The Chapel at Princeton

The chapel at Princeton Theological Seminary, storied place it is in American religious history, is a restful sight. One of my good friends calls its interior a triumph of Protestant style — a grand organ with arts-and-crafts motifs sits on the far wall, subtle Hellenic decorations…

Physiognomy and the Physiognomic

Hegel and Spengler Debate Skinheads

David Foster Wallace began a famously awkward interview by claiming that Wittgenstein believed humor is the only way we can address the deeper and darker problems of an era. I found…

Hoes for Midcentury Modern

The ecstasy of abstracted human collaboration

“We’re all hoes for Midcentury Modern,” or so I was told by a designer friend from RISD right before the world shut down. Her 200 square feet in the corner of a downtown Boston…

The Age of Ambition and the Fall of Rome

Visions of of Late Rome keep many of my friends up at night. Today the world is an…

Task Generality, or, Sex with Robots

A Reverie for 2018–2019

“Ah jeez, am I going to have to have sex with a robot?” So rang one of the most striking questions I’ve ever been asked. It was 2018, and I’d just caught up with a friend and revealed that I was…

Venture Communism

Advice about finding employment is generally bad. I hope to become a character who, if asked for career advice, can simply retort “one word: plastics” and have the courage to continue the deadpan.

White Sneakers

“Get white sneakers. Period. Done. End of story. You want to get chicks on Hinge? Turn yourself into a fucking object like the rest of us.”

I feel a Valkyrian rush to defend the front. Nay, to defend the ego. My inner voice spits and shrieks: This is trauma! This is…

LLMs Build Information Antibodies

Your company’s corpus is factually inconsistent. This is a feature…