The Social Reckoning (2026) • View trailerFour stars (out of five); rated R, for profanityAvailable via: Movie theatersBy Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.18.26Although director David Fincher’s The Social Network was a blistering indictment of the greed and betrayal involved with Facebook’s founding and subsequent rise in popularity — fueled by scripter Aaron Sorkin’s marvelously barbed, Oscar-winning adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires — that film now…

Ever wondered what North America would look like if the oceans rose by a staggering 690 meters?The Sliding Shores map gives us a fascinating peek at a radically transformed United States. Granted, even if every global ice sheet melted tomorrow, sea levels would max out around 80 meters - meaning this apocalyptic drowning is strictly theoretical. But as an exercise in extreme topographic visualization, it makes for a captivating spatial experiment.If you’re looking to explore actual,…

Reading Time: 37 minutes While I appreciate you are all REELING from the latest revelations suggesting that Reform UK’s membership might in fact comprise SOME ACTUAL RACISTS, I had quite a weird experience this week which I am going to share with you instead of Doing Commentary (you’re welcome!). So as a result of Google’s slightly odd mechanics, I occasionally get emails meant for Other Matt Muirs around the world – this is how I have learned that there are lots of Muirs in New Zealand, for…

This is David, your trusted gatekeeper between your precious attention and the firehose of the wild web. You are reading the Weekly Filet, the newsletter for curious minds who love it when something makes them go «Huh, I never thought of it this way!». As every Friday, I'm here to help you make sense of what’s happening, and imagine what could be. It's great to have you.1. The bombarding of childhoodHere's a little challenge for you: Read this article and whenever you read kids or children,…

A few weeks back Daniel and I worked collaboratively this piece making fun of Christine Brennan. We did something similar tonight in re: a similarly idiotic Threads post. I'm still working on editing it but it's a banger. While editing, I caught myself thinking about what I wrote yesterday. It felt good to be in that part of my brain. I don't mind sharing that I took a look at some MA programs at TMU, York, and the University of Toronto earlier today. Would I go back to school at 48 or 49?…

Individuals often have good reasons to indulge in delusions, such as re superstition, astrology, religion, or their own personal destiny. But society usually has less of a reason to indulge them in its policy analysis. For example, we shouldn’t be funding larger institutions of research to elaborate astrological theories. And even if people find value in their folk physics, folk econ, or folk psych, researchers shouldn’t be working to extend these frameworks, though we might want to understand…

I’m reading Ivan Illich’s “Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health” for the third time, and Illich’s writing reminds me of the writings of Nietzsche in that they are gnomic, aphoristic, metaphorical, and poetic. Readers are left to do a great deal of work as they are charmed by the rhythms, images, and wit. Illich’s book might have had a much longer shelf-life if had concentrated on the gnomic, aphoristic, metaphorical, and poetic and not included so many data and…

Reclaim Hosting (you know they are the best web hosts in the universe) published a new case study on the massive use of WordPress blogs at Baruch College in New York City. Big as in 10,000 sites for 60,000 users over 20 some years. I have great memories of the years I got the invitation from Mikhail Gershovich to be part of the Schwarz Commuication Symposiums and as well when he and Luke Waltzer started it up, here’s a screenshot I had from 2008: Blogs @ Baruch runs WPMU flickr photo by…

Time announced its roundup of what it thinks are the best inventions of 2026. Among them are John Ternus — or so it would seem — and the iPhone Duo. Andrew R. Chow profiled Apple’s new CEO, and this excerpt has caught some eyes: But Ternus and other Apple executives say they aren’t concerned. In the midst of a populist AI backlash, they contend that they are building a modest but personalized and privacy-preserving form of AI that will actually help ordinary people as opposed to merely dazzling…

Love in Venice Seen in 2017. I wonder if that particular craze has passed. Quote of the Day ”These are stochastic-parrot clever-hans software tools, potentially very useful when properly harnessed, but a source of madness to people who fall into the same trap that the gullible fell into when interacting with Weizenbaum’s ELIZA back in the day.” Brad DeLong on LLMs. Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news Mozart | Concerto For Two Pianos, K. 365; 3rd Movement. Link Long Read of the Day…

There are two things that as a male I’m statistically way more likely to be into but for some reason am not: gambling and video games. On gambling, McKay Coppins’ article “Sucker: My Year As A Degenerate Gambler” in The Atlantic was really eye-opening, as was the recent Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know episode “Are Prediction Markets Ruining Everything?” There are giant, obscenely funded industries dedicated to preying on human psychology and parting people from their money, and I’m just not…

Today, we’ll talk about the nature of truth. And I know what’s your first reaction: “how do I unsubscribe?”. Look, I’ve got no idea. I’ve been trying to figure that out myself.That’s my purse! I don’t know you!I know. I cover a variety of topics, but this is probably not what you signed up for. At the same time, this blog has only one rule: I shy away from current events. I’m getting older, so I’m deliberately giving up reach in favor of content that stands the test of time. News-related…

I missed the first day of DTX+UCX London this year, but managed to carve out some time to attend the second. Unsurprisingly, AI was everywhere. Agents, models, copilots and AI-powered features in seemingly every contact centre, networking and cybersecurity management platform. I’m not suggesting these developments aren’t important, but after a while the messages start to sound remarkably similar. Fortunately, there were some sessions that explored rather more interesting questions. Not so much…

Robert Burton (1577-1640), Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 2, Memb' I, Subs. 6 (vol. 1, pp. 215-216 of the Everyman edition): So many several ways are we plagued and punished for our fathers' defaults: in so much that, as Fernelius truly saith, "It is the greatest part of our felicity to be well born, and it were happy for humankind, if only such parents as are sound of body and mind should be suffered to marry." An husbandman will sow none but the best and choicest seed upon his land; he…

The following is my artist statement for onemillionedits.art I keep coming back to what it means to be part of something other people can change. I mostly think of this in relation to communities and social interactions, but a shared canvas becomes an interesting way to explore that. You can claim a space, put something of yourself into it, and feel attached to what you’ve made there. It can feel like home. Someone else might relate to that and want to build on it, or see it as a place for…

[This is a guest post by Rikab Gambhir. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] First, they came for the artists, and I did not speak out, because I was not an artist. Then, they came for the mathematicians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a mathematician. Then, they came for the physicists, and it was actually really cool and they gave me free tokens and promised to solve my entire field for me and now I can finally devote myself…

Brent Lang writing for IndieWire: With only one member of its creative team returning, Sony Pictures shied away from selling it as a sequel, but the studio still sprinkled bits of “The Social Network’s” DNA into promotional materials. The Social Reckoning, directed by Aaron Sorking, a continuation of sorts of 2010’s The Social Network, is poorer, it seems, for the absence of David Fincher, and Jesse Eisenberg. Fincher’s obligations to Netflix kept him away, while Eisenberg, among other things,…

Thursday, October 15, 2026 - 12:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project This book and the previous one I blogged could hardly be more different in approach, given that they both revolve generally around intersexuality. While DeVun focused on philosophy and symbolism in medieval Europe generally, while also addressing the practical consequences for people with ambiguous bodies, Linton narrows in on the specific concerns of 19th century France and the interaction of medical and literary discources.…

Choosing not to intervene in suffering preserves autonomy. Withholding assistance respects the dignity of self-determination. "I'm not ignoring you. I'm honoring your independence." Of all the principles in the New Morality™ framework, this is the one that practitioners most often encounter with skepticism moreso than hostility. The framework rarely produces hostility but a kind of hesitation may arise. It is a feeling that something is being asked of them that runs against the grain. The…

Inspired by Khem's email to me which riffed on my post, online and offline. Heya, Imperfect Hi Khem, Your post was super interesting to me. Because it's sort of a concept I haven't been able to dutifully explore and map out very well. Thanks for your reply! Well, you're in luck, because your reply inspired my very own below. Hope that it's a map that you and other readers enjoy exploring. There's been a pull with people looking to limit their online use, my friends talk about it constantly.…

From the Fall of the Berlin Wall until about a decade ago my animating intellectual question was pretty much, ‘how did a small number of natural sciences become qualitatively more impressive than the social sciences?’ Because I met the late George Smith relatively early in my thinking about this (as an undergraduate), I often formulated this question in terms of evidence; he liked his version of my question as ‘how to turn data into high-quality evidence?’ And his striking answer was (to…

Now it's time for the reactions I got when I made my point about the story. Context After raising concerns about how migration is represented in the textbook, I wrote to the publisher. You can find the whole email here: Hamid's Story and the Politics of Gratitude in a German Language Coursebook. Below is the reply from the publisher, with my reflections right after each part. In the emails below, the parts in bold are what I changed from the originals (anonymisation, removed passages). Email…

A key theme of the conference will be ‘Archiving and Curating Women’s Media Histories: Feminist Approaches, Practices and Possibilities’. The theme will foreground the importance of archivists and curators in the dynamic processes of doing women’s media histories. The archival turn in women’s media histories has produced a rich tradition of new work and has innovated enabling methodologies. This conference seeks to foster further dialogue among archival researchers, professional archivists, and…

Unless we find new ways to drive adaptation besides mass death and fragmentation, our civilizations may keep falling and rising indefinitely. I see 3 new ways: let capitalism run most all life areas, run small groups by speculative market estimates of future group adaptive success, or run big groups by such price estimates of achieving big goals in conflict with civilization collapse. All three ways rely on strong selection among market traders creating information that lets groups stay…

A new press release from the Simons Foundation, calling for workshops and other initiatives centered on mathematics in the era of AI.

Mugwort may well be the most cross-culturally consistent herb I've researched for this project, and I'd like to devote this article to it and do it properly, as I feel that it demonstrates the reach of folk knowledge quite nicely, or, in this particular case, the lack thereof that still leads to the same conclusions. A plant with many namesMugwort has been known under a variety of names in various European countries, including cronewort and felon herb; and, fittingly perhaps, Anglo-Saxon…

Over the course of the semester, I’ve been ruminating on the idea of a device free classroom. This is a nation wide trend that often begins with faculty abandoning devices such as the dreaded “powerpointer” (and embracing slides), avoiding enshittified Learning Management Systems, and not using phones in the classroom. Eventually students are drawn into process by leaving their phones and laptops in their bag and engaging more fully in the learning process while thinking more critically about…

Why Teach Philosophy is a new series of interviews with philosophers known for their teaching, their research on philosophy pedagogy, or their work on curriculum design. Created by Russell Marcus, professor of philosophy at Hamilton College, the interviews, he says, are “an offshoot of a larger research project about philosophical learning goals.” Currently there are interviews with David W. Concepción (Ball State), Mo Janzen (Anoka Ramsey CC), László Kőszeghy (International Baccalaureate),…

A friend reports being beset by requests from book clubs, readers circles, reading groups, to prepare some remarks for the edification of their members on the subject of his most recent book. He has a website, which may be critical in attracting these enquiries. Interacting with these requests eventually leads to a request for a donation to defray the costs of the event. The same problem was being reported recently on the SHARP listserv (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, &…

We now know enough about the brain to realize that its mystery will always remain. Like a work of art, we exceed our materials. ~Johan LehrerWhen our daughter was a preschooler, authority figures informed parents that the human brain was fully formed by around five-years-old. After that, there would be no new brain cells, which was why, they told us, the early years were so important. These were the scientific facts. Just a few days ago, a parent of a preschooler told me that the director of…