iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Quite honored to be part of such a line-up!

Reposted by Jonathan Basile

Jean-Thomas Tremblay @jttremblay.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

My new essay—on prosopopoeia, late liberalism, nuclear colonialism and imperialism, and sexual difference—is out in the Sept. issue of @differences.bsky.social. With readings of Albert Serra's Pacifiction, Anohni's Hopelessness, and an ecodrama by Ontroerend Goed. A taste of the big-book-to-come.

read.dukeupress.edu

Calamity as Defacement

Abstract. Prosopopoeia defines legal and discursive efforts to cognize, and to exempt ourselves from, extinction. The figure of the Anthropocene, for instance, fits a human mask onto the modulation of...

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Folks in Toronto - I'll be talking about my new book with Denis Walsh and Jean-Thomas Tremblay Oct. 7th, 4-6 PM. I'd love to see you there! (full details below)

NATURAL LECTION
Cultures of Evolution
JONATHAN BASILE
Book Launch Event and Discussion
Author Jonathan Basile (UofT)
Speakers Denis Walsh (UotT) and
Jean-Thomas Tremblay (York University)
October 7th, 4-6 PM
University of Toronto, Northrop Frye Building,
Room 009

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I have an new essay in differences - my first in a journal of gender studies! “New Material for the Old Ceremony” is a deconstruction of Lynn Margulis’s Origins of Sex, her downright weird writings on politics, and new materialists who see liberatory potential in microbiology

Abstract

This essay reconstructs and reconsiders a lineage of work in feminist sts and new materialism that inherits from Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's writings on microbial sexuality. Several feminist and queer theorists have argued that our conceptions of sex and gender could be expanded or liberated by learning new sexual possibilities from bacteria. These projects surreptitiously impose traditional sexual categories in order to claim that bacteria escape them; they show the oppressive and liberatory positions to be nonoppositional. This article turns to deconstruction to think through the consequences of this nonoppositionality. A deconstruction of life science and sexual difference challenges the pretense of “new materialist” research to receive from nature, matter, or life what depends on the active intervention of a reading. Nonetheless, this deconstructive practice of reading also destabilizes the foundations of “poststructuralist” accounts of sex and gender, such as Judith Butler's, which argues that culture “produces” nature.

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Bruce Clarke reviews Cary Wolfe's Jagged Ontologies - a brilliant overview of his use of systems theory and deconstruction. I particularly appreciate Clarke's nuancing of Wolfe's critique of sympoiesis (drawing on Scott Gilbert's eco-evo-devo) olrsupplement.com/2026/09/15/c...

olrsupplement.com

Cary Wolfe's Reality Principle - The OLR Supplement

Bruce Clarke situates Cary Wolfe's new book in the context of his and others' work on systems theory and deconstruction, while using Margulis to nuance Wolfe's view of sympoiesis

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I got to speak with Cary Wolfe, Giuseppe Longo, and Adam Nocek about our new books - very excited to share this with you all!

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I responded to Mike Fortun's essay about my review of Harden's book. I did not feel that Fortun had responded to any of my substantive criticisms of her work, nor did he evince a careful reading of Harden's book or research.

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Got this in the mail today. Excited to read it @jonothingeb.bsky.social!!

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Can anyone think of a short-ish (twenty or so) pages text that could introduce students to the history of debates/controversies that have followed from the work of Darwin? A broad overview of things like the Modern Synthesis, eugenics, the Scopes Trial, sociobiology...

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

We'd love it if you wanted to submit an abstract for the ACLA seminar we're proposing on Science and Ideology! Come think about Marxism, the sciences, and french theory with us: www.acla.org/seminar/bdff...

The prospect of a critique of scientific ideology (or a critique of ideological science) can seem inherently contradictory according to a doctrinaire interpretation of Marx’s conception of science and ideology. In the words of Canguilhem, “Science authenticates itself, [Marx] argued, by tearing the veil that is ideology’s only substance. Hence scientific ideology is a contradiction in terms.” If ideology, for Marx, was contrasted with true (Marxist) economic science, what could it mean to designate certain sciences as ideological?

How can one take account of the historicity of the sciences and critique their contingent, outmoded, and often indeed deluded and deluding forms while leaving room for that true scientificity that Marxism is meant to represent? Many of Althusser’s writings presented a confrontation with these questions, in part by building upon Bachelard’s concept of “epistemological break,” and his formulation of the science/ideology dichotomy informed the work of Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Dominique Lecourt, and remains influential in continental science studies, for example on the work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. This tradition also informed the work of certain Marxist scientists, such as dialectical biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin. At the same time, Jacques Derrida, in his seminars of the 1970s (two of which have been published since his death), deconstructed this opposition by asking how the entire system oriented by the progress from ideology to science must be changed if models or metaphors cannot ultimately be replaced by true and literal concepts.

We are interested both in papers that interpret and build upon this tradition by making use of its guiding concepts to intervene in present debates in Marxist theory, French theory, and science studies, as well as contributions that would think the limits of this framework and how subsequent developments of science and its economic and political contexts may ask us to reconfigure these concepts and the analyses this tradition put them to. To give just one example, both Althusser and Canguilhem turn to the genetics of their day as the primary representative of a true, nonideological science—a representation of genetics that is increasingly placed in question by biologists today, and which could well be understood as the fetishizing attribution of social and economic relations to things themselves.

What does a Marxist critique of scientific theory and practice look like today? As Marx and Engels often pointed out, the concepts they left us with responded to the conditions in which they wrote, and would need to be renovated with every passing generation. It is in this spirit that we invite contributors to think with and against this tradition, reawakening its spirit of radical critique.

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Our roundtable on Geoffrey Bennington's Scatter project continues with Peggy Kamuf's reflection on translating and inheriting from Specters of Marx: olrsupplement.com/2026/06/25/o...

olrsupplement.com

On the Scattered Legacy of Specters of Marx - The OLR Supplement

Peggy Kamuf on the thought of legacy in Derrida's Specters of Marx and Geoffrey Bennington's Scatter project

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

I wrote this essay to correct recent obituaries of Craig Venter, which overstate the significance of his human genome sequencing work, repeating the hype and exaggerated promises of his own self-promotion, which was designed to fuel speculative investment in his biotech companies

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

These are the more practical conclusions: I argue that we arrive at a more robust critique of 'AI', and a more thorough understanding of artistic and linguistic production (from human and machine), when it is not based on intentionalist theories of meaning

The LLM is no more a self-conscious subject than we are, but this removes one commonplace stopgap for critiques of ‘AI’. Its statements can no longer be claimed as meaningless, or its artworks as devoid of aesthetic quality, simply because it lacks the intentions of a subject. Our own language has never depended on our intentions for its meaning (as we can see, machine writing remains legible—so much so that at times it is difficult to distinguish or prove its provenance—even if we may tend to read it differently than human writing, when we know or think we know its origin). A structuralist view might conclude that language, as a system unto itself, not only does not depend on such intentions but is the matrix in which they are generated, that all the effects we attribute to our own subjectivity or initiative are effects of language, misrecognized. Derrida was never satisfied by such notions of the ‘death of the author’:

Rather than oppose citation or iteration to the noniteration of an event, one ought to construct a differential typology of forms of iteration, assuming that such a project is tenable and can result in an exhaustive program, a question I hold in abeyance here. In such a typology, the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance.

In other words, intention does not disappear from the scene once it is deconstructed—it is just that it, like everything else, is written and read. It cannot govern the meaning of a statement (we argue over presumed intentions or can dispute explicit intention-claims, can dissimulate intentions and even be at odds with ourselves over them, and can see further possibilities of interpretation or reading beyond a given intention, etc.). It follows from deconstruction not that intentions and statements of them are meaningless and not that language or writing univocally masters the scene, creating a meaning of and unto itself that forecloses all others, but that intentions are textual. In other words, we know them by that relay described above, understanding our own through language, the world, and the other. They exist for us or an interlocutor or witness only to the extent that they can be inscribed (implicitly or explicitly), which means that they are not the origin of language or action, but rather a participant in the scene of writing.

Then, our own ‘intentions’ can be transformed by inserting a novel writing machine into our circuits, and that machine may produce intention-effects just as we do, by displacing those relays, by taking part in the self-exteriority of textuality. That certainly does not mean that we ought to treat the writing of LLMs just as we do writing from other sources (except in the sense that both must be read, one way or another), it only means that the linkage we try to form between text and context is insecure in both cases.

Nor do we need to seek out our inner light to dismiss the artistic productions of ‘AI’. While it is often said that some form of genius, sympathy, or suffering sets apart human artistry, we should recognize that whatever self-relation we accomplish through art-making (a) necessarily subjects itself to established and iterable art-forms, genres, etc., even or especially when it attempts to exceed their limits, and (b) first comes to itself in a relay with such formulaic art (life imitates art, etc.). Again, it is what we have in common with writing machines that allows us to read them otherwise. Context plays a nonprogrammable role in how we read anything, including an artwork. The stories we can tell about a work and its author, the history and tradition within which we contextualize it, and the environing scene in which we situate it all play some role in how we interpret and relate to the work. This context does not determine or constitute reading any more than intention does (nor is it a simple given what counts as context); context participates in the scene. So, anyone is free to imagine that the products of ‘AI’ emerge from a thinking and feeling computer consciousness that they then relate to in an identificatory fashion (as they would any other artist—but perhaps not exactly so), or to see such works as the lazy detritus of a human machine-user or prompt writer, worthy of no more of the reader’s effort than was put into their creation.

even if we share a disdain for the type of poetic or artistic work thus far created with ‘AI’, we should not try to theorize its deficiency by claiming that all automated or programmatic processes are inimical to creativity. As Derrida often wrote, it is necessary to think ‘the event with the machine’. Invention or the unanticipatable is not only possible as a repetition that changes contexts, but every invention takes place this way. Long before LLMs, we had poets and artists making use of much simpler algorithms, and even before the computer, combinatoric processes were used to bypass the censors of consciousness; moreover, processes of recontextualization (such as found art or poetry) demonstrate the interrelation of invention and iterability. Even if such artistic practices remain matters of taste, I would argue against dismissing them on the grounds that art ought to emanate from the mystical font of pure creativity; if ‘AI’ art disgusts us today, if there is a truly visceral reaction against it, that is perhaps not because of its reliance on machine or iterability (always already the case), nor because of its uniquely bad aesthetic quality (the average and majority of human composition has been similarly slop-like, but may evoke a different reaction); rather, the context and story surrounding this technology is part of our aesthetic experience. That it is dismantling the economic possibilities for human artists and many others, forced upon us by a capitalist system fundamentally hostile to life and nature, serving as the fun-and-innocent front of an ideological campaign building infrastructure and ideological support for ever more totalitarian forms of surveillance, warfare, and governance, all for the benefit of eminently mediocre man-children (too lacking in taste to even appreciate what they are destroying, except for perhaps a barely conscious resentment), this shapes aesthetic experience in a manner that a theory of intentionalism can only obscure.

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Felicity Callard @felicitycallard.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Really looking forward to reading this

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Is Firefox suddenly acting really buggy for anyone else? Anyone found a way to fix this?

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University of Minnesota Press @uminnpress.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Two new books out in the world! #PubDay The Home of the Drowned, a novel by int'l prize-winner Elin Anna Labba, translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel. Natural Lection: Cultures of Evolution by @jonothingeb.bsky.social opens a novel terrain of scientific and political possibility.

Book cover for The Home of the Drowned: A Novel by Elin Anna Labba, translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel. An illustration of a blue lake surrounded by mountains under a red sky and yellow sun. A white hare jumps in the foreground. Text in black and gold.

Book cover for Natural Lection: Cultures of Evolution by Jonathan Basile. White background with a drawing of a macaque reading a book in its hands while sitting on top of the large black title letters.

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Will Beaman @greenbackbetter.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Finally something smart written about AI from a humanistic perspective that isn’t just a diatribe about plagiarism and five million other things condensed into one master sign. Highly recommend these excellent reflections!!

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

I'm very excited to share my book, Natural Lection, with you all! A deconstruction of "cultural evolution" and notions of nature/culture that circulate in the sciences and the humanities:

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

I wrote an essay exploring how structuralism and deconstruction have informed recent theory around 'AI' and 'LLMs' including @leifw.bsky.social's Language Machines: olrsupplement.com/2026/06/01/w...

olrsupplement.com

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Simon Glendinning considers the role of moralism in academic political theory and politics more broadly, in dialogue with Geoffrey Bennington's Scatter project: olrsupplement.com/2026/05/26/o...

olrsupplement.com

On the Genealogy of Moralism - The OLR Supplement

Simon Glendinning reads with and against Geoffrey Bennington's Scatter project, reflecting on political theory and contemporary politics

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

I'm thrilled to be co-editing this collection, Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, an outgrowth of the conference we did last year, bringing historians and philosophers of biology and evolutionary biologists to reflect on these influences in their own work

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Adrian Johnston's Infinite Greed provides a novel theory of Capital and the psychoanalytic subject by bringing together Lacan and Marx's drive theories: olrsupplement.com/2026/05/14/t...

olrsupplement.com

Toward a Labour Theory of Negativity - The OLR Supplement

Adrian Johnston provides a novel theory of Capital and the psychoanalytic subject by bringing together Lacan and Marx's drive theories

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Rebecca Colesworthy @rcolesworthy.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Hey, Rebecca, do you know where I can get a copy of little known up-and-comer Friedrich Hölderlin's complete correspondence in English? SO GLAD YOU ASKED. Now out in paperback from @sunypress.bsky.social. 750 pages of translated epistolary awesomeness. sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-...

sunypress.edu

The Complete Correspondence of Friedrich Hölderlin

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Jeremy Stewart @jeremystewart.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Absolutely delighted with this brilliant reading!!!! Thanks so much to Niall Gildea, Jonathan Basile, and the OLR!!!!

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Niall Gildea reviews @jeremystewart.bsky.social's I, Daniel as a creative-critical reading of The Post Card focused on parallels between Stewart's family tree and Derrida's, a Derridean rejoinder to autotheory and post-critique olrsupplement.com/2026/05/08/i...

olrsupplement.com

I, Daniel: An Illegitimate Reading of Jacques Derrida’s ‘Envois’, by Jeremy Stewart - The OLR Supplement

Jeremy Stewart's I, Daniel provides a creative-critical reading of bastardy in The Post Card, offering a Derridean rejoinder to auto-theory and post-critique

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

The release date is approaching for my new book, Natural Lection: Cultures of Evolution (www.upress.umn.edu/978151791998...). On cultural evolution as emblematic of instabilities that pass between the sciences and the humanities or nature and culture. Here's a discount code:

Natural Lection Cultures of Evolution by Jonathan Basile Get 30% OFF by ordering at z.umn.edu/azmk with code MN95970
Available June 2026 University of Minnesota Press

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Jonathan Basile @jonothingeb.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

this article expresses appropriate skepticism about the claims of polygenic score prediction, but this is not a good description of why they fail. It sounds as if any outcome must be attributable to gene sequences with deterministic outcomes—in fact, the very model of gene agency may be flawed

Environmental factors aren’t the only limitation; there was also the “missing heritability problem,” a mystery that has stymied geneticists for decades. Take asthma, for example. Twin studies suggest that the heritable component of the disease is as high as 80 percent, with environmental factors accounting for the rest, but researchers using biobank data can identify the cause of only about 14 percent of the phenotypic variance. Gaps like that have led to some unexpected outcomes: In one study, when families tested their children, only a quarter of those given the top polygenic score for height (also about 80 percent genetic) were the tallest of their siblings. (“Genetic predictions are not guarantees,” Nucleus warns on its dashboard.)

The source of the missing genetic influence remains elusive, but it has the unfortunate effect of weakening the predictions researchers can make about a long list of diseases and traits.

Some scientists think that bigger biobanks will solve the problem, allowing genomewide association studies to find hitherto hidden links between our genes and our attributes. But it’s also possible that polygenic screening will never be able to produce a reliable signal for certain traits and diseases, especially those in which a change in a single nucleotide has an unexpectedly large effect. “A big chunk of the heritability is actually in these rare variants,” Young said, “and we’re not capturing them with these polygenic scores.” The tests can approximate the weight of the haystack, but they can’t tell you whether it holds a needle.

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Isabel @isabelott.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Worth a read. Yeesh.

In religious terms, this is Scientific Calvinism or Evangelicalism, the insistence that we must be punished for our predestined sinfulness. In political terms, it is the fever dream of neoliberalism, a state that individualizes responsibility for the forms of life it predetermines, and spares no expense punishing those it relegates to wretchedness.

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El Pensador Sereno @elpensadorsereno.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

"Harden asegura que se opone a la eugenesia: no obstante, está ignorando lo que significa ese término para la mayoría de historiadores del tema, quienes ven su más reciente iteración en esta individualización ascendente y neoliberal del cribado y aborto de embriones supuestamente disgénicos."

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Given that Harden has a new book out that is largely a repeat of her first book, The Genetic Lottery, here's a list of critical reviews of that book. 1. Lottery, Luck, or Legacy: gcbias.org/wp-content/u...

In our view, these instances reflect a more general tension in the book, which arises
from trying to have it both ways: to argue that PGS for educational attainment provide
interpretable and meaningful predictions of inter-individual differences that reflect under-
lying genetic causes, yet to claim that they have no validity beyond hypothetical ancestry
group boundaries. As we have laid out, we believe instead that current PGS for educational
attainment are neither interpretable nor particularly meaningful. GWAS undoubtedly cap-
tures some causal genetic effects, i.e., more than confounding alone, and there is interesting
science to learn from these initial findings. But we currently understand next to nothing
about the causal paths from GWAS findings to educational attainment, notably the extent
to which they include analogs of Jencks-style “red hair effects” and the legacy of accumulated
indirect effects. That may not matter when PGS for EA are to be employed as a statistical
tool in the study of the impact of local social interventions, but it matters greatly when they
are used to elucidate, let alone redress, social inequalities.
Given these limitations, we do not see what the field of genetics has to add to the conver-
sation about redistributive justice, beyond confirming what has long been recognized–that
life outcomes differ for all kinds of reasons beyond people’s control–and we very much doubt
that overstating our understanding of the genetics of behaviors is going to increase empa-
thy. As the author appreciates, there is a history of this kind of practice, invariably with
nefarious consequences, yet every generation seems to believe that their technological twist
will help them to avoid the same pitfalls. Despite its engaging narrative, the Genetic Lottery
therefore leaves us unconvinced, and with the impression of genomics serving as a distraction
from much more exigent political conversations

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My Password is Louvre @bmceuen.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

“Indeed, every political project implicated in the rise of fascism in the United States today… can be understood as an emanation of, among other things, this ideological investment in eugenics.” exactlyyyyyy

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isaac @sevier.io · 01/05/2026

If you ever did 23AndMe or the UK Biobank your data was used by this vile eugenicist to claim people are racially predisposed to being sinful, and therefore punishable. In light of the final blow to the Voting Rights Act it's important to know how these arguments look, where they come from.

lareviewofbooks.org

Natural Election | Los Angeles Review of Books

Kathryn Paige Harden’s new book offers a defense of a kind of Scientific Calvinism that converges with the eugenicist ideals of the contemporary Far Right.

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Hanbin Lee @epigenci.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

lareviewofbooks.org/article/orig... I have several very serious takes about these human behavioral genetics research and one of them is that they tend to publish too much in "Nature" journals. That's a hard red flag.

lareviewofbooks.org

Natural Election | Los Angeles Review of Books

Kathryn Paige Harden’s new book offers a defense of a kind of Scientific Calvinism that converges with the eugenicist ideals of the contemporary Far Right.

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Alina Stefanescu @alinaetc.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Just in case anyone is dosing Blanchot and Bataille... drive.google.com/file/d/1ccM0...

drive.google.com

Dan Taylor, Death in Bataille and Blanchot.pdf

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

I'm so happy that someone has finally described the game plan of this little cottage industry so clearly. It's one more example of the scam economy we all live under now.

Importantly, in order for polygenic scoring to become a profitable and transformative industry, it doesn’t need to work. That is, these metrics do not need to pick out a class of people with a genuine propensity for virtue or vice, nor does screening an embryo for higher scores need to improve intelligence or law-abidingness. This biotech grift could become the latest trend in conspicuous consumption simply because enough people believe it works. It’s a question of our faith in predestination.

An “ethics” industry has grown up around this prospect, focused on the fear that granting limited access to this technology (only to those who can afford it) will create a separate race of tall, athletic, beautiful, brilliant, and virtuous children, who would cordon themselves off from the dysgenic masses. The true function of such alarmism, as with discourses of “AI safety” and “existential risk,” is to reinforce the false inevitability of these technologies’ success.

In fact, the stratified society being prophesied already exists—the children of the wealthy already live in a world apart. Everything from their healthcare to their schooling and experiences with the criminal justice system are fundamentally different from the realities of those with fewer resources. At no point in the present or future will maintaining this stratification require the wealthy or their children to be inherently healthier, more intelligent, or more virtuous. Hierarchy is a function of power, amassed within social, historical, and political structures, and resistance requires challenging the belief that social elites are truly the Elect.

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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

"Original Sin features a series of anecdotes about Harden’s [life], and becoming a geneticist only to realize she was still obsessed with the same questions of sin and redemption she had learned in church....The book reads like an Eat Pray Love of biotech grifting." - @jonothingeb.bsky.social

lareviewofbooks.org

Natural Election | Los Angeles Review of Books

Kathryn Paige Harden’s new book offers a defense of a kind of Scientific Calvinism that converges with the eugenicist ideals of the contemporary Far Right.

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Bird account @dialecticbio.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

I implore everyone to read this brilliant book review of Kathryn Paige Harden new book on the genetics of criminality. It cuts right through the bullshit to state plainly what Harden's project really is: eugenics bullshit and grifting lareviewofbooks.org/article/orig...

lareviewofbooks.org

Natural Election | Los Angeles Review of Books

Kathryn Paige Harden’s new book offers a defense of a kind of Scientific Calvinism that converges with the eugenicist ideals of the contemporary Far Right.

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Philip N Cohen @philipncohen.com · 29/04/2026

A key point from @jonothingeb.bsky.social here is that, as with AI, when liberals say, "Oh no this all powerful technology will doom us!", in this case, "The rich will use GWAS embryo selection to create a master race!", it's just $ in the bank for industries who want us to believe their shit works

lareviewofbooks.org

Natural Election | Los Angeles Review of Books

Kathryn Paige Harden’s new book offers a defense of a kind of Scientific Calvinism that converges with the eugenicist ideals of the contemporary Far Right.

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Gen Wojcik @genandgenes.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

“This tactic mirrors a broadly adopted political strategy: appealing to liberals to argue that their political aims can only be realized by embracing the current obsessions of conservatives.” - @jonothingeb.bsky.social A clear-eyed summary of a trap so many people fall into. We must do better!

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Nate O @nateo.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

This book review by @jonothingeb.bsky.social is a must-read. Not to toot my own horn, but back in 2018 I stumbled on Basile’s work on Borges and convinced him to publish an excerpt in a small outlet I was working at. His skill was immediately apparent even then lareviewofbooks.org/article/orig...

lareviewofbooks.org

Natural Election | Los Angeles Review of Books

Kathryn Paige Harden’s new book offers a defense of a kind of Scientific Calvinism that converges with the eugenicist ideals of the contemporary Far Right.

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Shumon T. Hussain @shumon.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

"“Sir, what ye’re telling us is nothing but Scientific Calvinism.” [...] that life was genetically preordained resembled the doctrine of predestination: [...] the privilege of “the Elect” was mirrored in the inequality of these genetic predispositions." 🤡 lareviewofbooks.org/article/orig...

lareviewofbooks.org

Natural Election | Los Angeles Review of Books

Kathryn Paige Harden’s new book offers a defense of a kind of Scientific Calvinism that converges with the eugenicist ideals of the contemporary Far Right.

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Kevin Bird @stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Brutal review, wow... "The book reads like an Eat Pray Love of biotech grifting, designed to make her into a public figure based on her personal journey, now presented as the living impetus for her advocacy."

lareviewofbooks.org

Natural Election | Los Angeles Review of Books

Kathryn Paige Harden’s new book offers a defense of a kind of Scientific Calvinism that converges with the eugenicist ideals of the contemporary Far Right.

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A Jean Stevenson @amandajean.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

It’s useful to practice identifying when purported liberal/progressive academics are doing fascists-are-in-power-we-gotta-get-right-with-em.

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Tell Lev Vision @l4leisure.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Get their ass, Jonathan!

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