Take a walk through the forest of songs I had on repeat throughout September 2026.

Artificial intelligence now participates in human culture and society, including in the production of knowledge. Its arrival unearths happily unsettled discussions about what it means for a human know something in isolation and in the context of a society. Our days will no longer consist merely of discussions about the weather, our exercise plans, and YouTube videos we watched; we will now find ourselves talking about AI's story, too.

A tour through the songs I discovered (or re-discovered) and obsessively listened to throughout August 2026.

We take a dive into the 1982 work of G. Paine regarding his formulation of a Lagrangian for the two-dimensional Lotka-Volterra equations.

Claude recently crushed me at producing a scientific result. It "accelerated" my research project. Now I need to ask myself what research is fundamentally about.

The Backrooms (2026) movie drowns in incomprehensible abstraction rather than tangling directly with liminopathy. With its non-plot, I found the film dissatisfying. Here, we deliberate.

A collection of thoughts that bubbled up during a reading of Thomas Nagel's essay "Sexual Perversion." What have we learned, and where do we stand having read it?

Who is featured in the picture on the landing page? And a non-exhaustive recap of my trip to Frisco, Texas.

A brief recollection of the unexpected feelings that erupted during an otherwise innocuous (or not?) visit to an academic conference.

Friends and acquaintances have graduated. The town is hollowing out.

I've been bathed in liminal spaces for some time now. It is exciting to see them come to the wide screen. Will the movie do them justice?

The ghosts of travel are the memories you have of the previous time you visited this place.

Tonight, I stood, abject, under the deep, penetrating orange of a street light at the base of the Red Rock Amphitheater under a dark and starry sky.

When the conference ended, a sinkhole opened right in the middle of it. Did anybody notice?

On the final "real" day of the conference, I bore witness to a vista so enveloping I had to reboot my systems and remind myself who I was.

A not-so-brief recapitulation of a session I attended at APS about applying tools and methods from physics to the human brain. It was in this critical session that I juggled the prospect of jumping sub-disciplines.

I got into a "fight" at APS without throwing a punch! Really, I have a bone to pick with the way "communication techniques" are presented in the context of science communication. We should care about changing minds, but we should also ask what makes a change of mind good in the first place and whether our communication techniques are as morally neutral as we sometimes present that they are.

And the entirety of the academy sets off for the snowy peaks!

A meditation on the art of building memory palaces, a robust mental skill that enables us to become memory champions. And a skill that may turn the familiar, warm places of our past into creaky, cobwebbed, haunted houses of our own making.