Month: April 2018
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The Mind-Expanding Ideas of Andy Clark
The New Yorker finally got around to predictive processing with Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of Andy Clark. Clark is the author of Surfing Uncertainty, the canonical and most comprehensive book on the subject. Perception did not, then, simply work from the bottom up; it worked first from the top down. What you saw was not just a signal…
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Tropical Modernism
At 7:12 p.m. on a Saturday we convened at AJ’s apartment in Boerum Hill, a neighborhood long home to literary figures like “that one character from 10:04” and maybe Jonathan Safran Foer. I had come straight in a Juno from La Guardia off a Cape Air flight, just hours after meeting in Cambridge with K.…
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Interview with A D Jameson, pt. 2
I first read A.D. Jameson’s criticism on litblogs like HTMLGiant and Big Other, where he wrote about the New Sincerity, Russian formalism, and cinema. I was interested back then in irony and sincerity, especially because I was in an environment where a lot of people I knew were doing molly on weekends, were peripheral to a hippie-rave subculture…
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Punk Ethos & the Blog: An Interview with A D Jameson, pt. 1
Read pt. 2 here. I first read A.D. Jameson’s criticism on litblogs like HTMLGiant and Big Other, where he wrote about the New Sincerity, Russian formalism, and cinema. I was interested back then in irony and sincerity, especially because I was in an environment where a lot of people I knew were doing molly on weekends, were…
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Nasime Aghdam’s Compelling Aesthetics
Aghdam was a vegan, bodybuilder, activist, dancer, and video artist. She took her own life on April 3, 2018 in a shooting at the YouTube headquarters.
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New Fiction is Psychic Occupation
“How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another about people, sealed as they were?” (Woolf, To the Lighthouse) Fiction—or more generally, longform narrative text—has long been the handyman of culture, serving whatever functions are needed at a historical moment. The Greek oral tradition, famously, functioned in part to preserve cultural…
Suspended Reason 