save my life, nothing prevents me from precipitating myself into the abyss.” I may experience fear at the prospect that I may be pushed from the cliff, but I feel anguish at the possibility that, when I find myself at the cliff’s edge, I might jump. Perhaps more disturbingly, I might find myself changing in fundamental ways that I currently find unacceptable. Should I spend my time fearing that possibility? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Malcolm Murray

Enrico Fermi famously asked – allegedly out loud over lunch in the cafeteria – “Where is everybody?”, as he realized the disconnect between the large number of habitable planets in the universe and the number of alien civilizations we actually had observed.

Today, we could in a similar vein ask ourselves, “Where is all the AI-enabled cybercrime?” We have now had three years of AI models scoring better than the average humans on coding tasks, and four years of AI models that can draft more convincing emails than humans. We have had years of “number go up”-style charts, like figure 1 below, that show an incessant growth in AI capabilities that would seem relevant to cybercriminals. Last year, I ran a Delphi study with cyber experts in which they forecast large increases in cybercrime by now. So we could have expected to be seeing cybercrime run rampage by now, meaningfully damaging the economy and societal structures. Everybody should already be needing to use three-factor authentication.

But we are not. The average password is still 123456. The reality looks more like figure 2. Cyberattacks and losses are increasing, but there is no AI-enabled exponential hump.

So we should ask ourselves why this is. This is both interesting in its own right, as cyberattacks hold the potential of crippling our digital society, as well as for a source of clues to how advanced AI will impact the economy and society. The latter seems much needed at the moment, as there is significant fumbling in the dark. Just in the past month, two subsequent Dwarkesh podcasts featured two quite different future predictions. First, Daniel Kokotajlo and Scott Alexander outlined in AI 2027 a scenario in which AGI arrives in 2027 with accompanying robot factories and world takeover. Then, we had Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu describing their vision, in which we will not have AGI for another 30 years at least. It is striking how, while using the same components and factors determining AI progress, just by putting different amounts of weight on different factors, different forecasters can reach very different conclusions. It is like as if two chefs making pesto, both with basil, olive oil, garlic, pine nuts, cheese, but varying the weighting of different ingredients, both end up with “pesto,” but one of them is a thick herb paste and the other a puddle of green oil.

Below, I examine the potential explanations one by one and how plausible it is that they hold some explanatory power. Finally, I will turn to if these explanations could also be relevant to the impact of advanced AI as a whole. Read more »

by Barry Goldman 

When I get up in the morning I drink a pot of coffee and read the paper. The coffee makes me irritable. The paper makes me furious and miserable. That sets the tone for the rest of the day.

I agree with Ezra Klein that the constitutional crisis is not coming, it is here. When the Trump administration can ignore a unanimous ruling of the Supreme Court, the breakdown of the rule of law is not threatening, it has arrived.

I am a lawyer. I speak the language. I faithfully listen to Talking Feds and Strict Scrutiny, and I read the relevant Substacks. But I’m afraid all the smart lawyers in all those places are making the same mistake. The Trump people don’t give a damn about the definition of “invasion” or “predatory incursion” under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. And they don’t give a damn about the difference between “facilitate” and “effectuate” in the Supreme Court’s order in the Abrego Garcia case. Arguing about legal definitions with Trumpers is playing chess with a pigeon. The pigeon knocks over the pieces, shits on the board, and struts around like he won. Pigeon chess has nothing to do with chess, and Trump administration litigation has nothing to do with law. This realization accounts for what I have taken to calling my macrodepression.

When I’m done with the paper and my daily dose of legal commentary, I sit down at my desk and toggle to microdepression. I look at my email. Inevitably, the people I’m looking forward to hearing from have not written. The people who have written are either cancelling something it took weeks to schedule, trying to sell me something I don’t want, or writing to tell me another one of my friends is sick or dead.

Then the phone starts ringing. Read more »

Sughra Raza. After The Rain. April, 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Martin Butler

In the 1980s being non-judgmental was very much in vogue. The idea was that you should withhold from morally judging other people and their actions, at least in a significant number of cases. It was an imperative that I came across in all sorts of contexts. I, however, thought it very misguided. Why should we be non-judgemental? It seemed like an abdication of our moral commitments, a kind of moral cowardice. And in any case, I thought it almost impossible not to judge other people and their actions. Of course we might choose not to voice those judgements, and perhaps this is what those promoting the non-judgmental attitude really meant. At the time I thought non-judgmentalism resulted from a half-baked moral subjectivism, the idea that there is no objective right or wrong and so I shouldn’t expect the actions of others to meet my own subjective moral standards – to do so would be an illegitimate imposition of my morality onto others.

Morality, according to this view, is more like taste, and in matters of taste I don’t expect others to be like me. This is of course incoherent since the very imperative to be non-judgmental is itself a moral demand, which must claim some level of objectivity since it is a rule that others are expected to follow. Judging others, according to non-judgmentalism, is something we ought not to do. It is presented as an objective moral rule.

A moral theory that at least appears to justify a limited form of non-judgmentalism is the moral philosophy of liberalism as presented by John Stuart Mill. This is encapsulated in the harm principle: we should be allowed to act as we want provided we don’t harm others. But of course this doesn’t stop us judging the actions of others, it merely requires that we don’t interfere or attempt to curb those actions simply because we disapprove of them, with the proviso that others are not harmed. Although it is notoriously difficult to establish a clear definition of ‘harm’, the virtue of this approach is that it allows for a distinction between what we might regard as morally wrong and what the state should outlaw. Judging something offensive, for example, cannot be regarded as sufficient grounds for it to be outlawed. It does not however get to the nub of what non-judgmentalism is about. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

There are two types of readers: People that can read just about anywhere, and those that prefer a specific location to do it. I’m the second one. To describe where I’ve done most of my reading, I use the phrase “reading place.”

“Reading spot” sounds too specific. “Reading nook” also isn’t quite accurate. 

I’ve had a number of reading places throughout the years, and they’ve all given me something different. Here are just a few of them…

It starts in my parent’s backyard. My first reading place is a deck. It’s big and brown and you get slivers if you’re not careful. Some of my first memories are on this deck, and some of my very first books are read here.

I have a variety of reading places as I get older. One of my favorites is my car. It’s named Marvin, and it’s a 1995 Mercury Grand Marquis. Along with baseballs and fast food wrappers, I also store books. Some of them are from my high school classes. Others are stolen from my sister. I lean back in the front seat, after school ends and before baseball practice starts, and knock out a few pages.

By the time I make it to college, my reading place loses a bit of it’s character. Gone is a place specific to me, and in comes one that is applicable to just about everybody: the school library.

It’s still wonderful, though. I’m surrounded by fellow readers that love learning for the sake of it and aren’t afraid to get into nerdy conversations. It makes me feel like I’ve found my people. I like to look at books I’ll never read and imagine I will. It’s my first struggle with tsundoku (getting more books than you can actually read). 

My first two years at college, this is where most of my reading happens. There’s no place in particular – usually whatever study room I can find that’s still empty.

The last two years is where I find my place. Read more »

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by Angela Starita

Driving through Journal Square in Jersey City with a friend, we’re both amazed by the construction that has happened there in the last two years. In this case, amazement is a form of horror: the new buildings, an array of towers, are grotesquely out of scale with the rest of the city. The worst offender is a blue-glass behemoth calling itself The Journal, the name serving as the only reference to its setting in Journal Square. As you head north, Kennedy Boulevard, the city’s main thoroughfare, veers to the left and heads up to Union City, West New York, and North Bergen. Until a few years ago, that curve underscored the Boulevard’s role as a connector, a common thread and organizing principle of those Hudson County towns, starting to the south in Bayonne. Now the approach to the Square is dwarfed by the new building, one of dozens that have gone up in a 10-block radius in fewer than 5 years. The road itself goes unimpeded, but visually the building creates a massive visual wall, intimidating, arrogant, an absolute full stop. 

My friend says what he dislikes most about so much new construction is its uniformity, so unrelated to the specifics of a place. I do a bad job trying to explain the roots of un-placeness in Modernist architecture: how after the bloodshed of World War I, European architects thought they had a duty to create work that could be, as they saw it, universal. I talk about Le Corbusier’s design of the Villa Savoye as its own system, regardless of landscape, that could be plugged into almost any setting. It was like making an Esperanto for space, I say; the idea was to supersede national styles and create buildings that met people’s needs without recourse to ornament or any device that covered structural “truth.” To these architects, if our organization of space could literally foster communication, maybe prevent even war. I want my friend to see that whatever the motivations of developers, the history of architecture as disconnected object has at least some noble roots. Well, he said, I still don’t like that it has nothing to do with where it’s being built.

Solutions to the problem at the heart of our exchange—how to shape, update, and expand a physical environment with integrity—have been varied and frequently polemical: the tabula rasa approach of Le Corbusier, in some ways epitomized by Brasilia, is a frequent if misunderstood whipping boy of both urbanists and the public. And while there’s a complex and sometimes poignant story behind those plans, I can’t disagree that the results of such ready-made towns—those designed by famous architects as much as the off-the-shelf developments across the country—are alienating. And of course, the blank-slate philosophy is appealing in a country where economic health is measured in housing starts. In Florida, my father’s town bought his tiny neighborhood, mostly woods, via eminent domain. Their nominal object was to create a more walkable environment by tearing down the existing houses and building new houses along with a nearby shopping street. When I asked a town manager, why not just incorporate the existing dozen or so houses into the plan, he claimed that developers only want a blank slate. Who knows if this was accurate or not, but he certainly told the truth when I asked why do this at all? “That area doesn’t generate enough income.” Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

Many people familiar with Theodor Adorno and his work in sociology, philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies might not know about his work as a public intellectual in postwar Germany. For those readers who are not familiar with his legacy, this book is a perfect introduction to some of his most important ideas concerning free will, self-determination, and the persistence and influence of authoritarian structures in democratic and capitalistic systems. As a public intellectual, Adorno steps out of the shadow of academia and the Institute for Social Research. The lectures in this book, all delivered between 1949-1963, are not only accessible to lay readers but remain relevant to our world today. The insights he offers in reference to postwar German society are remarkably still applicable to 21st century neoliberal democratic societies. However different the 21st century is to the 20th, especially regarding technology and globalization, his analyses remain relevant to our current times. In some instances, they are even more relevant today than when he first delivered them.

In 2025, as authoritarian discourses arise like ghosts from what might appear to be the cold ashes of 20th century fascism, Adorno’s work suggests that maybe they never really disappeared in the first place. From his perspective, what we are seeing in the United States and across the globe is a continuation of a hegemonic system of thought and behavior–and the consciousness that it engenders–that was never fully eradicated. Just as the “end of history” thesis was premature in announcing the triumph of western capitalism and democracy in the 1980s over communism, announcing victory over the ideology of authoritarianism and fascism in the west at the end of World War II is also beginning to look politically naïve and willfully ignorant.

Defeating Hitler’s Third Reich militarily was not the same thing as extinguishing the ideas that fueled its popularity and fed its imperialistic and murderous imagination. Indeed, as the work of the Institute for Social Research consistently revealed, the proverbial rock from under which Hitler and Nazism crawled was made from a familiar and seemingly innocuous amalgam of science, philosophy, education, nationalism, and culture none of which, together or separately, gave away the unforeseen terror that was hiding in plain sight. From the time of Adorno’s public lectures to our current time, the task during these transitional periods of history is not to predict, like astrologists mapping the stars for clues about what the future holds. In these times, speculative social science, for Adorno, is no better than a crystal ball. Trying to guess at what will be at the expense of understanding and changing what is, is a fool’s goal. For Adorno, resistance to the rise of neo-fascist discourses in the postwar era is first and foremost to ask, “How these things will continue, and [taking] responsibility for how they will continue” (186). This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a social imagination. But this is decidedly different than believing that we can actually know what the future holds. We should imagine what could be, as any tangible notion of educated hope depends on a vibrant social imagination, but we first must change, according to Adorno, our relationship to what is.

In what follows, I will discuss several points of entry from Adorno’s lectures into how and why right-wing extremism continues to thrive in the 21st century and the central role of education and culture in combatting or perpetuating these extremist ideologies. Read more »

by Charles Siegel

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” is one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines. It lives on, four centuries after it was written, on countless t-shirts and coffee mugs. People who have never read another word of Shakespeare know the line well, and think that Shakespeare hated lawyers and that his audiences hated them too. That facile reading, however, is wrong.

Shakespeare used lawyers frequently, as both a plaintiff and defendant, and moved freely in legal circles. His first residence in London was near the Inns of Court, where affluent students lived and studied law, and he had friends and relatives in the Inns. It thus seems unlikely that Shakespeare hated lawyers or held them in contempt. But it is the context in which “let’s kill all the lawyers” appears that most tells us what it really means.

The line is spoken by Dick the Butcher, the henchman of Jack Cade. In Henry VI, Part 2, the boy king has returned from France, and rival factions from the Houses of York and Lancaster are struggling for power. The Duke of York hires Cade, a commoner, to foment rebellion. Cade tries to rouse a crowd of people, and Dick chimes in:

JACK CADE: Be brave, then; for your captain is brave, and vows reformation. There shall be in England seven half-penny loaves sold for a penny: the three-hoop’d pot shall have ten hoops; and I will make it felony to drink small beer: all the realm shall be in common; and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass: and when I am king,– as king I will be,–

ALL. God save your majesty!

JACK CADE: I thank you, good people:– there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.

DICK: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

Shakespeare is saying that lawyers are what stand between order and chaos, between respect for individual rights and mob rule. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens agreed, writing in a 1985 opinion that “a careful reading” of the scene that shows that “Shakespeare insightfully realized that disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government.”

Today Donald Trump and his minions aren’t trying to kill lawyers. But he does seek totalitarian government, and he certainly wishes to dispose of lawyers, and the rules and norms, the rights and processes, that they guard. Read more »