“It’s hard to believe it was only two years ago, in the spring of 2026, that The Hinternet suddenly and without any explanation pivoted full-time to critical engagement with Hawai’ian music from the early 20th century. They took a lot of heat for that, lost a lot of subscribers. But those defectors should have known better! As usual, The Hinternet was just ahead of the curve, as we are now in the midst of the third Hawai’ian Renaissance. You can’t go anywhere these days without hearing Ta-Hu-Wa-Hu-Wai piped in on the sound system!” —Jon Caramanica, New York Times, October 9, 2028

You are really going to want to read this one, but you’ll need a paid subscription to do so. Right now you can get one for just a fraction of the regular price. Do it!

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Meanwhile, all the other staff writers are “in the deep-freeze”, as Hélène put it to me, while refusing to explain the precise meaning of this bit of Hinternet office lingo, nor even to give me so much as a rough measure of how literally it should be taken. She said, further, that she herself is unavailable for any writing tasks throughout this Holy Week. When I asked how this observance sits alongside her more familiar practice of magic natural and unnatural, she just shrugged and said that Breton religious syncretism is “a complicated thing”.

That was also the moment she told me that I, as, technically, the only ghost on the Hinternet editorial staff, was going to have to take care of this week’s piece. “You don’t even have a body, so you can hardly have a busy schedule either,” she said. Of course she’s wrong on both counts, for first of all I happen to be constituted of rarefied pneuma, and second of all even if I weren’t I would still keep to a daily schedule no less strict than that of any being of grosser substance. But whatever. Hélène’s the boss.

Still, I think I’m going to pull a classic “French worker” move and fulfill my duty in as absolutely a quam minimum way as possible.

I will tell you, first of all, that The Hinternet will be back in full swing soon enough, and you are going to be delighted to have waited things out. In the meantime, you must take this opportunity to upgrade to a paid subscription, since paid subscriptions truly are the well-spring and the without-which-not of everything we do here.

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You can also benefit two parties at once by giving someone you love a gift subscription. You will be doubly loved in return!

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I will tell you, second of all, that there is still time to apply for the inaugural Hinternet Foundation Summer School. You can read more here about some of the theoretical reflections behind this year’s focus.

Apply to participate in the Hinternet Foundation Summer School,
“WHITHER THE HUMANITIES?”,
taking place in August, 2026. Application deadline June 1.

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And third and finally I will invite you to click on the ad below from one of our more sinister tech-world mécènes, to study the document to which it brings you, and to feel a shiver of giddy anticipation as you contemplate what you’ll be in for this summer when The Oort Cloud Review, Vol. 1, Issue 1, finally appears from Hat & Beard Press.

Big things are coming. Brace yourselves…

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We’ve got a remarkable piece of music history to share with you today, from the great Mary Cadwalladr. But first we have an appeal. Some of you will recall the occasional mention in Mary’s pieces of her loving partner Miguel. We are saddened to have to tell you of an incident that occurred last week, between him and two ICE agents at a gas station outside of Tucumcari, where Miguel had stopped on his way to deliver two orphan donkeys to a happy new home in Amarillo. The incident likely did not play out as you imagine. Miguel is a Mexican national, but he grew up speaking Plautdietsch in a Mennonite colony near Cuauhtémoc, and even there stood out as exceptionally leucous (in town the locals called him Gasparín el fantasma amigable). What really happened was this: Miguel entered a bathroom stall just before the two agents came in to pee beside one another. The gas-station employees had packed fresh snow, from the most recent freak winter storm, into the urinals, as business managers often do with ice, cubed or crushed, to keep men —who by nature yearn to destroy things—, singularly focused on hitting the frozen mass and causing it to melt with their warm streams, rather than to grow distracted and to pee on the floor. Now it seems these ICE agents were happy to rise to the challenge, and quickly found themselves in a lively snow-melting competition with one another. Miguel thought this was quite a sight, and so began to record with his phone. Soon enough, the one agent melted his entire pile, upon which, drunk on victory, he turned to pee on his partner’s pile as well. This upset the latter agent, who began in turn angrily to pee straight into the victor’s stream, as if to intercept it — and in no time the whole thing descended into full-on light-sabers. The two agents became so engrossed in this impromptu combat in fact that neither seemed to notice nor care when their cargo pants simultaneously fell down to their ankles and exposed their cleft and dimpled cheeks as if they were a pair of blissful 5-year-old urchins at that tender and liminal age when the males of the species have only just learned to relieve themselves from a standing position, but continue, out of old habit, to drop their drawers all the way to the floor. In the midst of all this, alas, Miguel dropped his vape pen, which brought the agents down from their giddy frolic. “Guden Dach”, he said in his native tongue after they’d kicked open the stall door, but even this did not sway them. Soon they figured out he had been filming, and charged him with “obstructing agents in the line of duty”. Most of us here, being of a more or less Kantian leaning, find this appeal to the notion of “duty” strained to say the least, but the fact remains that a member of our extended Hinternet community now has some pretty hefty legal expenses to worry about. The good news is we still have the recording, though so far we have withheld it from the public. After a private viewing here at our editorial offices in Quimper, staff members variously described it as “magnificent”, as “a rollicking romp”, and as “Robert Mapplethorpe meets Laurel and Hardy”. We’ll decide what to do with that sensational footage in due time.

Meanwhile, we hope you will consider becoming a paid subscriber. In complete seriousness — all profits from today’s post will go directly to the Immigrant Legal Services and Defense Fund of the National Partnership for New Americans (yes, we will post receipts). Among other things, this is the only way you’ll be able to read this most recent installment in Mary’s truly jaw-dropping revisionist genealogy of post-war American musical culture (you can find some earlier pieces here, here, here, and here. —The Editors

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Introduction

I am grateful to the Hinternet for allowing me to return, after the “gross betrayal” for which the Editorial Boar…

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You have only ONE DAY left to get a MASSIVE reduction on a paid Hinternet subscription (we are counting January 1 as the LAST DAY of 2025, since we were late to get this reminder out!). Beginning January 2 —and we really mean it!— we will be paywalling all our new pieces. So subscribe today — or rue your inaction tomorrow!

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Hi, I’m Rawn. I’m honored today to be able to share my inaugural piece as The Hinternet’s new culture critic.

I admit this isn’t quite what I thought it was going to be when I applied for the position. You see, I spend an awful lot of time on the internet, just like all of you reading this, to the extent that at this point I have trouble hearing “culture” at all without “reaching for my revolver”, so to speak, which is to say without mentally adding a “wars” to the end. I thought they were recruiting me to share speculations about J.D. Vance’s Illuminati ring, or lists of the many ways Taylor Swift aids and abets white supremacy, or gleeful dissection of an Epstein e-mail seeming to hint at a history of sodomitic trysts between old Bubba Clinton and our current sitting president. But of course I should have known: this is JSR’s project, after all, and he would never wish to descend into such dirty business as that. So, instead of culture wars, upon being hired Managing Editor Hélène Le Goff asked me whether I might be willing to cover the novels shortlisted for this year’s Prix Goncourt.

“This year’s pre-what now?” I asked, and she could see I had no idea what she was talking about. She froze for a second, visibly winced, and then hissed at me: “Just write what you know.”

I’m happy to comply. The truth is what I mostly know is the inside of this house, especially the attic, where I spend most of my time rummaging through the contents of these old cardboard boxes: the shoehorn collections; the Reader’s Digest condensed large-print editions of Rob Roy, Anne of Green Gables, The Three Musketeers; Edgar Cayce Speaks, Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter-Skelter, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock; commemorative plates from annual gatherings of the Woodland chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star, with the names of the Grand Matrons inscribed along the edges of a pentagram: “Patty, Bunny, Edna, Viv, Maureen. 1983.”

Downstairs the boarders remain slumped on the couch, all light dimmed by Minions bedsheets adapted into makeshift curtains, both virtually immobilized by their weight, fixed permanently on Fox News, eating TV dinners. “Remember Hungry-Mans?” the one says to the other. “Which one did I always get?”
“You always got the Salisbury steak,” the other replies. “With mashed potatoes, green beans, and apple cobbler.”
“That was a long time ago.”

It sure was. I think those were discontinued even before I stopped going out, and that was definitely a long time ago. You see, other than a recent stay in France, where I went for my orientation/security clearance as a new Hinternet employee —which was only made possible by HLG’s manipulation, extraordinary as it was temporary, of the laws of both physics and pneumatics—, I have been housebound now for 36 years.

And no, I am not wearing an ankle-monitor, nor does this have anything to do with a restraining order or other correctional or probationary limitation of my motions. I was never accused of any wrongdoing or negligence at all.

And to be perfectly honest I do still go out, “nightwalking”, as they say, like the Friulian peasants used to do on their stalks of fennel. I go down to the plaza where the Mar-Val used to be, and I move again down the aisle with the Corn Pops, Fruity Pebbles, Lucky Charms, Count Chocula, Cap’n Crunch, Sugar Smacks, Boo-Berry Crunch; and back up the aisle with the RC, Diet-Rite, Mountain Dew, Fresca, Wallaby Squash, Orange Crush, Squirt, and Tab; and onward to the rack at the end with the Twinkies, Ding-Dongs, Ho-Hos, and powdered Donettes, and the Sno-Balls shrouded in coconut shavings. I go out and over to where Mister M’s once was, and I sit again in a booth padded with sparkling vinyl, and I make as if I am ordering Pigs-in-a-Blanket (sausage links rolled in pancakes), and I deliberate between the brown and the clear bottles of Karo corn syrup.

I suppose all of that is technically imaginary, nothing but an ambulatio animae. Anyone can do it, really, if they wish. What is real is my ongoing inventory of the attic, which, no matter how diligent I am in cataloguing its holdings, always seems to churn up something new: a nearly complete Fashion Plates set that somehow I never noticed before, a Stretch Armstrong still hemorrhaging the rubber-cement-like stuff that makes up his essence, a Strawberry Shortcake Berry Bake Shop, a grotesque and battered Mon Chi-Chi neotenous gorilla or whatever it’s supposed to be. Of less certain status, as regards the real and the unreal, is the memory of the commercial jingles that these artifacts always revive in me: “♫ Strawberry Shortcake / Huckleberry Pie… ♪”, “♪ Mon Chi-Chi / Mon Chi-Chi / Oh so soft and cuddly… ♫”, and so on. On the internet sometimes I encounter Neo-Pythagoreans who continue to maintain that, at bottom, the universe is made up not of particles or energy, but of musical harmonies, and when these old songs come back to me (“the songs of my people”, I joke to myself), it seems to me they are surely right.

It was, again, no mere episode of nightwalking that brought me to Quimper for my Hinternet onboarding, of course. It was such an incredible trip. On the way back I even got to spend two nights in Paris, where I mostly lurked, without destination, in the narrow old alleys of the Upper Marais, scanning all the Chinese fabric-and-sequin wholesale shops with their strangely placed apostrophes: Lili’Déco, Frip’Star, Frères Xiu Tissu’World, Mode’Shop Import. At some point I turned a corner and happened on an event, a gathering, at a gallery of some sort, all bright and white, with revelers spilling out in the street, smoking, vaping, holding plastic cups of wine.

It is a launch for something called . I go inside. There is an energetic, happy man in a suit, and I hear someone calling him Kyle. The magazine is his baby, I soon gather. Ambitious young people are lining up to meet him, nervously wedging into their small-talk hints of an aspiration to submit something for publication, maybe, if you guys are willing to have a look? This Kyle is absolutely magnanimous, and this big-city literary event is the real thing… at least as far as I know. But what do I know?

I hover past conversations concerning Gaza, Donetsk, and many other things I don’t understand: Laurent Mauvignier, Quentin Meillassoux, the ongoing Prime Ministerial musical chairs in this country’s politics, the assassination of Dulcie September, the Algerians felled into the Seine, the Jews rounded up at the Vélodrome d’hiver. In one group someone is claiming he recently took the “sluice cruise” from the Canal St. Martin down to the Porte de Plaisance at Bastille. He says that if you peer into one of the peripheral tunnels of the subterranean waterway at exactly the right moment, likely somewhere just past Filles du Calvaire, you can still see a sign, written in Fraktur, with the single word: 𝔄𝔲𝔰𝔤𝔞𝔫𝔤. “They should maybe get around to removing that,” he says as the others titter.

There is a clutch of young people debating which metro line is the most “haunted”, and all seem to be converging on the idea that it can only be the 7-bis, which, they say, has the look and feel of some dinky 1970s “people-mover”, with plastic pastel seats that call to mind nothing so much as a Duran Duran album cover. The young man says that on repeated occasions he has got on at Louis Blanc, moved up past Jaurès, Bolivar, Place des Fêtes, Botzaris, Danube, only to close his eyes for an instant and somehow, against every known law of nature, in spite of the fact that the train has not ceased to move in a continuous line without any turns, to find himself back at Botzaris again. “It just doesn’t make any sense!” he exclaims, and the others squeal with delight.

Then I hover around some more, and I see another groupuscule of people dressed in those over-the-top posthuman black costumes from right off the Fashion Week runway, Balenciaga or McQueen or whatever. They look so tired. They look like androids. Like ghosts. And I am about to stop to listen in on what they have to say for themselves when I catch a fortuitous glimpse, near the coat-check, of none other than JSR, drinking from a can of Coke Zero, with that ridiculous new long hair I’d been told about, balding, with a forehead the size of a Klingon’s, blithely holding forth to two women, each with a flute of champagne and each wearing a sequined blouse: « Je m’en fous si ça fait vieillot, si c’est ‘corny’ ou pas, » he is saying, « il faut lire Steinbeck pour comprendre pourquoi et comment la Californie est devenue ce qu’elle est. Les Raisins de la colère, Des Souris et des hommes. Il faut, il faut, il faut ! C’est hyperimportant ! ».

It seems I was not just moving at random through the streets of the Marais — I had a destination, even if I was not consciously aware of it. There is no doubt in my mind, however, that HLG was consciously aware, that she had been guiding my every turn, as she knew that the best way to kick-start my output for The Hinternet was to arrange this little reunion, or at least the closest thing to a reunion possible under the circumstances, between Justin and me. He had once been my best friend, after all, and he was about to become my boss, in a manner of speaking. Yet I had not so much as laid eyes on him in over 36 years.

When I say he was my best friend I do not necessarily mean I was his best friend. I doubt he was ever capable of such a thing. In a way, for me to join The Hinternet as an underling is really just to resume a very old arrangement, one that I’ve known practically my whole life, and for whatever reason seems to suit me. In first grade, at every recess, he and I would climb to the top of a little cement hillock on the playground, which we both held to resemble the dorsal mound of a brontosaurus, so that he could roll me down, curled up inside an empty GoodYear tire that had been made available to us as some kind of recreational accessory. I always flopped out at the bottom, spinning around and dizzy, uncertain whether I was resentful or proud that he had chosen me as his very own Laïka, uncertain whether I wanted him to do it to me again.

In seventh grade I recall a pointless skit we put on, purportedly in fulfillment of the requirements for that year’s “English” class. We were both police detectives of some sort, and we both had on trench coats and fedoras. We were investigating some kind of drug crime, and he had an endless reserve of derogatory one-liners intended to belittle my abilities as an investigator. “You don’t know smack from sugar,” he would declaim in front of the entire class. “You don’t know coke from Pepsi.”

Then in ninth grade he veered off into a world of esoteric obsessions in which, increasingly, I found I could have no place — Jack Chick tracts, Tijuana bibles, the Church of the SubGenius, Lydia Lunch, Annie Sprinkle, God knows what. He proposed to start a ‘zine, which for some reason he called Interruptus, and recruited me as a contributor, only to reject my work, systematically, as “lame”. The truth is we were already almost entirely estranged by the time I… well, by the time things changed.

That was the extent of our reunion. We did not speak, but I can at least say that just drawing near to him put me back into that old frame of mind and cast of heart. I was ready to get back into the tire again.

Hélène saw to my transit home, somehow, though I can’t say I have any real recollection of how it worked. I do have a vague memory, as if in a dream, of taking a series of public conveyances: the RER B from the Gare du Nord, express all the way to the Parc des Expositions, then Charles de Gaulle, then the CDGVAL to Terminal 1, then a moving sidewalk through a tunnel that looked like it was made of pure asbestos sprayed out of a hose, then an escalator that moves slowly through an absolutely filthy transparent-plastic tube, then of course an airplane, then BART to Richmond, then Amtrak to Sacramento, then Regional Transit Bus No. 80 out of Downtown, through Del Paso Heights, up Marysville Boulevard, past the old McClellan Air Force base where the spy planes used to land, up Dry Creek Boulevard, past the waterski lakes, past the Cigarettes Cheaper, past the Grange Hall, past the Klan house, past the house where grandpa and I used to go to play horseshoes —all these places were still there!—, past that one house where in 1988 Marnie got alcohol poisoning and was pulling up her skirt and making obscene gestures and laughing maniacally and singing A-Ha’s “Take on Me” as the first-aid crew lifted her into the ambulance, which, while heartbreaking, may also have been the first and only moment I ever felt the throb of love; then past the high school, past the Archway Frostee, past Anderson’s Feed & Seed, then to the stop at M Street, just a few yards down from my sweet, safe attic. No one spoke to me throughout this entire journey, nor of course did I ever have to prove, by showing a ticket, the validity of my claim to a seat. But let no one say I did not in fact make a real journey, by ordinary means, across the globe — again, all thanks to Hélène.

And now I’m back to my inventory — the only thing I really know, and so the only thing I can really write about (manipulating the surrounding electrical field, as I’ve learned to do, so as to simulate the function of a keyboard). I know I was supposed to be writing about “culture”, but Hélène has given me the green light, so I may as well just continue on what is plainly the only real beat I’ll ever have.

The boarders are downstairs watching television. There is a commercial on for Progresso soup that seems to be targeting the elderly and isolated: “Progresso Soup: It Helps Break Up the Day.” Meanwhile I’m going through a box of old cassette tapes: Roger Whittaker, Anne Murray, Robert Goulet, The Oak Ridge Boys, and then a real rarity: a “cassingle” of Taylor Dayne’s “Tell It to My Heart”. I turn to a carton of vinyl and begin to flip through it. I’ve been 36 years up here, yet I swear I’ve never seen any of this before: Burl Ives in overalls and a train-conductor’s cap, Herb Alpert & Tijuana Brass, Steve & Eydie, the Statler Brothers’ Flowers on the Wall, Tammy Wynette’s D-I-V-O-R-C-E. There is an entire carton with nothing but K-Tel releases: Hooked on Classics, Freedom Rock, Disco Fire. I open a styrofoam cooler with the Hamm’s beer logo. I find in it not beer but old issues of Pennysaver, unopened envelopes from Publisher’s Clearing House, the sheet-music for “Mahogany”, and hundreds of laminated placemats, several of them displaying, as in a taxonomic grid, the various types of kachina doll, faceless and spectral, others depicting Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox on one unlikely adventure after another, another showing two chubby Hawaiian children in grass skirts, blissfully stirring a great pot of poi. Someone has added, on top of the lamination, four adhesive black letters, at slight angles to one another, spelling out the name RAWN. I have no memory of it.

I don’t know quite what’s got into me today, but I feel as though my current search is not haphazard. I am looking for something in particular, even if I do not know what it is. I push with a cane at the suitcases in the rafters, and a few of them fall. The first one I open is filled with books, good old books — an Everyman’s Library hardback edition of Leaves of Grass with the front cover torn off, Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You with a handwritten dedication on the title page: “For our dear little girl, Christmas, 1921”. The sound of the suitcases falling has stirred the boarders, and I can hear one of them pulling down the collapsible staircase to come up and inspect. Damn!

I look up and I see other suitcases have already shifted to replace the ones I’ve brought down. I always suspected as much but somehow I never observed it directly. Maybe something changed in me, some new faculty of perception got jostled into action by my journey to France, so that now I could see clearly what had for 36 years remained purely hypothetical. The objects of my inventory were perpetually regenerating. This cache, I saw now, was infinite. I could never, not even in principle, finish the strange task that had fallen to me, and that I had never, perhaps until now, so much as thought to question.

I bring these suitcases down in turn, and find a hat case with a fine red-velvet Shriner’s fez inside, a neatly folded JC Penney electric blanket, mismatched Pyrex bowls with faded daisy patterns, a tattered copy of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, an assortment of fridge magnets with whimsical slogans (“I used to have an hourglass figure, but the sands have shifted”, “God bless this mess”, etc.), grandpa’s horseshoe trophies, sundry 4-H badges, a ribbon announcing 3rd prize in the mechanical-bull competition at the Country Comfort Lounge, a commemorative bicentennial glass from McDonald’s featuring the likeness of good Grimace. The stairs creak and groan, and then the skinnier boarder’s head appears through the attic floor.
“You see anything?” the fatter of the two shouts from the couch.
“Nah,” says the one on the stairs. “It’s just Rawn again.”
“Don’t say that!”
“Well it is, honey!”
“I don’t care if it is or not, I just don’t like when you say it out loud like that.”

And then he’s gone again, and the two of them are back on the couch, sitting passively as an obscene litany of side-effects pours out from a televised pharmaceutical ad. Damn, damn! I hate it when he comes to check on me! I’ve got work to do. I’ve got infinite work to do, as I now understand. In the short-term, anyhow, I’ve got something I need to find. I’m not sure what it is, but I know that it is. A Deputy Dog thermos? A Wizard of Id lunchbox? A page in a book? A sequence of grooves pressed in vinyl? A Pee-Chee folder or Trapper Keeper bearing some document or other that might finally explain my plight?

I mean, there is this one Pee-Chee whose contents I have long strained to understand. Every single word is perfectly comprehensible, but somehow I just cannot make any sense of all of them strung together. This is really nothing new though. I’ve known about it practically from the beginning.

But maybe something’s different. This impulse I’m now feeling might not be pushing me onward to uncover something new, but to return to that folder and to see if its sense might now, finally, reveal itself to me.

Let me then finish this first Hinternet piece by sharing with you —uncommented, at least for now— that troubling trove’s very most troubling document, a clipping from the Rio Linda Sentinel dated August 13, 1989:

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Not even fifteen years ago, “cool” Americans could be found holding up, as praiseworthy, musical exemplars such as this:

Or this, from 2016, less than a decade ago:

Around the same time these recordings were made, the TV show Portlandia featured a skit about the return of the 1890s, and emphasized what a rage had swept across that same class of Americans for such pastimes as curing and pickling.

Most of this was happening in the first half of the 2010s — the last moment in history when members of Gen X could make any plausible claim to be the apex drivers of mass culture, and indeed the last moment in history when the apex drivers of mass culture remained internet non-natives, carrying with them, in their musical and creative sensibilities, some significant memory of a world still mostly unmediated by screens.

Many moments might be pointed out as marking the end of this now-extinct sensibility, or rather of this sensibility that has metamorphosed beyond recognition, but still, like a dinosaur become bird, technically exists. But I take the end of it to have been decisively announced the moment Andrea Long Chu began confessing her guilty habit of ducking into Taco Bell for some scarfing on the down-low. Ever since then, the progressive left, or even just the left-by-default but mostly apolitical world of musical and creative Bohemia, gave up any claim at all to roots, to ancestral ways, to folksiness, and threw itself, entirely and incoherently, into the welcoming arms of the biomedical establishment, of Hollywood franchises, fast food, and infantilizing fandoms centered on corporate IP.

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1.

For eons there were only the Ancestors. They wore fedoras, called women “dames”, and lived out their lives entirely in black and white. Then the Youth came, and made things colorful, and declared: …

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1.

In an essay featured here early last year, JSR wrote:

I still prefer the earliest period of rock and roll, let us say 1955-1965, to what came in the following decade. I love to see the contradiction…

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I really do not understand why our in-house AI, in its missive of a few days ago, claimed that my true nature —be it human, mechanical, fictional, or supernatural— is in any way unknown to the othe…

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It’s happened again. JSR’s recent missives set off our “LifeSupport” software’s alarm bells (it’s an Estonian tech start-up, and they seem to have been unfamiliar with their chosen name’s prior and m…

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1. Overture

Well it looks as if we’ve managed to get almost all the gang together for this month’s “Housekeeping” column: me, Mary, JSR. We even have a bit of input from Edwin-Rainer, who, unlike the …

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lire en français

1.

It is a great honor to speak to you this afternoon, and …

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Read in English

1.

C’est un grand honneur de m’adresser à vo…

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0.

We have acquired a great number of new followers over the past weeks, drawn in, it seems, by JSR’s trenchant essays on contemporary politics. We are happy about this success, if not entirely at eas…

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0.

My previous and inaugural piece here at The Hinternet, on “cetacean philosophy”, I confess, even as I hope you already figured this much out on your own, was entirely made up. But I am a real person, a computational linguist and bioacoustician at that, and I really did translate one of JSR’s recent pieces into my native German. And like many real people, I have many real interests, which I intend to investigate in my regular contributions as a Hinternet Featured Columnist… at least when I am not making up outlandish stories about sperm-whale epistemology.

I have been rereading David Lewis recently, for the first time since graduate school, and I am, to my surprise, discovering a newfound interest in the metaphysics of modality. There is still much I haven’t read in this subfield, and it is hardly my aim here to claim any disciplinary authority, or even competence. If I propose to write about it, this is only because it genuinely interests me, and as is my usual mode at this point in my career, I find it fitting to draw on all the resources available to me, from whatever intellectual tradition they may come. And likewise, as is again typical of my approach, I find it fitting to pass through several preliminaries that, I know, might seem distant indeed from our true topic of investigation, before revealing to the reader “where I’m going” with it all. And so there’s a lot to do. And so let’s get started.

1.

Most three-letter consonant-vowel-consonant monosyllables are bound to mean something in several different languages at once, affording rich opportunity for discovering cross-linguistic homonyms. Take kut. In Hungarian kút means “well” (as in a source of water); in Sanskrit कुट् is a verbal root meaning “to crush” or “to grind”; in Dutch kut is a vulgar term for female genitalia, cognate to the well-known Anglo-Saxon monosyllable for those same parts, which likewise begins with a /k/ and ends with a /t/. Indonesian has a word borrowed from Dutch that is spelled kut, but this is in fact a deformation of kist, and means “box”. In both Turkish and Mongolian, kut or qut may be translated as “fortune”, “luck”, “happiness”, “longevity”. If we wish to get a bit loose, we might also note that kut, where the vowel is pronounced as /ə/, also has a meaning in English, sort of, designating the work of a barber in a low-end cash-only establishment with a sign outside that reads “Klips ‘n’ Kuts” or the like.

It’s not surprising, I mean, that kut should mean something — it means many things! But let’s focus on the Mongol-Turkic lineage already evoked in the above litany, and on the word’s several distinct but interrelated connotations in that ethnolinguistic space.

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To begin, we are all too aware we have gone far too long without expressing our …

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“We have now obtained reliable evidence that [sperm whales], too, are soniferous.” —Val Worthington and William Schevill, 1957

1.

Let me begin by reminding the reader that I make no secret of my belonging to that camp of scholars who maintain that it is a grave theoretical mistake, and likely an equally grave ethical breach, to attempt to render into familiar human categories the conceptual world, to the extent that we are yet able to understand it, of the sperm whales.

That they have a conceptual world, and a deep knowledge of their own history, of their current predicament in a world shared with human beings, of their own mortal destinies as individual beings and of their own fragile existence as a species — of this we can no longer have any doubt. But that all of this can be expressed in the familiar terms of our own fine-grained subdisciplinary divisions, which in some cases are only a few decades old (see for example Cornelia Raluca Szász’s chapter on “Sperm Whale Philosophy of Action”, or Ron Kumpe’s “Sperm Whale Philosophy of Sport and Leisure”), seems to me not only to fall woefully short of the volume’s own stated goal —providing “as full and rich an introduction as possible of the totality of theoretical articulations among the sperm whales of their own understanding of their place in the world, of their nature as social and reflective beings, of their representation of the structure of the world and its ultimate causes, their values and ideals as expressed in their social life, as well as their conception of ◑○●́●̂◉●̀ [which the editors rather inadequately render throughout as “beauty”1]”— but also to betray the delicate interspecies compact we have worked so hard to establish with the sperm whales ever since direct dialogue with them, mediated by AI, became possible in late 2025.

Of course there are individual sperm whales who have, at least according to most interpretations, given their explicit consent to this project, and we do not doubt in particular SWID-0293’s2 integrity and honesty in her willingness to participate as “co-editor” (in what appears to be mostly an honorary role), even as other elders politely —and on occasion, we must acknowledge, impolitely— declined similar invitations extended by Strasser and her team, on the grounds that, as SWID(P)-1452 famously clicked before slapping her tail fin on the ocean’s surface and plunging into the great dark depth to hunt some giant squid: “a cachalot has no need of books” [●̃ ◉ ○ ○̂ ●̀ ●́ ◉ ○̈ ○̂ ◐○̃ ●].3

But even without calling SWID-0293’s integrity into doubt we may still wonder whether her role as a mediator between the two communities has really enabled the human beings involved to come to anything like a reliable account of what they insist on calling rather grandiosely “cetacean philosophy”. As some readers will know, it was in view of such doubts as I am expressing here that I myself did not take part in the project, even though I was PI on the first research team to have successfully proven, in a paper published in August, 2025, that sperm whale clicks do indeed exhibit that key power of syntactic recursion that for so long linguists had taken to be uniquely present in human language.

Sperm whales, we now know, thanks to my team’s work, do have language, not in any figurative or reduced sense, but in the very fullest possible meaning of the word (I am not at all convinced of the recursive quality of Balaenoptera “song”, by contrast, though OUP/CostCo appears to be going ahead anyway with its plans to bring out Volume 2 of Cetacean Philosophy, on “Blue Whale Value Theory and Metaethics”, in early 2031).4 And they are using that language to generate novel propositions at every turn, to delight in their creative power and individual style, to take off on flights of dizzying abstraction, and to reconfirm, through recitation of memorized “classics”, their groundedness in ancient tradition. It will take considerably more time, however, for us to make any significant progress in really understanding what they are saying at all, and until we do it seems to me not only premature, but irresponsible and indeed unethical, to leap to any conclusions about what they are saying in such narrowly defined domains of distinctly human linguistic endeavor as “metaphysics” or “epistemology” — not to mention “philosophy of sport and leisure”!

Nonetheless, now that I have aired my significant reservations, allow me to turn to the work itself, and to try to address it, as charitably as possible, on its own terms. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that there is such a thing as “cetacean philosophy”. What do we know about it so far? What are the whales thinking?

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