This Is The Stoicism Talk The Navy Banned (Ryan Holiday At The U.S. Nava...

Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity

https://www.threads.com/@amouthful_of_cherries/post/DI5B9Rtv6gv?xmt=AQGzXwNHi3PaXrT_DZLOzG47kLDIQjuRdlCAEyCY5c4tJQ

Screen “guru”

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/random/

Dan Dennett's 4 biggest ideas

The 4 biggest ideas in philosophy, with legend Daniel Dennett “Forget about essences.” Philosopher Daniel Dennett on how modern-day philosophers should be more collaborative with scientists if they want to make revolutionary developments in their fields. https://bigthink.com/series/legends/philosophy-and-science/

How to Be a Happy 85-Year-Old (Like Me)

10 tips from Roger Rosenblatt. The best one:

4. Get a dog.

Just do it. Dogs are rarely trouble. They take more naps than you do, and they listen to you intently. That's because they think you might have food, to satisfy their bottomless appetites. Care not about their motives. No creature on Earth will ever find you more fascinating than your dog does. I'm excluding yourself, of course.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/opinion/aging-tips-getting-older.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Bewilderment

Such a gorgeous, gorgeous reminder that the future is not yet written and the pen is in our hands: https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/01/05/richard-powers-thea/

Whitewashing the past

National Museum of African American History and Culture

"…The National Museum of African American History and Culture—which, until recently, was run by The New Yorker's poetry editor, Kevin Young—comes in for particularly splenetic denunciation. Trump, in his first term, expressed a modicum of admiration while visiting what is affectionately called the Black Smithsonian. It is a spectacular museum, one that richly represents the story of African American struggle, suffering, and achievement. Daily, adults and schoolkids take in exhibits about chattel slavery and Jim Crow, Reconstruction and the civil-rights movement, and leave with a deeper understanding of American history in all its darkness and its promise. But in a culture war that demands that political opponents be branded, en masse, as "woke revolutionaries," there can be no complexity. And it will be the job, according to the executive order, of Vice-President J. D. Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian's board, to make matters simple. Vance is charged with leading the effort to remove from the museum what is called, in exquisite Orwellese, "improper ideology."

This urge to police the past is hardly unique to the Trump Administration..."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/14/at-the-smithsonian-donald-trump-takes-aim-at-history

The Failed Ideas That Drive Elon Musk

"…Four years ago, I made a series for the BBC in which I located the origins of Mr. Musk's strange sense of destiny in science fiction, some of it a century old. This year, revising the series, I was again struck by how little of what Mr. Musk proposes is new and by how many of his ideas about politics, governance and economics resemble those championed by his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, a cowboy, chiropractor, conspiracy theorist and amateur aviator known as the Flying Haldeman. Mr. Musk's grandfather was also a flamboyant leader of the political movement known as technocracy..."

Jill LePore

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/opinion/elon-musk-doge-technocracy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Democracy needs people talking, not scrolling; arguing, not trolling

30 Years Ago, This Book Saw the Coming Backlash Against Elites

Christopher Lasch’s “The Revolt of the Elites” anticipated the resentments of ordinary Americans that have led inexorably to Trumpism.

"...What democracy requires is vigorous public debate, not information,” he believed — in other words, people talking, not scrolling; arguing, not trolling. He would have laughed at Elon Musk’s assertion that he was turning X into the internet’s public square, only to flood the platform with the crudest conspiracy theories and most vicious vitriol..."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/books/review/christopher-lasch-the-revolt-of-the-elites-trump.html?smid=em-share

Your A.I. Lover Will Change You

Jaron Lanier, VR pioneer and author of "You Are Not A Gadget," says you're still not.

"...Why work on something that you believe to be doomsday technology? We speak as if we are the last and smartest generation of bright, technical humans. We will make the game up for all future humans or the A.I.s that replace us. But, if our design priority is to make A.I. pass as a creature instead of as a tool, are we not deliberately increasing the chances that we will not understand it? Isn't that the core danger?

Most of my friends in the A.I. world are unquestionably sweet and well intentioned. It is common to be at a table of A.I. researchers who devote their days to pursuing better medical outcomes or new materials to improve the energy cycle, and then someone will say something that strikes me as crazy. One idea floating around at A.I. conferences is that parents of human children are infected with a "mind virus" that causes them to be unduly committed to the species. The alternative proposed to avoid such a fate is to wait a short while to have children, because soon it will be possible to have A.I. babies. This is said to be the more ethical path, because A.I. will be crucial to any potential human survival. In other words, explicit allegiance to humans has become effectively antihuman. I have noticed that this position is usually held by young men attempting to delay starting families, and that the argument can fall flat with their human romantic partners..."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/your-ai-lover-will-change-you