Blog

Dwight Garner (2023),The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

Israel cannot continue its war on Gaza indefinitely—not so much owing to grueling moral quandaries or unbearable ethical qualms, but due to strictly fiscal and macroeconomic concerns, with all the political-economic consequences that an expensive war must have for both Israeli society and state in...

Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2023),The War That Must Not Occur(translated by Malcolm Debevoise). Stanford University Press.

Since Hamas’s horrific October 7 attacks on Israel, Israel has responded by unleashing tremendous amounts of violence on the Gaza Strip. This violence, Israel claims, has been targeted at Hamas infrastructure, aimed at preventing a repeat of the October 7 attacks. But Israel’s warfare has come at a...

Shadi Bartsch (2023),Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism. Princeton University Press.

Joseph Vogl (2022),Capital and Ressentiment: A Brief Theory of the Present.Cambridge: Polity Press.

Zachary Jonathan Jacobson (2023).On Nixon's Madness: An Emotional History. Johns Hopkins University Press.https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12723/nixons-madness.

Asociodicyis astructuredattempt to justify the social order in spite of its manifold injustices. Its conceptual lineage can be traced back to the notion of theodicy, or the justification of God despite the existence of evil and suffering, a term that was appropriated and “sociologized” by Max...

Lionel Barber (2020).The Powerful and the Damned. London: WH Allen.

OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 is one of theconsummate promulgators of apparently meaningful nonsense on the Web today. Roughly speaking, it generates output on the basis of a predictive model, where each next word is probabilistically produced on the basis of preceding words. It joins together words that seem...