The traditional division of Roman emperors into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ has as much to do with the factional loyalties of our sources as with any actual moral calculus: by any modern reckoning they were all terrible, even if some were better than others at maintaining peace (or order) within the empire’s frontiers and making sure its inhabitants were fed and housed.

Sheets of Fire and Leaping Flames

Fight Club is a puzzle with a solution; Tenet is a lot of stuff that happens. The Protagonist is unnamed in Tenet not for any purpose, I suspect, but rather because it’s thinkbait: a puzzle in the way an onion is a puzzle.

Walter Chaw: Tenet

Well, I’ve never felt constrained by any of it because at the end of the day, I know this to be true: Between action and cut, it’s mine. Now, it’s only 30, 40 seconds, but between action and cut, it’s mine. What you want to do with it after that is up to you, but between action and cut, between when the curtain goes up and the curtain goes down, it’s mine.

In Conversation: Laurence Fishburne

“What’s going on in that?” Reichelt said, looking at a photo of a musician wearing lederhosen and a high-and-tight haircut. Reichelt was munching on chocolate now. I had been told that Bild editorial meetings could be rough going, but this one was running smoothly.

“That’s the folk singer Andreas Gabalier,” said another man at the table. “He going to be awarded the Karl Valentin prize in Munich, but apparently he’s some kind of rightwing hardliner.”

“What’s he doing in the photo?” Reichelt asked.

“Apparently he’s contorted his body into the form of a swastika,” the man replied.

“I don’t quite see it,” Reichelt said.

“Couldn’t it just be a walk-like-an-Egyptian dance move there?”

“Yes, it’s all a bit unclear.”

“All right, we’ll just say that some people interpret it as a swastika.”

“OK, got it.”

Bild, Merkel and the culture wars: the inside story of Germany’s biggest tabloid

Unlike the gods of yore, we have no reason to believe that Big God Internet will always get things right. Thinkers in the Abrahamic tradition spent centuries assuring themselves that their Big God possessed omnibenevolence to match His omnipotence. Descartes rejected sceptical worries about an evil deceiver on the grounds that a good God would never permit it. Leibniz concluded that ours must be the best of all possible worlds, since it is the one that a good God has allowed us. For these thinkers, it was simply too existentially horrifying to allow that they might be in the hands of a vicious or indifferent god.

The internet is an angry and capricious god

Since I play white noise on my phone while I sleep – pink noise, actually, it’s the latest thing, recommended by the meditation gurus – my screen hours now actually exceed my waking ones.

The internet, mon amour

So this software problem was once solved, unsolved, and now re-solved in a worse way.

Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump

He could imagine the worst like no one else.

Larry Kramer Had the Courage to Act on His Fear

What a delight, I thought, what a joy, to know oneself so intimately. I thought of how people say, “How can you know you hate something when you’ve never even tried it?” and how, indeed, you absolutely do not have to try something to know that you hate it, if you truly know yourself.

The Joy of the Hate-Watch

in general, if a Wall Street bank comes to you out of the blue and says “hey we’ll pay you $50 to take some risk off our hands,” you should run away! Wall Street banks are not generally in the business of overpaying for protection that they do not need, and their derivative pricing models are probably better than yours.

It Doesn’t Pay to Be Too Ethical