https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/09/elite-academia-leadership-hypocrisy/687969/ Tyler Austin Harper on his disillusionment with academia. Black left-wing humanities professor who was sympathetic to affirmative action in principle, but observed it in practice looking like degraded academic standards, mindless tokenism that treated all people of a race alike, absurd exaggeration of the severity of present-day racism in their college town, and conspicuous indifference to economic issues like the high cost of college or the working conditions of college staff.
back in the 2000s, I thought of affirmative action as "technically against my principles but not a big problem in practice." Then I didn't update my views much for a while, but these days it seems clear that it became a big problem in practice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_sin Mortal sin = you go to hell if you don't repent. If I understand correctly, in Catholicism there are no sins where repentance isn't in principle possible.
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/15/why-we-like-things Celine Nguyen on "taste." I expected to hate this, but I didn't. She looks at some points in the history and philosophy of taste (the Bauhaus, Arendt) and comes down on the side of it being learnable, both social and individual, with no one "right answer" but with a limited possibility to communicate, persuade, or woo people to one's taste. Taste is only a "moat" against AI to the degree that it depends on living a life and caring about things, aka being an organism, which bots don't seem to be.
If I understand correctly, in Catholicism there are no sins where repentance isn't in principle possible.
Sounds correct to me. (I am not religious myself, but I have religious Catholic friends.)
This often leads to the clever "so why don't you just do whatever you want, and repent 5 second before you die", to which the counter-argument is that (1) death often comes unpredictably, and (2) if this is your plan, you will probably be unable to truly repent at the last moment even if you had the time. Repentance is not just "I am sorry that I got caught and now ... (read more)