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Prompted by Ben Woodard, there’s been a recent flurry of posts in the philosophy blogosphere about the differences between process philosophy and object-oriented ontology. Specifically, Ben argues that thinkers of process are stuck “in the twilight of becoming” and content to allow “becoming to be utilized as an escape hatch in argumentation.” There have been several replies to Ben’s charge,… read more

My friend Matt Maloney makes custom skull rings. Once I saw the bespoke designs he’d done, and given the knowledge of the coming cowpocalypse, I knew I had to have an artifact to document my year-long bovine madness. Matt and I met yesterday and I took delivery of the ring. Behold it, in all its taurine glory below. You can… read more

In his short treatise On Bullshit, the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt gives us a useful theory of bullshit. We normally think of bullshit as a synonym—albeit a somewhat vulgar one—for lies or deceit. But Frankfurt argues that bullshit has nothing to do with truth. Rather, bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce. Unlike liars, bullshitters have no… read more

In Friday’s New York Times, the novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer wrote a scathing indictment of academic writing. An Academic Author’s Unintentional Masterpiece takes aim at the well-known art historian Michael Fried, but it could easily have been written about almost any scholar in the humanities, veteran or novice, successful or luckless. It lambastes the bad, turgid, unclear writing so… read more

As you couldn’t possibly have missed, Netflix announced changes to their subscription plans this week. Specifically, they separated streaming subscriptions from disc-based ones. It used to be possible to add DVD rental to a streaming subscription for $2 extra, but now you’ll have to pay $7.99 more for a single-disc plan. While many are complaining that the company raised their… read more

In the autumn of 2004, I wrote a paper titled “Asynchronous Multiplay” for the Other Players Conference on Multiplayer Phenomena, which was held at IT University, Copenhagen in December of that year. To give you an idea about how long ago 2004 was on the timescale of game development and game research, consider a few facts: Facebook was incorporated in… read more

If you liked my Latour Litanizer, a tool for creating lists of objects, then you’ll also like Darius Kazemi’s new little gizmo, Objects that are enumerated in Graham Harman’s “Prince of Networks”. Here’s what he did: I wrote a script to parse the original text [Prince of Networks] for things that are probably lists of objects, and then did a… read more

Jean Georges is one of four Michelin Three Star restaurants in New York city. It’s very French, so French that you’re just as likely to hear the language spoken as English. That and the environment in the main dining room—a single, enormous, plush chamber on the ground floor of the Trump International Hotel—make the place feel monarchal and exotic. The… read more

It’s hard to believe, but tomorrow will mark the fifth time Ian McCarthy and I will execute our Bloomsday on Twitter performance “Twittering Rocks.” (For more information, read here and here.) New this year: thanks to @francophony, you can follow all 50+ Ulysses characters via this convenient list. When we first started doing this in 2007, Twitter was still a… read more