I am thrilled to hear that your substack is some kind of financial success. Happy for you because you so throughly deserve it, and also heartened that this kind of very high quality, um, I guess ‘narrowcasting’, can work financially. Cheers
Hi Justin, thank you for generously sharing your thoughts here on substack (and elsewhere). Your book „The Internet is not what you think it is“ helped me greatly to reduce my dependency on social media (mostly in the form of reader forums) and I'm grateful for this.
I find your way of thinking, of developing your thoughts in the moment of speaking (like once famously described by Heinrich von Kleist) causes some kind of addiction of its own. I especially liked your video with Greg LaBlanc in this regard. Even if, as a viewer, you don't seem to hold much in your hand in the end, it was still a great journey, a fun ride of thinking, and I believe, that teaching thinking (rather than just informing) in this way by example may be more important than the content itself.
If you should decide to move behind the paywall, I'd be happy to get a subscription gift! I hope you won't, because it would be a pity to limit the access to your marvelous and inspiring way of writing and thinking. Cheers, J.M.
what a pleasant surprise today to find your writing in my inbox after I finished my day’s work: building two new bookshelves in the bedroom (ran out of space in the adjacent library) for some new arrivals and old friends. In fact, the shelves are extra deep and spacing extra high because I needed space for the 1734 5th Edition of the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique of Bayle, with the nice long biography by Mr. Des Maizeaux. It just arrived from Paris last week. This was completed by the Oeuvres Diverses in 6 volumes (Hildesheim reprint), arriving from Groningen & Celle. Birthday presents to myself :). I also bought a huge magnifying glass for the modern miniature print. 🔍
On this shelf is also my complete Spinoza, Lucretius, Epicure, Moses Maimonides, and modern authors such as yourself, Fabian Scheidler, Jonathan Israel, Philipp Blom, Frans de Waal, Bernd Heinrich, etc. There’s also Kropotkin, Jared Diamond, and Carl Sagan... I aim to complete the shelf with some more 17th and 18th century Radical Enlightenment writers and clandestine manuscripts. I highly regret not being able to read Latin or Dutch!
Reading your new post today was very evocative - from the Thomas Mann pages en français to the vaporous Djins of Tunis reminding me of Byatt’s labyrinthine narratology. In fact I was just discussing the Medieval German “manuscript” in Die Dämonen from Doderer with my husband, after accidentally making the “discovery” that Anatole France’s La Rotisserie de la Reine Pédauque was also a product of “Archival Fugue”. (I just had the book in hand while rearranging the library, and saw the first footnote on the title page. This somehow escaped me when gobbling it up 20 years ago in Ithaca, NY. I need to look for France’s reference to Francine as Succubus in my 1921 analog volume.)
The second shelf is slowly filling up with oversized facsimile reprints of 19th century botanical color plates (tropical orchids) and heavy tomes of art and architecture. There are several meters of free space still empty, for the circulating “reading stash” that’s been taking over the chairs, benches, and tables all over the house.
Regarding Graeber (and Wengrow): I read both your reviews (also the one you recently removed from the ‘Stacks’). Forgive me my curiosity: are these publisher PR articles? They’re such a break from your usual self that I was quite perplexed. Especially because I read “The Dawn of Everything” Xmas 2021, due to hyped PR articles from the Atlantic and the Guardian. They didn’t live up to their product promise: showing how different social setups could be possible as exit from our current unsustainable predicament. The book had so many errors, I really had a hard time finishing without throwing it against the wall. I had to ask myself (like Bayle): either the authors were naive / not on top of their material / not proficient in their science, or they were engaged in bad-faith / dishonest / ideological sleight-of-hand & manipulation… for dubious Counter-Enlightenment interests (doing exactly the opposite of what they said they were trying to do). I would rather believe the first, though I cannot eliminate the second possibility. If God exists, he’s either incompetent or evil… or worse still: both. In the case of G&W, the only way out is to blame it on the publisher… either as bad gatekeepers, or as too good gatekeepers - for vested interests. This still doesn’t speak flatteringly about the integrity of G&W’s pen.
Sorry for the rant, I feel heartbroken for the idealistic and naive who might take them seriously and fall victim to political impuissance through magical thinking in disguise 🥸. In the worst case, this might trigger exactly the wrong kind of action.
Speaking of magical thinking: I’ve put my hands on In Search of the Third Bird. Not sure what exactly I should expect, but am sure we’re not on a Heideggerian Holzweg, but something fun and enchanting à Justin Smith & Friends.
Wishing you a good sojourn in the USA. As to longitudinal whacks: they might just be some escargotic commotion in the ether.
Feb 6, 2023·edited Feb 6, 2023Liked by Justin Smith-Ruiu
That's disappointing to hear that the earlier G&W piece was removed from the archives--from a purely essayistic standpoint, it was one of my favorites, and the opening vignette about the Turkish boy was especially striking. I'd be curious to hear why it was scrubbed.
Every claim in "The Dawn of Everything" might not hold up to the most rigorous scrutiny, but I still found it a very moving read. Even things that are not 100% factually accurate still have the power to inspire in non-nefarious ways. Graeber had his faults, but he was a dreamer and willing to take risks--qualities that are often in short supply in academics.
I reworked some of the material from the G&W review for a forthcoming publication, and rather than have to deal with the question whether any of the new piece had been previously published, I decided to just take the older piece offline. It will probably go back up at some point.
yes, I was also surprised about the purge when recently looking for the article again. The sketch of the boy observed while Prof. Smith was having his shoes polished was indeed memorable. I believe there was more evasion than direct engagement with the book in that review, if memory serves me right. The endorsement at the end felt a little disjointed from the rest of the text. I couldn’t make up my mind what to make of it: a kind and benevolent memory for a lost soul and perhaps friend, or a reworded blurb from the standardized PR text? The puzzle perplexed me.
Regarding your thought on G&W: I think there’s a clear distinction between fiction (legitimate dreaming, art) and truth-claims. Both registers are legitimate, provided we go about them honestly - giving the reader a transparent cue regarding truth-telling or play-dreaming. Part of why I love Justin Smith ‘s wide repertoire of writings is exactly because he moves effortlessly between the registers, without malice, negligence, or malpractice. I cannot say this about G&W. Whereas Prof. Smith operates with a dexterous scalpel and is an infinitely nimble and skillful word-weaver and idea sculptor, giving readers a fair warning when reality shifts into nocturnes, G&W knocks through genres like inebriated elephants in China shops, never caring about what a mess they leave behind for others to clean up. Their capacity for dreaming and hallucinating endangers unsuspecting readers, because they claim to write anthropology and history while in fact dabbling in magic mushrooms. The alert and experienced will smell a rat and be cautious and on guard. The wide-eyed and unsuspecting will fall to their lemming-deaths.
Here’s what I wrote about the book a while back. Take it with a pinch of salt as a private reading person with her own dilettante opinions:
“2/5 stars. Good idea, bad science, horrible editing…
I read this almost a year ago, because I read several hyped articles (Atlantic, Guardian), saying how phenomenal and innovative the Graeber & Wengrow team was, hitching Anthropology and Archeology together and going beyond Jared Diamond and “geographic determinism”. What sounded great turned out to be a jumbled mess. G&W wanted to say something about egalitarian societies, and how with the pending implosion of capitalism and unfolding of the climate catastrophe, we could look to ancient societies for creative inspiration about alternative social orders and economic models. I was especially interested in the story of agriculture and early agrarian societies.
However, what I read was a jumble of misinterpreted facts, and even creative (re)writing of history that doesn’t add up. I absolutely hated the first part about Hobbes vs Rousseau and the “European Enlightenment wouldn’t have been possible without the direct influence of Native American Enlightenment” - as if Spinoza’s ground-shaking philosophy that spawned the philosophical underground was directly borrowed from Amerindians… or that the Noble Savages [/ Non-Western view] wasn’t in vogue (Persian [& Chinese] Letters of Montesquieu) as cover for expressing otherwise censurable philosophical/religious/political ideas!
Even worse, W&G try to deny the impact of material conditions had on a society’s ability to choose its social system. Putting a people’s stronger centralized dictatorship vs decentralized egalitarianism down to “experimentation” and “creativity”. This is a gross error, as especially the seasonal shifts of societies from more hierarchical in winter during concentration of hunting to more nomadic loose bands in summer show how material shifts in environment and resource availability determines the range of freedom vs hierarchy available to a people to choose from.
Although an interesting idea of a book, and containing interesting facts, this book is gravely flawed in its research as well as argumentation. I don’t understand how such a badly composed book could have ended up being published, nor how reputable papers could have endorsed it with flaming PR. This book was a disappointment. For the uninitiated, it’s also a poison pill of wrong facts and untenable interpretations. This book needs a warning for “creative history”.
Jared Diamond is 1.000 times better and more lucid.
I bought a few other books from Graeber, based on recommendation from those who admired his support for the we’re the 99% movement. But I am afraid I will be bitterly disappointed. This Dawn of Everything book shows me they don’t take egalitarian politics too seriously. If anything, it plays into the hands of the 1% by making social hierarchy, economic systems, and political oppression a simple question of willpower and magical thinking. To help the 99%, you will need to be more concrete and materialist than that!
If you’re interested in equality, read “The Bonobo & The Atheist” of Frans de Waal instead. Absolutely wonderful book about innate egalitarianism. Or Kropotkin on equality & mutual aid - from animals to humans. Much better science and theory vs G&W’s Tower of Babel.”
I do feel strongly about G&W. Perhaps because they touch a subject close to my heart: how to exit the current collective human predicament. We need cool sharp thinking harnessed by warm dreaming hearts. They made mashed potatoes of it all.
I have a rather different memory of "The Dawn of Everything" (both the book and the JEHS article), but this is probably not the space to go into all of that. If that makes me one of the unsuspecting lemmings, then so be it!
That said, I will note the amusing irony of your comment that "Prof. Smith operates with a dexterous scalpel and is an infinitely nimble and skillful word-weaver and idea sculptor, giving readers a fair warning when reality shifts into nocturnes," since JEHS regularly posts fiction to this forum with no prior warning that we've moved out of the realm of essays and creative non-fiction. I recall one particular piece about "world criers" that I did not recognize as fiction until curiosity moved me to do some googling later on.
He's slowly made his intentions more explicit since it was first published, but "In Search of the Third Bird" operates in the same vein. (I mention this because you say you'll be reading it soon--notice the conspicuous absence of any indicators in the book's front matter that you're holding a work of fiction.) I discovered JEHS shortly before its publication, and I read the book over a two-week trip in the Yucatan January of last year. I was enthralled by this secret aesthetic cult of attention, only to (again) later find that it's a work of "historiographical metafiction" (itself a wordy enough label to mislead the inattentive reader--perhaps the point). At first I'd felt duped and more than a little gullible. Perhaps I am, but I also give credit to JEHS (and Burnett & Hansen) for their talent in creating historical and academic verisimilitude.
All that's to say: I think it's okay to be duped a bit around the margins as long as it's "for a good cause." (I credit JEHS's work in this space and also in the "What Is X?" episode on Authorship for changing my perspective on that.) And I do think G&W dupe only around the margins, since there's a more charitable interpretation of their work than what you've offered here. There's a *lot* of speculation in the book, but their core thesis--that the course of humanity has not been a linear one, that our present social arrangement is not a fait accompli, and that part of being human is having the freedom to choose otherwise as people have done repeatedly throughout history--requires far less than perfection from them.
"the elite institutions had been completely overrun by grosly immoral, criminal, vicious, and physically repulsive people, producing woefully terrible work, all perpetually coming up with new ways to honor their own awfulness and lack of achievement."
Already the case I'm afraid... stewards of capital and recipients of corporate cash, serially marrying their graduate students, replacing each tenure track position with four adjunct position...
I haven't figured out whether it's possible to send private messages on substack (rather: I tried and failed), so I'm contacting you on this way. To make it short: I'm sad to hear your substack will turn into a 'private party' event in the upcoming months, even though I understand you have all the best reasons for it. I've been reading your texts with great joy since I discovered them in september. They never fail to serve me as a breath of fresh air in the middle of a nearly purely analytical environment in my studies of philosophy. And I simply love your writing. Since you've suggested the possibility, I'd be delighted if I could keep reading your texts in the next months - even though as a student, the option of a paid subscription doesn't lie within my capabilities.
I've been reading your newsletter with pleasure for a while now and hope to continue doing so, but can't really justify paying the subscription cost at the moment, so I'd love one of the gift subscriptions. Thank you, and I will plan to switch to paid in the future. Good luck with all your new undertakings!
Oh my, you had me laughing out loud quite a few times during this piece...and this is also the best takedown of effective altruism I've seen (been waiting for someone to write it!). I intended on quoting your line about the "elite institutions" but I see someone has already done it. Chapeau!
Howdy; I'm in the midst of unpaid student teaching and would love to continue receiving The Hinternet while I do so. I promise to upgrade to a paid subscription once I'm gainfully employed again.
Postscript: I haven't had much time for the sort of reading it requires in the past few weeks, but I am greatly enjoying "In Search of the Third Bird".
I similarly would like to continue reading despite limited resources if possible; thank you in advance.
The end of the essay reminded me of Puck's final monologue: If we shadows have offended / Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumber'd here, / While these visions did appear. / And this weak and idle theme, / No more yielding but a dream, / Gentles, do not reprehend / If you pardon, we will mend.
Thanks be to God, but your essays are like fine wine, something sublime in all this mess and misery!
I am thrilled to hear that your substack is some kind of financial success. Happy for you because you so throughly deserve it, and also heartened that this kind of very high quality, um, I guess ‘narrowcasting’, can work financially. Cheers
Hi Justin, thank you for generously sharing your thoughts here on substack (and elsewhere). Your book „The Internet is not what you think it is“ helped me greatly to reduce my dependency on social media (mostly in the form of reader forums) and I'm grateful for this.
I find your way of thinking, of developing your thoughts in the moment of speaking (like once famously described by Heinrich von Kleist) causes some kind of addiction of its own. I especially liked your video with Greg LaBlanc in this regard. Even if, as a viewer, you don't seem to hold much in your hand in the end, it was still a great journey, a fun ride of thinking, and I believe, that teaching thinking (rather than just informing) in this way by example may be more important than the content itself.
If you should decide to move behind the paywall, I'd be happy to get a subscription gift! I hope you won't, because it would be a pity to limit the access to your marvelous and inspiring way of writing and thinking. Cheers, J.M.
Hi Jean, Thanks! I'll sign you up for a gift subscription. But I need to know your e-mail address first.
How long will you be away Justin? Bon voyage, et bon silence, et bonne écriture dans tous les cas.
De retour à Paris avant la fin de l'été, je le promets !
Safe travels.
Dear Professor Smith,
what a pleasant surprise today to find your writing in my inbox after I finished my day’s work: building two new bookshelves in the bedroom (ran out of space in the adjacent library) for some new arrivals and old friends. In fact, the shelves are extra deep and spacing extra high because I needed space for the 1734 5th Edition of the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique of Bayle, with the nice long biography by Mr. Des Maizeaux. It just arrived from Paris last week. This was completed by the Oeuvres Diverses in 6 volumes (Hildesheim reprint), arriving from Groningen & Celle. Birthday presents to myself :). I also bought a huge magnifying glass for the modern miniature print. 🔍
On this shelf is also my complete Spinoza, Lucretius, Epicure, Moses Maimonides, and modern authors such as yourself, Fabian Scheidler, Jonathan Israel, Philipp Blom, Frans de Waal, Bernd Heinrich, etc. There’s also Kropotkin, Jared Diamond, and Carl Sagan... I aim to complete the shelf with some more 17th and 18th century Radical Enlightenment writers and clandestine manuscripts. I highly regret not being able to read Latin or Dutch!
Reading your new post today was very evocative - from the Thomas Mann pages en français to the vaporous Djins of Tunis reminding me of Byatt’s labyrinthine narratology. In fact I was just discussing the Medieval German “manuscript” in Die Dämonen from Doderer with my husband, after accidentally making the “discovery” that Anatole France’s La Rotisserie de la Reine Pédauque was also a product of “Archival Fugue”. (I just had the book in hand while rearranging the library, and saw the first footnote on the title page. This somehow escaped me when gobbling it up 20 years ago in Ithaca, NY. I need to look for France’s reference to Francine as Succubus in my 1921 analog volume.)
The second shelf is slowly filling up with oversized facsimile reprints of 19th century botanical color plates (tropical orchids) and heavy tomes of art and architecture. There are several meters of free space still empty, for the circulating “reading stash” that’s been taking over the chairs, benches, and tables all over the house.
Regarding Graeber (and Wengrow): I read both your reviews (also the one you recently removed from the ‘Stacks’). Forgive me my curiosity: are these publisher PR articles? They’re such a break from your usual self that I was quite perplexed. Especially because I read “The Dawn of Everything” Xmas 2021, due to hyped PR articles from the Atlantic and the Guardian. They didn’t live up to their product promise: showing how different social setups could be possible as exit from our current unsustainable predicament. The book had so many errors, I really had a hard time finishing without throwing it against the wall. I had to ask myself (like Bayle): either the authors were naive / not on top of their material / not proficient in their science, or they were engaged in bad-faith / dishonest / ideological sleight-of-hand & manipulation… for dubious Counter-Enlightenment interests (doing exactly the opposite of what they said they were trying to do). I would rather believe the first, though I cannot eliminate the second possibility. If God exists, he’s either incompetent or evil… or worse still: both. In the case of G&W, the only way out is to blame it on the publisher… either as bad gatekeepers, or as too good gatekeepers - for vested interests. This still doesn’t speak flatteringly about the integrity of G&W’s pen.
Sorry for the rant, I feel heartbroken for the idealistic and naive who might take them seriously and fall victim to political impuissance through magical thinking in disguise 🥸. In the worst case, this might trigger exactly the wrong kind of action.
Speaking of magical thinking: I’ve put my hands on In Search of the Third Bird. Not sure what exactly I should expect, but am sure we’re not on a Heideggerian Holzweg, but something fun and enchanting à Justin Smith & Friends.
Wishing you a good sojourn in the USA. As to longitudinal whacks: they might just be some escargotic commotion in the ether.
Greetings from Bavaria,
Marianne
That's disappointing to hear that the earlier G&W piece was removed from the archives--from a purely essayistic standpoint, it was one of my favorites, and the opening vignette about the Turkish boy was especially striking. I'd be curious to hear why it was scrubbed.
Every claim in "The Dawn of Everything" might not hold up to the most rigorous scrutiny, but I still found it a very moving read. Even things that are not 100% factually accurate still have the power to inspire in non-nefarious ways. Graeber had his faults, but he was a dreamer and willing to take risks--qualities that are often in short supply in academics.
I reworked some of the material from the G&W review for a forthcoming publication, and rather than have to deal with the question whether any of the new piece had been previously published, I decided to just take the older piece offline. It will probably go back up at some point.
Dear Aaron,
yes, I was also surprised about the purge when recently looking for the article again. The sketch of the boy observed while Prof. Smith was having his shoes polished was indeed memorable. I believe there was more evasion than direct engagement with the book in that review, if memory serves me right. The endorsement at the end felt a little disjointed from the rest of the text. I couldn’t make up my mind what to make of it: a kind and benevolent memory for a lost soul and perhaps friend, or a reworded blurb from the standardized PR text? The puzzle perplexed me.
Regarding your thought on G&W: I think there’s a clear distinction between fiction (legitimate dreaming, art) and truth-claims. Both registers are legitimate, provided we go about them honestly - giving the reader a transparent cue regarding truth-telling or play-dreaming. Part of why I love Justin Smith ‘s wide repertoire of writings is exactly because he moves effortlessly between the registers, without malice, negligence, or malpractice. I cannot say this about G&W. Whereas Prof. Smith operates with a dexterous scalpel and is an infinitely nimble and skillful word-weaver and idea sculptor, giving readers a fair warning when reality shifts into nocturnes, G&W knocks through genres like inebriated elephants in China shops, never caring about what a mess they leave behind for others to clean up. Their capacity for dreaming and hallucinating endangers unsuspecting readers, because they claim to write anthropology and history while in fact dabbling in magic mushrooms. The alert and experienced will smell a rat and be cautious and on guard. The wide-eyed and unsuspecting will fall to their lemming-deaths.
Here’s what I wrote about the book a while back. Take it with a pinch of salt as a private reading person with her own dilettante opinions:
“2/5 stars. Good idea, bad science, horrible editing…
I read this almost a year ago, because I read several hyped articles (Atlantic, Guardian), saying how phenomenal and innovative the Graeber & Wengrow team was, hitching Anthropology and Archeology together and going beyond Jared Diamond and “geographic determinism”. What sounded great turned out to be a jumbled mess. G&W wanted to say something about egalitarian societies, and how with the pending implosion of capitalism and unfolding of the climate catastrophe, we could look to ancient societies for creative inspiration about alternative social orders and economic models. I was especially interested in the story of agriculture and early agrarian societies.
However, what I read was a jumble of misinterpreted facts, and even creative (re)writing of history that doesn’t add up. I absolutely hated the first part about Hobbes vs Rousseau and the “European Enlightenment wouldn’t have been possible without the direct influence of Native American Enlightenment” - as if Spinoza’s ground-shaking philosophy that spawned the philosophical underground was directly borrowed from Amerindians… or that the Noble Savages [/ Non-Western view] wasn’t in vogue (Persian [& Chinese] Letters of Montesquieu) as cover for expressing otherwise censurable philosophical/religious/political ideas!
Even worse, W&G try to deny the impact of material conditions had on a society’s ability to choose its social system. Putting a people’s stronger centralized dictatorship vs decentralized egalitarianism down to “experimentation” and “creativity”. This is a gross error, as especially the seasonal shifts of societies from more hierarchical in winter during concentration of hunting to more nomadic loose bands in summer show how material shifts in environment and resource availability determines the range of freedom vs hierarchy available to a people to choose from.
Although an interesting idea of a book, and containing interesting facts, this book is gravely flawed in its research as well as argumentation. I don’t understand how such a badly composed book could have ended up being published, nor how reputable papers could have endorsed it with flaming PR. This book was a disappointment. For the uninitiated, it’s also a poison pill of wrong facts and untenable interpretations. This book needs a warning for “creative history”.
Jared Diamond is 1.000 times better and more lucid.
I bought a few other books from Graeber, based on recommendation from those who admired his support for the we’re the 99% movement. But I am afraid I will be bitterly disappointed. This Dawn of Everything book shows me they don’t take egalitarian politics too seriously. If anything, it plays into the hands of the 1% by making social hierarchy, economic systems, and political oppression a simple question of willpower and magical thinking. To help the 99%, you will need to be more concrete and materialist than that!
If you’re interested in equality, read “The Bonobo & The Atheist” of Frans de Waal instead. Absolutely wonderful book about innate egalitarianism. Or Kropotkin on equality & mutual aid - from animals to humans. Much better science and theory vs G&W’s Tower of Babel.”
I do feel strongly about G&W. Perhaps because they touch a subject close to my heart: how to exit the current collective human predicament. We need cool sharp thinking harnessed by warm dreaming hearts. They made mashed potatoes of it all.
I have a rather different memory of "The Dawn of Everything" (both the book and the JEHS article), but this is probably not the space to go into all of that. If that makes me one of the unsuspecting lemmings, then so be it!
That said, I will note the amusing irony of your comment that "Prof. Smith operates with a dexterous scalpel and is an infinitely nimble and skillful word-weaver and idea sculptor, giving readers a fair warning when reality shifts into nocturnes," since JEHS regularly posts fiction to this forum with no prior warning that we've moved out of the realm of essays and creative non-fiction. I recall one particular piece about "world criers" that I did not recognize as fiction until curiosity moved me to do some googling later on.
He's slowly made his intentions more explicit since it was first published, but "In Search of the Third Bird" operates in the same vein. (I mention this because you say you'll be reading it soon--notice the conspicuous absence of any indicators in the book's front matter that you're holding a work of fiction.) I discovered JEHS shortly before its publication, and I read the book over a two-week trip in the Yucatan January of last year. I was enthralled by this secret aesthetic cult of attention, only to (again) later find that it's a work of "historiographical metafiction" (itself a wordy enough label to mislead the inattentive reader--perhaps the point). At first I'd felt duped and more than a little gullible. Perhaps I am, but I also give credit to JEHS (and Burnett & Hansen) for their talent in creating historical and academic verisimilitude.
All that's to say: I think it's okay to be duped a bit around the margins as long as it's "for a good cause." (I credit JEHS's work in this space and also in the "What Is X?" episode on Authorship for changing my perspective on that.) And I do think G&W dupe only around the margins, since there's a more charitable interpretation of their work than what you've offered here. There's a *lot* of speculation in the book, but their core thesis--that the course of humanity has not been a linear one, that our present social arrangement is not a fait accompli, and that part of being human is having the freedom to choose otherwise as people have done repeatedly throughout history--requires far less than perfection from them.
"the elite institutions had been completely overrun by grosly immoral, criminal, vicious, and physically repulsive people, producing woefully terrible work, all perpetually coming up with new ways to honor their own awfulness and lack of achievement."
Already the case I'm afraid... stewards of capital and recipients of corporate cash, serially marrying their graduate students, replacing each tenure track position with four adjunct position...
I haven't figured out whether it's possible to send private messages on substack (rather: I tried and failed), so I'm contacting you on this way. To make it short: I'm sad to hear your substack will turn into a 'private party' event in the upcoming months, even though I understand you have all the best reasons for it. I've been reading your texts with great joy since I discovered them in september. They never fail to serve me as a breath of fresh air in the middle of a nearly purely analytical environment in my studies of philosophy. And I simply love your writing. Since you've suggested the possibility, I'd be delighted if I could keep reading your texts in the next months - even though as a student, the option of a paid subscription doesn't lie within my capabilities.
I've been reading your newsletter with pleasure for a while now and hope to continue doing so, but can't really justify paying the subscription cost at the moment, so I'd love one of the gift subscriptions. Thank you, and I will plan to switch to paid in the future. Good luck with all your new undertakings!
Oh my, you had me laughing out loud quite a few times during this piece...and this is also the best takedown of effective altruism I've seen (been waiting for someone to write it!). I intended on quoting your line about the "elite institutions" but I see someone has already done it. Chapeau!
Howdy; I'm in the midst of unpaid student teaching and would love to continue receiving The Hinternet while I do so. I promise to upgrade to a paid subscription once I'm gainfully employed again.
Postscript: I haven't had much time for the sort of reading it requires in the past few weeks, but I am greatly enjoying "In Search of the Third Bird".
“Life deceives everyone except the individual who serenely accepts its few gifts and serenely makes the most of them.” Ivan Turgenev.
Fortunately -and despite my limited funds- life was bountiful with me.
A gift subscription to your Substack would be one more thing to be grateful for.
I too have limited resources and would like to keep reading -- thank you if possible, and if not, looking forward to your return.
I similarly would like to continue reading despite limited resources if possible; thank you in advance.
The end of the essay reminded me of Puck's final monologue: If we shadows have offended / Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumber'd here, / While these visions did appear. / And this weak and idle theme, / No more yielding but a dream, / Gentles, do not reprehend / If you pardon, we will mend.