Christopher Lasch's Angry Ghost

People made fun of the humanities and postmodernism, but it’s medicine and the sciences where the true one shotting is taking place.

The corporate softening of language over the past few decades has not only sanded away life’s jagged edges: it’s converted human suffering into abstractions. Example: “Food Insecurity.” That term evokes no emotion at all, whereas “hunger” produces a visceral one.

One of the saddest barometers of the decline of Britain is the loss of nearly all quiet coach etiquette over the last 5 years or so.

"democracy: A Journal of Political Renewal and Radical Change" was an ambitious, though sadly shortlived academic journal founded by Sheldon Wolin and Nicholas Xenos in 1981. It published classic essays by Christopher Lasch, Wolin, and Ivan Illich, among others, before it folded.

AI-assisted screenwriting has been going on longer than we thought and Top Gun: Maverick is a notable example.

Thought for the day: that presentist type of attitude which lacks all historical imagination, and assumes the past resembles the present (or else is of no interest) is amongst the most arrogant of all positions in academia. Inability to comprehend historical difference.

There is a surprising amount of ruin in a falling nation. Competent systems fraying, but maintaining their integrity for now in places. Residual forms of credit enduring, though increasingly being cashed in and converted into other forms. The slow dismantling of civic buildings.

Sad that gen z have apparently lost the ability to echolocate using sonar the way we did growing up

The global generalisation—via the Internet—of vaguely punk-adjacent millennial American hipster culture, c. 2011, and its values, etiquettes, and assumptions.

Unfortunate bookshelf audit incident today where I was forced to admit that, not only do I own both of Lauren Oyler’s books, but I’ve also read them cover to cover.

I sort of suspect that a fair amount of what gets referred to as “woke” isn’t really ideological so much as the result of some deeply maladjusted people having been given disproportionate influence over the way everyone else is supposed to live

Academics reviewing student complaints have a 3–4 year head start on the rest of the population in understanding what workplace culture is soon going to look like.

The negatively polarised in “not actually committed to the principles they claim to be motivated by” shocker.

my newest reason to dislike AI is that it’s making my beloved em dash seem suspicious

Christopher Lasch (speaking in 1993) on the university as "a sinking ship."

Tom Nairn, writing in the New Left Review in 1981.

Academia’s conception of a free-thinker: someone who finds out what the free-thinkers are thinking, & thinks that

The irony of the classic genealogy of English leftism (Diggers, Levellers, Chartists etc) is that even if you accept it, in all its anachronistic silliness, it makes little sense for a left that's now a) highly secular & b) largely characterised by cultural progressivism