November 2025

Our Own Prisons

By in books, foolosophy, lin yutang

The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighborhood.  From this prison there is no escape. But the moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world, and if it is a good book, he is immediately put in touch with one of the best talkers of the world. This talker leads him on and carries him into a different country or a different age, or unburdens to him some of his personal regrets, or discusses with him some special line or aspect of life that the reader knows nothing about. An ancient author puts him in communion with a dead spirit of long ago, and as he reads along, he begins to imagine what that ancient author looked like and what type of person he was. Now to be able to live two hours out of twelve in a different world and take one’s thoughts off the claims of the immediate present is, of course, a privilege to be envied by people shut up in their bodily prison. Such a change of environment is really similar to travel in its psychological effect.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

Lin’s image of the non-reader as “imprisoned in his immediate world” can sound like the usual literary snobbery, as if people who don’t read are just empty rooms with the lights off. That’s not quite right. I’ve known plenty of people who rarely open a book and yet have an inner life that runs on talk, work, hobbies, family gossip, or just steady contentment. For me, though, the metaphor fits uncomfortably well. When I’m not reading or writing anything that grips me, I don’t become serenely Taoist; I turn into a zombie going through the motions of existence. Conversely, I can chase after new books or ideas with all the undisciplined joy of a dog after squirrels. Other people can happily spend the afternoon dozing in a sunbeam like a cat, or get their novelty from shopping, scrolling, or watching television. I seem to need a different kind of stimulus, the feeling of being led by a voice on the page into another mind, another time. It’s a difference of degree rather than kind. A man content to pass the time in a rocking chair on the front porch might see me as enslaved to my books and laptop, unable to sit quietly and just be.

An Illusion of Unity

By in books, foolosophy, identity

Nostalgia for others’ lives. It’s because, seen from the outside, those lives appear whole, whereas our own, seen from the inside, seem fragmented. We’re still chasing after an illusion of unity.

— Albert Camus, The Complete Notebooks

What we like about the past is that sense of complete perspective, a story with a beginning, middle and end. We can never have that relationship to our own life without ceasing to be alive. We envy other people’s lives because we only ever see their stories with the jump cuts and edits already done; we’re stuck watching the raw footage of our own. A complete story of you is something other people will tell, if anyone does, when you’re safely out of the picture. So the longing for a sense of unity and completion isn’t just a quirk; it’s structurally impossible to satisfy from the inside. That’s why we get this “nostalgia for others’ lives” and for finished epochs: we’re really yearning for a point of view we can’t inhabit — a narrator who already knows how things turn out, a final edited cut of your own life while you’re still in mid-scene. In that sense, our chronic dissatisfaction with our fragmentary present is just the storytelling brain banging against the bars of time, demanding an ending it can fold everything into. And life’s reply is basically: you can have wholeness, or you can have immediacy, but not both.

Cogitare Aude

By in books, foolosophy, philosophy

The ancient philosophers (and for good reason) reflected a lot more than they read. That’s why they stuck so close to the concrete. Printing changed this. We read more than we reflect. We don’t have philosophies, only commentaries. That’s what Gilson is getting at when he says that the age of philosophers who busied themselves with philosophy has been succeeded by the age of professors of philosophy who busy themselves with philosophers. There’s both modesty and impotence in this approach. And a thinker who would begin his book with the words: “Let’s start from the beginning” would face a few smiles. We’ve reached the point where a philosophy book published today that doesn’t lean on any experts, quotations, commentaries, etc., wouldn’t be taken seriously. And yet…

— Albert Camus, The Complete Notebooks

The old philosophies were born from the pressure of experience; ours tend to be born from the pressure to publish. We inherit not so much Plato and Aristotle as the secondary literature about Plato and Aristotle, a great compost heap of commentary from which no new tree seems able to grow. Philosophy has become, in large part, the professional management of its own archives.

The culprit isn’t simply “too much reading,” though. It’s the research model of the modern university, where every discipline is expected to resemble science or technology: measurable “progress,” constant novelty, specialization, and peer-reviewed output. That works reasonably well in a laboratory, where yesterday’s result really can be superseded by today’s. It is absurd in the humanities, where the “data” are finite and centuries old, and where all the real questions about justice, death, love, and meaning keep coming around again, as the philosopher Carly Simon sang. To stay employable, humanists pretend they’re doing something like lab work: tiny, incremental “interventions” and “contributions to the literature.” The classics are not read as live challenges; they’re strip-mined for another paper on race, gender, or whatever the current thing is. Some innocent naif who fell in love with thinking in Philosophy 101 finds himself twenty years later in an academic career producing dreck about Aristotle and Queer Futurity, Kierkegaard and Neoliberal Austerity, Dante and Decoloniality. What a tragedy.

Meanwhile, the sort of person Camus has in mind who would dare to “start from the beginning” is increasingly unlikely to be found on a faculty roster. Interesting thinkers don’t need laboratories of thought; they need time, a modest income, and freedom from committee work. They use the past as a quarry for perspective. In practice, that kind of philosophy is already leaking back into its older habitats: notebooks, letters, pamphlets, essays, now blogs and newsletters. The university, having professionalized itself into sclerosis, may end up as a museum of philosophy rather than a seedbed for it. And yet, as Camus says. The materials haven’t changed: the world, a mind, and the question of what to make of both. The only real requirement is someone willing to think first and read second, and to risk writing a book that does not bow to the experts before it dares to say what it sees.

Pulp Miction

By in ai, media/propaganda, the geist of the zeit

What’s undeniable is that we’re all living in a world where the whims and desires of wealthy and powerful men create uncertain, unstable conditions for everyone else. Although no other major chatbot has gone ballistic in the same ways as Grok, any one of them could be subtly tweaked to promote a given viewpoint over another, or to quietly manipulate users toward whatever purpose. Likewise, any major creator of AI models unwittingly instills biases in its chatbots that are then difficult to expunge. Every user of mainstream AI or social media is subject to a calculus that they have no control over.

— Charlie Warzel and Matteo Wong

Leaving aside the AI details, when has this ever not been true? We did not emerge from some golden age where neutral, disinterested institutions merely reported the news until Elon Musk came along with a bad attitude and a large language model. For most of the twentieth century in America, a handful of media barons and three television networks curated reality for a mass audience. Before that, it was newspaper empires and party machines. Before that, it was church pulpits and state censors. The details change; the basic arrangement doesn’t.

I recently referred to The Atlantic as the outlet for “Acela corridor midwits.” I regret that lapse in judgment. I should have been much nastier. I hate that septic tank of conventional wisdom. I hate the writers, I hate the readers, I hate the hosting provider that keeps it online; hell, I even hate the paper mill that turns perfectly innocent wood pulp into the glossy pages of their worthless magazine. It is good for nothing but serving as a barometer of professional-managerial-class fixations. They are always extremely exercised about “the current thing,” always discovering some unprecedented danger to “our democracy” in the possibility that other people’s narratives might compete with their own. The panic over “misinformation” and “disinformation” is not mainly about Alex Jones and QAnon; it’s about the old gatekeepers realizing, too late, that the internet has permanently ended their monopoly on framing events. They are less outraged by lies than by the loss of their old prerogative to decide which truths are allowed to matter.

Their Musk pieces in particular have this odd double register. On the one hand, he is portrayed as a ridiculous, insecure clown — a needy egomaniac, a tech-bro Caligula surrounded by sycophantic code. On the other hand, he is treated as an existential threat, a man whose toys can bend the arc of history toward injustice and poison the global information supply. At some point, you’d think it would occur to his critics that if this pathetic buffoon and his tribe keep outmaneuvering you, that might say something unflattering about your own intelligence and competence. But that would require an uncomfortable kind of self-reflection. It’s much easier to keep publishing ritual denunciations, reassuring one another that you see right through him, while the world continues to be arranged by the same class of people who have always arranged it — including, awkwardly, the ones writing the denunciations.

‘Cause I’m TRT, I’m Dynamite! TRT, and I’ll Win the Fight!

By in battling personal entropy, extraordinary popular delusions, ohferfucksake

There should be some compound German word for that sinking feeling you get when you realize how much disproportionate effort it will take to address the incredible amount of ignorance packed into such a deceptively short statement, but you’re resolved to do it anyway.

I started taking testosterone replacement therapy in January of this year, with levels of 282 (300-1,000 is considered normal range). I had initially refused it for various reasons, but especially because I had long heard that it was strongly correlated with an increased risk of prostate cancer. Given that my father has prostate cancer, I figured I was already at enough risk. But I spent several months reading up and doing more research, and it seems that the high testosterone/cancer link is nowhere near as clear as I’d thought; some evidence even points toward low testosterone being a bigger risk factor. Eventually I decided the overall benefits — improvements in fatigue, libido, mood, bone density, anemia, maybe body composition — justified the potential risk, especially since I’m already monitoring my PSA levels regularly.

I have noticed two benefits. One, I started losing a millimeter of fat around the belly each month when I went in for calipers/tape measuring. That started right away, and has stayed pretty consistent. I’d have to check, but I think I’ve exchanged about ten pounds of fat for a like amount of lean mass. I honestly don’t think it’s anything anyone would notice at a glance. I still have the same “shape” overall. I just look like “middle-aged guy who goes to the gym,” not “WWE wrestler/IFBB bodybuilder.” And two, I started to notice only last month that I was definitely recovering faster from the most taxing lifts, like squats and deadlifts. Squats in particular were always tough on me. I could count on three days, sometimes four, of tender hamstrings/adductors/glutes. Not excruciating pain, just hobbling gingerly upon standing up, and preferring to bend at the waist rather than the knees to pick anything up off the floor. Now, it’s one or two days to recover, and it’s not nearly as intense.

It is not a panacea or a fountain of youth. I still have to do the same amount of warming up and cooling down before and after workouts. I still do yoga, and still go for monthly massages with a therapist who does medical and sports-medicine massages, which are more akin to grueling physical therapy than someone gently kneading your trapezius muscles. I wear neoprene shorts for the beneficial warmth and compression on leg days and quicker recovery afterwards, one of the few training “hacks” which actually make a noticeable difference. (I recommend Nordic Training Gear for price, quality and insanely fast shipping from Sweden, and I’m saying that for free out of genuine conviction — no affiliate links or kickbacks.) I take supplements like curcumin and omega-3s and amino acids. I still need at least eight hours of restful sleep every night, and of course I follow a tailored meal plan from a dietitian. I can’t say I notice any difference in sleep quality from TRT, nor any noticeable surges of energy, horniness, or desire to pick a fight with traffic cones. My assumption is that my health baseline was already high, so TRT didn’t change much. Granted, it may be different for someone who starts it as a scrawny, sedentary depressive.

“But what about the gains?” you might ask. What about the massive strength increase and the new PRs? Honestly, again, it has been pretty subtle. An obvious confounding factor is that I got a hernia at the end of January and had surgery on it in May, so I spent from January to July doing almost no serious lower-body work at all. Still, my squat is only ten pounds heavier than it was last November. Even my deadlift, which had been stuck for a long time, only jumped to its recent new high thanks to a radical innovation: I loosened my lever belt one notch. It turns out lifting heavy weight is much easier when you can take in more oxygen before starting! Who knew?  (Trainers hate this one weird trick!) I’m sure it doesn’t hurt to have higher testosterone levels, but it doesn’t lead to sudden fifty-pound jumps in personal records either. You still have to do just as much hard work as before.

The boring truth is that >90% of being strong and healthy is the same old stuff that everyone already knows and no one wants to do: eat balanced meals, get plenty of deep, restful sleep and keep building patiently on your previous work in the gym. TRT can improve things a little on the margins, but as with most things, if you go into it expecting miracles, you’ll be disappointed.

As for the original tweet, lots of things “naturally” decline with age: bone density, muscle mass, red blood cell production, estrogen/progesterone in women. We don’t look at an osteoporotic 70-year-old and say, “Well, you were supposed to have fragile bones, so bisphosphonates and calcium are bad for society.” Same for HRT in women. The “supposed to” line is just the old naturalistic fallacy. A guy getting 100-200 mg of testosterone weekly from his doctor is not remotely comparable to a young meathead furtively taking several times that amount of various synthetic testosterone-derivatives from shady sources. Low testosterone is actually associated with depression, fatigue, low motivation, and worse cardiometabolic health. Normalizing that doesn’t turn men into bar-fight goblins; it often makes them less irritable and more stable. I feel pretty confident in predicting that even widespread TRT will not lead to 75-year-olds brawling in the street with their grandsons over access to nubile young women.

Government Cheese and Government Gyms

By in extraordinary popular delusions

Sorry, give me a second. I’m just catching my breath after laughing at the thought of this poncy, trust-fund, Willy Wonka-looking commie setting foot in any gym, let alone the free gym in the inner city. But I digress. Yes, of course. The solution, as always, is more “free” infrastructure, and then we can finally condescend to speak of personal responsibility. It’s a traditional reflex on the left: confiscate more money, build more services, assume human nature will dutifully respond by behaving rationally and benevolently. What we already know from actual cities — that many free public spaces quickly become homeless encampments, drug bazaars, or toilets — gets reclassified as a funding failure. When the utopia underperforms, the answer is never “maybe this vision of human nature is wrong;” it’s “double the budget, tax the billionaires, confiscate the means of production, conscript the labor, and hire my friends and relatives to oversee the whole corrupt operation.”

Underlying this fantasy is a metaphysics that wants determinism when it’s convenient and agency when it’s useful for scolding “society.” The same people who talk as if junk food chemists and app designers have godlike power over our minds will, in the next breath, insist that “we” collectively are morally responsible for other people’s choices. If your brain, your neighborhood, and your childhood determine everything, then the fat guy on the couch is no more blameworthy than a vending machine. But that logic cuts both ways: if he’s not responsible, neither are the CEOs, the landlords, or the voters. The individual is treated as a puppet of brain chemistry and “structural forces,” while “industry” and “society” are treated as free agents who could simply have chosen otherwise. What cannot be allowed is the obvious, demoralizing fact that some people in the same environment, with the same temptations, get sick of themselves one day and change. They quit drinking, they stop eating garbage, they start walking, for no deeper reason than: “I couldn’t stand my own reflection anymore.”

That’s where the whole outlook runs into its black box: character. You can count gyms per capita and map grocery stores within walking distance; you cannot quantify the effect of a spouse saying, “I won’t watch you kill yourself,” or a child asking, “Daddy, why are you always drunk?”, or the slow accumulation of shame, pride, stubbornness, and self-respect that finally tips a life in a different direction. The people besotted with “hard data” are impatient with these soft, unmeasurable forces, so they demote them to anecdote, or dismiss them as ideological constructs of late capitalism blah blah blah. But in practice, those are often the decisive variables. And because character sounds uncomfortably like soul, will, virtue, and other disreputable pre-scientific notions, the planners prefer to pretend it’s not there. It is safer, and far more flattering, to talk about food deserts than deserts of the soul.

I Blew Up the Church, But I Did Not Break the China

By in atheism, ohferfucksake, religion

Technically, I think the church collapsed due to structural weaknesses (like trying to make moral behavior contingent upon acceptance of dubious metaphysical assertions, for example), but either way, what fancy-pants church is he going to where they use fine china? The ones I’ve been in for various events were serving potluck casserole on paper plates with plastic utensils and Styrofoam cups.

Oh, I’m aware he’s trying to make some deep metaphorical point about how morality didn’t exist until it was invented during the Council of Nicaea, but I’ve already given this more thought than it’s worth. I swear by all the fucked mothers of epithetical yore, this guy is one dumb motherfucker.

The Alibi Tail

By in aphorisms, books, eric hoffer

Laziness is the sin most willingly confessed to, since it implies talents greater than have yet appeared.

— James Richardson, Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays

Eric Hoffer said something similar in The Passionate State of Mind: And Other Aphorisms:

There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life. Moreover, when we have an alibi for not writing a book, painting a picture, and so on, we have an alibi for not writing the greatest book and not painting the greatest picture. Small wonder that the effort expended and the punishment endured in obtaining a good alibi often exceed the effort and grief requisite for the attainment of a most marked achievement.

The only weaknesses we confess without being pressed are the ones that serve as alibis. Like a lizard dropping its tail, we shed a painless little fault so the larger, more shameful creature — our vanity — can dart away to safety.

Bad Tattitude

By in art, foolosophy

Theodore Dalrymple:

One of the reasons my thoughts on this subject remain so speculative rather than empirical is that I am reluctant to ask people the reasons that they had themselves tattooed. I have read some first-person intellectualised accounts, even some by professional philosophers, but I doubt that they are representative of what one of them called ‘the tattooed community’ (all people these days with something in common are called a community), or that their philosophical justifications for tattooing are any more than post facto rationalisations for what they have done. The reason for my reluctance to ask is that the question is almost impossible to put neutrally: even to ask it is to imply criticism and thus provoke antagonism—rarely a stimulus of frankness and truth-telling.

My oldest friend from high school got her first tattoo the other day: a tiny sigil near her wrist. Her college-age son was getting one and asked her to join him. I razzed her: “In my day” — which was also her day, of course — “a tattoo said to your parents, ‘I reject middle-class respectability. I intend to spend my days consorting with sailors, prostitutes and motorcycle gang members.’ Now they’re doing back-to-school BOGO deals for mom, smdh.” But that’s the point: when even a middle-aged, middle-class professional woman gets inked as a mother–son bonding exercise, whatever taboo tattoos once carried has been successfully laundered through the culture. At this stage, they’re less a symbol of rebellion than another suburban rite of passage, alongside senior pictures and college visits.

I’ve lost track of how many times Dalrymple has written some version of his case against tattoos. If I didn’t know (and share) his feelings on psychiatry, I might urge him to seek therapy. In fairness, there’s some good stuff in it. He’s right that “self-expression” as an unquestioned good is idiotic; Mein Kampf was self-expression too. And he’s right that people now talk about “self-censorship” as if it were always cowardice, never just ordinary tact or basic self-control.

But the further he goes into tattoo territory, the more he starts diagnosing a phenomenon he mostly refuses to look at. By his own admission, he’s reluctant to ask people the reasons that they had themselves tattooed. For a man who spent his career talking to patients and prisoners, this sudden delicacy is bizarre. You don’t have to cross-examine anybody. You can just smile and ask, “What does that one mean?” or “What made you decide to get it?” If you can’t imagine posing a neutral question about something people are proud to display on their skin, that’s just squeamishness. And it’s very convenient squeamishness: as long as you never ask, you’re never at risk of your tidy theory being complicated by the messy fact that different people had different, sometimes perfectly sane, reasons. Instead, he relies on a tattoo-culture magazine full of militant kitsch: “my body is my secret technicolour garden,” “each tattoo is a victory,” and so on. It’s like judging the practice of reading by an end-cap of “Live, Laugh, Love” gift books. Of course the rhetoric is insufferable. Anything run through the machinery of lifestyle journalism will sound like a narcissist who swallowed an Instagram caption generator.

I have around seventeen hours of tattoo work on me. When I got them, in my late teens and early twenties, I wasn’t trying to become “InkGuy Virginia Division,” or to manifest my “secret technicolour garden.” I was a young adult with a head full of books, music, and half-formed convictions, trying to mark that new, tentative self on the only canvas I knew I’d always have. They were my way of saying: this matters to me, enough to hurt for it. I don’t feel romantically about them now; I don’t preen in the mirror and whisper “my scars that I have chosen.” But I also don’t regret them. They’re a record of a younger self I’ve outgrown without disowning. Dalrymple wants tattoos to be evidence of a “desperate search for public recognition and individuality,” even a covert desire to dissolve one’s individuality into the herd. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they’re just what they were for me: a more or less clumsy, but honest, attempt to put down a stake in one’s own life. If we’re going to pathologize that, we might as well condemn diaries and adolescent bands while we’re at it.

If I were eighteen now, in an age when every barista and HR manager has a sleeve, I’d probably do the contrary thing and stay blank. The fashion has definitely made many tattoos boring. But that’s precisely the point: once something has become this banal, this distributed across classes and temperaments, it stops being a clear “sign” of anything except the human urge to decorate and commemorate. People love to say, “But how is that going to look when you’re old?” As if the worst thing about old age is the prospect of looking a bit silly. When I’m old, I expect to be a lot more concerned with my prostate, that suspicious lump under the skin, or whether my heart remembers how to keep time than with whether my upper arm tattoo has sagged like an overripe fruit. The fixation on “you’ll look ridiculous later” actually strikes me as adolescent: an inability to imagine anything worse than awkwardness or uncoolness. Adulthood is when you realize that no matter what you do, you will look ridiculous eventually — wrinkled, sagging, patched together by medicine — and that this is the least of your problems.

Water, Water Everywhere, and Not a Drop to Drink?

By in ai, ohferfucksake

Karen Hao’s Empire of AI has a headline-ready story: in drought-stricken Chile, Google plans a data center that will use more than a thousand times as much water as a nearby city of 88,000 people. That’s the sort of detail that lodges in a reader’s mind. Unfortunately — or amusingly, depending on your temperament — it appears to be nonsense. When you work the numbers backward, her claim implies that the entire city survives on less than a sip of water per person per day. The more likely explanation is a simple unit error — treating cubic meters as liters — magnified into a three-orders-of-magnitude horror story. The same chapter seems to blur the difference between water merely withdrawn (and then returned) and water actually consumed, and to invite readers to see a large global withdrawal estimate as if it were all drinkable water being siphoned off by data centers.

I don’t think this is just a math problem. It looks like a case study in motivated reasoning. The story is too perfect: AI, already despised in many circles as a job thief and art thief, now shows up as a literal water thief, menacing poor communities in the “global South.” It plugs straight into an existing “climate crisis” narrative: Western tech giants strip-mine the planet, this time not for oil but for electricity and water. Once you want that story to be true, a ridiculous number like “one building uses a thousand cities’ worth of water” stops feeling like a red flag and starts feeling like a God-given symbol. The data becomes raw material for the morality play.

What bothers me more is what this says about our so-called expert class. Hao isn’t some random journalist writing a TED-talk of a book for the NPR crowd; she has an MIT engineering degree and a background in energy studies. The book had a fact-checking team. Multiple prestigious outlets blurbed and recommended it. Yet apparently no one along that entire chain stopped to say, “Wait a second; can any single building on Earth really use more water than a city?” The institutions that keep telling us to “trust the science” can’t be bothered to do high-school-level sanity checks on their own favorite cautionary tales. This is how you burn trust capital. And once you’ve burned it, you don’t get it back by scolding people for being “anti-science.”

Meanwhile, the influencer class is delighted. They thrive in exactly this kind of epistemological vacuum. Every time a credentialed journalist or public-health authority face-plants in public, another YouTuber or Substack crank gets to say, “See? They lied to you again. Here’s what they don’t want you to know…” The tragedy is that the average layman, watching all this, is not crazy or wicked for becoming cautious. When people say, “Let’s wait and see before we reorganize the economy around your latest ‘a study has shown’ crusade,” they’re not rejecting reason; they’re saying “look who’s reasoning.”

I don’t know how long it will take to rebuild institutional trust, or if it’s even possible in the old sense. It may be that for the rest of our lives, trust is going to be granular and provisional: this lab, not “science”; this reporter, not “the media.” In the meantime, we’re stuck navigating an information landscape where both the official gatekeepers and their self-appointed rivals are constantly auditioning for our belief. My main hope is simply that reality doesn’t present us with a genuinely Plague-level threat while we’re still busy not believing one another. Microbes and CO₂ don’t care about our culture war, and they don’t wait for our epistemology to recover.

440

By in battling personal entropy, books

Bodily strength, even if it is short-lived, aside from the effects noted elsewhere, makes us still more courageous than usual, and less susceptible to fear, even of extraordinary dangers, etc.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

Squatted 440 last night, another personal record. We finished up with “celebratory” one-leg hack squats, for sets of 15, 12, 10 and 8, with my trainer leaning on the apparatus for the set of 8 for extra resistance. Coincidentally, mere seconds after finishing the last rep, the power went out in the gym and all along the street. I think what happened was that the sheer force of my effort and willpower caused an electromagnetic surge that blew the transformer on the utility pole outside, a phenomenon known as “Hulking out.” I’ll have to learn to harness this awesome power before I inadvertently bring the roof down, or collapse the floor.

Waking the Dead

By in books, foolosophy

Reading. The resurrection of Lazarus. Lifting the slab off the tomb of words.

— Georges Perros, Paper Collage

What I like is that Perros skips the usual cozy metaphors for reading — conversation, companionship, illumination — and jumps straight to something borderline morbid: tomb, slab, corpse. It takes seriously the fact that books are not “alive” in any ordinary sense. They’re remains. The author is gone, the moment of composition is gone; what’s left is this sealed chamber of words, inert until someone comes along and does the shocking thing: opens it.

It suggests publication as burial, an author laying treasured thoughts to rest. You’ve done what you can with a thought. You raised it from a vague feeling, you shape it, fix it on the page, and then you inter it. You don’t get to keep living inside it. At best, you visit the grave now and then by rereading.

But the reader is something between mourner and graverobber. A mourner, because they come with feeling and reverence; a graverobber, because they’re not necessarily obeying the author’s intentions. They crack the tomb for their own purposes — using the text as “intellectual kindling,” stealing a line or an image, ripping the jewelry off the corpse. Perros’s Lazarus image is both miracle and violation.

And then there’s the specifically Lazarus part. In the gospel story, when Lazarus shuffles out of the tomb, he’s still wrapped in grave clothes. He’s technically alive, but not yet free; someone has to “unbind him, and let him go.” That’s not a bad picture of how reading actually works. The text is “resurrected” when you open it, but it’s still wrapped in its time, its idioms, its private context. Only as you work over it — interpret, misinterpret, argue with it — does it get unbound and start walking around in your own life. Every strong reading is a slightly different Lazarus.

And of course, sometimes the slab stays shut. Whole shelves are just neat little cemeteries: immaculate rows of sealed tombs no one has opened in years. When Perros calls reading “lifting the slab off the tomb of words,” he’s also implying: most of the time, nobody bothers. So when a reader finally does come along, of course it can feel a bit like grave-robbing. You’re the first living person who has touched these remains in decades. No one can predict what sort of revenant you’ll raise when you pry the stone away.

Some books you read once and forget. Others are like ghosts: you disturbed their rest, and now they live in your house. And like actual ghosts, they’re not always benevolent. Some are consoling presences; they keep you company, give you courage, put a hand on your shoulder when you’re tempted to lie to yourself. Others are more like poltergeists. They knock things off shelves. They make it hard to keep believing what you believed before. You read some philosopher or diarist in a fit of curiosity, and the next thing you know you’ve spent three years arguing with their voice in your head.

Maybe that’s the deeper point behind Perros’s image: reading isn’t just raising the dead; it’s also accepting that whatever you wake may decide to follow you home. Some books you close and they stay put. Others you close, and find they’ve moved in.

Conversations Aren’t Contests

By in books, bricolage, calvin and hobbes

We no longer know how to talk because we no longer know how to listen. There’s no point in speaking well: you have to speak quickly, get it out before being interrupted, and there’s never enough time. Say whatever you like, however you like: you will always be cut short. Conversation is a game played with shears, in which everyone clips their neighbor’s words as soon as they start growing.

— Jules Renard, Journal 1887-1910

****

Calvin: When a person pauses in mid-sentence to choose a word, that’s the best time to jump in and change the subject! It’s like an interception in football! You grab the other guy’s idea and run the opposite way with it! The more sentences you complete, the higher your score! The idea is to block the other guy’s thoughts and express your own! That’s how you win!

Hobbes: Conversations aren’t contests!

Calvin: OK, a point for you, but I’m still ahead.

(8/5/1995)

Assuage Against the Machine

By in fresh hell, gender

Tyler Austin Harper:

Kingsnorth’s most contentious claims concern his insistence that technoculture and its products—large language models, genetic engineering, and so on—share a great deal in common with progressive ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender. They all, in his telling, attempt to use technology to overcome what were once hard natural limits. Unlike some other critics of the transgender movement, however, Kingsnorth shows compassion for those struggling with their identity and does not scapegoat them for larger problems in society. “People with gender dysphoria, girls with short hair, boys who play with dolls, people whose sexualities differ from the norm: they are not, in fact, the real issue,” he writes. But he rejects assertions that “biology is a problem to be overcome” and that the “body is a form of oppression.” These ideas, first aired on his Substack, have, not surprisingly, alienated some fans of his earlier environmental writing. The writer, green activist, and former Kingsnorth enthusiast John Halstead said that Kingsnorth has become a “transphobic proto-fascist.” Specifically, Halstead argues that Kingsnorth confuses sex with gender, and is mistaken to call binary sex “natural,” given that other species have more sexual variation.

For my part, I don’t find Halstead’s objections especially persuasive. Rather, the principal problem with Kingsnorth’s gender analysis is that it mostly ignores the ways that those of us who live in the aftermaths of the industrial, scientific, sexual, and digital revolutions are all already “cyborgs,” as the science and technology theorist Donna Haraway would put it. Microplastics permeate our bodies, birth control courses through our veins, smartphones rewire our neural pathways, medical devices keep our hearts pumping. If, as Kingsnorth claims, gender-affirming medicine is an assault on human nature and the human body, then so, too, are pacemakers and prosthetic limbs, or Botox and condoms, for that matter.

I’ve never been much interested in Paul Kingsnorth. I’m not a Luddite, and I have no interest in becoming a subsistence farmer in response to the “climate crisis,” which I think is mostly performative hysteria. However, it does seem like his newest book, Against the Machine, might still grapple with some interesting issues. I realize it’s The Atlantic — caveat lector and all that — but I was nonetheless annoyed to encounter this irrelevant tangent. Kingsnorth’s concern is that modern technoculture treats everything — land, animals, even the human body — as raw material for the will, rather than as something given that places claims on us. That’s a theme even I’m interested in. Instead, I’m forcibly reminded that I’m reading a review tailored to the sensibilities of Acela corridor midwits: we get a narrative detour to confirm that, yes, some thoughtcrime may occur here, but there’s no need to panic, it has been safely contained and rebuked, and we remain Good People. It feels less like a serious engagement with Kingsnorth’s argument and more like a pilot’s announcement of mild turbulence. The reader is invited to relax. Whatever Kingsnorth thinks about bodies, limits, and modernity’s Promethean will, it won’t require changing any of the emojis in your social media bio.

What makes it more exasperating is that even the counterpoint offered is rote and weak. Harper blithely suggests that we’re already cyborgs, so who is Kingsnorth to object to gender-affirming surgeries and hormones? But this is just a category mistake. There is an obvious difference between unintended collateral damage (microplastics), restorative medicine (pacemakers), and deliberate, irreversible interventions into healthy sexual development. To pretend they all belong in one moral category called “assaults on nature” is precisely the sort of flattening a serious critic is supposed to resist, not perform.

Which is a shame, because aside from the obligatory culture-war throat-clearing, Kingsnorth’s basic question is unavoidable: are there any non-negotiable limits built into human nature and the world, or is everything from sex to climate to cognition just clay for the will to mold? You don’t have to be a radical environmentalist or a would-be peasant in rural Ireland to see the importance of it. You can reject Kingsnorth’s own answers and still recognize that he’s at least posing the right kind of question. What I want from a review is help in thinking that question through, not another in-flight assurance that the moral instruments are functioning and the crew’s politics are sound. If Kingsnorth is wrong about givenness and limits, show me where. If he’s right in places but goes too far, mark the line. But don’t waste my time with ritual genuflection toward the Rainbow God. I can get that from any algorithmic feed. From critics, I’d prefer something closer to thought.

For a sense of what actual context and perspective looks like, you can put Harper’s piece alongside John Gray’s review of the same book in the New Statesman. Gray takes Kingsnorth’s central claim seriously: that contemporary environmentalism and progressive politics are not a radical alternative to the Machine but one of its more hysterical moods, still committed to remaking the world as raw material for human projects. Gray traces the lineage of this idea through Lewis Mumford’s “megatechnics,” Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain phase, his eventual conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy, and the eschatological fiction. Then he does the thing a critic is supposed to do: he asks whether a collapse of the Machine would mean anything like Kingsnorth’s “uncivilisation,” or whether, as history suggests, it would more likely mean famine, pogroms, militias, and then a new, harsher form of industrial order.

Reading Gray after Harper clarified what had been bothering me. Gray sees the same faults I see in Kingsnorth: the fantasy that a smallholding in Galway could somehow scale to eight billion people; the muddled eschatology that can’t decide whether it wants Christian apocalypse or pagan world-cycles; the refusal to admit that renouncing technological progress may mean a more denatured planet, not less. Watching him work through those points, you can feel a mind engaging the book’s actual architecture. With Harper, by contrast, I found myself briefly disoriented: what does gender have to do with Kingsnorth’s core outlook? Why is that the element being singled out for extended treatment? It’s like a film where a jarring line or bit of acting breaks the spell: suddenly you’re no longer inside the world of the story, you’re staring at a studio note. Gray makes me want to argue with Kingsnorth; Harper makes me want to argue with The Atlantic.

1 2