Michael Uhall

My second book, Theory of the Alien, is out from Routledge this fall, with an affordable paperback in 2027. It asks how the Space Age reshapes power politics, geography, strategic imagination, and, perhaps most centrally, the concept of the human: www.routledge.com/Theory-of-th...

If you find the idea that intelligence may have evolved before exotic or far-fetched, then you may not yet have come to terms with Darwin. But coming to terms with Darwin cuts both ways: grayskythinking.substack.com/p/intelligen...

My long review ("What Is Living and What Is Dead in Contemporary Vitalism?") of Benjamin Noys' Envisioning the Good Life: The Limits of Contemporary Vitalism (edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-envisio...) is out now in Theory & Event 29:4 (2026): muse.jhu.edu/issue/57673

New at The Space Review (@thespacereview.com), "The orbit is the territory: rethinking spacepower in a domain where nothing stays still," on spacepower theory and territorial claims in Low Earth orbit (and beyond): www.thespacereview.com/article/5317/1

Penumbria 68: Infestada, containing my short story "Sustrato," is available now: www.penumbria.mx/penumbria-in...

"An idiot sultan could paralyze the Ottoman Empire in a way that a pope or Holy Roman emperor could never do for all of Europe."

New at boundary 2 online: “Warfare Modulation,” on atmospheric violence, collective sensation, sound, and survival beyond narrative from W.G. Sebald and Peter Sloterdijk to Palestinian DJ Sama’ Abdulhadi: www.boundary2.org/2026/08/mich...

In the essay below, @grayskythinking.bsky.social suggests how instead of clinging to the existing paradigms as they fall apart, we can reexamine current assumptions to begin salvaging and repurposing their scattered pieces into something genuinely more adaptive. #backloop

For Boyd, entropy becomes a generative engine, the very means by which the breakdown of one order supplies the materials for another: grayskythinking.substack.com/p/gray-sky-t...

"Armor yourself against the knocks of being alive, insist on 'being in control,' and you will be able to hide from the fact that you are a real, vulnerable being in a contingent universe. But you will have a trapped, shitty life, and you will export your unhappiness to other people."

"The Army in general lost a lot of analytical prowess due to the past 17 years of constant combat and increasing reliance on PowerPoint."

www.thespacereview.com/article/5139/1

VoC is proud to present a new featured article by political theorist @grayskythinking.bsky.social on Alex van Warmerdam's Borgman (2013), considering the film's feral Outside irruption into late capitalist domesticity and what it means to leave yourself behind. www.vaultofculture.com/vault/featur...

Very cool article about @egarcmol.bsky.social's teaching and work: las.illinois.edu/news/2026-03...

The start of a limited series of translations from German philosopher and intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg, writing about outer space: “Before spaceflight had even begun, it had already been conceived as a metaphor.…”: grayskythinking.substack.com/p/astronoeti...

Absolutely essential reading by @lalehkhalili.bsky.social for this exact moment in historical time: www.versobooks.com/products/606...

View of Planet Earth from Artemis II...

Someone needs to tell the American people what's going on in the Pentagon, and it obviously won't be Pete Hegseth, who is at war with America's senior military officers. My latest: www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Meanwhile, in things that actually matter: phys.org/news/2026-04...

As is tradition,

Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, after the successful launch of Artemis II. A crucial image for the psychogeography of outer space.

"The intent of my introductory comments is, in part, to give the reader a sense of the uniqueness and independence of [Hans] Blumenberg's approach, which is attested to by its having been almost universally ignored for decades."

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Just remember that there is no shortage in higher ed enrollment and more people are trying to go college than ever. The higher ed disinformation is about cutting funding, creating the illusion that no one believes in the value of college. It's bullshit. www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2026...

Here, the environment that Sebald understands as a medium of destruction provisionally becomes, in Abdulhadi’s work, the medium through which that same destruction is refracted and held at bay, and in which catastrophe, perhaps, is survived. grayskythinking.substack.com/p/reading-ge...

Honestly, not just possible, but necessary. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

I think the President musing about killing people "just for fun" would have resulted in every major paper demanding impeachment in the before times.

“Don’t know shit about your enemy. Assume he is a stupid baby.” —Sun Tzu

@juhaarvidhelminen.bsky.social's photographs perform a kind of geopolitical degloving, in which the symbolic skin of power that so often clothes authority in many-colored mantles is peeled away, leaving behind only pellucid black abstraction: grayskythinking.substack.com/p/reading-ge...

There's half a dozen things a day you've never seen before, but what I can't get over is starting a war on total lack of political credit.

The Houthi Conundrum and the War in Iran – Gregory D. Johnsen agsi.org/analysis/the...

For Augustine, the imperfection of political life becomes a kind of speculative engine, the very means of generating projects and trajectories that surpass, survive, and perhaps even transform their conditions of origination: grayskythinking.substack.com/p/gray-sky-t...

Discussions of AI that do not engage explicitly with discourses around autonomous weapons, cognitive offloading, and corporate financial misconduct are disingenuous or fatally shortsighted.

A lot of people say AI isn't very good for the world and its outputs are routinely unreliable, but these haters fail to see how it's revolutionizing how we incinerate schoolchildren.

On DeLillo's Point Omega (2010): "Perhaps seeing like a state means you can truly see nothing beyond the circumscribed horizons of the self, after all; perhaps only certain griefs or losses can change this": grayskythinking.substack.com/p/reading-ge...

Why bomb a school? Could've been aiming at something else and missed. But it looks like this missile hit the intended target. Except the target selection—perhaps by an AI system called Maven that uses Claude—was based on outdated information. Target suggestions are one thing. But no human review?

Today's gift link. "Those on the isolationist right who thought Trump shared their views made the mistake of inferring too much from his domestic policy." www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/o...

"It’s worth noting the degree to which experimental writing and political history are intimately, perhaps even inextricably intertwined. A single speech act can bring an entire geopolitical world of possibility into being": grayskythinking.substack.com/p/reading-ge...

Plato uses his political philosophy to develop alternative assumptions. This is where gray sky thinking slips the shining wire of mere critique, which always sutures the critic to the object of her critique: grayskythinking.substack.com/p/gray-sky-t...

Brief reflections on @tim-weiner.bsky.social's The Folly and the Glory, a brisk and unsettling survey of American-Russian political warfare (1945-2020) and some of the recurring pathologies of great-power projection: grayskythinking.substack.com/p/reading-ge...

The default assumption that the future will resemble the past is dangerous. This short article introduces “gray sky thinking” as a framework for conceptualizing existential risk without continuity bias: grayskythinking.substack.com/p/introducti...

Nuclear nonproliferation was on the ballot in 2024, though most Americans didn’t realize or care. In term 1, Trump let Iran out of nuclear restrictions in exchange for nothing, accepted DPRK as a nuclear weapons state, and made US allies want their own deterrent. Now 50 years of US-Russia is done.

Adriana Mandacaru Guerra has written a scholarly review of my first book, Noir Materialism (www.bloomsbury.com/us/noir-mate...), for the January 2026 issue of Theory and Event (29:1): muse.jhu.edu/issue/56178. It's always an honor. Currently open access: muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

"My personal view (not the university’s view): a university that forces philosophy professors to remove texts by Plato from their syllabi is not a serious university, it reduces itself to a political propaganda institution, just like philosophy departments in the Soviet Union": archive.ph/LiA44

Part 3 of a series on conceptual engineering and pragmatism ("The left hand of all creation: how to repurpose whole worlds") is up at Diffractions Collective. Part 3 engages with algorithms, Günther Anders, Ray Brassier, and chirality. diffractionscollective.com/2025/11/21/t...

Part 2 of a series on conceptual engineering and pragmatism ("The left hand of all creation: how to repurpose whole worlds") is up at Diffractions Collective. Part 2 engages with S. Spielrein, J. Schumpeter, John Boyd, and Nick Land on creative destruction: diffractionscollective.com/2025/11/13/t...