Nasreddin got himself into some serious legal trouble–the reasons are lost to time. Before the king sentenced him to death, Nasreddin asked for a delay because he was the only person in the world who could teach a horse to sing. The king was skeptical, but gave Nasreddin a horse and a year to teach…
The internet can sometimes disappoint you, but sometimes it can be so very, very satisfying. When you’re quote-hunting these days, it’s usually just a disappointment. For instance: I have long loved a quotation from Gustave Flaubert that is translated as follows: “Be regular and ordinary in your life, so you can be violent and original…
What is the opposite of semantic satiation?
Most people know the story: Tom and Joe are fishing on a boat in the middle of the river, when they spot a baby floating past. Joe tosses his pole and jumps into the water to save the child, and Tom helps him back into the boat, checking on the infant. They’re rowing back to…
I wrote this little primer at the bottom of a long discussion of the Schocken Books editions of Arendt’s work, and then reposted it a while back on Facebook. It’s been popular, so I’m reposting it again here so I can easily link to it without feeding social media. Race-thinking precedes racism. Arendt’s analysis of…
Education is the ultimate escape plan. Here is a free philosophy education, year by year, with no institutional permission required.
Sandel’s Justice, Kagan’s Death, and Philosophize This! from episode one, with an AI tutor to help process what you hear.
Millican on epistemology, the Edinburgh course, and forall x for logic, with Philosophy Bites in your ears.
Adamson’s History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Sadler on Hegel, Dreyfus on Heidegger, and Wolff on Kant and Marx.
Harvey through Capital, a reading group, PhilPapers, and an AI that argues back instead of explaining.
Read primary texts, write about them, argue about them. At this point you are doing philosophy.
Concepts worth carrying around, one idea per essay.
The surplus left over once needs are met. Who gets the extra share creates inequality and how it is spent shapes culture.
Read the essay, 2017The tendency of a market to sort participants into worse and worse pools when one side of a deal knows more than the other.
Read the essay, 2026When a disorder feels like part of the self rather than an intrusion, so the sufferer blames the world instead of the illness.
Read the essay, 2016Tracing metaphysical concepts back to the remembered appearances that thinking works on, which strips them of any claim to a truer world behind this one.
Read the essay, 2016Some arguments take more than one essay. These are meant to be read in order.
Sequence 4 parts 2026
What Deleuze, Carroll, and the Stoics can tell us about prose that has nothing behind it.
Sequence 3 parts 2026
Consumption as labor, fandom as cultural R&D, and AI training as an enclosure of the commons.
Sequence 6 parts 2011
Six posts on forgiveness as Arendt's answer to the irreversibility of action, Auden's Falstaff, and her prejudice against charity.
Things I’ve built: tools for writers and legislative teams, and a learning world for kids.
A parent-guided learning world of investigations, stories and making things: follow a creature’s trail, plan a garden in Number Garden, grow words in Word Garden, or stage a puppet show in the Story Loft.
after-the-storm-learning.anotherpanacea.workers.devLive · for writersA development editor for fiction and argument-shaped nonfiction. It diagnoses structure and never rewrites unless you ask.
apodictic.anotherpanacea.comLive · for teamsAn open, self-hostable bill tracker: AI bill summaries, member votes and hearing calendars, for a few dollars a month.
floorvote.orgOpen sourceGlass-box stylometry for authorial voice. Every measurement shows its work. Not an AI detector.
github.com/anotherpanacea-eng/setec-voiceprintSequence 3 parts 2025–2026
Why chatbots say “I,” what the pronoun means technically, and why consciousness is the wrong question to ask about it.
Sequence 3 parts 2026
What stylometry can and can't tell us about AI prose: detector verdicts, semantic smoothing, and a blind test of a papal encyclical.
Jennifer Doleac, Nancy Cartwright, and the double standard of “what works” in criminal justice reform
Who gets to appear in public without being treated as a threat?
Sequence 2 parts 2026
Why the American constitutional order keeps inviting one-person rule, and why the repair has to come from Congress.
We think about our moral lives in a framework held over from medieval Christianity, and if we reject those assumptions then we need a new framework.
I tested whether AI could approximate a developmental editor, built a tool called Apodictic, and learned surprising lessons about writing craft, reader contract, and the real limits of large language models.
Sequence 2 parts 2025
Arendt never wrote the volume on judging. Can a machine write it, and what do we want from judging anyway?
Apparently context is scarce. Here’s some: “Democratic party politics is urban machine politics, scaled up” from Noah Smith A variety of activists and special interests — collectively known as “The Groups” — can basically persuade Democratic staffers and politicians of their ideas in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms, well out of the public eye. Democrats’ focus…
