Alex Dobrenko

The closest analog to a short-form, feed-based platform “creator” as a unique job in Scarry’s Busytown is a farmer. More specifically, it’s a sharecropper. TikTok splits 50% of ad revenue with creators who have at least 100,000 followers. Sharecroppers did not own the land they worked; the farmer provided the land and often housing and equipment,... See more

Cardboard’s ubiquity rests on simple claims: I can hold that, and I can go there

A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious

subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of

consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the

origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds... this is all great stuff.... See more

One thing that sets these intensely creative individuals apart, as far as I can tell, is that when sitting with their thoughts they are uncommonly willing to linger in confusion.To be curious about that which confuses. Not too rapidly seeking the safety of knowing or the safety of a legible question, but waiting for a more powerful and subtle... See more

For that bit of boilerplate, we can indirectly thank none other than Grigori Rasputin, the famously hard-to-assassinate Russian mystic and intimate of the last, doomed Romanovs. It all started when an exiled Russian prince, Felix Yusupov, and his wife Irina sued MGM in 1933 over the studio’s Rasputin biopic, claiming that the American production... See more

At least the puke is not your own.