Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

This week’s POSTCARD is about the topics in the title, as well as aesthetics, culture, writing, and, once again, AI.

• AI

  AI is technology, not a product, John Gruber argues. Instead of a single killer AI product, the technology will permeate every application: „Actual products have to be real. Actual experiences have to rely on actual products.“

• Writing

  The Hinternet Editorial Board suggests „an honest scale of AI reliance“ for writers. And Jasmine Sun explains why she thinks „it’s the best time in the world to be an independent writer.“

• Theory

  Should identity-based academic fields be reformed or abolished? „The problem is the theories, not the subject,“ Helen Pluckrose writes. Leaving the study of important aspects of human life to ideologically homogeneous spaces would be worse than „reforming the field to meet the standards of rigorous academic inquiry,“ she argues.

• Aesthetics

  Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen share what they learned when awarding their New Aesthetics grants. Here is a list of the recipients; here are my two cents on the call.

• 10 things about Germany that are just weird

  Including, as you might have guessed, a general faith in authority.

Noteworthy

“Culture is an ecosystem, a cycle that maintains itself that is reinforced by policies, structures, power dynamics, physical spaces, rituals, processes, recruitment, training, precedents, celebrations, values and, above all else, bagels and maybe spreads too. It’s an operating system that runs across anything and everything, and changing it involves considering the entire system.“

—Tom Goodwin, Digital Darwinism. Surviving the new age of business disruption, 2nd edition, London & New York 2022, p. 237.

A mystery link leading into the unknown

What is...

• ... a dickover?

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

How to make bubbles burst? Rather than the much-discussed digital filters or political tribes, I am talking about cognitive bubbles that are surprisingly common in academia. Of course, funders encourage “interdisciplinary” or even “transdisciplinary” projects, but in reality, it is very challenging to productively combine different mindsets and methods within an overarching framework. Interdisciplinarity often ends up being merely additive: a vague overarching theme holds the edited volumes together while everyone is basically just doing their own thing. One is more likely to encounter successful cross-disciplinary productivity at the individual level: polymath figures like Tyler Cowen pair profound subject-matter expertise with a restless curiosity about other fields.

Lately, I’ve developed a bit of an obsession with how to break through the often-unnoticed echo chambers within the humanities. In an initial proposal, I suggested taking a cue from forward-deployed engineering to get beyond an “application” mentality: the goal isn’t to implement “correct” solutions, but rather to develop them on the ground. I’d like to make a second suggestion in this post: a “new” genre I’m tentatively calling the “reverse review.”

Reviews are a well-established format in academic discourse and intellectual life. Knowledgeable critics use their taste to navigate the influx of new releases, giving readers direction through positive picks and the occasional takedown. There’s nothing to be said against this genre, which is currently enjoying a new heyday right here on Substack. I’ve published more than 150 reviews myself, mostly of new literary releases, but also public-facing non-fiction and academic works. And yet, I find myself increasingly wondering what to make of the asymmetry inherent in the art of reviewing. What entitles a reviewer to pass judgment on books? Wouldn’t it be worth a try to reverse the direction and let the books become the critics of those who read them?

I envision it this way: a reverse review requires readers to use a book to question their own assumptions. What can I, as a cultural theoretician, gain from reading a book on evolutionary biology? Or economics? Or medicine? Can I, as a philosopher, learn something from the memoirs of a chef? As a writer, from a book about computer languages? The goal would be to immerse yourself in an entirely different way of thinking and push yourself beyond your mental comfort zone. Without overlaying your own patterns. Without trying to see through things. Without acting like you already have it all figured out.

While this kind of approach to reading might seem normal to many, I often find that the academic world—especially in the humanities—operates quite differently. Deconstruct a discourse, contextualize it, and call it a day. In contrast, the reverse review could be an exercise in returning to a learning mindset by systematically challenging internal jargon and ingrained biases. It would require one to account for blind spots and to articulate wavering beliefs and newly posed questions.

The more profoundly and precisely a book succeeds in challenging the reader, the better the reverse review would turn out.

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

This week is about different facets of the ‘I’, which nowadays inevitably relates back to the ‘A’.

• Literary intelligence I

  Sam Kriss: „I hate it. I find it viscerally disgusting; a cold shudder like someone’s poured jelly down the back of my neck. I hate that it’s everywhere; I hate that when I read basically anything now I’m constantly on alert, twitching like a schizo in an underpass. Is this thing really what it says it is? Is this person actually a robot in disguise?“

• Literary intelligence II

  Henry Oliver: „What happens when a great writer trains their own model? Or when they use a series of prompts that guide the LLM to a new sort of intertextual writing? Or when AI companies train their models to be better writers? Or when a young person no one has yet heard of emerges with a strange new sort of writing based on their years of AI prompting since their childhood?“

• Cognitive and social intelligence

  In a powerful reply to Carl Hendrick’s informative article on cognitive surrender, Norma Sancho argues that „in many contemporary educational settings, the student has already been abandoned before the chatbot appears.”

• Superintelligence

  Daniel Muñoz reports on his first meeting with someone exceptionally „determined to get the most out of every moment of their life—out of every conversation, every decision, every burrito.“

Noteworthy

„The liberal vision (...) is beautiful, it’s more fun, it’s more prosperous. It’s more peaceful in a lot of ways. It’s louder. It might be a little more obnoxious, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the neo-Victorianism on the left and the weird ultra, you know, national, like ethno-nationalism on the right.“

—Greg Lukianoff on The Dishcast

A mystery link leading into the unknown

„The order...“

• “... is rapidly fadin′“

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

I. A postcard from my biology teacher

When I was young, I had a biology teacher who was a great mentor to me. Prior to his untimely death from illness, he sent me a postcard advising me to do something meaningful with my life before time runs out. His message made me realize that after school, I would be trading a significant portion of my lifespan for work, without knowing how much time—particularly in terms of physical and mental well-being—would remain once, if ever, I hit financial independence. I concluded from his life’s trajectory that I should choose a profession that isn’t merely a tool for income, leisure, or a comfortable retirement, but one that is meaningful in itself. Work, I was certain, shouldn’t be treated as a mere chore one must endure to reach a good life, but rather as an arena for a deep life itself.

II. The intellectualistic fallacy

The rationalist I was then (and basically still am to this day) merged the existential takeaway from my biology teacher’s postcard with a premise that, in retrospect, seems at best endearingly immature: that the desired blend of work and meaning would only be possible through intellectual labor, if not to say, the quest for truth. Didier Eribon delightfully described such a naive attitude in his autobiography, Retour à Reims:

„I only found out much later that some intellectuals are deeply committed to craftsmanship. A love of books, writing, and reading doesn’t rule out practical activities. (...) What I had long perceived as a fundamental, class-based opposition (books vs. manual labor) had been, at best, constitutive only for myself and my own history. I had a similar experience with sports.“

It goes without saying that non-intellectual work can be deeply fulfilling—whether by adding broader value to particular interests, by being helpful to others, or simply by achieving mastery. Often, it will even be more meaningful than bullshit jobs and busywork in the knowledge sector.

Furthermore, when you consider how much digital technology has blurred the line between knowledge work and leisure, the old 9-to-5 grind almost feels like a refreshingly honest and healthier alternative. This was, however, already true in the pre-digital past, though in a less externally determined way: Those who read and write for a living often lose the ability to read a new book out of pure joy, instead of checking if it’s worth a review, if it fits a study, or if it contains an idea that could be turned into something.

When success (a factor I chose to ignore in my youthful naivety) enters the equation, the relationship between intellectual work and a sense of purpose becomes even more suspect. That’s because neither pure professional achievement and its accompanying status nor fringe self-expression, but rather “successful self-actualization,“ has become a hallmark of the late-modern middle-class career, as the sociologist Andreas Reckwitz aptly observed. This is why managers seek out sense-making stories—of innovation, diversity, or sustainability—while intellectuals pursue prestigious professorships, lucrative keynote speeches, and bestselling books. The great alignment of work and meaning, however, intensifies the instrumental bias that was always inherent in the professionalization of the intellectual: Which topics could become relevant? Which projects promise impact? What is the next big thing?

Which brings us to the workplace I finally ended up in: the university. Nowhere is it more evident that intellectual pursuits might provide meaning, but they certainly don’t guarantee it. Who would argue that the production of unread papers, grant acquisition, and administration represent a meaningful intellectual activity? Who would want to claim that “the aging Foucault-inspired monoculture” (David Brooks) provides a thought-provoking intellectual environment?

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that academic work can only be experienced as meaningful if three conditions are in place. They correspond to the core components of general well-being in self-determination theory (SDT), namely autonomy, mastery, and belonging. Autonomy: independent research that doesn’t require adjustments to meet any donors’ expectations. Mastery: enough time for deep immersion, detours, and thorough thinking. Belonging: a conversational context of shared references and value.

III. Life

What would I write on a postcard to a student if I were to send one like the one my biology teacher wrote me decades ago? Nothing else, of course, other than what he wrote to me. If the recipient, however, were inclined to draw the same intellectualist conclusion that I did as a young man, I’d add that a) knowledge work in general and academic work in particular is not only far from being the only meaningful career path but that b) further conditions must be met for this typle of work to be actually meaningful, and that c) in the current academic landscape these conditions are only granted to a happy few who manage to carve out a niche for themselves.

Then again, maybe that kind of postcard doesn’t even need to be written today. The reality that thinkers on the periphery of the academic world, software engineers sharing their experiences, or podcasts featuring culinary pros so often prove more intellectually engaging than browsing the latest cultural studies journals makes me suspect that some of the smartest young people are already seeking both meaning and mental spark outside of academia.

The humanities should pay close attention to them.

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

This week’s POSTCARD focuses on education and art.

• Education

  William Deresiewicz advocates for the revival of liberal education. Hollis Robbins, however, notes that he overlooks crucial factors that separate aspiration from actuality. I think she’s onto something. Talking of education: In a knowledgeable and thoughtful article, Hollis asks what the “higher” in higher ed means. Hint: AI is forcing the question.

• Post-partisan storytelling

  As part of a larger project and a five-part series of articles, Erin O’Connor sketches a theory of post-partisan storytelling.

• Taste, cont’d

  Scott Alexander contra everyone on taste.

• What makes art great?

  Nabeel S. Qureshi argues that good literature uses language „to be surprising, to have a work with layers of patterns, and to produce something with great depth.“ He adds a fourth, content-related aspect: „Art, at its best, is in part about these most spiritually weighty human experiences, and this component of greatness is not reducible to any formal factors, because it is life itself.“ Henry Oliver replies.

• Meat, music, LLMs

  A brilliant piece by Justin Smith-Ruiu on the mechanization of music and language, in which he argues „that so much writing today appears to me as the textual equivalent of smooth jazz.“ The way forward? „It seems to me it would be far preferable to strive to come up with something like the textual equivalent of ‚Blue Monday‘, or even of ‚Lujon‘, something that owns up to the technological conditions of its production, while continuing to look for new ways to preserve and express what is irreducibly human under these conditions.“

Noteworthy

“Yes, I think I can say this much about myself: that in my very core, I am an enthusiast and a skeptic alike.“

—Axel Matthes, founder and longtime publisher of Matthes & Seitz, a German publishing house established in 1977, who will celebrate his 90th birthday on May 18, 2026. With its translations of the Surrealists, Matthes & Seitz became a major destination for French literature, essays, and philosophy in Germany. Matthes received the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1997 in recognition of his services to French literature.

A mystery link leading into the unknown

„No...

• .. I don’t like it.“

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

I recently spent two long afternoons at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna. The reason was the exhibition HELMUT LANG. SÉANCE DE TRAVAIL 1986–2005 / Excerpts from the MAK Helmut Lang Archive. It was the first comprehensive exhibition about the Austrian fashion designer and artist born in 1956.

I wanted to find out why the brand founded by Lang in 1986 and left by him in 2005 had such a defining impact, why the fascination with Lang’s work persists to this day, and what his philosophy and process can teach us in a completely changed cultural context.

The man, whose personality was so central to his brand that it immediately faded into irrelevance after his departure, had agreed to the exhibition project, but didn’t show up for the opening. Lang had always been a master at navigating the laws of the attention economy, keeping a low profile and, in doing so, becoming a blank canvas for people’s projections. Anyone who wants to understand the person and his work should therefore hold back on interpretations and stay close to the source material. Only then does the mindset behind his work become clear—and only at this level of abstraction can it remain relevant.

I. The place

As is well known, Lang continues to reside in the United States after moving his home base from Paris to New York in 1998/99. Nevertheless, it was only logical to host the exhibition in Vienna, the city where his career began.

Austria is omnipresent in Lang’s work. By his own account, growing up in the mountains of Styria left him with three things: “the lesson of the earth,” a sense of craftsmanship (his grandfather, who raised him, was a shoemaker), and the confidence to do something with his freedom, as he was sent outside to play as a child in a household without a television. At the same time, Vienna—the city where he first struggled to get by working as a bartender—has left its imprint on his work: not only through the modern rigor and urban civility of Adolf Loos, but also through fin de siècle eroticism, a slightly deranged beauty, elements of Wurschtigkeit (a particular ‘could n’t-care-less’ attitude), and a penchant for the morbid.

You can clearly see the blend of traditional and modern influences in the videos and music from Lang’s fashion shows: Elements of traditional dress (Trachten) are just as prominent as the slim-cut suits that define his aesthetic. Lang set his debut Fall/Winter 86/87 show, “L’apocalypse joyeuse,” to the Third Man Theme from the eponymous film, whereas subsequent runway shows featured electronic tracks by Peter Kruder.

It is for good reason, then, that the curators follow Lang’s maxim of treating all materials with equal importance: documents from the design process, sketches, prototypes, and samples are displayed alongside packaging, advertising proofs, finished campaigns, press clippings, photographs, show videos, behind-the-scenes images, and artist collaborations. By adopting Lang’s design strategy and following the architecture of his shows and shops, the exhibition allows visitors to walk through Lang’s world, experiencing an immersion that goes deeper than a mere display of clothing ever could. Furthermore, those who have long followed Lang’s work—such as yours truly—could easily have been lenders themselves, creating a seamless link between the museum and their personal lives.

II. The era

The exhibition gains an existential depth not only from the objects in the display cases but also from those visitors find in their private wardrobes and archives. Furthermore, it’s the memories that the exhibition evokes of the 1990s. Freddie deBoer aptly described the vibe of that decade as “a modern sensibility without all of the pathologies of the internet.”

„There was an immediacy to experience back then.“ „You used to do things and have places to do them.“

It is ironic that Lang, the very first designer to broadcast a runway show online (one of the many firsts he’s known for), can only be fully appreciated in the very ‘analogousness’ of the historical moment when his career reached its peak. It was the final window of time before the raw edges of major Western cities were gentrified away, before culturalization went into hyperdrive, and before software ate the world. In short, it was that incredibly cool moment right before it all fell apart.

Many of the now 70-year-old designer’s contemporaries and companions have already passed away, including his longtime stylist Melanie Ward. For those who are still alive, the exhibition provides plenty of reasons to look back: to the boutique opened in 1996 at Seilergasse 6, for example, just a stone’s throw from the Loos Bar in the Kärntner Durchgang, or to the iconic shop at 80 Greene Street in New York, which served as the blueprint for the exhibition architecture. Plus, of course, to the breathtakingly confident beauty of those who wore his designs, often so subtly that the Lang label went unrecognized.

Crucial to Lang’s achievements was the lucid grasp of his own age and the openings it afforded him. He leveraged those moments of transition to create a vibrant equilibrium between the analog and digital worlds, tradition and the modern era, and high and popular culture.

III. Mindset and creative process

Anyone looking for a historical comparison in fashion will—despite the completely different silhouettes and their underlying body philosophies—most likely think of the Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto. Because both are similar not only in their proximity to art, but also in the fact that they aren’t concerned with a particular style, but rather with the code of clothing itself. “I kept all the traditions and shades that were good – and then re-thought it all,” Lang once said, and despite the almost entirely opposite results, this approach mirrors the work of the Japanese artist. In both cases, the designer essentially taps into the source code of tradition to transform it from within, recontextualize it, and make it relevant for today.

Form and Freedom

„We merged the old idea of made-to-measure tradition with punk. That, in essence, is Helmut Lang.“

Lang’s self-assessment captures the essence of his work far more accurately than the minimalist label frequently attached to him. It was the clarity and precision of his basic cuts, refined through constant iteration, that allowed him to focus on materials, details, and creative experimentation.

While frequently labeled as intellectual, Lang’s work is better defined by a distinct blend of mind and sensuality, a form of physicalized wisdom that celebrates the inherent beauty of intelligence. Reduction, certainly, but also an integrated self-reflection (Lang often highlights the constructed nature of the artifacts) and a shifting refraction: “fusing precise tailoring with delicate materials, transparency, and layering,” as one wall text aptly noted. „There was a real structure, but then there also was this real loucheness,“ as fashion critic Tim Blanks noted.1

It only becomes truly apparent in retrospect that Lang’s work represented a human objection to purity ideals of all kinds. An offhand comment made on Japanese television in 1992—”by respecting the tradition, of course”—perfectly encapsulates his position. Embracing formlessness was something he never would have imagined. Nor would he have thought to enforce strict gender boundaries or, conversely, to dissolve them entirely. Lang was interested in the interplay between essence and letting go, materiality and shape, typology and contextual variation, concealing and revealing. He was unwavering yet open to serendipity, respectful while remaining subversive.

This is especially clear in his accessoires vêtements, which are given plenty of room in the exhibition. Just as layering and seemingly non-functional elements add a sense of playfulness to the rigid silhouettes, these objects—shifting between garment and accessory—aren’t mere gimmicks. Instead, they are details that loosen up the seriousness by adding ambiguity, humor, and sex appeal.

Creative adaptation, not absorption

The relationship between the world and a product can be examined from two angles: the path the world takes into products (for instance, through artistic ideas), and the product’s trajectory back into the world.

Through collaborations with artists like Jenny Holzer and by adopting existing forms (such as American utility clothing or fetish wear), Lang “appropriated” the world with his artifacts. But unlike the mere instrumentalizing absorption that has become so typical of the late-modern “creative” economy (the Dylan song underscoring a commercial; the language model turning individual expression into digital blur without regard for copyright), he has added something of his own—in his case, often even something unmistakably personal—through the transformation of the original elements.

His goods, as unlikely as it may sound, embody human imperfection rather than commercial gloss and corporate slickness. Critics like Ingeborg Harms have noted the “provocative balance of urban agility and melancholic disintegration” of Lang’s garments, their “beautiful, lively messiness,” their “wounded, experienced” quality that speaks of the lived lives of grown-ups.2 “They took classic elements,” Vanessa Friedman wrote, “and added just the slyest layer of kink, sending everyone slightly off axis.”

The Lang world’s fractured nature—at times poetic, at others harsh—is also revealed by the people he sent down the runway: intriguing personalities, often recruited from his own circle of friends. Likewise, the backstage photos (another first) bear witness to improvisation and fragility, while also capturing the master’s steady hand.

Lang drew on the ideas circulating around him, yet he refrained from draining their cultural vitality just to repackage them as hollow commodities. Quite the opposite, Lang offered something in return, enriching things with his soul.

Intervention, not image

Lang frequently pointed out that his clothes are crafted for “real life,” not for the camera or the catwalk. He drew inspiration from workwear and utility clothing, as well as denim and T-shirts. “His most expensive formal clothes have the ease and simplicity of everyday stuff, and his casual clothes have the correctness and detailing of ready-to-wear,” wrote John Seabrook in the New Yorker. A key strength of the Vienna exhibition is its highlighting of the reach of Lang’s concepts beyond the actual garments:

We’re retracing how Helmut Lang designed the runway at floor level, so that the models were no longer stared at on a pedestal, but could instead walk back and forth right through the rows of the audience. We’re reminded that Lang was the first to send famous models and old friends (among them Elfie Semotan), men and women, young and old, and people of diverse skin colors down the runway all at once. We’re looking at the 1998 taxi top campaign, where Lang ran ads on over 1,000 New York City taxi tops, as well as in National Geographic – places far outside the fashion bubble. His stores weren’t just displays, but rather places you actually moved through. We learn that he discontinued his secondary line in 2000 because he no longer wanted a hierarchy between evening wear and everyday clothing. Lang converted paper bags into clutches and formulated a fragrance reminiscent of the worn garments of a loved one who is no longer present. In short, he delivered on the avant-garde pledge to transition art into the realm of life through site-specific installations, urban interventions, and shifts in everyday life.

IV. What remains?

As confident as it was to step down at the height of his success, and as much as Lang’s new pursuit as an artist makes biographical sense—just as a full life requires withdrawal and reflection—Lang’s radical break caught his followers off guard, forcing them to wear his now-unavailable pieces for decades until they fell apart, exactly as was intended.

What more does Lang’s retirement represent, though? Is it no longer possible to work the way he did today? Has the paradigm worn thin, as culture now oscillates between a mix of imposed and self-imposed calculatedness on the one hand and blatant tribal signaling on the other? „When everything you experience arrives predigested, nothing feels like it’s yours, and everything feels rushed,“ Freddie deBoer writes about the post-1990s era. Is there still room for the quiet resolve—the calm, almost shy radicalism—that the soft-spoken designer embodied in such an unprecedented way, the impact of which still echoes today?

Maybe what makes Lang’s legacy so alluring today is that it carries a certain hangover vibe, a sense of the morning after. Lang designed fashion for adults who still have that rebellious spark but also don’t kid themselves. Identity-driven slogans don’t win them over any more than mere private prosperity does. Therefore, abandoning the avant-garde gesture of art crossing over into the fabric of everyday life is not an option.

One can look to see whether enough friction remains in other parts of the world to still strike a spark. One might seek out cultural energy in other realms, such as the culinary world. And one can acknowledge just “how idiosyncratic — how personal — the exhibition is. It all comes from him,” as Tim Blanks observed.

As previously noted, Lang wasn’t concerned with a specific style but with the effects flowing from deep conceptual rigor. His garments felt so natural back then and remain so desirable today because they empowered people to be their best selves.

Elfie Semotan:

„People weren’t walking around in disguises or anything; they just looked much sharper.“

Neville Wakefield:

„It’s like everything with him: It fits. And I don’t mean physically. It fits psychologically. You feel yourself in his designs.“

Vanessa Friedman:

„It made me feel like both the coolest and the most grown-up versions of myself.“

Tim Blanks:

„His clothes were extremely intelligent and they were functional. But once you got into them, they were also sexual.“

Sarah Mower3

„The designers who succeed are those who hit on something that makes us feel more ourselves. Stronger; cooler; more confident, certainly. But ultimately, ourselves.“

This widely recognized effect—of not looking like an idiot wearing someone else’s ideas—the designer’s frankness in not dictating anything to you, but rather helping you be the best version of yourself, contains a radical message of freedom. It might hold Helmut Lang’s most important legacy.

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

This week, an old-school collection of recent finds from the interwebs.

• Young kids

  Theo Baker reports from Stanford, „an incubator with dorms” where „teenagers are sometimes handed ‚pre-idea funding‘—hundreds of thousands of dollars, or in rare cases, even millions—before they have the glimmer of an actual company in mind.“

• Old folks

  A delightfully, deeply human ode to old ladies by Roger Rosenblatt: „What is the secret here? (...) They look at problems, all problems, and they say: I can handle this.“

• Liberalism and beauty

  The discussion about the liberal imagination, kicked off by The Point, continues here and here.

• Tastewashing

  Palantir goes fashion, but Kyle Chayka is „not going to let them take chore coats away from me.“

• The future of the humanities

  Over at the Persuasion Institute, Sam Kahn will be hosting the first „Intellectual Bootcamp“ on May 1. I’ll be tuning in, and I suggest you do the same.

Noteworthy

“The fundamental architecture of daily material life - how we heat our homes, how we move from place to place, how we grow and store and cook food, how we build structures - has changed remarkably little since 1970. (...) And Claude can’t change the baby’s diaper or get him to eat his mashed peas.“

—Freddie deBoer, challenging the idea of AI-driven disruption

A mystery link leading into the unknown

A music video, shot on a day off between two concerts in Austria, probably in January 1988, and ...

• ... directed by Anton Corbijn

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

When I returned to Budapest (where I lived from 2004 to 2009) for a few days at the end of last year, it wasn’t just the lost independence of the judiciary, media, culture, and education that my conversation partners complained about, but the increasingly deteriorated infrastructure caused by Orbán’s nepotism and the growing impossibility of leading a normal life that comes with it. Last week, the gap between state propaganda and the economic reality of the people finally brought down the Fidesz government, which had appeared unbeatable.

A number of analyses have underscored the role of day-to-day life in the election results. Discontent with the mundane aspects of life served as a unifying force for an otherwise deeply divided voting bloc. Gabor Gyori, a political analyst with the Policy Solutions research organization in Budapest, told the New York Times that voters longed „for normalcy, meaning moving away from constant hysteria and toward a governmental focus on everyday issues.“ Charles Lane emphasized that „even a deeply entrenched right-wing populist leader can overplay his hand, and alienate the public, by failing to deliver on issues that most affect daily life.“ And Ross Douthat concluded, „that the best political response to populism is usually to deal with its concrete policy demands, rather than insisting that a democratic emergency requires people to back the establishment no matter what.“

To be sure, engaging with political ideas is exciting, and political movements need motivating rhetoric, but at the end of the day, the litmus test for any policy remains whether it improves people’s lives—or rather, whether it allows for a ‘normal’ life. There is comfort and hope here against right-wing agitation and left-wing overreach alike. However much digital echo chambers have caused political discourse to drift away from reality, most people in today’s fragmented society still seem to find political contentment in the functional, the regulated, and the ordinary.

Interestingly, this insight is increasingly gaining traction in communication. David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, recently shared interesting thoughts for winning elections in a climate of populist polarization:

„No data. No stats. Instead, focus on personal stories from local voices (...) The voters who decide this election should be the lead storytellers (...) Don’t script anyone. Turn on the phone and camera and let people tell their story. As a former political ad maker, I can humbly say the best lines never come from professionals. They come from people in a language that is raw, real and accessible. Regular, nonpolitical Americans are the most effective influencers. That’s especially true on TikTok, which prohibits political advertising. Anything that smells paid and prepackaged will backfire.“

Lulu Cheng Meservey, who pioneered the go-direct approach, framed the shift in communication more broadly, not just limited to political communication:

„the real has never been more precious, refreshing, special, and rare. We need real people, building real things that actually matter, through real discipline and effort, with real outcomes in the real world.“

More specifically:

• „Designing real world events and artifacts, leaving people with memories that far outlast the cheap ‚impressions‘ generated by brainrot content troughs

• Showing up as real humans, with real flaws and foibles, instead of ultra-polished personas following AI scripts

• Forming real relationships that will weather time and tide“

When it comes to communication and campaigns, however, things are tricky, as the fabrication of ‘realness’ undermines the very thing it’s trying to create. Goethe, 1807: „One feels design and so is out of humour.“ This paradox, however, does not alter—in fact, it only confirms—a profound yearning for a pre-political being-in-the-world within a society saturated by signs and feverish debates.

Back in the summer of 2023, Andrew Sullivan—hardly the calmest of commentators—put out an unusual article titled “A Normal Summer And A Normal President,” in which he states:

“For the first time in years, this feels like a normal summer (...) we’re traveling again; taking holidays; seeing old friends and family, catching up after that strange, lost interlude of plague, when years of our lives suddenly seemed to evaporate into a time warp. In this little resort town I live in each summer, the old rituals are back with some punch: the crowds at the daily tea-dance, the daily trek to the beaches, the late-night drunken shenanigans.“

Sullivan argued for savoring the fleeting moment he described as „an interlude, a throwback, a pause.“ It is precisely what the Hungarian people yearned for when they voted the corrupt autocrat out of power. A moment whose lightness is reminiscent of what Hungary—next to intellectual seriousness—stood for for a long time: a lighthearted, joyful life, „the kind of thing that only really exists in a free society, where politics is kept at a distance, and private life can have its moment in the sun.“

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

Once again, the small country of Hungary impressed the global stage through its unique brand of freedom-loving obstinacy. The weekend’s election results moved me not only because the unthinkable occurred, but also because I lived and worked in Budapest between 2004 and 2009 and have stayed connected ever since. To be sure, the real test will come in the day-to-day grind, showing just how much of Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian populism will actually be rolled back in the coming years, but for now, there is every reason for relief and celebration. Is there a blueprint within Péter Magyar’s election success for regaining liberal territory around the world? This week’s POSTCARD presents quotes from reports, commentaries, and analyses that together provide a roadmap for countering authoritarianism.

• Don’t be afraid

  Michelle Goldberg, reporting from Budapest for the New York Times: „Over and over, Magyar beseeched the crowd, ‚Do not be afraid!‘ The crowd, in turn, broke into a chant: ‚We are not afraid!‘ I asked a woman I met in the crowd, Mariann Szabo, to explain Magyar’s words: What had people been afraid of? An elementary schoolteacher and mother of two, Szabo said that people like her, who worked in the public sector, feared that if they were seen to oppose Fidesz, they could lose their jobs and thus their ability to survive. That fear kept many people quiet about their politics. Before Magyar’s campaign, Szabo knew there were others in her town who didn’t like Orban, but not how many. Suddenly, it seemed as if everything was about to change.“

• Tell an optimistic story that looks to the future

  „After many years in office,“ Yascha Mounk rightly emphasizes, „leaders tend to be judged on their record rather than their rhetoric. And Orbán’s record increasingly looked abysmal.“ His promises sounded accordingly tired. András Bíró-Nagy, a political analyst: “The message was, ‘We could live even worse’.”

• Don’t pivot to the other extreme; offer common ground instead

  The Editorial Board of the New York Times: „Mr. Magyar, who identifies as center right, won partly by avoiding the social progressivism that dominates elite left-leaning circles and alienates many voters. He ran as an economic progressive and a cultural moderate if not conservative. (...) anyone who opposes Orbanism should examine the full Hungarian campaign, not only the convenient parts.“ Idrees Kahloon, reporting for The Atlantic: „Magyar succeeded because his party achieved ‚transformative repolarization‘ rather than ‚reciprocal polarization.‘“

• Take infrastructure and lived experience seriously

  It's still the economy, stupid! Gabor Gyori, a political analyst from Budapest: Tisza’s supporters are “very diverse and probably divided on many issues, but they all long for normalcy, meaning moving away from constant hysteria and toward a governmental focus on everyday issues”. Charles Lane over at Persuasion: „The outcome in Hungary shows that even a deeply entrenched right-wing populist leader can overplay his hand, and alienate the public, by failing to deliver on issues that most affect daily life.“

• Go where no one else goes

  „Magyar directly campaigned all throughout Hungary, including in rural constituencies that tended to go unvisited because they were considered Fidesz’s heartland, “ Idrees Kahloon writes in The Atlantic.

Noteworthy

“How do you pull this off without inciting a thirst for revenge? You also have to convince the two and a half million Hungarians who voted for Orbán on Sunday to embrace democracy again.“

—Wilhelm Droste, cultural practitioner in Budapest, interviewed by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on April 14, 2026

A mystery link leading into the unknown

„The people have the power / The power ...

• ... to dream, to rule / to wrestle the world from fools“

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

The Alphütte Wasserfall is one of seven huts in the Bernese Oberland that Beat “Yeti” Hutmacher has carefully renovated, rents out to travelers, and offers as a retreat for creatives. It’s located near the Swiss village of Grindelwald and is accessible only on foot. I spent a week there before Easter.

The very first time I walked in, I ended up with a nasty bump on my head. Even though I tried my best to watch out for the low ceilings and doorways, not a day went by that I didn’t hit my head. At that point, I knew: I couldn’t afford to be confrontational. The cabin, seasoned by 350 years of existence, would only shelter me on its own terms. My efforts were rewarded.

Read more

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

Digitalization, the peak of quantification, is embracing the qualitative par excellence: taste. For real?

• Taste I

  „Is it discernment? Sensibility? Cultivation? Is it inborn or learned? A marker of distinction or a marker of class?“ the New York Times asks.

• Taste II

  Taste „has become as much of a tech-world cliché as ‘disruption’ was in the twenty-tens,“ Kyle Chayka argues in the New Yorker, and senses „taste-washing.“

• Taste III

  Will Manidis is „against“ taste, because he thinks it turns human beings into „a critic of creation rather than a co-creator. A consumer (...) the activity is acquisition. And the acquisition leads nowhere.“

• Taste IV

  Analog interfaces with their „innate intuitiveness“ continue to be the benchmark of good design, John Gruber believes: „Light switches were easy and obvious. Flip the switch. Thermostats were easy and obvious. Turn the dial until the indicator points to the temperature you want. Light switches and Honeywell thermostats were so simple they seemed like they weren’t ‚interfaces‘ at all, which is why they were such great interfaces. The best interfaces almost literally disappear.“

• Taste V

  Taste, of course, requires immersion, time, and openness. It needs to be cultivated, as Ted Gioia points out: „I think Wynton Marsalis was right. He said — and this is controversial — but he said, if you take somebody who spent their whole life just eating McDonald’s hamburgers, you could take them to the best Michelin-starred restaurant in the world — they wouldn’t enjoy it because they would not have cultivated their taste to understand that.“

Noteworthy

„It’s the review that took three months but no one will read. It’s the investigation that required patience. It’s the work of understanding something before declaring judgment. All of it still exists, still gets made. It just doesn’t travel. And in a system where only what travels matters, we’ve made expertise indistinguishable from noise.“

– Om Malik

A mystery link leading into the unknown

„And I don’t mean that in a small way...“

• “... I mean that in a big way.“

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

Whatever your take on it, the technology we call AI is fundamentally shifting how we process information and interact with computers in our day-to-day lives. Om Malik:

“Artificial intelligence doesn’t just search; it synthesizes, contextualizes, and presents information in a user’s preferred format.“

This shift is having a profound impact, particularly where work is text-based: in education and the humanities. At the same time, it’s becoming evident that the current LLM-based AI is running into constraints. Along with many other experts, Yann LeCun has strongly emphasized this. David William Silva summarizes LeCun’s position as follows:

„Large Language Models are a dead end on the path to human-level intelligence. They are, at their core, text-prediction engines, extraordinarily good at retrieving, recombining, and generating language, but fundamentally incapable of understanding the world they talk about. They lack common sense, causal reasoning, and any model of physical reality (...) no amount of scaling, that is, bigger models, more data, more compute, will ever bridge that gap. To get anywhere near genuine intelligence, AI must go far beyond text and learn from high-bandwidth sensory experience: video, spatial data, interaction with the physical world.“

LeCun is now pursuing the ‘World Model’ approach instead, an alternative that has gained the support of Tim Berners-Lee as well. „Real intelligence“, Le Cun writes, „does not start in language. It starts in the world.“ The goal is to capture and handle “real-world sensor data” that is “unpredictable” and “noisy.” A similar statement can be found on the website of the AI company general intuition: „human intelligence far exceeds language (...) Truly intelligent machines must move from words to worlds“. General intuition’s Pim de Witte and Packy McCormick recently published an extensive guide to World Models. These, the two explain, are “action-conditioned,” because actions compress “how humans respond to the countless variables in their environments.” World models can therefore be defined as “systems that learn from watching the world and the actions taken in it.”

The material turn comes to AI

The transition from words to the world comes as no surprise to cultural theorists, as the ‘world-as-text’ approach established by the ‘semiotic turn’ has already been criticized for its one-sidedness. Context isn’t just text. Culture comprises not only symbols but also material objects and social practices. AI solutions won’t achieve greater accuracy until things and practices can be digitized as well.1

The world-as-bottleneck also serves as the focal point for yet another excellent text from Chris Walker this week. He recalls the extent to which scientific discoveries in the industrial modern era were grounded in “contact with reality” and physical practice—specifically in “hands-on experimental work through which scientists build intuitions and encounter surprises that force deeper reflection.” These avoided the “exploitation trap,” where—as is the case with LLMs—only “low-hanging cross-domain connections in published literature” are established: impressively fast, to be sure, and insightful to a certain extent, but ultimately remaining within “well-explored territory.” Irritating insights from the field that prompt new conceptual frameworks are inevitably ignored.

The world is not enough

In contrast to language models, are world models better suited to navigate messy and dynamic contexts? Beyond romantic assurances and ethical concerns, there are compelling reasons to believe that we are ultimately facing a basic impossibility, notwithstanding several probable advances. Why? Because world or contextual knowledge is frequently ‘implicit’ expertise, which brings with it a series of difficulties for digitalization. First, as far as LLMs are concerned:

• Tacit knowledge is not reflected upon by actors and therefore isn’t put into words, which is why it cannot be fed into LLMs.

• Even with reflection, it is questionable whether every relevant aspect can be articulated and thereby digitized.

• Assuming that were possible, we still would encounter a changed situation with every new ‚application‘ as the field evolves, necessitating the constant input of the latest local expertise.

But also when it comes to world models. Chris Walker asks: „Could you build a surveillance apparatus comprehensive enough to capture all of this? Maybe. Brain-computer interfaces might someday access knowledge that even the knower can’t articulate.“ However, he suggests that „total capture can be worse than incomplete capture,“ because taste and judgment matter: „The challenge here is not codification but curation: selecting and assembling the right bundle of already-codified information at inference time.“

That means we have to address two further issues:

• If we assume that dynamic knowledge can be captured in real time via action-based world models, we are still left with the challenge of identifying which knowledge is necessary for a specific task.

• Finally, Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem presented itself, meaning that

  an ‘abductive’ moment of judicial capacity would endure.2

Watching the AI conversation unfold, I’m increasingly curious about who is actually benefiting from whom. The humanities and social sciences, by handing over administrative tasks as well as the evaluation of enormous amounts of quantitative data to AI? Or developers and engineers who need to upskill in qualitative aspects? Mētis, taste, judgment, context, tacit knowledge, the move from language to practices—and more recently, Peirce’s abduction: So many terms from philosophy, science studies, and humanistic inquiry are gaining sharpness and relevance in the wake of AI debates that well-conceived humanities might even have a bright future.

That said, the current craze for words such as „taste“ will pass more quickly than the skill itself can be mastered. For the cultivation of the irreducibly human demands immersion, tenacity, patience, and consequently, time.

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

Academia has long been challenged by independent writers, open-minded think tanks, and countercultural ventures. Meanwhile, more and more para-academic initiatives are emerging that leverage digital technologies and platforms such as Substack to revitalize and redefine intellectual life from outside the ivory tower. In his recent piece on the state of the humanities, Justin Smith-Ruiu listed some of these endeavours and argued that in order to reform themselves, universities need „external pressure from independent para-academic initiatives capable of modeling how the humanities are actually done.“ His article inspired me to dig a little deeper into „alt-ac.“ The result is this totally biased and incomplete map of the academia-adjacent.

• Micro-colleges

  Inspired by Deep Springs College, an institution of higher learning founded in 1917, a series of “micro-colleges” seek to integrate academic rigor, manual labor, and community life – often in low-tech environments – instead of „taking online courses, or abandoning the humanities in favor of classes in business or STEM, or paying high tuition to fund the salaries of more Assistant Vice Provosts for Student Life.“ The New York Times describes them as „communitarian pragmatists, with liberal arts for the mind, labor for the body and an ethos of secular monasticism for the spirit. They are the descendants of philosophers like John Dewey.“

• Great books programs

  Many institutions and initiatives, both traditional and new, concentrate on great books, among them St. John’s College, the Catherine Project, or The Invisible College, a series of courses on literature for paid subscribers of John Pistelli’s newsletter Grand Hotel Abyss.

• The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

  Founded in 2012 and named after the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, the BISR offers „community-based education“ and aims to „integrate rigorous but accessible scholarly study with the everyday lives of working adults and re-imagine scholarship for the 21st century.“ Among other programs, it offers one called „Praxis.“

• The Program for Public Thinking

  An initiative promoting „a more thoughtful, humane, and pluralistic public conversation“ that is co-sponsored by The Point magazine and the Parrhesia Program for Public Discourse at the University of Chicago. Founded in 2023, it offers a two-week summer workshop as its flagship program. Similar to the mission of the highly recommended magazine, it seeks „to cultivate habits of thought traditionally associated with liberal arts education but largely absent from our broader cultural discourse: analytic rigor, interpretive generosity, and the ability to test and question one’s own convictions.“

• Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life

  A non-profit providing deep reading programs on a farm in the Catskills: „no grades, no credentials, no distractions — only the joyful, demanding work of thinking carefully, reflecting creatively, speaking honestly, and rediscovering what it means to live a good life.“ It was founded in 2023 by Berta Willisch, the widow of Matthew Strother, who died of cancer at the age of 35.

• The Strother School of Radical Attention

  SoRA is a Brooklyn-based non-profit founded by D. Graham Burnett. It is dedicated to „to push back against the fracking of human attention by coercive digital technologies“ and advance „Attention Activism“ through community programs in the study and practice of human attention.

• The Hinternet Foundation

  Founded in 2025 by Justin Smith-Ruiu, this venture is dedicated to ensuring the humanities „remain vital and relevant as technology reshapes the horizon of human experience.“ Its programs include an essay prize, a fellowship, a summer school, a conference, working groups, and ed tech initiatives.

Noteworthy

“I believed in doing things the right way—reading the right way (to learn from books, not lecture them), thinking the right way (with both feet on the ground), writing the right way (like an actual human being), teaching the right way (helping students to be better versions of themselves, not little versions of me)—and I wasn’t going to yield the field without a fight. I wasn’t going to let the bastards grind me down.“

—William Deresiewicz in his moving account „Why I Left Academia (Since You’re Wondering)“

A mystery link leading into the unknown

Get something para-academic...

… for free!

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

If there is one mode of thought that defines human inquiry like no other, it is reflexivity. Self-reference is the supreme test for determining if a statement is free of contradictions. Anyone who denies the existence of truth is at least claiming that very statement to be true. Those advocating for ethical standards ought to lead by example. And if someone praises the humanities, shouldn’t this person be willing, in principle, to pursue them personally?

In a powerful declaration on the state of the humanities, Justin Smith-Ruiu last week laid out the circumstances under which a decision for or against “universitarian humanism” has to be made today: falling enrollment numbers, declining standards, AI, and a moment that he aptly describes as „the conjoint triumph of hyper-financialization at the level of institutional organization, and the hermeneutics of suspicion at the level of ideology.“ It is this mix of “hyper-quantification” and a “now-institutionalized, half-educated spirit of contempt” that leads academics, both inside and outside the university, to conclude that they should discourage their own children from following the path they themselves once pursued with such great enthusiasm.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not talking about people losing interest in their initial passions or finding they’re better suited for other fields as they get older. Instead, the point of my thought experiment is whether I, as a young person, would still opt for a humanities degree under today’s conditions. When I compare these conditions to when I was a student in the 1990s, the hiatus is impossible to miss: The politically imposed Europe-wide streamlining of degree programs into fully modularized bachelor’s and master’s programs, known as the Bologna Reform, had not yet taken place. It was a period marked by great scholarly autonomy. I recall advanced philosophy seminars where, week in and week out, we scrutinized the fairly obscure ‘minor Kantians’ and later produced a term paper that could easily qualify as a master’s thesis by today’s standards.

Even back then, however, it wasn’t exactly smart to assume that a life mostly marked by frugality and even precariousness would somehow end with a tenured, full professorship in a city where you actually wanted to live. And the few who (like me) managed to do so mostly found themselves in institutions that had little to do with their fond memories of student life, feeling more like underfunded, over-administered factories for grant acquisition and degree production.

In short, anyone opting for a degree in the humanities these days, especially with academic aspirations in mind, appears to be walking onto a sinking ship with their eyes wide open. On the other hand, not a day goes by without tech and business circles emphasizing that in the AI era, nothing is as important as that very last-mile-knowledge based on handling tacit knowledge and developing taste—‚skills‘ traditionally honed in a liberal arts education.

The humanities—capitalized or not

Throughout Smith-Ruiu’s latest essay, there is a distinction that could be rephrased as the Humanities, with a capital H, versus the humanities, with a lowercase h. What JSR intends to revitalize is Human Inquiry with a capital H—rigorous, erudite investigation of „universe-in-a-grain-of-sand topics“.1 In contrast, humanities with a lowercase h would refer to the liberal arts integrated into hybrid, ‚business-schooly‘ degree programs. Always geared toward economic „whitewashing“ or „self-indulgent me-search“, JSR finds them lacking a mode of thought that locates the liberal essence of the humanities in the awe-struck exploration of the ambiguous and the transgressive in human existence.

It may be a secondary rationalization of my intellectual biography and academic CV to argue that, while this dichotomy captures something accurate, it shouldn’t lead to playing off traditional forms of human inquiry against transdisciplinary ones. I earned my master’s in philosophy and German language and literature, and my PhD in Kulturwissenschaft, but I took extra classes in rhetoric, art history, biology, and law out of sheer curiosity. Some of my most talented fellow students pursued history or philosophy with genuine dedication while majoring in fields like economics, law, and psychology. My frustration with the hermeneutics of suspicion prompted me to turn away from the repetitive, incredibly boring ‘critique of power’ in favor of economists studying cultural phenomena or computer scientists tackling philosophical questions. All this has convinced me to believe that degree programs that integrate career-oriented disciplines with philosophy (especially the philosophy of science and ethics) and the arts are worthwhile, ideally giving each a one-third share of the curriculum. The obvious objection that this inevitably leads to superficial, half-baked knowledge—as in the examples mentioned and dismissed by JSR—only holds water if teaching were to consist of nothing more than poorly executed, ahistorical service-provider science and if those aspiring to academia could no longer fully commit to humanities research, spending years in the archives to produce detailed monographs on highly specific topics.

Call me naive, but beyond a certain diagnostic power, there’s no reason to maintain this binary. Just as ‘pure’ versions of the humanities can indirectly provide ‘utility’—whether in the form of being able to handle the unknown, in the form of character building, or even just as a credential for entry into any kind of career—conversely, a sense of intellectual friction can be injected into transdisciplinary programs by cultivating the challenge of engaging with sources that do not confirm one’s own views and engaging in fearless debate.

What I’m getting at—and here I am aligning myself with JSR again—is that the question of whether I would choose to study the humanities again under today’s circumstances needs to be put another way: Where do the qualities of what once made a humanities education so precious thrive in today’s world? Is this kind of experience still achievable at universities today? If it is, at which institutions, in which departments, with which faculty members? If not, where and how does it happen instead? Any path—sometimes in niches within traditional institutions, sometimes even within ‚business-schooly‘ programs—is valid, provided it doesn’t compromise the essence of humanities research.

What do the humanities cultivate? And where?

When I ask myself what the real value of my studies was and what I’m still drawing from today, it is this: a conversational setting that enabled reflective, revision-ready, and fearless thinking, alongside an exploration of the world through reading, writing, and open-minded observation. By engaging with texts that exceed one’s grasp, talking with those who were already more advanced or a bit smarter than oneself, and through the transformative effect of aesthetic experiences. The university, with its seminars and libraries, created the opening, but it was eventually a circle of friends that defined the experience, as we talked through the night about books and lectures, movies, plays, and exhibitions.

To finally answer the original question: if I were to find such a place again today, I wouldn’t hesitate to take the risk of pursuing a degree in the humanities. If it were more of a transdisciplinary program that offered those kinds of opportunities, I’d prefer it.

And what about the post-university, para-academic communities that are technically viable today on a global scale and for which JSR advocates? To me, they represent a great learning opportunity for individuals whose life situations keep them out of the ivory tower. Moreover, I view them as a supportive community for those struggling with the diminishing freedoms within established institutions.

At the end of the day, what someone studies—if anything—is secondary to the daily decision of what one chooses to cultivate. „The humanities,“ JSR writes, „are democratic precisely because they do not come down to us through blood-ties, but must be cultivated anew over the course of an individual life.“ He’s right.

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

AI is a great opportunity to more precisely define what makes humans unique, in other words, to reflect on „the element of distance between what metrics give you and what you need to make a decision,“ as Hollis Robbins phrased it in her essay on „the last mile.“ So, instead of yet another lexicon of AI lingo, here’s a small glossary of terms that attempt to capture human singularity.

• mētis

  Many concepts and intellectual frameworks in today’s AI debate can be traced back to the history of ideas. These include judgment (Kant), the rule-following paradox (Wittgenstein), and the concept of mētis – a knowledge that enables humans to navigate the intricacies of specific situations and adapt to ever-changing circumstances, resisting standardization and therefore digitalization.

• Tacit knowledge

  The notion of tacit knowledge, put forward by the philosopher of science Michael Polanyi, points in a similar direction. Polanyi famously claimed, “that we can know more than we can tell,“ for instance, when an apprentice learns practical, implicit, even inarticulable knowledge by observing the master. Chris Walker concludes: „If we take Polanyi seriously, and I think we should, then we can make a precise claim about AI’s limits: if we cannot write down everything we know, then AI cannot learn everything we know.“

• Process knowledge

  Similarly, Dan Wang makes the case for experience and expertise that algorithms can’t capture, „all the things that come with learning-by-doing“ and calls it process knowledge: „Process knowledge is the kind of knowledge that’s hard to write down as an instruction. You can give someone a well-equipped kitchen and an extraordinarily detailed recipe, but unless he already has some cooking experience, we shouldn’t expect him to prepare a great dish.“

• Local knowledge/context

  In his latest article, Chris Walker revitalized Hayek’s classic argument against central planning, which claims that crucial knowledge is local and embedded in people’s practices. Walker argues that even if AI will someday be capable of digitizing contextual knowledge, „investing in codification quality upfront, maintaining it as domains evolve, and curating the right codified knowledge for each task“ will require „context engineering,“ which he defines as „experienced judgment about what matters, applied to an environment where AI does the processing.“ The whole piece is eye-opening: „The AI did the processing. The context engineering is what made the processing valuable.“

• Taste

  Another concept from the history of ideas gaining new prominence in the context of AI is „taste.“ E.g., last week Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told Ezra Klein that „the thing that is increasingly limited, or the thing that’s going to be the slowest part is having good taste and intuitions about what to do next. Developing and maintaining that taste is going to be the hard thing. Because as you’ve said, taste comes from experience, it comes from reading the primary source material, doing some of this work yourself.“ To dig deeper, here’s a collection of classic quotes on the topic, and here’s a practical guide featuring literature as an example.

Noteworthy

“I wonder how many of the people making predictions about the future of truck drivers have ever ridden with one to see what they do? (...) These people have local knowledge that is not easily transferable. They know the quirks of the routes, they have relationships with customers, they learn how best to navigate through certain areas, they understand how to optimize by splitting loads or arranging for return loads at their destination, etc. They also learn which customers pay promptly, which ones provide their loads in a way that’s easy to get on the truck, which ones generally have their paperwork in order, etc. Loading docks are not all equal. Some are very ad-hoc and require serious judgement to be able to manoever large trucks around them. Never underestimate the importance of local knowledge.“

—Dan Hanson

A mystery link leading into the unknown

Fuel To...

• …Fire

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

It is always illuminating when experts from different fields or professions share their perspectives on the humanities, such as natural scientists exploring aesthetics or economists analyzing culture. Maybe there’s something to be learned there?

Lately, a peculiar gap has opened: many talented minds are steering clear of the humanities, believing that fields like computer science offer greater intellectual stimulation, influence, and professional growth. On the other hand, especially in the context of AI, humanities-based skills are gaining significant traction and praise across the business, tech, and security worlds. For example, Jeff Bussgang, a venture capitalist and Harvard Business School professor, recently noted:

„(...) being good at discernment and taste and judgment, I think, is going to be really important. And for young people, how to develop that? I think it’s a moment where it’s like the Revenge of the Liberal Arts, meaning, like, go read Shakespeare and go read Homer and see the best movies in the world and, you know, watch the best TV shows and be strong at interpersonal skills and leadership skills and communication skills and really understand human motivation and understand what excellence looks like, and understand taste and study design and study art, because the technical skills are all going to just be there at our fingertips (...)“

What should we make of this? Are the traditional humanities more appealing than they realize? Or does the STEM environment offer a better climate for open minds than humanities departments constrained by orthodoxies and an unspoken pressure to ideological conformity? Is Big Tech absorbing the last bits of critical thought? Or should the humanities embrace this new interest coming from unexpected places?

Silicon Valley and the humanities

As far as I can tell, three distinct approaches are emerging in how the humanities engage with the cultural side of Silicon Valley:

• Intellectual histories of the Bay Area, such as those proposed by Fred Turner, Adrian Daub, or Moira Weigel

• Critiques of the so-called Silicon Valley canon and its one-sided focus on social engineering

• Ethical critique of surveillance and security technologies

All three perspectives are insightful and important. They share the premise that the humanities can offer a ‘contextual’ or ‘critical’ lens on the intellectual framework of the tech industry. But they also share a remarkable bias—namely, the assumption that the humanities have something to say about and to the tech world, without having anything to learn from it in return. There is a quick tendency toward condescension. For instance, Jürgen Kaube characterizes Peter Thiel’s comments on René Girard as “embellishments,” “private quirks,“ and “lingering memories of his own youth on campus and a teacher who impressed him.” That might as well be the case.1 But has anyone ever actually bothered to sift through the Silicon Valley canon—which is indeed unbalanced and oddly heterogeneous—to find legitimate starting points for a critique of intellectual life?

Palantir and the study of philosophy

Palantir Technologies, the data integration software firm specializing in defense and security applications, was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, who remains the company’s CEO. Although their political views differ, Karp’s biography, much like Thiel’s, reveals a surprising interest in philosophy. He holds a doctorate in social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt, where, for a time, his thesis adviser was Jürgen Habermas. In Klaus Stern’s 2024 documentary Watching You, Karp is seen at psychoanalyst Margarete Mitscherlich’s 80th birthday party; his advisor confirms that he also attended Habermas’s birthday celebration. A photo taken years later shows him surrounded by Palantir employees in front of a portrait of Michel Foucault, the French thinker who characterized the panopticon as a model of disciplinary power.

So, does Karp deserve to be taken seriously as a philosopher who applied his theories to the real world? I suggest a reverse approach: instead of following the CEO’s explicit statements, look at his company’s day-to-day practices. Palantir’s appeal to top talent and the company’s success aren’t so much rooted in its founders’ deep thinking, but rather in specific practices, as reports from former employees show. It is the way Palantir handles ’unknown knowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns‘ that makes it a compelling case for the humanities.

Forward-deployed engineers

In general terms, both the sciences and computer-based data analysis are about sorting and synthesizing vast amounts of information that would otherwise be impossible to navigate. Palantir apparently succeeds better than its competitors at processing datasets that are „often formatted differently from the others and siloed in separate databases.” But how do they do it?

The company is considered mysterious and notoriously secretive. Recently, however, several insightful accounts from former employees have emerged. For this post, I’m skipping the company’s own blog as well as CTO Shyam Sankar’s and Global Head of Commercial Ted Mabrey’s Substack to focus instead on firsthand reports from Palantir alumni.2 Can these practical accounts serve as a resource to help the humanities better define their specific appeal, potential, and relevance in the digital age?

The most comprehensive and thoughtful report I could find was written by Nabeel S. Qureshi, who worked at Palantir from 2015 to 2023.3 Also worth reading is a recent post by Chris Walker, who was with Palantir from 2010 to 2016, as well as pieces by Adam Judelson and Barry McCardel, both Palantir alums.

Qureshi mentions three points that may offer insights for the humanities:

1. During the interviews, it’s made clear that beyond technical expertise and soft skills, a certain kind of philosophical broad-mindedness is expected: “one of my interviews we just spent an hour talking about Wittgenstein.“

2. The approach only works with highly motivated individuals eager to have an impact. Consequently, the workplace culture rewards feedback: “criticism was highly tolerated and welcomed.“

3. While wide-ranging curiosity and openness toward criticism are—or at least should be—taken for granted in the humanities, the third point involves something less common: tackling specific problems on the ground rather than just applying pre-packaged frameworks and toolkits.

Interestingly, the third point reflects exactly what Henry Farrell, in a nuanced critique, finds lacking in the Silicon Valley canon:

“The engineer’s focus on simplifying and solving problems can be of great value, so long as it is leavened by a deep appreciation of the richness and complexity of the systems that it looks to transform.“

To go beyond simply acting as a product provider or consultant and instead develop on-site solutions that feed back into product development, so-called forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) are sent to customers.4 Chris Walker explains:

“Forward deployment means leaving your office and embedding in the customer’s environment (...) Code is a key output, but it’s downstream of something that doesn’t exist in any database: an understanding of how work actually gets done.“

This approach, he says, allows software engineers to understand the “real map of influence and trust”:

“You observe the workarounds, the informal protocols, the tribal knowledge passed between colleagues. None of this is written down. Very little of it can be written down. Tyler Cowen likes to say ‘context is that which is scarce.‘ Forward-deployed engineers are hunters of scarce context.“

Nabeel S. Qureshi agrees with this assessment:

“the key idea is that you gain intricate knowledge of business processes in difficult industries (manufacturing, healthcare, intel, aerospace, etc.) and then use that knowledge to design software that actually solves the problem.“

Forward-deployed engineering means communicating within specific contexts, listening, translating languages (e.g., from CS to exec-speak), engaging stakeholders, recognizing trade-offs, navigating ambiguities, and immersing oneself in the messiness of day-to-day reality. It’s a genuinely praxeological method, as Adam Judelson points out:

“The golden nugget in this philosophy is that you don’t worry about how to ask users the right questions or obsess over ‚interviewing‘ them. Instead, you are literally there, in the shit with them, getting involved in what is happening.“

Even more pointed:

“You have to be the user to unlock this concept. I don’t mean that spiritually as in ‘think like the user‘; I mean literally do their same job with your product as an extended member of their team and see what you learn.“

Writers like Hollis Robbins and Jasmin Sun have begun advocating for a similar conception of the humanities in the age of AI. The latter writes:

“The job of the researcher, then, is to live in the world—to uncover the subtexts of small things (...) I want to do work grounded in place and culture, to put human faces on abstract secular trends. Translate between disciplines, fill trust gaps. Let the Hill staffers bring their memos and the economists their charts. Writers serve the public as historians of vibe: they tell us what it feels like to be here, now.“

To be sure, merely adopting the (temporarily) popular label FDE isn’t enough, as several critical voices have noted. FDE is a very radical concept. Barry McCardel points out that this approach to building and delivering software „needed more than technical skill – forward-deployed folks also needed creativity, judgement, and customer-facing charisma.“ He underlines:

“The core of ‘Forward Deployed‘ culture is a radical deference to teams in the field. They are empowered to do whatever they need to solve a problem, even if it bears only a thin – even begrudging – relationship to the base platform. This isn’t limited to just configuring or customizing; it’s inventing entirely new products and technologies, if that’s what it takes to win.“

And:

“But to reap the benefits of Forward Deployed Engineering, you have to not only accept the chaos, but embrace it. You have to look at overlapping efforts, and failed projects (and burnt-out husks of FDEs) with gratitude for the lessons learned. This is the core of the ‘forward deployed‘ model, and unless you’re willing to commit, you’re not really doing it.“

McCardel hits the mark by characterizing FDE as “R&D,“ as “primarily an opportunity to build and learn, rather than harvest short-term cash.“ This requires a “mindset that you don’t actually know the thing to build, and you’re going to discover it bottoms-up with users.“ James Pratama makes a similar argument, describing FDE as a first-principles-approach where the goal isn’t “product-market fit,” but rather “outcome-market fit.”

For the humanities, if they’re looking for a true understanding of the world and real change rather than just cheap virtue signaling, an ‘FDE-mindset‘ entails moving beyond convenient, one-size-fits-all theories. To avoid being sidelined by know-it-all attitudes and gestures of condescension, they should study the success of Palantir—hated as it may be. While the pace will certainly be slower than in tech deployment, what the humanities may learn is to get out there, ground their reflections, and subject themselves to the demanding intricacies of life.

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

If there is any consensus in the debates surrounding AI, it is the indispensability of the human element. For this assumption to be more than just a romantic way of reassuring ourselves, we need to clarify exactly what it means. This week’s POSTCARD brings together a collection of noteworthy contributions on the matter.

• Human touch

  Adam Ozimek makes a historical argument: people have always preferred the human touch, even when mechanical alternatives are available. Think live music, theater performances, and attentive service in a restaurant.

• Last mile

  Few authors match Hollis Robbins for her sharp and thought-provoking insights into AI and what she calls „the last mile“: local expertise and human judgment that exceeds AI capability. You can find the original „last-mile-articles“ here and here; more on the topic here (how universities approach strategic decision-making), here (learning velocity), and here (personalized education).

• Tacit knowledge

  Chris Walker worked as a „forward deployed engineer“ at Palantir from 2010 to 2016. He learned that eventually it’s not the code that makes the difference, it’s „an understanding of how work actually gets done“ – a knowledge that cannot be digitized.

• AI-native firms

  Jasmine Sun: „Increasingly, fewer jobs will look like doing tasks ourselves, and more will involve teaching AIs to do them for us. How can we transfer context to the machine? Can they adopt the values and instincts we’ve evolved over millennia to have? (...) Can you teach taste? Creativity? Learning to learn? This is the great pedagogical project of our time.“

• All our records will be lost

  M. E. Rothwell takes a long-term view: „As a civilisation we seem to think that anything ‘backed up’ digitally is safe forever. But the 1s and 0s of our online archives remain bound by the laws of the physical world, stored as they are in data farms and cloud servers. Bit-rot and data-decay will ensure that in a mere millennium from now all our records will be lost, if the hardware is not constantly maintained, new copies not continually forged. A thousand years is a long time — do we really think our descendants will seek to preserve all that we’ve produced? Energy constraints, future wars, or the simple act of forgetting will most likely render all our online activities to the abyss.“

Noteworthy

„- I will assume that anybody speaking might know something I don’t;

- All who are speaking from behind a screen are equal until proven otherwise;

- I will not suspend my own judgment just because whoever is speaking claims to have institutional authority behind them;

- I will not be impressed with what someone has said because I have heard of them before. The converse is true as well. I will endeavor to give someone I have heard of an equal hearing even if my envy and resentment may predispose me against them;

- I will endeavor within reason to give extra hearing to the powerless and voiceless.“

—Sam Kahn, outlining an ethos for the digital era

A mystery link leading into the unknown

An ode...

• ...to the places people go to.

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

Two weeks ago, I laid out three arguments for reading the news. But newspapers, newsletters, newsfeeds – they’re a rabbit hole, aren’t they? And I’m not just talking about keeping up with the rapidly evolving political situation, but also about the abundance of insightful analyses. When the unread newsletters in my inbox recently exceeded 1,000, I realized I couldn’t keep up anymore and needed a new way to handle the influx of information. Here’s what I came up with.

1. Contexts

When newsletters primarily arrive in your inbox, new messages from other contexts (such as work emails that arrive on the weekend) grab your attention every time you open your email program to read the news. Conversely, incoming newsletters involuntarily catch your eye, even if you just intended to reply to personal emails. To avoid these built-in context switches, I recently changed a few settings. I didn’t expect these small changes to be so instantly calming.

Substack

Given that most of the newsletters I get are from Substack, I changed my delivery preference from email to app. To catch up on new newsletters, I either log in via my browser or open the app, usually once or twice a day. What can I say? The difference is huge.

Pro tips for Substack heavy users:

• Manage your content preferences in settings to control which topics you see in your feed.

• Actively manage notifications.

• Turn off autoplay.

Feedbin

For blogs, newsletters, and feeds not hosted on Substack, I use Feedbin to read them. It’s perfect for RSS, newsletters received using a custom-generated Feedbin email address, indieweb social, podcasts, and YouTube.

Smart mailboxes

For newsletters linked to a subscription and its associated email address, such as those from the New York Times, I set up my email program to redirect these messages to a smart mailbox, ensuring they are stored separately from other incoming mail.

An even better option would be to use a dedicated email address solely for news, but that would require updating every single source – a hassle I’ve avoided up to this point.

2. Timeframes

Even if you heroically resist endless scrolling and succeed in deliberately limiting the time you spend exposed to the news, there’s still a tricky question to answer: what’s the ideal time of day for reading the news?

To be honest, I don’t know

If you struggle with mornings as much as I do and have cherished that half-asleep morning news ritual since your youth, it will feel counterintuitive to ignore the headlines, avoid wasting energy and concentration in a constantly updated stream of bad events, and instead tackle the most important tasks first thing in the morning, as many well-meaning folks advise.

I’m afraid the never-ending cycle of digital news compromises Hegel’s idea of reading the morning paper as „a kind of realistic morning blessing.“ But how can one keep this effect when switching to another time? To be frank, so far I haven’t figured out a better hour that actually works.

Briefings

A workaround could be to get up to speed with a briefing and save the analyses for the evening. I recommend Kagi News, an app that „reads thousands of community curated RSS feeds from publications across different viewpoints and perspectives“ and then leverages AI „to distill this massive information into one comprehensive daily briefing, while clearly citing sources.“ There is only one update per day, and it takes less than five minutes to read.

If you prefer a summary by a single human being, a major newspaper’s briefing, like The Morning from the New York Times, can help keep morning news consumption at a healthy level. If you’re interested in newsletters curated by writers who read tons of material and recommend the best to their readers, this overview will help you get started.

3. What to read

It’s all in the mix.

Facts and filters

As I laid out in my first argument two weeks ago, an underrated way to read the news is to focus on fact-driven materials such as source documents, speeches, and in-depth investigative journalism.

To reduce filter bubbles, those without an e-paper subscription may try to avoid personalized home screens and clear their browser cache before visiting a newspaper’s website.

Viewpoint diversity

Because newspapers choose and interpret news differently, it’s smart to read two papers with contrasting political stances side by side. Alternatively, you could simply pick up a different paper every day.

As comforting and reassuring as it is to have one’s worldview, prejudices, and blind spots confirmed, it can actually be quite liberating to burst one’s information bubble.

Legacy and new

Legacy media and the new creator’s economy are not mutually exclusive. Both have strengths and weaknesses. „A newspaper,“ as Becca Rothfeld recently pointed out, „is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing.“ However, it’s best to mix original reporting, fact-checked and edited articles from traditional outlets with independent voices from gatekeeper-free platforms.

Print and screen

It’s not just romantic reasons that make reading a printed newspaper worthwhile from time to time, maybe on the weekend. The printed form inherently entails a certain slowing down, which isn’t just beneficial for your news intake. Plus, Sunday papers and magazines offer a broader perspective on daily events, using long-form articles to better contextualize current affairs.

Good and bad

To counterbalance the impression that the world is getting worse and worse and will soon come to an end, it’s imperative to acknowledge inspiring and optimistic news. It’s also wise to step back from the current moment and take note of long-term trends usually obscured by news hooks such as „the vast improvements in human living standards across long stretches of time.“

Global and local

Finally, if you read the news because you care about change, consider going local. That’s where you have the most agency and a strong chance to really make an impact in real life.

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

It was only a matter of time: this issue is all about politics.

• Lingua secundi mandati

  The weave and TYFYATTM.

• What do we mean when we say “racist”?

  Sherman J. Clark rejects a single definition: „The goal is to develop the practical wisdom to navigate its multiple meanings and purposes: to know when precision serves and when it stifles, to recognize which definition is operative and why it matters, to discern what the speaker is trying to accomplish.“

• Are we all racist?

  Paul Bloom offers a pleasantly nuanced perspective.

• On being a publicly engaged intellectual...

  … and a mensch.

• “The quantity is naturally indefinite“

  A prominent patient was medically prescribed alcohol during Prohibition. No surprise that a champagne was named after him.

Noteworthy

„Passion that is not disciplined by goals is self-indulgence. The core of real political passion is obsession with outcomes: what must change, how power actually moves, what tradeoffs are unavoidable, and which tactics advance the cause rather than merely advertise our virtue. (...) To insist otherwise is to treat politics as therapy and the oppressed as props in your emotional drama. (...) Anything less, anything that prioritizes our rage over results, is an abdication of everything we claim to stand for.“

—Freddie deBoer

A mystery link leading into the unknown

Let’s get real...

• ...about free speech!

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.

Nothing seems more imperative and self-evident these days than reading the news. And yet there is no shortage of well-meaning advice to avoid the news, go offline, read books, and concentrate more on what’s within one’s own control. It might seem that such advice would take care of itself, given that its very proponents write for newspapers themselves and rose to prominence there. However, it’s a fair question: why pay attention to news that, so say the least, doesn’t serve your well-being?

Let me be clear: My question isn’t why there should be a free press. That a fourth estate is needed to speak truth to power requires as little explanation these days as it did during the three days of the Condor. Given that original reporting, correspondents, and fact-checking are costly, it appears incumbent upon a concerned citizen to subscribe to quality newspapers. Furthermore, because independent newsletter writers highlight angles that legacy media neglects for whatever reasons, it’s prudent to support them financially. Remember: the truth is paywalled, but the lies are free.

Supporting quality journalism, however, doesn’t inherently require you to read it. Not everything that is fit to print may be worth my time. So, why read the news? I can think of three reasons.

1. Raw material

In a world of fake news and slop, trustworthy facts are more important than ever. However, even the most reputable news coverage we consume filters, contextualizes, and comments. What to do to be an informed citizen rather than just someone with an opinion? Focus on unprocessed facts such as original sources and in-depth investigative journalism. I remember that the newspapers I read in my school days contained considerably more source material than they do now: legislative texts, political speeches, all sorts of documents. Raw information like this makes a strong case for reading the news, because it serves as a grounding force in a world saturated with interpretation. It provides gravity to judgments.

2. Educational impulses

I confess I’ve always learned a lot from newspapers, magazines, and blogs, and continue to do so. It started with young me looking up foreign words while reading. Subsequently, newspapers became my source for books, exhibitions, travel destinations, design objects, and even evidence-based self-help. Currently, I’m finding inspiration in Substacks, whether it’s economists delving into culture, the digital literary sphere, or individual writers whose voices I no longer want to miss.

As long as references to ideas and aesthetic experiences are not confused with cultivation itself, as long as they don’t remain hearsay or half-education, and as long as stimulation doesn’t prevent thorough understanding, there’s nothing wrong with turning to press publications. Quite the opposite: even today, and particularly in an era where legacy and independent media coexist, journalistic texts can contribute to widespread education.

3. A place in the world

Among the posthumously published aphorisms in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s “Wastebook” (1803-1806) is an entry1 on reading newspapers:

“Das Zeitungslesen des Morgens früh ist eine Art von realistischem Morgensegen. Man orientiert seine Haltung gegen die Welt an Gott oder an dem, was die die Welt ist. Jenes gibt dieselbe Sicherheit wie hier, daß man wisse, wie man daran sei.“

“Reading the newspaper first thing in the morning is a kind of realistic morning blessing. One aligns one’s attitude towards the world either with God or with what the world is. The former offers the same assurance as the latter, that one understands one’s position.”

It appears that Hegel saw the newspaper’s comprehensive connection to current affairs as a means of grounding oneself in reality, of anchoring oneself in the world. Alexander Kluge has delved deeper2 into Hegel’s morning readings:

“Der Philosoph las außer den Berliner Blättern täglich die Edinburgh Review. Er war auf das Detail kapriziert. Das findet sich im Rohmaterial der Nachricht, nicht in der Meinung. Hegel brauchte mehrere Zeitungen, um unter der Tünche der Meinung die Einzelheiten wiederzuerkennen: Er las nicht, er produzierte. Stets neugierig auf die Wirklichkeit“

“In addition to the Berlin papers, the philosopher read the Edinburgh Review daily. He was fixated on the details. These reside in the raw material of the news, not in the commentary. Hegel needed several newspapers to identify the specifics beneath the gloss of opinion.“

In a world of disturbing news, disinformation, and disruption, it’s easy to see a grounding, but hard to see a blessing (albeit secular) in reading the news. Sure, being aware of events that might affect one’s life can instill a sense of control that can be interpreted as a blessing. But Hegel’s remark carries a deeper layer of meaning. What I mean is a sense of not being adrift, but rather, despite the profound concerns reading the news stirs up, feeling like a part of the world, with all the demands, duties, and delights that entails.

Why read the news? To hear the voice of the news anchor, saying:

“Good Night, and good luck.”

or

“Questo è Morning, cominciamo.“