What I'll Do Here

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Expect in this space:
  • Posts about books I'm reading as I (slowly) process them.
  • Reflections on topics I teach (Economics, Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, and US History).
  • Responses or summaries of other pieces that grab my attention.
  • Many sentences and paragraphs that would offend Messrs. Strunk &White.
  • Frequent sabbaticals.

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Popular posts from this blog

Moral Sight

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"Chop Suey," Edward Hopper If you've ever tried to explain a moral dilemma to a friend, you've likely struggled to fully articulate its complexity. There's so much more to difficult conversations or decisions than the basic "facts" we might use to describe them.  Should you confront a coworker about their recent behavior? Well -- it may depend on the moment, the mood, the time of day, etc. In “Literature and the Moral Imagination,” Martha Nussbaum argues that these ambiguities and particularities are best explored in literature -- in her words, “the novel can be a paradigm of moral activity.” In Nussbaum’s view, fiction can give us a window into the complexity of moral judgment. This is both a claim about morality and a claim about literature. Knowledge of abstract universals is not sufficient to recognize what we ought to do, but even “intellectual knowledge of particular facts” will not suffice for virtue. Instead, she argues, virtue moves beyond bot...
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Review: Enduring Divine Absence

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L'Absinthe, Edgar Degas (1876) While reading Joseph Minich's recent  Enduring Divine Absence ,  I was reminded of C.S. Lewis' first Screwtape Letter. In it, the demon Screwtape recalls a mini-crisis when the atheist "patient" he tempts considers Christianity. The danger passes as soon as the atheist walks out his front door: Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true. He knew he’d had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about “that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere lo...
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Stop Hate-Sharing

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Riot in the Galleria,  Umberto Boccioni Everyone agrees that America is becoming more and more polarized and that social media deserves some of the blame. I think it’s worth tracing out exactly why this is the case. What mechanisms on social media trigger our most tribal impulses? What are the individual actions or habits on social media platforms driving polarization?  Much has been written and said about the way social media creates echo chambers of similar opinions and insulates us from disagreement. But beyond simple groupthink, I’d like to focus on the way social media tends to convince us that opposing tribes are sinister. Consider the following sequence: The Sharks and the Jets are social groups that distrust each other and each has its own Facebook group. A Shark writes a somewhat nasty joke about a member of the Jets as part of an email that he accidentally sends to the wrong email address. Of course, it ends up forwarded to a Jet. The Jet shares the em...
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