Noise🔗

Inside you there are two wolves. They are extraordinarily small wolves, obviously, in order to fit inside you, but they are otherwise normal adult wolves of ordinary proportions. They are cuter than you are imagining, because they are tiny wolves. They are less spiritually magnificent than you are imagining, because they are yours. You can lead a full and healthy life with only one wolf. Would you consider donating one of your wolves to a stranger in need? Laparoscopic wolf extraction is a minimally invasive medical procedure. Most patients recover quickly, and long-term side effects are usually intangible. Note that it is unlawful to give or receive monetary compensation for a wolf transplant; however, you will be entitled to believe that your wolf will receive karmic remuneration for its participation in this generous deed. Your wolf yearns for release from saṃsāra. Any questions regarding this procedure may be directed to anyone wearing a Three Wolf Moon t-shirt at your local GameStop.

Keepsake preservation🔗

When my father passed away several years ago, a family friend made quilts out of his shirts. For a long time I kept mine packed away out of sight. It seemed gruesome. Whenever I thought about it I’d get a feeling as if my dad, with all his love and warmth and cheer and strength, had been fed into some machine and this lifeless object had come out the other side.

My aversion to the quilt faded with time, of course. Eventually it became not just a keepsake that I treasured in theory, but also one I might actually prefer to keep out and visible on a day-to-day basis. But there was another concern that kept me from doing so: the fear that the quilt would be damaged. I share my apartment with a cat, and every piece of fabric he’s able to reach tends to get vigorously scratched and rapidly coated in a thick layer of fur.

But a few months ago I decided it was absurd that many of the most sentimentally-valuable objects I possess spend all their time in boxes and closets. What a waste!

So I took the blanket out of the closet and kept it folded next to the couch. It did become one of Pham’s favorite places to curl up and, yes, it got a little scratched and a little hairy. But it’s the history behind such objects that give them their value; accumulating more history isn’t going to reduce that value. I decided that if, decades from now, along with making me think of my dad, this quilt also makes me think briefly of my cat, that’s quite all right.

…then I remembered there’s also the risk of Pham puking on it and I put it back in the closet

Four phone frustrations🔗

1. Getting notifications diverts my train of thought onto someone else’s agenda.
2. Knowing that I haven’t gotten any notifications is also distracting, if there’s one I’m waiting or hoping for.
3. The Internet in general, and infinite-scroll social media in particular, constantly tempt me to procrastinate the boring or frustrating parts of projects I care about and seek a quick dopamine hit instead.
4. The unending supply of podcasts and audiobooks tempts me to pump information into my ears continuously instead of leaving myself time to think.

The obvious solution to these problems (and so many more!) is to wander off into the wilderness and commune with nature until I get eaten by a bear. But then who would make sure my cat gets his meds twice a day? Plus it’s chilly outside and I hate being cold.

Anyway, I love the Internet. But even a great friend gets on your nerves if they hang around 24/7. Smartphones keep us continuously linked to a colossal, frenetic nexus of billions of minds. Sometimes that link feels less like a lifeline and more like a tether.

Since my four complaints above all revolve around distraction, willpower isn’t a great solution; consciously resisting the urge to check my phone is also distracting. For me the most satisfying solution is to leave the phone at home and go somewhere else. I’ve been doing that a lot lately. Constant connection has become so normalized that disconnecting for even a few hours now feels strangely indulgent; it’s almost a guilty pleasure.

Be mad when people kill your enemies🔗

Leftists on social media reacted to Charlie Kirk’s murder in a variety of ways, ranging from horrified condemnation of the killer to smug jokes about it. Some, without explicitly condemning or condoning the killing, took the opportunity to declare that they weren’t going to feel sad about Kirk’s death, because he’d spent his life pushing dangerous and harmful ideas. I think this is a dangerously irrelevant reaction.

Focusing on how terrible Kirk was or wasn’t gives the impression that you’re OK with an individual unilaterally deciding to kill someone as long as—in your judgment—the target deserves it. The more that way of thinking is normalized, the more dystopian our society is going to get. The more conservatives believe that we’re just going to shoot them when they say things we think are dangerous, the more they’re going to feel entitled to shoot us when we say things they think are dangerous. Where do you think that process of escalating distrust and violence leads? Isn’t it far more likely to lead to a bloody free-for-all or a totalitarian takeover than to any sort of just and equitable regime?

(And who do you think is better-positioned to impose their will if we start resolving all our major disagreements by violence—the party that celebrates gun ownership or the party that frowns on it?)

No matter how you feel about your political opponents being dead it’s in our collective self-interest to be strongly opposed to them being killed. If you really think it’s important to denounce someone’s politics right after they’re murdered, I’m begging you to first denounce the murderer just as strongly. It’s the least you can do to help keep the fragile threads of democracy from fraying further.

🩶 review: Hollow Knight: Silksong🔗

You awake on a bench. You dash through a few rooms. You fight three challenging waves of enemies. In the first phase of the boss battle, you carefully dodge your opponent’s attacks, patiently waiting for the few moments it’s safe to strike. At long last, the second phase of the boss battle begins.

You die within a few seconds.

As you awake on the bench again to repeat this entire process for the dozenth time—all this repetition itself a mere epicycle within the larger cycle of punishment that makes up so much of Silksong—you rage and fume at the game’s designers. This is BORING, you scream; why are you making me repeat SO MUCH effort every time? But you are not bored. You are in love. Or you are addicted. Or both? Or they’re the same thing? It doesn’t matter. This game is a beautiful masterpiece just like its predecessor and you will spend 90 hours of your life on it and regret nothing.

But you won’t be even slightly tempted to try Steel Soul mode. You’re not a masochist.

P.S. the “Choral Chambers” and “Cogwork Core” theme songs are magical.

🤯 review: Tony Tulathimutte’s story collection Rejection🔗

Learning in high school about body positivity and gender norms and the cultural construction of beauty had led him to believe that adults aren’t obsessed with looks. This turns out to be untrue…(p. 2)

Love is not an accomplishment, yet to lack it still somehow feels like failure. (p. 31)

Holy shit, this book. It’s so dark and it’s so good. My favorite story is the first one, “The Feminist”. It was published online in 2019 and a Guardian article says it “went about as viral as any short story could” so I guess I’m way behind the times in commenting on it. Clearly, it can be interpreted multiple ways, but here are my thoughts:

The rest of the stories are excellent too. “Ahegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression” is particularly memorable for the totally unhinged fantasy its protagonist writes - excerpt:

I am now the most important man on earth, because the enormous umbra cast by my cock over the earth’s surface, and the renewable phallothermic energy it generates, and its surprising ability to convert carbon into greater cockmass, have reversed climate change—therefore, keeping me hard is a matter of planetary survival. (p. 139)

…and for the hilariously mortifying twist ending in which the protagonist accidentally emails this fantasy to everyone in his life.

🙏 review: Joelle Kidd’s retrospective on 2000s-era evangelical culture, Jesusland🔗

From the introduction:

Admittedly, it is a niche topic—but not as niche as one might think. Because just as often, when I reveal the topic of my book, the other person’s eyes go wide. They know exactly what I’m talking about. They, too, can still remember every lyric to their favourite Relient K song, had a subscription to Brio, or rocked a rubber Livestrong bracelet that read Jesus Is King or Live for Him. Like anyone with experience of a niche subculture, finding a fellow former peer is a weird kind of homecoming. I can’t explain to you the ecstatic feeling of singing about talking to tomatoes and having a new friend chime in with the next line. If you know, you know. (p. 9)

I very much identify with the sentiment that “finding a fellow former [evangelical] peer is a … kind of homecoming.” For me it’s less about shared pop-culture references and more about a certain kind of solidarity; evangelicalism and the (traumatic) process of leaving it played a major role in shaping my life and outlook, and this is most easily understood and empathized with by others who grew up in semi-fundamentalist backgrounds.

That said… my favorite Relient K song—by which I mean the only one I can remember—is their rendition of “The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything”. In retrospect the original version seems more entertaining though.

One way Kidd’s experience differed from mine is that she was conflicted about some aspects of evangelicalism from an early age (whereas I was pretty all-in until college). For example, she found creationism unconvincing and was frustrated that it was presented as a package deal with Christianity:

I wanted to hold onto my religious belief, and I was annoyed that my school environment was making it difficult. My family, and even the churches we attended, had never seemed to consider an anti-evolution stance fundamental to Christian belief. But at school, it was all a zero-sum proposition. All my internal dispositions, all the intellectual orientations that felt natural to me, seemed to be outlawed, and my religion was suddenly tightly tied to political affiliation, personal opinions, and whether or not I thought certain scientific facts were true. Why did it have to matter? No one’s material circumstances were being affected by the age of Earth, I thought. Couldn’t some of us just think Noah rode a dinosaur and some of us think God did the Big Bang, and we could all shake hands and be done with it? Couldn’t I just be left alone? (p. 184)

When I did finally start rejecting my old fundamentalist beliefs, I had a similar desire to somehow “hold onto” Christianity, but I could not find a way to do so that felt intellectually honest to me. I sometimes wonder how my life would have been different if I’d grown up in a religious community that emphasized practice rather than belief. Perhaps I’d have been content or even enthusiastic to remain within it. But while such non-dogmatic churches might give their existing members fewer reasons to leave, I think they’re also much less able to give compelling reasons for outsiders to join. Part of evangelicalism’s appeal is the certainty it offers: certainty about how God wants us to live and about how we can get literal eternal life and eternal joy. The theoretical justification for such certainty is the idea that God himself told us all that stuff and we’ve got a written record of it. If you give up on the claim that that written record is 100% trustworthy, you lose your main basis for confidence in the more practically and emotionally important doctrines too. So there’s a powerful incentive to rationalize a belief in biblical inerrancy no matter how difficult it may be to do so.

Anyway, the book is fun and thoughtful and I can probably forgive it for making me look up the song called “Cartoons”.

🔥 review: Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits collection🔗

Ellison reads some of these himself and his performance is really something. He may be the most intense and dramatic narrator I’ve ever heard on an audiobook. That’s what pushes this into the realm of “great” for me, though it helps that his writing is stylish too.

Some memorable entries:

• “Deathbird”, in which Genesis is recast as disinformation, the Earth is ruled by a mad god, and the last man’s final duty is to euthanize the world.
• “Jefty is Five”, in which a boy who does not age has access to impossible anachronisms, like new episodes of discontinued radio shows.
• Mefisto in Onyx, in which a telepath goes to see a death-row inmate and comes to believe he himself is the murderer—not realizing the inmate is not only a telepath too, but has the ability to jump into other bodies permanently.
• “How’s the Nightlife on Cissalda”, in which an explorer of parallel universes brings back a “disgusting thing”…

There are some duds as well. I could definitely have done without the long, navel-gazing story about a writer, All the Lies That Are My Life. And the narration of “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream” is a bit too intense; the volume changes just make it annoying to listen to.

🤬 review: Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s tell-all about Facebook🔗

Some of the allegations made in this book include:

• Egregiously hypocritical and abusive behavior by Sheryl Sandberg, including what sounds like sexual harassment of employees (including Wynn-Williams) although it’s not explicitly called that in the book
• Facebook deliberately ignoring nations’ laws and even having employees whose jobs were, essentially, to be the fall guys and go to prison if local authorities decided to try enforce the laws by raiding the local offices
• Zuckerberg and other Facebook leadership being willing to make significant compromises on privacy and free speech in order to try to get into China, including censoring someone outside China at the Chinese government’s request
• The author being fired in retaliation (partly) for having made sexual harassment allegations against an executive

It also includes an anecdote about Facebook work culture having become so toxic that one employee was having a seizure and thrashing on the ground while almost everyone around her, including her manager, just went on working without doing anything about it. That… does not sound real?

I’m not going to give a rating to this book because I have no idea whether any of it is true. Here’s one former Facebook exec (Katie Harbath) disputing some details. It’s hard not to automatically be sympathetic to Wynn-Williams against the Goliath that is Facebook/Meta, though, particularly when they’re trying to use a non-disparagement agreement to shut her up. I feel that non-disparagement agreements are inherently hostile to the public good and ought not to be legally enforceable.

🥃 review: various soft drinks mixed with blue raspberry flavored vodka🔗

according to a person (me) who loves sugar and hates the taste of alcohol

👍 review: season 1 of Murderbot🔗

The books are great; the show is good. There’s no particular thing I’d point to and say “whoa, they did an incredible job with that!”—except maybe the hairstyles for Sanctuary Moon—but it’s fun and I binged the whole thing in one sitting. I’m glad they’re making another season.

👍 review: Helen Phillips’ short novel Hum🔗

She was highly invested in an intricate and important scenario, but the instant she awoke, she couldn’t remember anything about it. Good practice for death. (p. 144)

A common complaint about this book in my book club was that it was just too real: not so much a work of science fiction as a concentrated dose of the anxieties and stressors that already make up everyday life in the modern world. The protagonist May is worried about money, unable to find work because of AI, constantly distracted by meaningless phone notifications (or by the absence of meaningful ones), frustrated that her husband and children are continually distracted by their own devices, and unable to appreciate the present because she’s always conscious of how quickly it’s slipping away. And when she tries to take a break from the lifestyle that’s making her miserable she’s publicly shamed as a terrible mother.

So it’s not necessarily a pleasant book to read—the inside of May’s head is a stressful place. It’s also maddening to watch her make her problems worse through poor impulse control, but I appreciated the reminder that this exasperating character trait doesn’t make someone any less worthy of our sympathy.

If you’ve read The Anxious Generation (review) you’ll definitely be thinking about it when you read Hum. The blowback May gets for leaving her kids unsupervised and without their “bunnies” (phones, more or less) is representative of how much social norms around childcare and children’s independence have changed in recent decades. I find myself completely on May’s side here: she wasn’t even slightly irresponsible, it’s society that’s crazy. Whether you agree on that or not, I hope you’ll agree it was appalling for strangers to condemn and harass her: a handful of videos on the Internet don’t give them enough context to judge her. That’s easy to recognize when reading the novel; the question is, in the real world, the next time you hear about person X doing horrible thing Y, will you remember to be cautious about jumping to conclusions?

👍 review: Iain Banks’s standalone sci-fi novel The Algebraist🔗

This is a typical Banks book so, of course, I really liked it. And as usual, Peter Kenny’s narration adds to the experience. Spiritually it feels like another Culture novel.

A couple interesting throwaway concepts:

• a religion based on the belief that the universe is a simulation which will end when a sufficiently large fraction of its inhabitants comes to recognize it as such; this religion is said to derive some of its appeal from the fact that many different species independently derived the simulation hypothesis
• a practice of bringing a new species into the galactic community by abducting some individuals before their civilization even develops much technology, so that by the time the original civilization does develop interstellar travel on its own, it’s not even the largest population of its own species in the galaxy

👍 review: Brandon Sanderson’s Tress of the Emerald Sea🔗

We adapt to our situation like water in a strangely-shaped jug, though it might take us a little while to ooze into all the little nooks. Because we adapt, we sometimes don’t recognize how twisted, uncomfortable, or downright wrong the container is that we’ve been told to inhabit. We can keep going that way for a while—we can pretend we fit that jug, awkward nooks and all—but the longer we do, the worse it gets; the more it wears on us, the more exhausted we become…

A charming, quick, light yet sometimes eloquent read. Definitely recommend.

👍 review: Jeff VanderMeer’s sci-fi/horror novel Annihilation🔗

Confession: for a long time I judged this novel (negatively) by the movie. Now that I’ve actually read listened to the book, I’m interested to read more in the series. I don’t recommend the audio version though—it’s got a hypnotic quality to it and I found my mind continually wandering.

🤷‍♂️ review: Alasdair Reynolds’s time-travel novella Permafrost🔗

There are a couple clever bits here: one of the time travelers accidentally taking over the body of a dog, and the notion that a particular technology (MRI machines) might happen to serve as anchor points for future time machines to connect to. The story itself is just OK, and the time travel mechanics aren’t super interesting. (What would it even mean for there to be a delay as the timeline readjusts to eliminate paradoxes? Is there some sort of meta time-dimension along which changes to the block universe contained in the regular spacetime dimensions occur?) Not the most memorable of Reynolds’s works.

🤷🏼‍♂️ review: The Joy of Clojure, 2nd edition🔗

I’m pretty enamored with Clojure, but I’d probably have been more enamored with this book if I’d read it at a different point in my life. The examples often seemed motivated mainly by academic rather than practical concerns and that wasn’t what I wanted right now. Nevertheless, the book is packed with good information about the language. I appreciated the breadth of coverage and attention to subtleties.

🫤 review: Shelly Kagan’s ethics book How to Count Animals, more or less🔗

Drinking game: take a shot every time Kagan uses the phrase “But for all that…” You’ll be unconscious in no time! Or: take a shot every time he mentions an issue only to immediately say he’s not going to get into that issue.

But for all that, I find Kagan’s writing quite endearing. I’m just skeptical of his arguments.

I’ve written before about the notion of reflective equilibrium: how our intuitions about concrete cases and our intuitions about various abstract principles put pressure on each other in a process of perpetual refinement. I think people fall along a spectrum regarding which of those directions they’re more sensitive to pressure from. Some of us are more willing to revise our concrete judgments to make them fit into a more compelling unified theory; others are more willing to gerrymander the theory to accommodate more of their initial judgments. I feel like this book falls too far along the latter end of that spectrum. It works hard to come up with a theory whose prescriptions about when to treat humans and various animals alike or different line up closely (not perfectly) with common-sense opinion. I think this adds many complications to the theory that would seem arbitrary if you weren’t trying to reach specific preordained conclusions.

For example, consider what Kagan calls “modal personhood”:

Consider, for example, a 20 year old human who suffered irreparable brain damage as an infant, so that she never became a person, but remains, instead, at the cognitive level of a four month old. This individual does not have the potential to become a person, since there is nothing that we could do now for her that would allow her to become one. But for all that, it is still the case that she could have been a person (now), had the accident not occurred when she was a baby. (p. 137)

Kagan thinks this might mean the human in question has higher moral status than a nonhuman with equivalent capacities (assuming the nonhuman doesn’t also have a comparable degree of modal personhood). But the idea that modal personhood has ethical significance sounds pretty implausible to me on its face, and our natural tendency to care more about the human in this scenario seems easily explained in other ways: we just have a bias toward our own species, or it’s easier for us to empathize with modal persons, or we’re taking into account the impact on the human’s family members, etc.

Kagan also discusses the notion of “modal doghood” which I think would make a great album title.

By writing the above sentence, have I increased the modal albumtitlehood of the phrase “modal doghood”?

No. Kagan distinguishes “potential” from “modal” whateverhood. Since it remains possible that one of you will one day release a record titled Modal Doghood, it would be more accurate to claim I’ve increased the potential albumtitlehood of that phrase. Now go get to work on it! And don’t forget me when you’re modally famous!

The point of the book is to argue that there is a hierarchy of moral status, so that for example the same kind and quantity of suffering matters more (in itself, not in virtue of any differing consequences it may have) when it happens to certain creatures (like ordinary humans) than others (like ordinary insects). I remain entirely unconvinced, but Kagan does raise some interesting points along the way.

In section 4.4 he discusses whether the principle of equal consideration of interests rules out hierarchical views like the one he’s defending. You’d expect it to, but he argues it doesn’t “if we interpret the principle…as requiring only that we give equal weight to interests that are similar with regard to all morally relevant characteristics” (p. 106), since belonging to beings of differing moral status might constitute a relevant difference in otherwise similar interests. On the other hand, if “the principle is to be understood as requiring us to give equal weight to any two interests that are similar qua interests—that is, that are similar with regard to the features of the interest that make it have a bearing on one’s welfare” (p. 106), it will rule out Kagan’s view. He argues that “so construed the principle does little more than beg the question.”(p. 106) I’m more interested in his claim that this version of the principle is also incompatible with any ethical system that assigns intrinsic importance to questions of distribution:

Indeed, it is worth noting that no one sympathetic to our distributive principles can accept the principle under its second interpretation. For if interests that have the same impact on welfare must be given the same weight in our moral deliberations, then it is [sic] must be irrelevant to ask whether a given boost in well-being would go to someone who is worse off than others. We cannot legitimately hold that it will do more good to give the increase to someone who is worse off, rather than give an increase of the same amount to someone who is better off. Yet these are exactly the sorts of considerations that anyone drawn to egalitarianism will think relevant in assessing where a given increase in well-being will do the most good. Thus, despite the similarity in names, anyone who accepts an egalitarian distributive principle must reject the principle of equal consideration of interests, when it is understood in this second way. (p. 107)

I need to think about that a bit more.

Near the end of the book Kagan discusses “the problem of normal variation”: if differences in moral status exist and are rooted in differences in the degree to which different beings have various capacities, wouldn’t that (disturbingly) imply some humans have higher moral status than other humans, since e.g. our cognitive abilities vary from individual to individual? One response Kagan considers is that moral status may be determined according to a “step function”: status increases abruptly when capacities cross certain thresholds, but is constant between those thresholds. That sounds like exactly the sort of theory-gerrymandering I complained about above, but Kagan has an interesting strategy for justifying it: he appeals to the need for our ethical systems to be practical. Humans aren’t psychologically equipped to continually sort individuals into very subtle gradations of status on a case-by-case basis, so a practical system—he suggests—needs to give us just a few categories and we need to generally be able to tell easily which category any given creature falls into. (He initially presents this within the framework of rule consequentialism, but argues other ethical theories can make the same move.)

🫤 review: PKD’s Ubik🔗

In this future, when someone sustains a fatal injury, they aren’t buried—they’re kept preserved in cold pac at a “moratorium”, existing in a state of “half-life” from which they can be occasionally warmed up for (audio-only) communication with the world of the living. This communication must be used sparingly, as their remaining lifespan ticks away with every moment of contact.

That’s a cool premise, but it’s the only thing I really liked about the book. The prose is enjoyable enough (and Anthony Heald does a good job narrating) but the characters are mostly flat and unlikable and much of the story feels like someone recounting a nonsensical dream.

🫤 review: Debbie Urbanski’s Portalmania: Stories🔗

I was looking at this author’s blog and, because I just recently wrote about how writing negative reviews gives me an itchy conscience, it caught my attention that she’s expressed frustration about being expected to ignore one- and two-star reviews on Goodreads without responding to them. (I think it’s totally fair for an author to respond. I also think a lot of extreme reviews may really have more to do with the reviewer’s desire for attention than with the book they’re reviewing. In those cases, to say they’re using the book “as a public punching bag” is especially apt: they wanted something they could bash and decided the book could be put to that use.) She also suggests, quite plausibly, that bad reviews may reflect “a reader / book mismatch” where “the reader is fine, the book is fine - but this is not the book the reader was meant to read at this time or maybe even ever.” (She says not to read her previous book if you “loved Station Eleven but hated House of Leaves”, so, I won’t. (OK, I didn’t actually hate House of Leaves, I just thought the tedium overshadowed the good writing, but it’s more fun to take an extreme stance!))

I think I was, indeed, mismatched with most of the stories in this collection. They generally seem to be more metaphors than stories per se, and the main theme is asexuality; though some things were clear, I often felt I was missing the right experiences or background to be sure exactly what message the story wanted to convey.

I really liked two of the stories though:

• “Long May My Land be Bright”, in which the US deals with its political division by having a different president on odd- and even-numbered days
• “LK32C”, about a mother’s relationship to her violent, uncommunicative, inward-focused son