I keep coming back to this odd case: the “just asshole” or the “neutral asshole.” This is the person who doesn’t treat himself as worthy of special attention because he’s special. That’s the standard asshole, who, on Aaron James’s account, thinks he’s special and therefore
I stopped assigning papers longer than a page or two about four semesters ago because I wasn't sure how to engage in the arms race with generative AI. I think writing longer papers is valuable, but I had to figure out what I thought was valuable about it.
I'm rereading Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, who is the model of the kind of asshole that I'm interested in because he undeniably did some world-changing great things and was undeniably an asshole, and almost certainly did some of the world-changing great things
Having distinguished meaning and purpose, I want to know how are they related, and why do people tend to conflate them? They must be close, given how the terms are used mostly synonymously. Here are a few ways they seem to be related. First, one's overall purpose could
I'm sketching out a paper for a conference on meaning in life, which isn't something I've been working on for long because I didn't think serious philosophers worked on such things. Now, I know that some serious philosophers do, and, more importantly,
I've read Robert Caro's The Power Broker twice now, and each time I've been struck by how odd is the chapter, "Two Brothers," on Robert Moses and his brother, Paul. Robert was immensely powerful in New York, and Paul struggled financially, despite
In the very long break since I last wrote here, I've been reading a lot of books on assholes. I've even structured my introductory ethics class around not being an asshole, which answers the question that some (assholes) usually ask early on in an ethics class:
and why I continue to go
another shot at understanding meaning without purpose
I was asked “Where do you feel most at home,” and what came into my mind (and then out of my mouth) was a cafe that I think I’ve only been to once, on a grey day in Paris twenty years ago, where I sat at a bench facing
you can't work hard enough to become the coach's son
learning how to read and why time isn’t spent
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ethics for assholes, part 4
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why ethics can't be too hard
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high standards and reasoning
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part 1, on rational reconstruction
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thinking about Robert Moses
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my meaningful, purposeless life
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I just finished reading Shubeik Lubeik, a graphic novel from the Egyptian writer and artist Deena Mohamed. It’s a wonderful imagining of a modern Egypt in which wishes are bought, sold, regulated, and used. One of my favorite parts of the book focuses on a regret, on undoing the
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A perfect martini is one with half sweet vermouth and half dry vermouth: “perfect” is a type of martini, not a description of the martini. A dry martini is one with dry vermouth, so asking for a martini to be “very dry” should mean that it has extra dry vermouth,
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Kate Bowler wrote a best-selling memoir of her young diagnosis of and treatment for cancer called Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I’ve Loved). I read it when I had a similar cancer diagnosis, though I’d heard of the book (and loved the title) before that.
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I wasn’t raised to be a planner. There were no big events, like vacations or trips, to break up the weekly patterns. I saw friends daily in school or three times a week in religious meetings. There were a religious assemblies a couple of times a year in another
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What is it about achievements that are so important? The philosopher Gwen Bradford proposes that the value of an achievement isn’t in the final product, but in the difficulty we have to overcome to get there. It’s our will we’re praising, not its results. That seems right:
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I got my PhD in 2011, and, since then, I have formally used the title “Dr.” twice, both in the first few months after getting it. The first time, I was signing up for a magazine subscription, and when the website asked for a title, I decided that I had