As the Russian invasion of Ukraine passes its hundredth day the question as to why it started in the first place hasn’t really been settled. Putin gave two potential and not particularly consistent reasons in his speeches in February: he wanted to ‘denazify’ eastern Ukraine, the official line oft-repeated in…

Recent years have seen an increase in interest in propaganda and political rhetoric. In my field, philosophy of language, a change has occurred from the consideration of often technical and abstruse facts about how language works to how language is used to manipulate and subjugate. Thus Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda…

Last week I posted some things to quantitatively store, search, and present media, and in particular the output of the state news agencies of Russia and Ukraine. As I indicated in that post, I was a bit dissatisfied with how it turned out — it wasn’t as accessible (to journalist…

(Update, a few days later: don’t use this. I claim three benefits for it but i) the first is moot as Telegram — unbeknownst to me at the time of writing! — lets you export in a computer-readable format ii) the lemmatizer, as I note in the text, is imperfect…

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”. This sounds like an American invention, and Donald Trump claimed it as his own; but the term was used in Russia and Ukraine long before it began its career in the United…

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. Asking someone on the metro about his stop, he got into conversation and, revealing that he was from Donetsk, his travel guide ingenuously asked…