I saw that there was a new book by DFW, to use the excessively chummy but concise abbreviation I’ll hereafter gravitate towards, last week. Having formerly been a big fan, I bought it without really looking much, only to learn it was in fact an excerpt from his posthumously published…

One of the advantages of medium for the casual or not-so-casual blogger is cleanness and simplicity. This is reflected in part in the stats page, which lets you see your daily views across all articles, monthly views across all articles, as well as more granular stats for each article, all…

The book mentioned above is by Justin E. H. Smith, a professor of philosophy in Paris. In addition to a large body of scholarly work mainly on early modern philosophy he’s been branching out into ‘pop’ or ‘public philosophy’, and this, in addition to blogs and podcasts and other such…

“Concepts and practices moved from east to west. An example is the word “fake,” as in “fake news”. …

A couple of years before he was captured and tortured, Ukrainian writer Stanislav Aseyev went from his home region of eastern Ukraine to the capital Kyiv. …

Today in the late morning GMT time Sergei Lavrov spoke some about a story that’s heating up in the Russian language news agencies and sites, the supposed existence of biological weapons facilities, or biology facilities that could be used in the development of bioweapons, located in Ukraine and funded by…

(Update: I made a quick site to post clippings from the media on the war here) What the fuck’s he thinking?? So asked a notoriously combative Russian politician after one of seemingly many recent unforced errors on Putin’s part (I’ve added profanity). It’s a good question. Many commentators put it…

How much Mandarin can you learn in 3 months, and how? — I always assumed Mandarin was impossible to learn. Obviously not entirely impossible since people learn it. But I thought that a casual learner, without classes and by themselves, couldn’t really do much. This was only confirmed when I started looking at some Chinese introductory books. An introduction to Chinese characters…

Notes for a map, part 1, v0.1 The aim of these notes, as the title suggests, is to explain Bitcoin from the bottom up. In successive chapters, I will discuss electricity, computers, macroeconomics, the history and philosophy of money, financial markets, political philosophy, and the architecture of the bitcoin network. …