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The Sincerity Files #5

I would like to reflect on the responsibilities of academics like myself in cases like this one, and to suggest that, if we hope to sustain human bonds or a world of shared value, clear thinking is th...

The campus where I work can hardly be labeled a bastion of literary enthusiasm. But, every spring, for a brief, three-day period, it does its best to pretend otherwise.

This fall, The Point, a Chicago-based magazine of politics and culture with a national readership, is publishing a symposium on the question “What is health for?” As part of this symposium, we would l...

On a dark, gray day in October 2025, the first dozen attendees of the Effective Altruism Global conference make their way to the Sheraton Hotel just north of Times Square in New York City.

As the public face of Silicon Valley secessionism, Srinivasan’s Network State Conference seemed like a prime window into the techno-capitalist frontier.

We’re having a party in New York during Brooklyn Book Festival.

On a dark, gray day in October 2025, the first dozen attendees of the Effective Altruism Global conference make their way to the Sheraton Hotel just north of Times Square in New York City.

On a dark, gray day in October 2025, the first dozen attendees of the Effective Altruism Global conference make their way to the Sheraton Hotel just north of Times Square in New York City.

The problem with Backrooms—like much of the online content that inspired it—is less that it relies too much on vibe and more that it fails to understand what makes that vibe interesting in the first p...

There are few movies that I truly hate, but Deep Water (2006) is one of them. The documentary follows Donald Crowhurst, an over-leveraged, under-prepared British […]

As the public face of Silicon Valley secessionism, Srinivasan’s Network State Conference seemed like a prime window into the techno-capitalist frontier.

As the public face of Silicon Valley secessionism, Srinivasan’s Network State Conference seemed like a prime window into the techno-capitalist frontier.

A tropical rain had landed in Singapore, breaking the swelter of October’s first days. It was a period of anticipation and planning that, for me, […]

Greg Jackson on “The Fifth Syllable”

Our contention is that, if we fail to think through and delimit the role of AI in our lives, we risk undermining the intelligibility of our own guiding cultural concepts, and thus initiating a period ...

This past January, I traveled to a small town in Wisconsin’s Driftless region, the southwest corner of the state the glaciers missed, to join a summit of representatives from the far-flung universe of...

Our contention is that, if we fail to think through and delimit the role of AI in our lives, we risk undermining the intelligibility of our own guiding cultural concepts, and thus initiating a period ...

I’m waiting for Ben to die, and I’m getting a little annoyed with how long he’s taking. Last December he announced a diagnosis of stage […]

I’m waiting for Ben to die, and I’m getting a little annoyed with how long he’s taking. Last December he announced a diagnosis of stage […]

I’m waiting for Ben to die, and I’m getting a little annoyed with how long he’s taking. Last December he announced a diagnosis of stage […]

My daughter joined her school’s newly formed girls’ wrestling team in the seventh grade. Her first tournament was at a high school in Oak Harbor, Ohio.

Between the late 1980s and the mid-2000s, newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times occasionally ran stories about gay men who were […]

This past January, I traveled to a small town in Wisconsin’s Driftless region, the southwest corner of the state the glaciers missed, to join a summit of representatives from the far-flung universe…

Our contention is that, if we fail to think through and delimit the role of AI in our lives, we risk undermining the intelligibility of our own guiding cultural concepts, and thus initiating a period ...

Our contention is that, if we fail to think through and delimit the role of AI in our lives, we risk undermining the intelligibility of our own guiding cultural concepts, and thus initiating a period ...

Our contention is that, if we fail to think through and delimit the role of AI in our lives, we risk undermining the intelligibility of our own guiding cultural concepts, and thus initiating a period ...

Hope being an exotic commodity these days, I try to take it wherever I can get it. One of the few recent times I’ve felt […]

Our contention is that, if we fail to think through and delimit the role of AI in our lives, we risk undermining the intelligibility of our own guiding cultural concepts, and thus initiating a period ...

Our contention is that, if we fail to think through and delimit the role of AI in our lives, we risk undermining the intelligibility of our own guiding cultural concepts, and thus initiating a period ...

Just Like Us #2

This interview with Carlo Ginzburg, which we are publishing here for the first time, was conducted a decade ago at the University of Chicago.

The Sincerity Files #4

The annotated table of contents below offers a sneak peek at what’s in issue 37.

When I first moved to Brazil, I was overwhelmed by its vastness and diversity. Brazil is physically larger than the 48 states, and includes German-speaking […]

When I first moved to Brazil, I was overwhelmed by its vastness and diversity. Brazil is physically larger than the 48 states, and includes German-speaking […]

The last thing we should want to do with accounts of mystical or transcendent or contemplative experiences is send them to the taxidermist and mount them for inspection.

The last thing we should want to do with accounts of mystical or transcendent or contemplative experiences is send them to the taxidermist and mount them for inspection.

This interview with Carlo Ginzburg, which we are publishing here for the first time, was conducted a decade ago at the University of Chicago.

This interview with Carlo Ginzburg, which we are publishing here for the first time, was conducted a decade ago at the University of Chicago.

This interview with Carlo Ginzburg, which we are publishing here for the first time, was conducted a decade ago at the University of Chicago.

This interview with Carlo Ginzburg, which we are publishing here for the first time, was conducted a decade ago at the University of Chicago.

It’s 8:15 p.m. on Friday, June 12th, and we’re at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, a few hundred of us, for the UFC Freedom […]

This interview with Carlo Ginzburg, which we are publishing here for the first time, was conducted a decade ago at the University of Chicago.

In the late 1990s, I read a short story by Nirmal Verma called “Terminal.”