Can philosophy be content?

Content and its discontents

First post of the month! I’ve been busy! In a good way. Hope you’ve been okay too.

This is a video where I discuss philosophy content: podcasts, newsletters, videos, and other digital-first formats for philosophical knowledge. I’m speaking as somebody who creates this stuff, working through reservations I have about how the mandate to go viral shapes theoretical thought. There are some tangents, like PJ Harvey showing up by way of Rob Horning - this is the first video I’ve created without any notes in hand. Totally unscripted! It only took me 5 takes…

In other news, The Lenox Institute’s first event was great. Tickets sold out multiple days in advance and we got a lot of positive feedback afterwards. If you’re here because we met in person last week, hi! If you’d like to come to the next one, please see below. We have something casual on Friday the 26th and other programs are in the works. There’s also a ton of non-Lenox news I haven’t shared here yet, including a virtual panel called “Should We All Live in Communes?” this coming Tuesday, June 23rd, hosted by Acid Horizon Research Commons. All below the fold.

Live events

Tuesday June 23rd, 5-6:30 pm ET: “Should We All Live in Communes?” - a virtual panel and live audience Q&A with Marina Sitrin, Associate Professor of Sociology at SUNY Binghamton; Fern Thompsett, Postdoctoral Fellow at Tuft University’s Center for the Humanities; and Henry Kramer, faculty in Religious Studies at CUNY Hunter and Academic Dean at the Strother School of Radical Attention. No need to register in advance; here's the link again, which has all the info you’ll need to join.

Friday June 26th, 3-5 pm ET: Under the auspices of The Lenox Institute, I’ll be hosting a free, informal discussion about the ethics and politics of AI at Principles GI, a coffee shop in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Here’s their Instagram, and while there’s no need to register, it’s helpful for us to know how many people to expect. Not strictly necessary, but if you’re planning on attending, I’d encourage you to let us know by messaging info@lenoxinstitute.org.

Podcasts

Magnifica Humanitas: Religion, Humanism, and the Critique of 'AI' - I joined the latest episode of Acid Horizon to discuss the pope’s encyclical. Part two is subscriber-only, which is very well and good because my thoughts about the Summer of Ludd don’t need to be that public. (There’s no central website for the Summer of Ludd - get it! - but this page is representative.)

How Can We Build Solidarity With Children? with Madeline Lane-McKinley - the latest episode of LEPHT HAND looks at how the constructs of childhood and adulthood are weaponized across the globe and argues (à la McKinley’s 2025 book) that rethinking them is necessary for anti-fascist politics.

As a teaser, the next LEPHT HAND will feature Sereptie and I on Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s 1993 book The Need for A Sacred Science. It’s been a while since we’ve done an episode without a guest, but we’re really excited for this one, and it overlaps with a lot of my interests - no doubt we’ll both pull our weight...

Courses

Anti-Civilization: Recovering from Industry and Progress starts Tuesday August 4th and runs for 5 weeks. Live sessions are Tuesdays from 7-8:30 pm ET. I’m having a lot of fun putting the syllabus together! Happy to answer any questions about it.

This isn’t available to the public, but just some personal career news: starting in August, I’ll be teaching a course on AI and society for Bard Microcollege, a tuition-free initiative that operates at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. I’ll also be contributing to a week-long pedagogy workshop in advance. This will be my first traditional academic position since early 2025, and I’m pretty interested to learn about their approach to teaching and learning as AI’s siege on higher ed continues.

So, yea, busy. All this madness is actually just a fraction of what I do for work; hopefully the pause in substantive writing is understandable. For what it’s worth, I’m writing an essay about the concept of pseudoscience that’ll show up here soon.

Thanks for reading / watching / listening, especially if you’re able to do so outside. I love the run-up to the summer solstice. Relax your eyes, maybe you’ll see the elves…