James Vincent

when one of your country’s most compelling cultural products is spectacles of public violence, of course a weak government would want in on that action. if you can’t beat em, join em!!

incredible piece - for the story itself and the reporting, yes, but also for the sustained and barely-disguised contempt in which the author clearly holds his subject www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

any historians/philosophers of science who've been writing/researching the impact of AI? looking to speak to people for a piece if anyone has any suggestions...

"The US military acknowledged for the first time on Monday that it has weapons in space, as China and Russia grow their military programmes in orbit."

fascinating translated essay seemingly written by a deepseek engineer - first half is him contemplating his own replacement by AI; conclusion is geopolitical, saying US winning AI race is "no less than letting Hitler master atomic bomb technology before the Allies” docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Revisiting one of the best magazine stories ever written, Tom Junod for Esquire on the falling man image of 9/11 www.esquire.com/news-politic...

"It’s true that I know at least four guys named Dave and none named Bank of America. At the same time, not one of the Daves I know—nor even Bank of America—has tried to saddle me with a 400 percent APR on a two-figure loan." thebaffler.com/salvos/paid-...

qntm's lena is brilliant, yes - but it missed the mechanism by which digital immortality would actually be achieved... not as some scientific project, but the result of a political assassination followed by an attempted taboo on the reproduction of your image

beautiful, mind-bending piece by T.J. Clark arguing that palaoelithic art like the chauvet caves were a reaction to the rising hegemony of language over thought — a counter-proposal that attempted to dissolve the linear, hierarchical structure of language www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

been thinking on this and while the absolute figures are bad more granular numbers would be helpful. how much does cooking, celebrity memoir, puzzles etc account for nonfiction sales? aren’t these activities being eaten by online as much as history fans going to podcasts? bsky.app/profile/thel...

I’ve spoken with my agent and we’ve decided that my nonfiction books about scientific history are in fact auto fiction in that you auto read them immediately

TIL that both “consider” and “desire” reflect a Roman obsession with stars, seen in their incorporation of the Latin sidereus or starry. “considerare” (look closely) literally means “to observe the stars” while “desiderare” (long for) likely means “await what the stars deliver”

Ladies and gentlemen...this is Woke No. 5

Got a new google scholar notification, so I go check and find this very cool poem by Wang Jibing 王计兵, the recent Lu Xun prize winner, prefacing a PhD thesis on women migrant workers and the gig economy PhD students in all disciplines: more poems in theses please, we love to see them! ✨💫

it's cool man all you need to do is slow down refocus attention restore friction embrace inconvenience, cultivate silence nurture craft protect boredom write longhand walk walk walk walk walk - have you thought about walking? - and everything will be o k a y i p r o m i s e

how miserable will life be when instead of showing you idealized versions of other people, adverts use AI to show you idealized versions of yourself — scrolling past your face, but more beautiful; your head, on a more attractive body... hopefully the suicides will force standards

i find it grimly appropriate that voyager golden record — a collection of sound, data, and images intended to represent the totality of human culture and carry it to the stars — begins with a greeting by then-UN secretary-general kurt waldheim, a suspected war criminal

"To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs — but a tribute nevertheless." - George Steiner

here’s a clam and misty morning from wales for your troubles

"To say that someone has a strong will means that she desires fiercely. Or it means that she has conquered her desires and is no longer their servant... The person who breaks his diet wishes for two things at once: to eat and to refrain." harpers.org/archive/2026...

great piece on gwendoline riley - including the salutary reminder that scorn and contempt allow us to retain our dignity at uncertain costs www.bookforum.com/print/3301/g...

TIL that "omicron" in the greek alphabet means "little o" and "omega" means "large o." little and large; micro and mega

nice argument. however, i've already depicted myself as the chad boethius, smiling over my hindu-arabic numerals, and you as the soyjack pythagoras, struggling to match my calculations with your reckoning board

This is bombshell stuff.

What a fascinating story - Fernstedt is like a character from a Joseph Mitchell piece - the homeless man (and former journalist) living in the porch of the UKs most expensive house www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

advertising has really reached some transcendent peak over on X, the everything app

for some reason i had not seen this animation of DESI before and i find it very beautiful - it's amazing how we've essentially recreated a compound eye, with a focal plane formed of 5,000 individually articulated fiberoptic strands, all shimmering under the night's sky