Adam Pontius

Money is not the same thing as political power. You have to spend it well. Donors that convert money into political power (Kochs being best example) spend years building institutions that can handle high volumes of spending effectively. Musk clearly has never had the patience for that.

None of which is to say that the level of Musk's spending isn't toxic for American politics. But breathless coverage of overall spending isn't much better than breathless coverage of what billionaires say.

Unfortunately I don’t think geography gives Canada and Mexico much of a choice. But the insularity Stancil points out here is a structural, long running, endemic problem, part of the wages of American exceptionalism.

Reinhold Niebuhr’s book on this has aged well. He elaborates the theme of the U.S. imagining itself as exceptionally ‘new’ or ‘young’ really well. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Unfortunately I don’t think geography gives Canada and Mexico much of a choice. But the insularity Stancil points out here is a structural, long running, endemic problem, part of the wages of American exceptionalism.

The pain and embarrassment of that awareness drives a lot of the ‘tankie’ aspects of left in the U.S. Swapping out ‘America the hero’ for ‘America the villain’ doesn’t really change the plot all that much though when the problem is more akin to what ‘kids these days’ call ‘main character syndrome.’

Unfortunately I don’t think geography gives Canada and Mexico much of a choice. But the insularity Stancil points out here is a structural, long running, endemic problem, part of the wages of American exceptionalism.

This is because exceptionalism simply means believing in being the exception to the rule, and if a community believes they are exceptions to world politics (“new world”) the result is a culture that doesn’t track the rest of the world closely in any respect.

Unfortunately I don’t think geography gives Canada and Mexico much of a choice. But the insularity Stancil points out here is a structural, long running, endemic problem, part of the wages of American exceptionalism.

So: the method that's being applied to determining LLM authorship is putting together a dictionary of frequently used words by models that are constructed from patterns in language like the frequency with which words are used? Can't think of any reasons why that would go wrong...

I'm noticing a certain amount of magical thinking about Anthropic's watermark. It sounds like an interesting institution, but it is just that: an institution Anthropic will need to maintain. It's not a technology that will magically make all of the challenges LLMs pose for higher ed disappear.

I've become fascinated by the furor over Emily Wilson's review of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. I liked the film and do not believe Wilson's review does its subject justice. The more I hear interviews from her the more I think the review may just not explain her point of view very well. ...

We've been given the gift of two radically different takes on one of the most important stories in the Western canon, created by creators with thoughts about it that are deep and complicated enough that they aren't easily elucidated outside of their chosen mediums.

I've become fascinated by the furor over Emily Wilson's review of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. I liked the film and do not believe Wilson's review does its subject justice. The more I hear interviews from her the more I think the review may just not explain her point of view very well. ...

Consider for instance the way meaning changes between this screen shot of the transcript of the interview, and the truncated descriptions of her quip in the headlines:

I've become fascinated by the furor over Emily Wilson's review of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. I liked the film and do not believe Wilson's review does its subject justice. The more I hear interviews from her the more I think the review may just not explain her point of view very well. ...

The irony is that I think this point is lost in the review behind her own rhetorical fireworks and humorous asides, what I might refer to as literary spectacle, not entirely different perhaps from the cinematic spectacle which she deride's in Nolan's adaptation. ...

I've become fascinated by the furor over Emily Wilson's review of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. I liked the film and do not believe Wilson's review does its subject justice. The more I hear interviews from her the more I think the review may just not explain her point of view very well. ...

What becomes apparent in both is her issues with Nolan's adaptation are with the issues she has with most translations and adaptations, that they are pulled in too close to our modern English language world, domesticating the story beyond her recognition of the story as she reads it in Greek. ...

I've become fascinated by the furor over Emily Wilson's review of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. I liked the film and do not believe Wilson's review does its subject justice. The more I hear interviews from her the more I think the review may just not explain her point of view very well. ...

There is her interview with LRB here, which I think may have been released before the review. ... www.youtube.com/watch?v=onDD...

Saw a report this morning that someone made a huge bet on prediction markets against Collins winning reelection several hours before the Politico article on Platner came out. Our political system is now so marinated in corruption that we no longer recognize the smell.

The effect of German speaking refugees on American intellectual culture after WWII was so great that it’s often easy to forget how few such refugees were actually granted entry during the war: