“A public high school teacher asks why the wrong things cause a fuss in schools.”
philosophy
Posted inEditor's Pick
I Once Fell for the Fantasy of Uploading Ourselves. It’s a Destructive Vision.
“In the early 2000s, I spent hundreds of hours trying to upload my mind to the web.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Degradation Drug
The fact that some prescription medications can lead to impulse-control problems is nothing new. But that doesn’t change how disruptive they are to people’s lives, or the philosophical recalibrations they demand. Carl Elliott’s dive into the world of pramipexole fallout is as fascinating as it is terrifying. The longer Hannah took pramipexole, the worse her […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation
The weirder things get in the world, the easier it is to believe that what we know as reality is in fact happening within the confines of some sort of program. Physicists, despite their love of ideas like quantum entanglement, tend not to agree. But in this shaggy, personable essay, Jason Kehe — under the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
At the End of the World, It’s Hyperobjects All the Way Down
“The message some readers heard in the arrival of these phenomena was a frightening one: Look upon our works, ye mighty, and despair. But there’s another message in Morton’s book, one that Morton is increasingly extolling as hopelessness threatens to paralyze so many: Our sense of ‘the world’ might be ending, but humans are not […]
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Story
‘I’m a Big Fan of Writing To Find Out What You Don’t Know.’
Mark Haber discusses “Reinhardt’s Garden” and its protagonist’s quest for a true understanding of melancholy: “not a feeling but a mood, not a color but a shade, not depression but not happiness either…”
Posted inBooks, History, Nonfiction, Story
How Diderot’s Encyclopedia Challenged the King
The encyclopedists’ plan to catalog knowledge seemed harmless enough. But what they intended was far more subversive: to restructure knowledge itself.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Nonfiction, Story
On Subtlety
What’s so great about having things spelled out clearly?
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Hiking With Nietzsche
An infirmed Friedrich Nietzsche hiked the Swiss Alps to work on his writing. Philosopher John Kaag followed Nietzsche’s trail, taking the great thinker’s ideas out of his books and into the world.
Posted inNonfiction
I Think, Therefore I Am Getting the Goddamned Epidural
On midwives, metaphysics, and intensely natural births.