Tag: Culture
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Nietzsche and Niceness
My friend Johnathan recently delivered an excellent lecture on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. He rightly noted how underrated Nietzsche’s ideas are today, showed how they could be usefully applied to the contemporary world, and offered some fair criticisms of the Nietzschean perspective. After I left the lecture, I…
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Synchronous Digital Experiences
Synchronous digital experiences feel underrated. As life continues to move increasingly online, they’re our best path to sustained opportunities for collective effervescence. The baseline argument for their power is the appeal of watching sports. I’m not a big sports fan, and even I feel the magic of watching the Super…
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Underrated Internet Communities
What are the most underrated internet communities today? The rationalists and effective altruists were underrated in the 2000s and 2010s. I stumbled on lesswrong in high school (through reddit) and got a kick out of the quirky perspective over there. It felt interestingly orthogonal to debates I was exposed to…
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*Killers of the Flower Moon*
(spoilers below) There’s a criticism of some of Martin Scorcese’s movies that he makes the behavior he’s trying to condemn look cool. Scorcese’s Jordan Belfort may be insane scum, but he also oozes charisma. I think there’s a case to be made that Scorcese’s doing a Miltonian thing to show…
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On Fandom
From Tyler Cowen’s new book on the history of economic thinkers: Do you want to know which single book probably is the biggest influence on this one? It is the Bill Simmons 2009 book The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy. I loved that book and…
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The Generalist on A24
A24 has been a saving grace for keeping cool weird stuff in moving pictures for the last decade. They absolutely dominated the Oscars this year, which nicely marked how significant they’ve become in the non-Marvel section of the movie world. The Generalist recently put out a great piece on their…