For the most part, I’ve been using these bricolage posts to present links and quotes, sometimes with some thoughts of my own thrown in about them. But my original notion was to also use them to present shorter thoughts of my own, that either didn’t amount to full essays (leaving open the possibility that they might turn into full essays as time went on). So I thought this week I’d give it a try, and start with that. Then the usual clutter of links and comments upon links below that.
1.
Emotions are tools: but they’re not our tools.
Emotions are the tools of evolution, with its inhuman blind purposelessness shaping us to its ends. If we feel fear or hunger or joy or ennui, these are modes that evolution has generally found in the past to be useful for its purpose (selfish genes reproducing themselves). This doesn’t mean either that they are helpful in this situation (evolution works in averages, not specifics, and, being blind, does not prepare for new situations), nor does it mean that they are helpful to our purposes, which may be counter to those of our not-so-benign, not-so-omniscient, but dark and powerful creator.
But when you feel a strong emotion, stop and realize: this is you being used. Perhaps for good ends, perhaps not. But it is working upon you, and the shape of the chisel is still visible in the molding of the stone.
Emotions are tools, and they are not our tools: but they can be. We can wrest the hammer or tape measure or pen from its cold dead hands and use them to our own purposes. Doing so might be easier, in fact, if we bear in mind that they were designed for another being’s purpose (or, more strictly, another process’s pseudo-purpose). You can use hope and love and anger and boredom to achieve what you wish to achieve.
But they are never entirely our tools. They will always bear the stamp of their unfeeling unmindful maker. And use them though we can, we should always be wary: for evolution is smarter and stronger and wiser and crueler than we, and will still be using them even as we imagine we have mastered them for ourselves alone.
Emotions are tools. But then so, in the end, are we.
2.
For various reasons, I’ve been listening to a lot of episodes of the Ezra Klein show. And it’s really good! I thought I would recommend a few.
For those of you who don’t know, Ezra Klein is a journalist who is in his early forties. As it happens, I have been reading Klein’s writing since Matt Yglesias was promoting him as a new blogger (and I thought of him, slightly embarrassingly in retrospect, as Matt’s mini-me). And I’ve off-and-on followed his career as he went first to the American Prospect, then to the Washington Post, then to Vox (which he & Yglesias co-founded, along with Melissa Bell), and finally to the New York Times, where (presumably) he’ll stay, as there’s nowhere else to go that’s up. While he was at Vox, he began this podcast, and his move to the Times included bringing the podcast along.
The format is that he interviews different people—mostly people who have written books, but some journalists and others. And he’s really terrific. His own thought is smart, subtle, nuanced, and persuasive; he is an amazing interviewer; he brings out the best in his guests, and challenges them appropriately but also thoughtfully and respectfully. It’s just super.
So I thought I’d recommend a few episodes. In particular, I want to mention three different types of episodes. At some point—on air? In the show notes? I don’t recall and can’t find it—Klein mentioned that one of his producers. made schema of the different types of shows they put out. He doesn’t list them, sadly. (I put it in as a question for a future ask-me-anything—he does them periodically—so if he says, I’ll let you all know.) But the one category he does mention is “new lens”: shows that give you a new way of thinking about the world, usually by introducing you to the thought of some interesting academic with a book to sell. These are my favorites.
The absolute best of the ones I’ve heard (and there are tons of shows I haven’t heard yet—I’ve mostly focused on the ones from 2023 & some in 2022, although that includes some reruns) is this show where he interviews C. Thi Nguyen about games. It is much deeper and more world-shaping than that sounds. (I’m hoping to read Nguyen’s book in the near future.) If you listen to just one, listen to this one.
Other good ones that are (or are arguably) in this category include several that could also be categorized as about “health”, such as this one with guest Stephan Guyenet about food and our brains, and this one with Rachel Zoffness on pain, but I think that both of these fall into the “new lens” category too. There’s also this good one about status with guest Cecelia Ridgeway and a guest host (whose good, but not quite as good as Klein), this one about meritocracy with Daniel Markovitz, and this one with Alison Gopnik about love. (Note that Vox changed the name of their podcast when Klein left, but kept the same feed, some of these pop up as under a different title, but the links should still work.)
Another (sometimes overlapping) category is ones where he interviews SF writers. He’s interviewed Kim Stanley Robinson (twice), N. K. Jemesin (twice), Ted Chiang, and Adrian Tchaikovsky (the first three are writers I know and really like; Tchaikovsky was on my entirely metaphorical to-read list and this interview bumped him up several notches.)
Finally, this year he’s done a series on AI. I think his take on this is terrific—appropriately skeptical, questioning his own conclusions, but also landing in a place that seems, well, incredibly sensible. Here are the AI episodes he has either done or re-posted this year: discussion with Brian Christian; with Sam Altman; with Gary Marcus; solus rex; with Kelsey Piper; with the show’s producer Roge Karma; with Alondra Nelson; and with Erik Davis. You don’t need to listen to all of those to get Klein’s basic take—I think if you are going to listen to one, listen to solus rex; if you want to add a second, add the one with Roge Karma. But if you like those, the whole series is worthwhile.
I don’t want to oversell Klein’s show. Some of them are eye-opening; others are merely interesting; and still others are news chats of the sorts that you can find in many places. I have linked to some of the ones that I have found really good, and there are more where that came from; but there are plenty of merely meh ones too. And since de gustibus non disputandum est, you may find a few that I linked to meh too.
Yet I don’t want to under sell Klein’s show, either. For what I have presented here so far suggests that the podcast is simply a series of usually interesting conversations with usually interesting people. But it’s more than that. The fun of listening to a bunch of his podcasts—the bit that makes it, not a mosaic story, but perhaps second or third cousin to one—is starting to hear the connections among them. Klein not only interviews, he discusses: he shares his thoughts and ideas. We begin to get a sense of the connections among his various concerns, the relations between his various ideas. We can see that a question in one episode arises from the insight sparked by another. We see thematic clusterings—his concern for the ways that our quotidian lives run, that are present in both in the health episodes and in the many that he devotes to one sort or another of mindfulness and attention; his concern for the ways in which well-intentioned liberal policies end up hampering the ends of liberal government; his concern for the way that large systems have consequences we neither want nor see. Then, if you read his columns in the Times (and he has slowly wrested away the title of “most consistently interesting Times columnist” away from Bouie, who had in turn wrested it away from Krugman1) you can see how various conversations, and moments in them, have shaped his ongoing thought. Klein is, in brief, an interesting mind, with an intersecting web of important concerns, and measured yet striking takes (always thoughtful, always self-reflective) on a variety of the issues he thinks about. It’s not just that he is worth listening to because he has smart discussion with smart people; he is worth listening to because his own thought, and its development and connections and changes, is interesting, and it is fun and enlightening to get to know it, and watch it change.
But no worries: if you don’t have time for a binge, the individual discussions are great too. And at any rate, you have to start there, since (as in all things) you have to start somewhere. I suggest here as a good place to begin.
(One parenthetical note: he calls that episode “life-changing” in the title. And liff though that may be, it seems true that Klein has a very good sense for which episodes of his show are particularly good: if he says one is unusually worthwhile (as he does often, but not too often), it’s a good one to take a chance on.)
3. Funny Things That Are (Still) Funny
I think I may make this a recurring feature. New and old items, which are funny (or, where appropriate, still funny):
Patrick H. Willems explains Batman: The Mask of the Phantasm to his parents.
I personally found this twitter thread of working Shakespeare lines into ordinary conversation hilarious. Sample:
Kung Fu Monkey’s classic blogpost The Crazification Factor. A classic from the blogosophere days.
(August) Strindberg & Helium. I recommend this one as a place to start, but they’re all great.
Daveed Diggs (most famous for being the first actor to play the Lafayette & Jefferson roles in the musical Hamilton) and a friend acted out their favorite Calvin & Hobbes cartoons. This cartoon is one of my favorite Calvin & Hobbes’s, because I first saw it while an undergraduate, posted to the door of a philosophy professor, with the added handwritten caption, “Why philosophers hate Wittgenstein.”
And for a select audience, this meme (which I saw on Mark’s Little Internet Project) is comedy gold:
4.
Other links and items of note:
Peter Beinart discussed an interesting new article “Antisemitic Attitudes Across the Ideological Spectrum”, which found that (as they put it) “Contrary to the expectation of horseshoe theory, the data show the epicenter of antisemitic attitudes is young adults on the far right.” Beinart notes that in many ways this ought to be unsurprising—most prejudices (racism, sexism, etc) are more common on the right. But a lot of people and institutions have been devoted to selling the contrary narrative—because they wish to conflate antisemitism with opposition to Israel and its policies. But it turns out that they’re different. More on this later, perhaps.
A superb analysis from Dave Karpf:
The future we are headed towards will, in so many ways, be worse than the present. Apple’s Vision Pro is a prototype of the sort of luxury commodity that will become more attractive in degraded tomorrowland.… Spatial computing will never be as nice as the actual, in-person event. We ask “what is this for?” because, today, it isn’t for much of anything. We naturally compare this technological imaginary to the status quo. But what if the status quo is does not last?… When I look at Apple’s Vision Pro, I see a luxury device for a degraded future.… But we’re on track for a world where, some weeks, there will be wildfires in Canada and you just can’t go touch grass in Washington, DC. And I suspect that’s a world where those who can afford it will find a headset like the Vision Pro very appealing. It’s a Jackpot technology. It isn’t for anything in today’s world. It’s purpose-built for a diminished future.
Daniel Ellsberg died this month. He was, to use a language that I find it hard to use without irony (but which is absolutely strictly true in this case), an American hero. Here is a good eulogy for him by historian Heather Cox Richardson; here is another (which notes some of his flaws while not omitting his heroism) by historian Erik Loomis. And, via Loomis, the great Noam Chomsky explaining why Ellsberg’s actions were morally right. RIP.
Remember when I said Substack was most likely going to falter sometime between 2026-2029 (due to my joining)? Well, the early signs have already begun.
I think this is less a question of either of those writers getting less interesting, or being upstaged by more interesting peers, then, first, my sense that each writer has a particularly good fit for the issues and temper of a particular time (or perhaps it is simply that they have a good fit for the way in which I personally see the issues and temper of the time), and, second, that over time we come to be familiar with each writer’s viewpoint and perspective, and so each specific column increasingly offers only its own local insights, and not the more global insights of a new temperament.