The Matt Levine Exhaustion Index For a number of reasons, I'm extremely tired right now. So tired that my first run at the previous sentence read "For a number of reasons, I've extremely tired right now." A good way of gauging how much my tiredness is impacting my capacity is how much of that day's
Trad Life I find the trad people fascinating, and as such I really enjoyed this New Yorker piece which is mostly about one of the OG trad people, Alena Pettitt, a woman from Cheltenham(?!) which is curious as I'd really thought of it mostly as an American thing prior to this. I
The Essence Of Crankdom In response to Freddie's very reasonable question of why some people get an easier ride than others from the media for their bad actions, Tom suggested that it's basically the cool factor: Pharrell was in the Blurred Lines video that caused so much furore back in the day, but everyone
New Podcast! At long last (I have finally edited the episode we recorded about a month ago) the first/zeroth episode of the scifi book podcast I'm doing with my pal Shonalika is live! Very exciting stuff; we talk about Yoon Ha Lee's Hexarchate Stories, and all the Machineries of Empire books
From A Certain Point Of View I've started seeing an IFS practitioner because I found the book I read about it so useful, and even though we've not properly started yet I've already found it useful. Something they said in our first session that's really stuck with me is that it can be true both that
First Day Of Spring My health has been quite bad the last few weeks, and to compound it the weather has been almost universally dreary. Whenever we've had even the hint of blue sky I've been outside to try and make the most of it. The drab sameness of the clouds is been punctuated
Institutions Are Made By People For lunch today we went—for the last time ever—to The Green Kitchen, the best vegan cafe in Brighton. Actually, just the best cafe in Brighton. Katie, the morris-dancing lesbian owner, came over for a hug and said farewell, Cody, the front-of-house, showed us pictures of his parrot. CM
Be Nice To The Robot I don't believe that ChatGPT is anything close to a person, but I find something fundamentally upsetting about a lot of the prompt tricks that people use to get it to do what they want. The ones that present it with a whimsical scenario: pretending you're in a Star Trek