In the article, I lament the loss of a path I wanted to walk. Explore how the Humanities suffered under anti-democratic forces, and explain why their study is crucial for us all.

Again, a tough write. I seemed to struggle taking the academic down a notch in this one. But the article was well received in most regards. It's been a tough few weeks getting coherent thoughts down on paper, but I'm back into a rhythm. Any feedback welcome.

The population of North Korea only has extremely limited internet access; while a select group of people can access the internet for research purposes, almost everybody else can only access a countrywide intranet called Kwangmyong.

For a country that is closed to the internet, however, the quality of OSM data in North Korea is extraordinary: 324,415 data points drawn by 889 contributors since 2007.

It is particularly interesting to note that there are a number of street-level points of interests (POIs), as POIs are regarded as information that only the local people can contribute.

Raise the son who makes frat culture irrelevant. We need to raise a generation of sons who look at the blueprint of frat culture and laugh at those rapist losers. We need to raise a generation of sons that make the entire notion of fraternities obsolete.

The shift must be seismic for this campus rape cycle to end, and the good news is research has identified a clear problem with a practical solution if we are to pretend college campuses are places where not getting raped matters as much as male bonding. And it’s breathtakingly clear cut. We can abolish something that has an established track record of resulting in rapes: Fraternities, the socially condoned epicenters of college rape culture. Abolish frats.

“But it’s a brotherhood of friendship and service that has roots in tradition —” fuck you, Brendan, go play outside.

Fraternities are rape incubators and this is backed by hard, peer-reviewed evidence.

According to a longitudinal study by the NIH published in 2022 titled “Selection and Socialization Accounts of the Relation between Fraternity Membership and Sexual Aggression,” researchers found that frats cause rape.

We still have far to go in the attempt to encode a land ethic sufficiently strong to temper our appetite for Earth’s resources and focus our work towards restoring land health. A land ethic, good land use, and an equitable and civil society arise from countless actions and conversations, constantly unfolding, as the nation’s citizens go about their daily lives.

Agriculture is an ecologically embedded enterprise, and we should not tolerate actions that degrade our natural capital, the diversity and function of our ecosystems, or the health of the atmosphere, soils and waters that surround and support us. At the same time, we must recognise that agriculture is embedded in society – a farm practice that runs counter to society’s goals is hard to maintain. I agree that a farm can and should be valued by its owners as a place to live, and as a source of pleasure in good farming, good eating and engagement with both domestic and wild neighbours. Society continues to measure farms, and judge farmers, on their production of grain, meat, biomass and other commodities. Farmers are caught up in a highly competitive market system that typically allows only a slim margin between money coming in and money going out. Meanwhile, the goal of public policy for agriculture continues to be guided by the desire for cheap food.

While the predicament of modern agriculture may appear so dire that we will inevitably adapt and organise a more sustainable system, ecologists at Murdoch University in Australia came to a different conclusion after analysing the problems facing farmers in the semi-arid southwestern part of that continent. Farmers and policy-makers continue to invest in production systems that don’t fit the land because they are now tightly bound up in patterns of modern agribusiness and food production. Financial capital goes to conventional farmers more easily than to alternative farmers, and social capital – in the forms of agronomic research, technical assistance (for addressing issues with animal health, soil fertility, soil erosion and water pollution), and especially processing, distribution and retail – supports the energy- and natural-capital intensive system. The authors describe this as a ‘lock-in trap’, ‘an industry that has so much “sunk-costs” that it may continue to degrade the resource it relies upon until the capital is totally removed.’ Shifting the system to a more desirable state – one that is ecologically as well as socially resilient – requires us to forge new social connections in the quest to establish more sustainable patterns of land use.

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I’d started to suspect that something was wrong with me when a friend I’d known since childhood died and I didn’t shed a tear. I sat at her memorial service and felt something worse than nothing — a calcified layer around where feeling should have been, as if something were trapped in my body with no hope of emerging on its own. I noticed the absence at other times I would usually have sobbed. A late-night fight with my husband, at the point where any other form of communication feels impossible. Fifth-grade graduation, when the valedictorian thanked her teachers for helping her when she was going through chemo. Pixar movies, Call the Midwife, Sarah McLachlan singing “in the arms of the angel” — none of it moved me to tears. I wasn’t a monster, I was pretty sure. Something was wrong with me. I craved the cleansing sensation after the tears stop, that feeling in your sinuses that’s like you’ve been swimming in the ocean. The boneless relief that comes after sobbing has ceased to wrack your body and you can finally rest, absolutely drained. I had no idea what it would take to get back there, the place I’d been effortlessly able to access for the first 41 years of my life. But I would spend the next six months trying. I hoped it might even be fun.

L., my therapist, mostly wanted to know why crying was so important to me — a valid question, as her questions tend to be. I didn’t have a good answer. I told her I craved crying’s cathartic physical release, then clarified that I still had orgasms (just to get that out of the way). Joking around about how much of a therapist she was being, L. asked me to think harder about the significance of crying, to go beyond the moment of triumphant weeping to imagine what it would mean. I realized that I didn’t really know. I’d just understood it as a goal and also something to write about. Unlike every other therapist I’ve ever had, L. doesn’t treat my writing as something separate from the excavations of self that we talk about in therapy but as an inextricable part of my whole deal. It wasn’t that she worried about professionalizing my emotional journey; she was just wondering if I had a thesis beyond “I haven’t cried, and I want to.”

I didn’t have a thesis. Instead, I described sitting at my friend’s funeral, watching as the rabbi sobbed her way through the service, and glancing around to confirm that mine were the only dry eyes in the room. Didn’t she think it was strange that she’d never seen me cry? With my previous therapists, many sessions had ended in tears. But I’d been a different person before I started seeing her and B., before I’d gotten on this exact drug regimen, before the events of 2022 had split my life into a clear “before” and “after.” I wanted the tears back, but I didn’t want the rest of it; I didn’t know whether that was possible, but I wanted to try. When I thought about the project in those terms, I understood why L. and B. were wary. The “before” version of me had done her best to ensure there wouldn’t be an “after.”

If you allow the most wealthy and powerful segment of society to opt out of public services, those public services will get worse. The reason is simple: You have removed the incentive for the most influential people to use their influence to improve public services. Indeed, we see this dynamic in action everywhere we look. If rich people can all go to a private hospital, the public hospital is worse. If rich people can buy their way out of the TSA security lines, the experience for the regular people who have to wait gets worse. And when the rich people’s kids all go to private schools, the public schools are worse than they would have been if they educated everyone’s kids.

From the perspective of an individual parent, the purpose of school is to give their own kid the best possible education. But from the perspective of society—from the perspective of an architect of public policy—the purpose of schools is to give everyone a good education. Wealthier parents often observe that poorer public schools are full of poorer students with more severe needs. They respond to this by opting out and putting their kid into a private school where the student population has less severe needs, and more resources to address them. This may be rational if the goal is to give their kid the very best, but by isolating the neediest children in poorer public schools, it produces a worse outcome from the perspective of public policy, where every student is equally important.

Roughly 30% of China's population plays mahjong. That's over 500 million people... But what surprised me wasn't the amount of people that play mahjong here. Rather, it was the distinct, negative outlook that people have toward the game. It's even exempt from the Chinese Cultural Heritage list because of this collective "distaste", even though the association has enlisted analgous games such as Weiqi (Go) and Xiangqi (Chinese Chess). So I took to the parlors to understand why.

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I could feel her looking at me. Her body slung in adolescent impertinence against the front passenger seat door, shoulders turned so she could face me fully. Usually when I picked up my daughter, Najya, from middle school, she’d tumble into the car and bombard me with the day’s escapades, chattering nonstop about her friend group or complaints about an annoying teacher or her wonder at the test she’d aced despite thinking she’d failed it. But not this day.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I worked to keep my face neutral, buying a few moments to gather my thoughts.

As they neared the end of her seventh-grade year, Najya and her closest girlfriends were thinking about their futures. Honors students, they searched the nation’s top colleges, and that led to a curiosity about New York City’s highest ranked public high schools. Wondering about their chances of getting in, they decided to Google their own school and its ratings. And in doing so, Najya and her tight trio of Black girl nerds confronted not only the reality of the city’s deeply segregated educational landscape but also that the Brooklyn school they all attended existed firmly on the wrong side of the divide.

By dismissal time, Najya’s shock had turned to boiling, and the seatbelt had barely clicked before she was confronting me. I had braced myself for this moment, spent nearly a decade expecting it, preparing for it. When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black. Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration.

I’ve lost count of how many times I have written some version of this sentence: Nationally, a Black student is less likely to have teachers who are qualified and experienced, and to be offered rigorous and college-prep curriculum, to have up-to-date technology and attend school in modernized facilities.

In New York, a combination of housing segregation and “academic” sorting, called school choice, that begins as early as pre-K means most Black students — even middle-class ones — are forced to attend racially segregated schools with high rates of poverty. And nationally, schools in predominantly nonwhite districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts, according to a 2019 analysis by EdBuild. In everything that we measure, these schools have less, even though the economically struggling student bodies they serve need more. And so the test scores and poor academic performance that typify these schools reflect not just the disadvantage of the students but, more essentially, the disadvantage of the schools.

New York City is a diverse school system — there is no racial majority among its student body — and yet Black children remain the most segregated of all student groups. As the U.C.L.A. Civil Rights Project describes it, New York “is a four-race city where white and Asian students, on average, attend middle-class, predominantly white and Asian schools and Black and Latino students are increasingly going to school with each other in schools where poverty is the norm.”

Black parents put their children forth as plaintiffs in lawsuits argued by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund that ultimately ended legal segregation in the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. When the federal government refused to enforce the new law of the land, Black parents sent their children to wade through white mobs to enter white-only schools, pushing their doors open for the rest of us.

And yet decades later, integration now exists for a minority of Black children — usually those born to families like ours who have the money to pay for private schools or live in tonier ZIP codes zoned to heavily white public schools, or who can pay for tutoring that allows their children, from a very young age, to test into programs for “gifted” students. Most Black students, however, languish in the type of schools that the law was supposed to have eradicated.

So, like the generations of Black parents who came before us, Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage. New York is considered one of this nation’s most liberal cities, while operating a school system that is among the most racially segregated. This segregation exists because policymakers and affluent parents — even those who profess a belief in integration and equality, — shed their advocacy at the schoolhouse door and refuse to take or support any substantial action to integrate the city’s schools. Faraji and I decided that our role in this struggle meant upending the status quo and sending our child not to a wealthy white school but to a poor Black one.

We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there. From my past reporting, I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget. I witnessed how dismissive school officials could be to lower-income parents who lodged complaints or made demands for resources and how deferential they were to wealthy ones. I believed Faraji and I could bring some of that power with us. We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.

But my child just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.

“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.

In this video, I share a personal story. I analyse the psychology of the "creep" and explore the psychological landscape of the outsider. When we stop outsourcing our safety to habitual "bubbles of belonging", we also enter a space of personal agency. The idea that the inside world is safe and the outside world is dangerous might be an illusion altogether, created by those who do not want us to escape systems. I recommend a life lived off-script.

• 00:00 Intro: A pimp tried to recruit me
• 03:38 The safe belongers
• 08:38 A Personal story
• 12:49 Individuation cannot go backwards
• 14:46 The existential wasteland
• 16:42 Creepdom agency
• 17:15 The "outside world" is not so dangerous

She describes a situation others would describe as creepy, but she did not experience it as such. She explores why she sees creepiness and safety traveling alone differently from others.

Goes into attachment to social bubbles and views and risks of social bubbles compared to outside of them.

Assassin's bullets and upsets at the polls. The world is facing a crisis of governance. I explore why that might be through a reflection on the tragedy of the Treuhandanstalt and the rise of the AfD.

In Harlan County, USA, Barbara Kopple’s camera doesn’t just film a coal miners’ strike, it becomes part of the fight.

Growing up in Tokyo, where entire neighborhoods can feel like shopping corridors, my grandparents sometimes took me to Mitsukoshi, one of Japan’s largest retail emporiums. The store was a veritable monument to beauty and abundance, stocked with everything from fine silks to sweet treats and plush sofas. As we walked from floor to floor, they would buy me “proper” clothes and take me to the fruit parlor on the top floor to eat strawberry parfaits while overlooking the entire city.

As I got older, I grew more curious about how these stores evolved into the grandiose institutions they are today, particularly in Japan. What I found as an academic surprised me: They have a very long and rich lineage, starting as comparatively humble enterprises hundreds of years ago.

We can trace many of Japan’s most prominent department stores, such as Mitsukoshi, Takashimaya, Shirokiya, Matsuzakaya, and Daimaru, back to the premodern Edo period (1603–1868).

Mitsukoshi, for example, started off as an expansive kimono fabric store (gofukuten) in 1673 in Edo (today’s Tokyo). Inside the establishment, originally called “Echigoya,” well-off customers shopped while seated on tatami mats, selecting designs from fabric pattern books (hinagatabon). In the premodern print below by Okumura Masanobu, one can see attendants presenting several bolts of fabric to a group of customers, while other patrons are being served tea. The seated figure in the foreground smokes a pipe while shop attendants bundle her purchases. The shopping experience was meant to be both leisurely and luxurious, reserved mostly for wealthier customers.

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At the beginning of 2024, as big tech slashed its human workforce to fund the AI revolution, fashion romanticized the geek. The prior fall, Miu Miu models descended the catwalk in frumpy cardigans, gray hoodies, and chunky frames, wearing their hair disheveled as if they’d pulled an all-nighter at the library. “I have always been driven by the idea of understanding how women deal with the interaction between vanity and thought,” remarked Miuccia Prada, the brand’s namesake and visionary. Prescription glasses became fashion’s hottest accessory. “It” girls started to look like librarians, or more relevantly, start-up founders. Uncool was cool. This was supposedly a good thing: “In a period in which it’s easy to succumb to the pressures of adopting every micro-trend or the aspiration to curate an immaculate image on social media, this aesthetic offers women the opportunity to opt out of the illusion of perfection,” praised one Who What Wear writer.

If only. “Geek chic” wasn’t liberation from the social-media rat race, just a deceptive new manifestation of it. (Tellingly, the faces of the aesthetic were mostly supermodels like Bella Hadid.) In the years since, our image-conscious culture has grown only more extreme, giving rise to looksmaxxing and the normalization of treatments like peptides and GLP-1s. At the same time, appearing smart has become even more aspirational. In April, Vogue heralded the rise of the “intellectual influencer,” one who shares content “rooted in their expertise, hyperfixations, knowledge, or insights on a specific subject, rather than their looks or style.” (Listed examples include a Substack writer and the podcaster Jay Shetty.) TikTokers advise their audiences on how to be “disgustingly educated”; pop stars now open libraries and curate film series. Last month, Prada and the cult South Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster debuted a limited-edition glasses collection with a book-themed campaign that features Japanese actor Kentaro Sakaguchi reciting a poem in a lecture hall.

This is a convenient public distraction for the true geeks — tech broligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman — who are busy colonizing our reality. They’ve captured us on their platforms, engineering algorithms for maximum addictiveness — facts and ethics be damned — and hollowed out countervailing institutions like journalism and academia. (Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s Grok AI spat out nonconsensual sexualized deep fakes of real women, including minors; when emailed for comment, XAI replied with the message, “Legacy Media Lies.”) In a quest for AI domination, they have strip-mined the intellectual commons, automated workers out of jobs, and commandeered local water supplies.

Now, big tech is literally coming for our retinas with AI-powered smart glasses through which it will attain a total view of our lives. Backlash to its agenda has necessitated it market these wearables as stylish and empowering lifestyle accessories, not disruptive new tech products. It is doing so with the help of a desperate fashion industry that has already glamorized glasses, reduced to selling the illusion of agency in an attention economy over which it has little authority. (Prada and Gentle Monster are collaborating with Meta and Google on AI smart glasses, respectively.)

Living grief lacks the tapestry of rituals, language, and social permissions around grieving that a person is offered with death. In death, that commemoration can help us feel closer to our loved ones. With living grief, it’s the opposite: ritual is like death by a thousand paper cuts, as it only reminds you of what you’ve lost. It can also lead to confusion or distance in relationships. I frequently hear from patients whose families or friends have ghosted them, sometimes after telling them they ‘ought’ to be better by now or are keeping themselves sick.

Living grief diverges from the collective and is an exercise in othering.

In a 1999 book entitled Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief, Pauline Boss discussed losses that remain unclear and unresolved because a person is simultaneously present and absent. Her own examples were family members grieving someone physically present but changed, such as with dementia or addiction, or someone who is missing in action. However, the concept also applies well to patients’ own experiences. We are, after all, grieving the parts of ourselves that are simultaneously here and gone. The illness itself can create ambiguity because symptoms fluctuate, which may prevent patients from fulfilling the roles society expects of them. It can also prevent validation of the loss of self, because a crisis of meaning has less objective ‘proof’ when it’s tangled within the dense webs of chronic illness — especially invisible illness. And the interminable duration of chronic illness is exhausting for the patient and their loved ones.

While my grief stems from one precipitating event, there is no one ‘thing’ it organizes itself around. It seeps into all sorts of nooks and crannies where I never thought to look, and creeps in without warning even during the times that I think I’m ok. What causes my grief is also the thing I need to make peace with and accept; every symptom, limitation, medical appointment, failed treatment, or activity that I can no longer do is a reminder of the identity I no longer have.

It’s constant work to reframe and not let myself stew in the emptiness of what I lack.

We don’t have the societal tools to support living grief, perhaps in part because of its ambiguity. But I think also because we don’t want to collectively admit that you can’t will your way to being better. I’ve discussed this in part in a piece I wrote about how people have told me to ‘just fight harder’ to seal my leak. In reality, I am determined to live every single day. Unfortunately, the output is not always what society thinks I ought to show for it. My life is reflected in the advocacy I’ve been fortunate enough to engage in, the papers I’ve helped co-author, and the writing that I hope helps people understand what it’s like to be this unwell. I don’t have progress pics or quantifiable changes to share with the world. Some days I can take a walk; other days I am stuck in bed. Vastly fluctuating capacity, even when mobility is limited, is part and parcel of long-term disability. Yet the discourse is often focused on poking holes in the patient: someone ‘is faking it,’ someone is ‘performing illness.’ That disconnect between the unified expectation of progress and the reality of chronic illness is part of what makes being sick this long so isolating.

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyMx3pF3qY4
• Invidious, a privacy focused YouTube wrapper: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=YyMx3pF3qY4

In this video, he just sits and talks about his recent trip and experience in Europe and compares some things as an American. So no video footages other than him sitting there, no music (which I like).

Context: Before the trip, he was already visiting some places and there are some cultural shocks which he got used to and is not listed here. He also often watches (and reacts) to documentary and videos about the differences from American and European stuff. So this was not an entirely blind trip going in Europe for him. I can highly recommend his other videos, if you are interested into this topic (as I am).

Inspired by a beehaw chat on Flock, I spent way too much time today (almost 6 hours) turning my discussion on governance (about 12 hours of work) into a discussion on governance with Flock. The purpose is to highlight that modern governance is a dizzyng array of public-private partnerships, traditional government, and service providers. It can result in accountability problems when contracts and services rest with private companies. The public rarely hears or understands what's their local governments are agreeing to before the contract is signed. The problems that arise from this are present all around us.

We do not know exactly when Meslier became an atheist. Everything suggests, however, that his unbelief may have predated his ordination – and that 1716 marked less a conversion than a strategic turning point, when, after being disciplined by the archbishop for confronting the local lord, he shifted his efforts from the pulpit to the page, carrying the struggle onto another terrain: that of writing. Meslier states the logic of this secret, posthumous intervention in the opening sentence of his Mémoire:

My dearest friends, since I would not have been permitted – and since it would have brought consequences both dangerous and grievous – to say openly during my lifetime what I thought of the conduct and government of men, of their religions and their morals, I resolved to tell you after my death.

Meslier wrote for a readership he could reach only once he was beyond punishment. He copied out the manuscript by hand, intending it to survive him. That posthumous strategy turned a private contradiction into a political intervention.

His great text was born of that lived contradiction. After the affair of 1716, when he realised he could no longer fight the alliance between lord and archbishop openly – at the scale of the village – he displaced the struggle. He was no longer attacking only a brutal country lord; he was facing up to the system as a whole. His reasoning was this: if feudal power oppressed the peasants, it was because it was upheld by the Church. If the Church was able to uphold the feudal lords, it was because the Church itself rested on religion. And if religion held men in its grip, then one had to go back to the heart of the mechanism, and dismantle the springs of faith. One might object that Meslier collapses religion, as organised by the Church, into faith. In any case, that is how the Mémoire des pensées et sentiments de Jean Meslier (Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier) came into being: a huge text, which he copied out by hand three times, intended for his parishioners and, beyond them, for ‘all those like them’. Nothing in that title announces a simple exercise in freethought, let alone an attack on what Meslier himself called ‘the conduct and government of men’.

This point is crucial, and it has often been missed. Meslier was not writing for a circle of literate readers curious about antireligious arguments. That is precisely what sets him apart from the philosophes of the Enlightenment who would come a few decades later. He wrote for ordinary people. He wrote for those crushed by the social order, whom he called on to be ‘disabused’. His atheism was therefore, from the start, popular in its intended audience and political in its purpose. While many 18th-century atheists remained tied to aristocratic or learned circles shaped by the Enlightenment, Meslier addressed the people. No wonder some people have likened him to Marx avant la lettre.