Seth Ariel Green's website

Kylie, standard or speciation

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In Consider Phlebas, we learn about a band of humanoid pirates:

Tzbalik Odraye roomed with Rava Gamdol, who looked as though he came from the same place as Yalson, judging from his skin and light fur, but he denied this…Lamm was rather below average height, but very muscular and dense looking. He had double eyebrows and small horn grafts.

In other words, (guided) speciation: specialization from a common genetic stock to meet the needs of different environments.

Pull the dark threads

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A friend is reading Manacled, already a Romantasy classic, and shared this excerpt:

To quote a very different fanfic: “Too many competing objections, that was the problem.”¹ But the next day, the excerpt continued nagging at my attention. I think there are two things I like about this. The first is its total lack of shame; as another friend put it, “it just… goes there.” The second is that it’s pulling at the dark threads of Harry Potter — charismatic psychopaths often being the best fleshed-out characters (Bellatrix), Rowling’s obviously conflicted attitudes towards class and status in Britain, and the ways in which violence and attraction might go hand in hand (Hermione slapping Draco in PoA) — and seeing where they might go.

'Regression to the meat' newsletter

Thu, 15 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s https://regressiontothemeat.substack.com/.

My first post is here.¹

Would be glad to hear your thoughts!

My reservations about Substack notwithstanding 😃↩︎

Ah, the rude virtues

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In 2023, a Harvard professor was cancelled for having signed a brief for Obergefell stating that states can respect the “equal dignity of all persons” while also promoting “the distinct benefits of a male-female marriage scheme in law and culture,” and for having written some things that signal approval of abortion restrictions.

From his own account, a few details stand out:

At the Epidemiology departmental faculty meeting on April 5th, a central agenda item was “Discussion on matters related to [my] views.” The Department chair allowed me to make some remarks prior to this discussion. I commented that I had real sorrow over the pain and distress in the community…

Columbia is scared of discovery

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In the news:

White House Cancels $400 Million in Grants and Contracts to Columbia

Columbia Agrees to Trump’s Demands After Federal Funds Are Stripped

Columbia President Is Replaced as Trump Threatens University’s Funding

At my local cafe last week, some incensed folks asked: why didn’t Columbia have more courage? Why couldn’t the Ivy League band together and mount a hearty legal defense?

I think @patio11 has the right answer here:

Wonder and horror, equally counterpart to doubt

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In ‘Man in Search of God’, Abraham Heschel writes:

The greatest hindrance to knowledge is our adjustment to conventional notions, to mental clichés. Wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is, therefore, a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is.

One of many things that people like, and fear, about hallucinogens: they forcibly open the mind to this kind of authentic awareness.

the business of doubt is one of auditing the mind’s accounts about reality rather than a concern with reality itself; it deals with the content of perception rather than with perception itself…Doubt, then, is an interdepartmental activity of the mind…When in doubt, we raise questions; when in worder, we do not even know how to ask a question. Doubts may be resolved, radical amazement can never be erased. There is no answer in the world to man’s radical wonder. Under the running sea of our theories and scientific explanations lies the aboriginal abyss of radical amazement.

A delightful passage in 'A Place of Greater Safety'

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Two minor characters are meeting a third for the first time:

⁠“Let’s hope we can do as well for you this time,” Pétion said, with gallantry. “And yet you are a Parisian, my friend Brissot tells me?”

⁠You’re overdoing the charm, Jérôme, his friend Brissot thought.

⁠“Yes, but my husband’s affairs have kept us so long in the provinces that I no longer lay claim to the title. I have so often wished to return—and now here I am, thanks to the affairs of the Municipality of Lyon.”

Date Me Docs, obviously

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I recently wrote a date me doc – see here for context. (I continue to be belatedly zeitgeisty.)

To me, the case that single people should do this is self-evident: why not? what are the costs? But a few pieces of social context made writing one seem not just desirable but advisable:

To dating apps — increasingly owned and run by one megacorp — we are the product, not the client. They dampen and constrain our self-presentations to capture and monetize attention.

Meaningfully reducing meat consumption is an unsolved problem: meta-analysis

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I am co-author on a new meta-analysis about interventions aimed at reducing consumption of meat and animal products. We conclude that no theoretical approach, delivery mechanism, or persuasive message should be considered a well-validated means of reducing MAP consumption.

Here is

'Bad Hombres' movies

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a conservative trope that Hollywood hates Trump, Republicans, and all they hold dear. But we still get movies with fundamentally Trump-y themes animating them. Consider what we might call the ‘bad hombres’ genre:

Silent Night, in which a (white) man seeks vengeance against (Latino) gangsters in southern California after they kill his son
Peppermint, which has the same plot except it stars Jennifer Garner
Brawl in Cell Block 99, in which some bad, multicultural gangsters try to ruin Vince Vaughn’s life because he’s prudent and ethically grounded (apparently its studio has a populist bent)
…probably others I haven’t seen (ChatGPT suggests The Marksman, Rambo: Last Blood, and Sicario).

On the one hand, there’s something unseemly about both sneering at these concerns and then seeking to profit from them. On the other, these stories were in our mythos when Trump descended the escalator. (Personally I prefer movies like The Forever Purge which approaches the same material with a more sociological bent.)

A few salient election details

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Of the many, these stick out:

Harris got zero votes in 2020 because she has no natural constituency and isn’t good at campaigning. Why would things have been different this time?
Trump is what McCain wanted to be, a true maverick. Getting Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. onboard — dominating the crank vote without alienating mainstream Republicans — is remarkable.
Democrats have bungled governance, over and over. Last year we learned that California has apparently always been capable of making San Francisco a nice place to walk around, but only did so to impress President Xi. I am at least a little glad to see this way of doing things rebuked.

The office drone who would be king: 1999 in cinema

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

According to readers of the New York Times, the top four movies of 1999 were The Matrix, Fight Club, Office Space, and American Beauty. I love this selection because I think they’re all basically the same movie, starring basically one character:

The movie goes like this:

An office schlub encounters a mythical stranger who teaches him that rules of reality are optional. He decides to stop playing along and immediately becomes cool, popular, and powerful: a middle-aged Übermensch. With his newfound powers he attempts to throw off the shackles of society and achieve his true desires, pitting him against powerful forces that fear his liberation.

The gazpacho, it scalds me

Thu, 03 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When an I Think You Should Leave skit takes me a long time to warm up to, it’s usually because the situation for which it’s a perfect rejoinder hasn’t come my way yet.

This week, I thought a lot about poor Howie from the charades skit. He wants to enjoy some Gazpacho, but

Howie: This gazpacho soup just burned my lips.

chorus: The gazpacho?

Howie: Yeah, it’s been sitting out. It warmed up.

Five observations about "The Substance"

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I would have enjoyed this movie a bit more with some tighter editing, less repetition, and more leavening humor. But I did enjoy it. Diana Stevens, who shares some of my concerns, didn’t.
This movie is basically Fight Club with no good/bad distinction between the halves of the self. (Although Fight Club is also a little confused about this because it’s so horny for Brad Pitt.) Sarah Gorr makes the same connection.

My spunky milieu, childless Brooklyn

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have noticed recently that I seem to be part of a distinct demographic group without a name.

My friend Jacob and I came up with Spunk: Sporty Professional Urbanist, No Kids.

We are:

Ages 30-45
Living in Brooklyn, SF, etc.
Thoroughly professional managerial class
Possessed of omnivorous tastes
Very physically active (running, climbing, skating, etc. )
Readers (you can find us at book bars)
Joiners of clubs and leagues
Childless (maybe kids are on the long-term agenda, maybe not)
Politically liberal but market urbanists on housing, public transport, and bike lanes
Reasonably successful at work but not workaholics
Pretty good at our hobbies but not elite
Without a singular dominant interest in our lives
Occasionally experiencing the lifestyles of much richer people (e.g. when work flies us to Istanbul or Singapore to spend a week with colleagues)

There’s a parallel to David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise – “These are highly educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success. The members of the new information age elite are bourgeois bohemians” – but I also want to capture our dedication to stakeless pursuits as a kind of rebuke to our over-schedueled, status-competitive childhoods. Meanwhile, our own lack of children, as my friend Rye puts it, “implies we are kind of spunky in a way that having no kids makes space for us to be.”

AMD also seems a bit adrift

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Intel recently announced a plan to eliminate 15,000 jobs after historically bad quarterly results.

It’s been rehearsed to death that Intel missed the boat on mobile and AI, but execution issues seem just as important to the story. When Apple ditched Intel for its own processors in 2020 to glowing reviews, the root cause was quality assurance. Even if Apple was a small, difficult customer, more alert leadership might have seen their departure as a canary in the coal mine and moved heaven and earth to fix QA. Instead, four years later, Intel’s desktop chips are still having serious stability problems, and other laptop vendors are jumping ship.

Would that every great artist had a dance music period

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I saw RJD2 spin a few weeks ago, and I was very pleased to hear him play The Who’s Eminence Front, a great, dance-y track whose keyboards evoke (for me) Steve Reich’s Four Organs or the opening theme to Nausicaä. Among great rock artists pivoting to dance music, I’d put this track second in my personal pantheon, behind only Paul McCarthey’s Temporary Secretary, which, as far as I know, sounds like nothing else ever recorded.

My circuitous, undirected career path

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Something I wrote for the EA forum.

Extraordinary cost-effectiveness analyses call for supporting theory

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A new post on the EA forum.

My talk on 'Nudges, Norms, and Persuasion Approaches to Reducing Consumption of Meat and Animal Products'

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I recently presented an in-progress paper at the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab, where I will be taking a research scientist job starting on July 1st.

The recording is on YouTube and the slides are here.

Five agreeable-sounding propositions about housing

Wed, 15 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Bryan Caplan asks us to think about ending zoning, while Manville, Monkkonen & Lens (2019) advocate for ending single-family zoning. I share these priorities, but I think they sound disruptive. Here are five propositions about housing and construction that, I hope, sound more agreeable.

If a single-family home is ok, a duplex, triplex, in-law suite, or cottage court are all probably ok too.¹
Cities with a wide variety of housing are fun to walk around.

'Someone to sit in your chair/To ruin your sleep'

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Some thoughts.

In Being Alive, Bobby enumerates deep and shallow reasons to stay single. Paul responds: there’s more than that. He’s right, but I also think: those things are important because they’re true, because they’re real.
“A person like Bob doesn’t have the good things and he doesn’t have the bad things, but he doesn’t have the good things,” I get it.
On Adventure Time, Prismo says: “when I’m alone I can just sit on the couch and when I’m hungry I can eat whatever I want. It’s not like: ‘What should we eat for breakfast? Wait! We should coordinate!’” Jake calls this bleak, but I would instead call it injured.

Sexual violence prevention programs change ideas, not behaviors

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I am a co-author on a new meta-analysis: Preventing Sexual Violence —A Behavioral Problem Without a Behaviorally-Informed Solution, along with Roni Porat, Ana P. Gantman, John-Henry Pezzuto, and Elizabeth Levy Paluck.

The vast majority of papers try to change ideas about sexual violence and are moderately successful at that. However, on the most crucial outcomes — perpetration and victimization — the primary prevention literature has not yet found its footing. We argue that the field should take a more behavioralist approach and focus on the environmental and structural determinants of violence.

What if college sports were focused on public health?

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In college I played chamber music and ran track and cross country (XC). While both were subsidized by the school, playing music has positive spillovers both for the community (people got to see our concerts) and into the future (e.g. something about how a meaningful life involves making art). Track & XC had, to a first approximation, zero positive benefits for the community at large. (Track meets are boring and XC meets are boring and far away.) Any justification of the sport as a college-sanctioned activity for some but not all people has to start with enrichment for participants.

Deleting social media creates (welcome) barriers to returning

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Like many people, I am troubled by my relationship with screens, particularly my phone’s. I am trying three remedies. First, I use my phone in grayscale, like Lorde. Second, I avoid screens from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown.¹ Third, I deactivated my Facebook and Instagram accounts, logged out of LinkedIn and Twitter, and deleted Reddit from my phone. For LinkedIn and Twitter, I deleted my passwords so I’d have to go through a recovery process to log in again.

Venom, an emotionally self-aware ubermensch

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have a soft spot for movies that get away from their creators.¹ I don’t think that Tony Scott, for instance, intended Top Gun to be a quintessentially gay movie. I think instead that he longed for a richer set of homosocial relationships, where men can like, love, hate, compete, fight, make up, and simply be close to one another all the time. Ancient people would not have questioned this, nor its obvious erotic overtones; the collective unconscious emerges.

Towards richly annotated digital books

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I am reading Lord of the Rings again and, as always, there are many words, phrases and names I don’t know. But this time I am reading digitally, so when Denethor talks about “Vorondil father of Mardil” who “hunted the wild kine of Araw in the far fields of Rhûnm,” I can at least look up ‘Vorondil’ and cross-check his place in the appendix.

Even better would be an easy way to pull up and cross-check the Tolkien Gateway, the Interactive Middle-Earth map, or perhaps Andy Serkis’s off-kilter renditions of Tom Bombadil’s songs in a way that allows the reader to luxuriate in the details without losing their place in the text.

Five categories of social adversary

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When trying to explain a social problem, we might argue any of the following:

Those people are bad, e.g. blame the capitalists for global warming, the poor for their predicament, or the Jews for “a whole range of things…from the world war to short skirts to jazz music.”
That policy is harmful, e.g. a minimum wage might “price working poor people out of the job market.”
Those people are too radical, e.g. too quick to adopt relatively untested ideas as enduring truths.

Environmental & health appeals are the most effective vegan outreach strategies

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Now published on the EA forum, aiming to publish in an academic journal next year.

Towards non-meat diets for domesticated dogs

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

An essay I just wrote for the EA forum.

The fraud is the lack of use cases

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I have been consuming a lot of SBF content lately, e.g. Zvi Mowshowtiz’s review of Going Infinite, David Morris’s comments on FTX’s lawyer, Molly White’s courtroom reporting, and a Bloomberg documentary.

To summarize the story so far:

someone(s) working at FTX and/or Alameda set things up to allow Alameda to gamble with FTX customer money.
Alameda more or less burned that money on a bunch bets that Number Go Up, AKA that the crypto market would grow monotonically.
That turned out to be false.
Eventually, people found out that a lot of Alameda’s extant assets were just FTX-brand magic beans with no real value.
FTX depositors got scared (or were spooked) and tried to withdraw their money, on the theory that trouble at one company meant trouble at the other.
This theory turned out to be sound, and FTX couldn’t meet withdrawals, in violation of its terms of service.
After more machinations, FTX declared bankruptcy, and now Sam Bankman-Fried is taking the stand in New York.

As best I can tell, his defense strategy is to dispute who authorized step 1, the loaning of FTX assets to Alameda. SBF is basically claiming that someone else at the company set this up, and he wasn’t aware of it, that he was just following the advice of his lawyer. This is, on the face of it, preposterous, but also I don’t see how it’s exculpatory. Judge Kaplan shares my skepticism.

Social Media Manager as a distinct professional class

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I have now worked in marketing and marketing-adjacent jobs at two startups, producing blog posts, social media, and external content under the tutelage of two directors of marketing, a head of growth, and a chief marketing officer. I’ve learned that marketing is a quasi-discipline with sacred texts, gurus, widely understood conceptual divisions (I mostly did content marketing, as opposed to product marketing or growth hacking), and dogmas about what tactics are appropriate to which situations (e.g. ‘outbound links’ are penalized on LinkedIn but, until recently, not on Twitter).

Substack is reader-hostile

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of writers I like have moved to Substack.

I presume that some of them are doing it for a big payday, e.g. Danny Lavery was kind enough to tell the Times that his 2-year Substack contract was worth $430,000.¹ Others say that it multiplied their readership.

But as a reader, Substack is a big step down from (e.g.) blogspot, wordpress, or self-hosted content. When I click a blogpost, it’s because I want to read it, not

Towards ML-literate dystopian fiction

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

My favorite moment in M3gan comes when Allison Williams says to the title character: “I know you think you’re maximizing your objective function.” it was fun to hear an explicit nod to the language of AI-alignment; someone who worked on this movie reads LessWrong, or talked to people who do.

M3gan could serve as a great prequel to an AI apocalypse movie (though I think it’s unlikely). But thinking those movies over – Terminator, Oblivion, The Matrix – they’re mostly action movies that come down to a test of strength. The robots basically think and act like humans, albeit more indestructible.

GiveWell should fund an SMC replication

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

An essay I wrote in response to GiveWell’s “Change Our Mind Contest.”

Traveling North

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

An essay about my friend Danny, and our respective journeys on the Appalachian Trail, published in the spring/summer 2022 issue of A.T. Journeys.

My original (more stylistically out there) submission is here.

UX testing for public infrastructure

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

An article in the Wall Street Journal documents LaGuardia Airport’s remarkable turnaround:

It’s no longer appalling. It’s actually nice. In fact, when a panel of judges recently named the world’s best new airport building, the prestigious honor went to Terminal B.

The design team ran some “clever experiments” see if things worked like intended:

One was a live trial in which hundreds of friends and relatives came to a concourse of Terminal B right before it opened in 2018. They were handed tickets for phantom flights and given instructions—grab a coffee before heading to Gate 29, say—as the ORAT experts observed their behavior and studied their feedback. When they realized that certain signage was too subtle and the loudspeakers sounded different in a bustling environment, they added splashes of color and tweaked the volume so that real passengers wouldn’t get lost.

Having your social justice cake and eating well too

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A few years ago, a friend was doing a prestigious postdoc at a prominent law school. One time, a scholar who was in town for a seminar asked to be taken to a thousand-dollar-a-head restaurant,¹ and it was my friend’s responsibility to clear that with their department chair – who promptly said, more or less, “no problem.” So out they went, my friend, the visiting scholar, and a few others; and thus did the school spend something like 10% of a law student’s yearly tuition on a single dinner.

Contagion and A.I., a parable and a fairy tale

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Contagion got a lot of attention these past few years for being eerily predictive and apparently inspiring some aspects of the UK’s pandemic response. I watched it last night, and it is indeed unnerving. I like the shots that lingered on high-touch surfaces; Sodenbergh knows that you’re thinking of all the times you’ve been in all-too-close proximity with a sick person, and all the residue they leave behind.

But the movie really came together for me in its last 80 seconds, which show a bulldozer destroying a bat’s habitat, who then settles into a pigpen and infects a pig, who is then taken away, killed off-screen, and prepared for consumption by a chef who poses for a photo with Gwyneth Paltrow’s character as the words ‘Day 1’ appear on-screen. (We’ve already learned that she’s the index case.) This is a very plausible genesis story for a global pandemic, but why include it at all? Why not end with Matt Damon’s character and his daughter celebrating a return to normalcy?

Re: Baudrillard on Dead Ringers

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In The Vital Illusion, Jean Baudrillard writes:

A sort of anticipation of cloning can be found in nature itself, in the phenomenon of twins and twinship (gemellité). We can perceive a kind of cloning in the hallucinatory redoubling of the same, in the primitive symmetry that makes the two twins seem to be like two halves of a single self, of the same individual—and we escape the phantasm only by way of a break, a rupture of the symmetry. But perhaps we have never properly escaped our double; and cloning, then, may simply be reviving this hallucination of the same, of the twin from whom we have never quite been separated. At the same time we may see in cloning the resurgence of our fascination with an archaic form of incest with the original twin, and the grave psychotic consequences of such a primitive fantasy (Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers is a dramatic illustration of this).

Most of the time this twinship remains obscure and symbolic, but whenever it materializes, it illuminates the mystery of the symbolic separation, of the invisible division found at the heart of each of us. (Indeed, there are some who claim to have discovered its biological trace.) From this internal division surely comes the sacred, or rather the accursed character of twinship in every culture. In our culture, however, we also see the other side of this accursedness—the endless resentment and remorse associated with individuation. It is effectively only through this original separation, this “ontological” cleavage from the twin, that the individual being first appears and, with it, the possibility of alterity and of a dual relation. And so we are individuated, and proud of it; but somewhere inside, in an unconscious still deeper than the psychological unconscious, we never overcome, we never fully accept this separation and this individuation.

Is there not a terror of and a nostalgia for this double, and, to go further, for the whole multiplicity of semblables from whom we have divided ourselves in the course of evolution? Do we not, after all, deeply regret our individuation?

Marianne Moore and Dan Harmon, inscrutable to the future

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

My favorite Marianne Moore poems are generally the ones I understand right away, because they’re short, they rhyme, and they’re about animals. I like animals. I like the way she describes rats, chameleons, and talismanic seagulls. Those poems are lovely and easy to digest. It’s a lot more work to figure out what’s going on in, e.g., Diligence is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight, or To a Prize Bird, which, I learned when I looked it up, is actually about George Bernard Shaw.

I've been zeitgeisty lately

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

was a zoomtown-er in Park City in October 2020;
left my job to pursue personal projects in April 2021;
got an unsanctioned booster shot a few days ago.¹

I wonder if the trend of being trendy will continue? I also am prompted to think about how much the ideas that feel original or appealingly counternormative to me are just ‘in the air.’

This one I will explain. I got the J&J shot in April 2021. When I got back to NY in August from traveling, I was worried about breakout cases. The fact that I got one dose in the first place rather than two seems to have been an artifact of clinical trial design considerations, and a desire to go to market faster, rather than something cognizably scientific; we often see that boosters provide immunogenic response; and, contra one of the dumbest things I’ve read in a newspaper, I think we can indeed make generalizations between vaccines. So I got a second; I felt no compunction about lying when they asked me if I had been vaccinated already. I also can’t see a way in which my declining a shot would have led to some more deserving person getting hers faster. (It’s a lot more likely, I think, that the marginal dose would just go in the trash.)↩︎

I want my words to tell the story

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In late summer 2010, I was on a bus one evening in Philadelphia, returning to Swarthmore. A man came on who had the words ‘Fuck em all’ tattooed across his chest. I looked at that man, probably more than was polite or advisable, and thought about it. Every single day, that man woke up and had that attitude branded on his skin. By contrast, I could shave and put on a suit and look at home in a consulting firm; or a tie dye shirt and a hemp necklace and fit in at a music festival. That was precious to me, I realized. So I decided to never get a tattoo. I cherished being protean. My words and my outfits and ornaments can tell the story, whatever story I like.

"I'm an ethical vegan, and not the fun kind"

Sun, 20 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

On an episode of Indian Matchmaking, our hero Nadia meets a potential suitor named Vinay at a restaurant and learns that he keeps to a vegan diet. “It was honestly just curiosity,” he says. “Are you ok if I get…” Nadia trails off. “Oh yeah yeah, of course!” he says. “Like, I grew up non-veg, like uh, thirty-five years of my life is non-veg,” and they laugh about it. It was an awkward moment, but they’ve skated past it, because he’s the cool kind of vegan, not one of those preachy PETA people, heaven forbid.

An adjective I think about a lot

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In An Electronic Soundtrack for Spiritual Awakening, Kelefa Sanneh calls Jon Hopkins “one of the most celebrated electronic musicians of his generation.” Now, I like Hopkins’s music a lot – Collider, Light Through the Veins, Open Eye Signal, and Emerald Rush are all a lot of fun – but “one of the most celebrated”? I think not, at least, not the way Metro Boomin’s tracks with Future are literally present at celebrations all around America, because he makes, get this, popular music.

It's weird that no one on "The Good Place" wants children

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

(Spoilers for the whole show)

because the show draws so obviously from conservative, christian beliefs about the purpose of life.

One of the people I watched The Good Place with speculated that the show features zero children in the afterlife, where most of the action takes place, because no one wants to think about dead kids. I’m fine with that; it is, ultimately, a network sitcom, the kind of show you watch because it offers familiar faces¹ and comfortable pleasures. For me, it evoked a time when pretty much everyone I knew watched the same shows, and whether they were ‘good’ or not was sort of besides the point, because they were something to talk about. (This was not the only nostalgia I indulged during the pandemic.)

Opposition to unplanned progress, bedrock of our politics

Thu, 13 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

An article in the Times reports local opposition to redeveloping Industry City in Brooklyn. In Councilman Menchacha’s letter on the subject:

I firmly believe housing is a human right and that no one should be forced to leave their home because they can no longer afford to live in their own neighborhood….I and my team are committed to working with everyone in the neighborhood to build on a legacy of community-led and comprehensive planning that creates guaranteed housing and jobs

Despicableness as Context

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I would like to figure out when and how to engage with artists who are bad people.

On the one hand, Richard Wagner did not much care for Jews – and not just in the way that was cant for 19th century Germans, but actively going out of his way to disparage Jews and Jewish composers.¹ This doesn’t bother me, and I think it’s because I don’t see any connection between his music and his beliefs. Ride of the Valkyries works as a statement of grandeur and violence wherever it pops up.

All the words in Lord of the Rings that I did not know

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Sixty-four in all! I had a sense of what some of these meant but included them if I wasn’t pretty sure, and a lot of the usages were archaic.

The joy of putting together a list like this was both learning a bunch of fun words and also engaging with the people who have tread before me in understanding LOTR minutiae, e.g., the folks who wrote the Tolkien Glossary and Tolkien and the OED.

Rihanna & Borges; or, when Rihanna covers "Same Ol' Mistakes,"

Thu, 09 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

she imparts to the text the full weight of her celebrity. The words

Finally taking flight
I know you don’t think it’s right
I know that you think it’s fake
Maybe fake’s what I like

become rich with the overtones of her many personas: badgirlriri, the world’s richest woman musician, the CEO of a huge corporation – a person who has lived half her life under unbearable scrutiny, here, acknowledging the burden of making art that appeals to the median human. When Kevin Parker sings the same words, he speaks to a smaller niche, defending himself against accusations of selling out for achieving a tiny fraction of the fame Rihanna lives with.

The Pleasure of the Appendices of the Lord of the Rings

Mon, 25 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien writes:

It is perhaps not possible in a long tale to please everybody at all points, nor to displease everybody at the same points; for I find from the letters that I have received that the passages or chapters that are to some a blemish are all by others specially approved.

Allow me to cast a vote of special approval for Appendices A and B, particularly the sections about what the dwarves of the Lonely Mountain and the elves of the Woodland Realm and Lothlórien were doing during the War of the Ring. These passages provide the all-too-rare pleasure, in literature and in life, of context.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Peer-reviewed articles

Meaningfully reducing consumption of meat and animal products is an unsolved problem: A meta-analysis | Replication Package with Benny Smith and Maya Mathur (2026). Appetite 216.
Effects of adding plant-based menu options on meat selection frequency: A randomized controlled experiment | Replication Package with Jessica Hope, Jacob Peacock, and Maya Mathur (2026). Food Quality and Preference 105931.
Preventing sexual violence: A behavioral problem without a behaviorally informed solution | Replication Package with Roni Porat, Ana Gantman, John-Henry Pezzuto, and Elizabeth Levy Paluck (2024). Psychological Science in the Public Interest 25(1): 4–29.