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The Scientific “Debate” Over Free Will
Debates about free will never seem to go out of style, and two recent books addressing free will from a scientific perspective suggest that we are far from achieving any kind of consensus. And while most metaphysical questions don’t carry much practical import, there is a general sense that, when it comes to free will,…
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The Sting
Criterion’s newest collection is movies all about con-games. I love this sub-genre and while some great ones are missing, you can choose from The Grifters, The Lady Eve, Trouble in Paradise, Matchstick Men and, of course, the platonic form of con movies, The Sting. Few movies have such balanced leading-man roles and both Redford and…
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Better Living Through…Philosophy
It sucks that none of the easy answers our culture provides are worth a damn. It sucks that being rich, being woke, being left or being right is all cheap, mass-produced, highly consumable intellectual crap worthless for thinking about a good life. Getting to something better is not easy. Philosophy is the art of pushing…
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In Memoriam: Bob Knight
As an Indiana boy and Duke graduate, Bob Knight had peculiar salience in my life. He was growing into legend as I was growing into fanhood. And while there’s no denying that he could be a jerk (he wasn’t always a jerk, but he obviously had problems with his temper), he was, quite simply, the…
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Tetris
Not quite as elegant or compelling as the game itself, the origin story nevertheless manages to tell a fascinating and surprisingly sweet tale of gamesmanship and devotion to craft. Yes, the closing sequences in Russia border on farce and do the movie a disservice, but the essence of the story, much like the game, is…
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How to Think About…The Israel-Gaza War
The Fallacy of a Solution Not every problem is solvable – at least in the sense of there being some immediate set of actions that will remove (or even alleviate) the problem. No single actor in the Middle East has control of the problem and most of those who might appear to be able to…
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Dark City
The year before Matrix and more than a decade before Inception came Dark City. Perhaps The Matrix’s all-around brilliance and incredible special effects cast a permanent shadow on Dark City. Yet it is a compelling and fascinating story in its own right. And I can’t help but think Nolan’s incredible shifting cityscapes owe some debt…
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The Day of the Jackal
As the elaborate cat-and-mouse game unfolds, it’s never quite clear who is the hunted and who the hunter. The Jackal (a brilliant Edward Fox as a professional assassin) is stalking de Gaulle. And the entire French government is stalking the Jackal. I suppose one knows that de Gaulle isn’t going to die, but what makes…
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Exhalation: Transformative Experience and AI
Ted Chiang’s Exhalation is one of the best collections of short science fiction that you can find. It also happens to have several stories directly concerned with transformative experience and decision-making. That’s unusual. Most short science fiction stories are idea driven. They take a concept and run with it. In Exhalation, for example, Chiang writes…
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A Daughter of the Samurai: A Memoir
Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto’s memoir from the early twentieth century lives inside one of the great cultural collisions of the modern era. It spans her girlhood in Japan living through the final collapse of the samurai tradition and the Western-mania that swept Japan to her arranged marriage and life in America. Much was lost and much…
We are not rational animals, we are animals that must work to be rational
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