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The Tyranny of Clocks
I have this little ritual that perhaps will sound minute and insignificant to others, but which is of profound importance to me. Every Friday, after I’ve finished with my workday, I unclasp the watch which has been my companion for some five years now, I set it on my night table, and I won’t put…
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“First as tragedy, then as farce.”
“First as tragedy, then as farce.” I’ve joked before that if I hear about another “once in a lifetime crisis” in my lifetime that I may well lose my mind. Well, I was speaking with a friend the other day, and it dawned on me just how widespread this sentiment was among my generation, and…
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Babel, or Goodbye to All That
Sadly, Osamu Dazai has to step aside now that Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by RF Kuang has replaced The Flowers of Buffoonery as my favourite novel. I have long been partial to fantasy stories since I was a little kid, but it’s not just the…
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Radical Antiquity
One of my old professors, Chris Zeichmann, recently published a book called Radical Antiquity about anarchist (in the etymological sense of the term) movements in antiquity. It was an easy read, by which I mean that I ripped through that densely-packed tome in about 4 or 5 days. He gave a plethora of examples of…
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Wonderland
Earlier this year, I read a really great book by journalist Omar El Akkad. Its provocative title: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. He was, of course, referring to the humanitarian crisis and genocide in Gaza, but one might also apply his words to a great many other crises throughout history. People…
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Cyberpsycho: A Horror Story
Recently I made a post about AI, and someone responded by saying that my blog “scared” them. To be honest, as part of Gen Z, the onset of a dystopian reality feels pretty par for the course at this point. If I hear “once in a lifetime event” once more in my lifetime, I may…
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Like a bat
In my high school philosophy class, we had to read this paper by Thomas Nagel called “What is it like to be a bat?” In it, he basically makes the point that the question is impossible: we cannot literally put ourselves into another’s shoes… or, you know, wings… try as we might to imagine what…
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When the World Ends
I’ve been neglecting this topic for a while—not because I don’t care, but because I didn’t want to add to the noise. Everyone seems to have some big opinion about AI, most of them either vaguely utopian or vaguely apocalyptic, and honestly, I wasn’t interested in either. But lately, I’ve been feeling this quiet unease…
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Games, Trains, and Automatons
If you want to understand the lame state of contemporary capitalism, you need not look any further than Toronto’s Union Station. At a first glance, the place will look sickeningly clean, but upon closer inspection you’ll see that it’s quite dirty. Buried beneath a facade of elemental dirt and dust is the tasteless alienation familiar…
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