Image Source Stanislas Dehaene’s Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts is a compulsively readable summary of the “global neural workspace theory” of consciousness. Chapters 1-2 are an especially useful summary of the last two decades of research into unconscious perception. If you are unfamiliar with the idea that your memories and perception […]
Readers may remember a post from a few months ago where I excerpted a few of the most interesting passages of François Bougon’s Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping for the sake of public reference. This week Foreign Policy published my review of the book as a whole. Here is how I start it off: Xi […]
I spent some time this weekend updating the blog roll and other side bars, which I had otherwise left untouched for a year or two. Hypothetically one could use Internet Archive to see how the blog roll has changed since this blog’s inception twelve years ago. Many of the internet’s best blogs simply do not […]
Image Sourc “We should continuously upgrade our understanding of Marxism and maintain steadfast pursuit of the great ideal and goal…. We should earnestly study, understand and believe these theories, and put them to good use. We should not be conceived or impetuous when we have won success and not waver or give up in times […]
This week Jonathan Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich had their big piece on WEIRD psychology and the Catholic Church published in Science. [1] Long term readers will remember that I wrote about this piece in the American Conservative when the pre-print was published last year, and then wrote a critique of the […]
Othello and Desdemona in Venice by Théodore Chassériau (1819–1856) Earlier this week I suggested that major authors of world literature could be divided into three categories. Each of the categories is an attitude towards fictional and dramatic narrative. I labeled the three approaches as that of the artificer, the reporter, and the fabulist. In that […]
This piece began as a continuation of a post I wrote some months ago, “A Study Guide For Human Society, Part I.” That post laid out my thoughts on the best way to organize one’s history reading. I promised my Patreon subscribers that I would continue the series with a post laying out my personal […]
