Elon’s Academy

We’d better imagine something completely different, and fast. “The scenario that follows,” cartoonish though it is, “is built entirely on Musk’s own statements.” More than “perplexing”… “Imagine a day in 2035. …students port their Neuralinks into Grokipedia modules on history. They learn that the term “slave” originally referred to white people and the British Empire was important mostly for ending African slavery. Terms like “racism” and “sexism” never appear as they have been proven to correlate directly with the “woke mind virus”—considered eradicated since 2032. The great error of history in the dark years of the early twenty-first century was that “weak makes right.” This was part of what is described as the “vampire cult” of education now mercifully superseded. The powerful, she learns, should never apologize. Even great civilizations, though, do not last forever. She absorbs the surprising fact that all empires have fallen for the same reason: low birth rates. Fewer people mean not only less labor power—no longer relevant due to the replacement of almost all workers by humanoid robots—but, more importantly, less human intelligence. As she has been taught many times, intelligence is the “the primary evolutionary vector for humans.” On guard against further decline, her science class teaches her about the latest developments in selective human breeding for higher intelligence, including “iterated embryo selection” which allows for choosing specific genetic alleles and cross-fertilizing them without implanting them in a womb, as well as the now-standard “spell-checking” of genetic code to remove all mutations. Learning about this technology is framed as a patriotic duty to ensure strong offspring and reduce future burdens on the privatized health system. It is incumbent on smart women like her to produce at least 2.1 children. She is reminded again of the self-evident truth that there are only two genders and of the evils of past decades, when people changed their genders in what is now recognized as “child mutilation and sterilization.” Such actions are now punishable by imprisonment. More important of course is the pursuit of digital superintelligence. Advances have already made possible the creation of a fleet of humanoid robots ten times the human population on earth. They are a constant presence on streets and in homes. The school itself is maintained and guarded by them. They also lead the gym class, which doubles as border defense education with drills and carbon-fiber weapons. On the way home, the air is hazy with vapor and filled with a low-level hum from the cooling towers of the Neural Districts—massive data center complexes ringing the city. A Tesla sign on a fence reads “Data is Sovereignty.” Asking her parents why the trees are dead and the streambeds dry, they respond “critical infrastructure.” At home, the lights are dim because “nonessential use” is rationed to supply the data centers at peak hours. She talks to her parents about Mars. Starship is now launching twenty times a day and the rockets have become fully reusable, but the launch window only comes every two years. Promotional videos and gleeful simulations populated by animated companion AIs circulate constantly on X. One more push, one more sacrifice, they all sing, and humanity will ascend.” — Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff https://a.co/0i68r6H4

Pragmatism as anti-authoritarianism

[And as I read it, existentialism at its core is also about freedom in defiance of authority... but is this compromised by its ideological varieties? jpo] Richard Rorty:

Cosmic existentialism

    [and humanism/anti-authoritarianism/pragmatism...]

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot

“Existentialism was increasingly passé—a naïve relic of ‘Descartes and the Enlightenment’”…

The Men Who Made Theory French 

...Emily Eakin’s “The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory” (Penguin Press) argues persuasively that it wasn’t. Eakin is a senior editor at the Times Book Review (and previously an editor at this magazine) who, like her fictional counterparts, hails from the Midwest. Unlike them, she fell hard for theory. As a sophomore at Harvard—not the hottest hotbed of deconstruction in the Ivy League (that would be Yale) but close—she became a literature concentrator, as theory students were known. Soon, she was copying passages from Derrida into her journal. “Theory was cool,” Eakin recalls. “Theory was French. Theory was also, strange though it might sound, sexy. . . . There was a libidinal rush at seeing reality, language, the human psyche, pried open and ripped apart.”

At last, representation for the theory-pilled girl! Part memoir, part biography, part philosophy primer, “The Frenchmen” interleaves Eakin’s bildungsroman with careful close readings and details of her subjects’ lives. Lacan, Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, and de Man are all present as mononymic embodiments of their thought. But they are also present as themselves—as Jacques, Louis, Roland, Michel, Gilles, Félix, Jacques, and Paul. (This last one is not technically a Frenchman, Eakin concedes, “but a French-speaking Belgian who taught in the French department at Yale.”) Along the way, Eakin introduces their intellectual forefathers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and, at the edges, even some women: Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Luce Irigaray. For those of us who learned to see French theorists as stars in a void, as discrete but brilliant points of light, reading “The Frenchmen” feels like being handed a map of the constellations. All sorts of hitherto obscured connections are illuminated.

Theory emerged from the hothouse intellectual climate of postwar Paris. In the fifties, the dominant philosophical movement in France was existentialism, which, with its humanist ethos and its emphasis on the freely choosing individual, offered a generation shattered by the Second World War a way to talk about meaning in a world rendered meaningless by its horrors. But, to a nascent cohort of French philosophers, existentialism was increasingly passé—a naïve relic of “Descartes and the Enlightenment, of an obsolete, romantic past,” Eakin writes. (In Lévi-Strauss’s 1955 memoir, “Tristes Tropiques,” he called existentialism “a sort of shop-girl metaphysics.”) By the media-saturated, technologically advancing sixties, it seemed that systems, not individuals, were the forces governing reality.

Where existentialists saw man condemned to freedom, the so-called structuralists saw man constrained by an “impersonal regime of the system and the subject,” Eakin writes. Some of these systems were political and social, like the state and the family. Some were conceptual, like “madness” and “reason.” The elemental structure that determined all the others was language. Knowledge was not possible without language, the structuralists argued; everything we knew about the world was filtered through language’s scrim and shaped by its architecture. A precise understanding of structure required a scientific understanding of language, and for that structuralist philosophers turned to linguistics... 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/03/the-frenchmen-emily-eakin-book-review#rid=9385c9fa-074d-4b1d-a0b4-36fe6bc3a75c&q=dayna+tortorici

Michael Sugrue: Husserl - Phenomenology and the Life World

This lecture explores the complex world of Edmund Husserl, a key figure in 20th-century philosophy known for his rigorous approach to phenomenology. Dr. Michael Sugrue breaks down how Husserl sought to build an indubitable foundation for knowledge by looking inward at the structures of human consciousness. The video examines the challenging balance between this internal, subjective focus and the desire for universal, scientific certainty. Throughout the discussion, you'll learn why Husserl felt that modern science had lost its way by ignoring our personal experience of the world. Ultimately, it’s a fascinating look at the struggle to define the self and reality in an increasingly materialistic age.

The 3 elements of stupidity

Outsourcing your critical thinking, being willfully ignorant, conforming (Bonhoeffer, via Jonny Thomson) https://youtu.be/HbQ-t8GXYTA?is=7JFt8t7OJUN6fqpE

In the presence of hope

“Trudeau has produced a steady stream of fierce social criticism for nearly sixty years and has no intention of changing his tune anytime soon. He remains an eternal optimist who vows to continue to make the most of whatever breathing room he is given. As the cartoonist emphasizes, “It’s a lot easier to get through the day in the presence of hope.””

— Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News into Art by Joshua Kendall
https://a.co/0crdHVEP

Defiant optimism

… Humans are future-oriented creatures. Not being able to look ahead deprives us of what matters most. Data collected in an ongoing study on people’s well-being showed that young adults across the world score low not just on happiness but on eudaemonistic well-being, including meaning, purpose and fulfilling relationships.

As an adolescent, I took solace in the saying “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” This aphorism, often attributed to Martin Luther, wasn’t about the joy of digging holes. It represented defiant optimism in the face of uncertainty. In the hardest moments of my youth, my goals gave me dignity and agency. When the present felt unbearable, my aspirations allowed me to transcend my surroundings. I think about sitting in the back seat of my rusty car, clutching an SAT book. I still bear the scars of my work ethic; I wish I’d known, like today’s youth, how to give myself more grace. But I also wish they understood how the dream itself illuminated the path a few feet ahead of me, until I stood on solid ground.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/opinion/gen-z-ambition-millennials-career.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

“forget your Platonic essentialism”

“…each of us is a composite, comprising myriad cells, each cell with its own genome, many of those genomes acquiring aberrations all their own and diverging, click by click of the mutational ratchet, from the DNA in the zygote from which we have grown. So forget your Platonic essentialism when it comes to human identity. We are jumbles, as Khamsi variously illustrates. That’s why I called Beyond Inheritance a crosscutting book. It cuts across disciplines and diseases, across fortunate accidents and piteous dilemmas, across time and across scale, to remind us of the wisdom of Heraclitus: the ultimate constant is change.” David Quammen, Song of the Cell, NYRB 

“forget your Platonic essentialism”

“…each of us is a composite, comprising myriad cells, each cell with its own genome, many of those genomes acquiring aberrations all their own and diverging, click by click of the mutational ratchet, from the DNA in the zygote from which we have grown. So forget your Platonic essentialism when it comes to human identity. We are jumbles, as Khamsi variously illustrates. That’s why I called Beyond Inheritance a crosscutting book. It cuts across disciplines and diseases, across fortunate accidents and piteous dilemmas, across time and across scale, to remind us of the wisdom of Heraclitus: the ultimate constant is change.” David Quammen, Song of the Cell, NYRB 

Insecticide

Or anti-natalism

Introduction to Unweaving the Rainbow - Richard Dawkins

https://youtu.be/FQAPmA0vnlE?is=tzb2FhGvi9o83UIX

"You are extremely lucky to be here" - Richard Dawkins

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hKmbXApKLa0&feature=shared

Just our luck

…Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous. Because we experience that miracle every day, we treat it as ordinary, even guaranteed, mostly unnoticed at all. We postpone joy, assuming there will always be more time. We don’t see the beauty in small moments. We simply go about the business of life, without taking a second to notice life itself. In making this comment, I am aware that in the time-driven, frantic pace of our world today, many people do not It is almost impossible to wrap our heads around such things. We could not have had this grand perspective as recently as a century ago. And we have found it not through Prince Henry’s ships but through our laboratories, our telescopes, and our minds. So the question is: What are we to make of the fantastically improbable fact of our existence, our moment of life? Or, as Mary Oliver asks in the last lines of her poem “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.” I can speak only for myself. First of all, gratitude ought to replace entitlement. Gratitude not only for my great good fortune in a long chain of accidents, but gratitude to the individual human beings who have helped me along the way. Some years ago, I went to a Buddhist meditation retreat and learned about the concept of the “retinue,” a constellation of mentors that one imagines hovering nearby. Attempting to put this beautiful idea into practice, I collected the photographs of a couple dozen people who have guided me in my life—parents, high-school teachers, college teachers, music teachers, rabbis, colleagues. Some had already passed away. I made a poster of the images and hung it above my desk. Each day, I look up at the poster and give gratitude. It seems like a simple thing, but the gesture helps me position myself in the world, helps me slow down and take a moment to acknowledge my good fortune as the recipient of caring attention and the good fortune of simply being alive. Two millennia ago, the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius understood the fragility of life when he wrote in his Meditations: “Whatever you do, whatever you project, so do and so project as one who may at this very moment depart out of this life.” With my one brief moment, I can try to make the world a slightly better place. Gratitude without action is empty. The mentors hovering above my desk all gave me something. Although I cannot return the favor to each of them individually, I can return it to the world. I can attempt to pass on the kindness and good faith and caring. There is an irony here. As each of us dwindles in size by comparison to the cosmic stretches of space and of time, our individual lives, our improbable existence becomes more and more important. With the understanding of my great good fortune, I also feel a sense of responsibility. But to whom, or to what, am I responsible? Not the universe, which is without mind. And not the huge number of human beings who could have been but never were. I can hardly be responsible to people who do not exist. I believe it is a responsibility to myself—to not waste my precious life. In the immense hallways of time and of space, out of the fantastic number of potential lives and the infinite chain of accidents that led to this moment, I am here. I breathe. I see. I feel. I experience this grand spectacle of a cosmos I find myself in. That is not a thing to be wasted, or left unobserved. Alan Lightman Notes: A longer version of this essay was published in the Atlantic on June 2, 2026 https://open.substack.com/pub/alanlightman1/p/the-ordinary-miracle-of-existing?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Happily skeptical of Systems

One of Simone de Beauvoir’s funniest lines is in The Prime of Life where she shades elitist philosophers for their obsession with creating a “lunacy known as a ‘philosophical system’.” This was why she resisted the label of ‘philosopher’ and was more interested in living attitudes and practical solutions. My friend Massimo Pigliucci’s excellent new book How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic: The Power of Doubt in a Meaningful Life—Lessons from Cicero’s Philosophy starts with a similar premise and links it back to the ancient Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero – a member of the Skeptical Academy in Athens in 387 BCE and Pigliucci’s main philosophical guide through the book. Pigliucci writes in his introduction: … https://open.substack.com/pub/skyecleary/p/five-ways-to-be-a-happy-skeptic?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Iris

Today is the birthday of Iris Murdoch (books by this author), born in Dublin (1919) and raised in London. Her parents met in Dublin during World War I. Her English father’s cavalry regiment was stationed there, and on his way to church one Sunday, he met a girl who sang in the church choir. They married in 1918. Iris was an only child, with a happy home life. She once described her family as “a perfect trinity of love.” Her mother was always singing, and had a very happy personality. Her father enjoyed discussing books with Iris, and she felt — even as a young girl — that she would be a writer one day. She studied philosophy at Oxford and Cambridge, where she met Ludwig Wittgenstein. During World War II, she worked for the United Nations, helping refugees displaced by the war. While she was working in Belgium, she met Jean-Paul Sartre. After the war, she returned to Oxford as a lecturer, and spent some time studying Sartre’s work, especially his fiction. She was interested in the way that a writer could use fiction to express bigger ideas.

She wrote her first novel, Under the Net, in 1954. Reviews were generally positive, and the book was named one of Modern Library’s 100 Best English-language Novels of the 20th Century. Murdoch went on to write 25 more novels, including The Bell (1958), The Black Prince (1973), The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), and The Sea, the Sea (1978), which won a Booker Prize. She also wrote plays, poetry, and philosophical works. Her novels often deal with things like the illusion of free will, the comedy of the sexes, and the complex relationship of good and evil. In particular, she grappled with writing about moral goodness without sounding preachy. She told The Paris Review: “Plato remarks in The Republic that bad characters are volatile and interesting, whereas good characters are dull and always the same. This certainly indicates a literary problem. It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don’t know much about goodness. Attractive bad characters in fiction may corrupt people, who think, So that’s OK. Inspiration from good characters may be rarer and harder, yet Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov and the grandmother in Proust’s novel exist.”

Oxford literature student John Bayley glimpsed Murdoch riding her bike past his window one day, and fell in love at first sight. They were married in 1956. Even though they were very close, she kept parts of her life separate from him. She had many affairs with men and women, but in her opinion they had nothing to do with Bayley or her commitment to their marriage. In his memoir Elegy for Iris (1999), Bayley wrote, “In early days, I always thought it would be vulgar — as well as not my place — to give any indications of jealousy, but she knew when it was there, and she soothed it just by being the self she always was with me, which I soon knew to be wholly and entirely different from any way that she was with other people.”

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-wednesday-july-15-2026/

Rick and Morty - You pass Butter

https://youtu.be/X7HmltUWXgs?is=AV38HZCItk0ZsP0R

Whose purpose?

“it is often said that we are here to do God’s will. If this were true we would be like the house-cleaning monster described earlier. Our lives would have a purpose for the being that created us but not a purpose for us. We would each be like Sartre’s being-in-itself–an object to be used for the ends of others–and not a being-for-itself–a conscious being making choices meaningful for itself. If we found that our sole purpose was to serve God then we might think that was a worse fate than to have no predetermined purpose at all. Is it better to be slaves with a role in the universe or to be free people left to create a role for ourselves?” — What's It All About?: Philosophy & the Meaning of Life by Julian Baggini

What's It All About?: Philosophy & the Meaning of Life

“‘You’re T. S. Eliot,’ said a taxi driver to the famous poet as he stepped into his cab. Eliot asked him how he knew. ‘Ah, I’ve got an eye for a celebrity,’ he replied. ‘Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him, “Well, Lord Russell, what’s it all about?” And, do you know, he couldn’t tell me.’ On which man is the joke in this true story? Is it Lord Russell, the great philosopher, who despite all his supposed intelligence and wisdom was unable to answer the cabby’s question? Surely if anyone can tell us ‘what it’s all about’, the world’s greatest living philosopher can? Or is it the taxi driver, who expected to hear the solution to such a big problem in the course of a short journey? Even if Russell knew the answer, wouldn’t it require time and patience to explain the secrets of the universe? Perhaps the best answer is that neither man merits mockery. Certainly not Russell, for if it were possible to answer the question properly in ten minutes someone would already have publicly done so and the taxi driver would not have needed to ask. But nor should we mock the taxi driver for his ignorance. His question is one almost everyone asks at some point. The problem is that it is vague, general and unclear. It is not so much a single question but a place-holder for a whole set of questions: Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? Is it enough just to be happy? Is my life serving some greater purpose? Are we here to help others or just ourselves? What’s it all about? To answer these questions I believe we need to undertake a rational, secular inquiry. By ‘secular’ I do not mean ‘atheist’. I mean simply that our arguments must not start from any supposed revealed truths, religious doctrines or sacred texts. Instead they must appeal to reasons, evidence and arguments that can be understood and assessed by all, whether they have a faith or not. This is because even for many believers, the authority of established religions cannot be taken as absolute. As we understand the great diversity of faiths in the world, the historical events and forces that shaped their doctrines and sacred texts, and the fallibility of many of their leaders, the idea that they provide direct access to absolute truth loses its credibility. Divinely inspired or not, the human hand is all too clearly present. That means that even if we do believe, we cannot accept religious teachings unquestioningly. We must use our own intelligence to determine for ourselves whether or not the answers they provide stand up. And because at some stage most of us can’t help but wonder what it’s all about, we can’t avoid this kind of philosophizing for ever...” — What's It All About?: Philosophy & the Meaning of Life by Julian Baggini

There’s an Ancient Solution to Our Modern Crisis of Attention

An idea a day keeps angsty distraction away:

“… Abraham Lincoln owned few books but mastered them all. By reading aloud and chewing on the likes of Aesop and Shakespeare as a young man, he forged a mind he compared to steel: “very hard to scratch anything on” but “almost impossible, after you get it there, to rub it out.”

I thought of Lincoln the other day as I pondered the character called the Autodidact in Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel “Nausea.” This strange fellow haunts the local library with the goal of reading every book in alphabetical order. Stuffed with facts but starved for meaning, he embodies the belief that volume of information is a substitute for depth of understanding.

By anchoring each day in a single idea, I’ve spent 20 years trying to avoid the Autodidact’s hollow fate. I no longer chase the endlessly receding horizon of staying informed. I’ve traded the anxiety of the shallows for the untapped wisdom of deep waters…”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/12/opinion/attention-crisis-seneca.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Shallow Surfacemaxxers

Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare

…some have responded by seizing the female obsession with looks, already rooted in misogyny, and rebranding it with maximum toxicity—in other words, by becoming looksmaxxers.

Looksmaxxing is a product of the men’s-rights movement, whose adherents previously gathered in fringe corners of the internet, where they solidified their reactionary community around the conviction that women do not deserve equal rights. Now much of their thinking has infiltrated nu-conservatism, and the rest of us have been forced to learn about Braden Peters, better known as Clavicular—the king of the looksmaxxing sphere. Peters, who is twenty, looks like a hot guy in a fraternity; his most remarkable traits are his obsessive commitment to achieving this beauty—he’s used peptides, supplements, meth, hammers—and the total lack of joy it seems to bring him. (“I have, like, no regard for, like, my happiness,” he said recently, on a podcast. “Like, that seems like a very immature idea.” A few months later, he collapsed at a club after a suspected overdose.) The table of contents on the message board looksmax.org enumerates every aspect of the male physique and life style that can be quantified and improved: more than a dozen sections (Eye Area, Craniology, Penis, etc.) broken into even more arcane subtopics (“Limbal Rings Influence Facial Attractiveness,” “The Falio of a Recessed Anterior Nasal Spine”). It goes without saying, or perhaps can be gleaned from the word “craniology,” that looksmaxxers view race, sexuality, and disability from roughly the same vantage point as that of an early-twentieth-century eugenicist…

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/our-plastic-surgery-nightmare

‘ I’m Worried About Weimar America’

Dreher: Well, Friedrich Nietzsche famously said in the late 19th century, “God is dead and we have killed him.” Nietzsche didn’t believe in God. He was talking about the idea of the Christian God in Western civilization. Nietzsche was not a romantic about this. He saw that it would be very dark and difficult for humanity to find some sense of meaning if God were dead.

And he was right. We can’t make our own meaning. Nietzsche was not a Nazi, but the ideological convulsions that came in the 20th century with Soviet Communism, with Nazism in Germany, and so forth, all of them are products of the death of God... [or maybe just good?]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/opinion/america-politics-weimar-rod-dreher.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Levinas and James

Bringing to light new facets in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and William James, Megan Craig (our Fall Lyceum guest last year) explores intersections between French phenomenology and American pragmatism. Craig demonstrates the radical empiricism of Levinas's philosophy and the ethical implications of James's pluralism while illuminating their relevance for two philosophical disciplines that have often held each other at arm's length. Revealing the pragmatic minimalism in Levinas's work and the centrality of imagery in James's prose, she suggests that aesthetic links are crucial to understanding what they share. Craig's suggestive readings change current perceptions and clear a path for a more open, pluralistic, and creative pragmatic phenomenology that takes cues from both philosophers.

https://iupress.org/9780253222381/levinas-and-james/

“Feeling anxious does not mean you have an anxiety disorder”

…All around us, more of what was once understood as part of life has come to be seen as something requiring treatment. Psychiatrists including Allen Frances, who led the task force that developed an earlier version of psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, have warned of “diagnostic inflation.” Prolonged grief now has its own diagnostic category. Newer diagnoses that were intended, in part, to reduce the overdiagnosis of childhood bipolar disorder may also place more childhood behavior, such as tantrums, on the spectrum of mood disorders.

As the boundary blurs between a disabling disorder and ordinary distress, people may start to view their suffering through a clinical lens. But often, distress functions less as a symptom than as a signal. Feeling anxious does not mean you have an anxiety disorder. It could point to circumstances that are worth changing.

Before turning to therapy, consider reaching out to someone you trust, volunteering, joining a community activity or reconnecting with a group that once mattered to you...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/opinion/therapy-loneliness-friendship.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Existentialism and pragmatism online

To Claude-

What about websites and blogs? Anthony Grayling’s Substack, for instance, often raises broadly existential and pragmatic topics. https://open.substack.com/pub/acgrayling/p/one-and-all?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

• A.C. Grayling’s Substack — as you note, frequently touches ethics-of-selfhood and practical philosophy of life, often with a semi-Stoic/existential-pragmatist blend.

• John Kaag’s writing (your WJS successor) — he writes for outlets like Aeon and The Stone (NYT) blending James/pragmatism with existential themes of mortality, hiking, and the “American philosophy” tradition — very close to your own register.

• The New York Times “The Stone” column — an ongoing philosophy-for-general-readers series that regularly features both pragmatist and existentialist voices in dialogue.

• Sarin Marchetti and others in the pragmatism-scholar orbit occasionally publish on Blog of the APA (American Philosophical Association) with posts bridging James, Dewey, and Continental existential themes.

• Massimo Pigliucci’s Substack (Figs in Winter) — mostly Stoic-focused, but frequently draws pragmatism and existentialism into the same frame when discussing “philosophy as a way of life.”

Would you like me to dig up specific representative posts from any of these — Kaag’s or Pigliucci’s, say — the way I just did with Grayling’s?

John Kaag — writes at Aeon on exactly this intersection. His essay “Is life worth living? The pragmatic ‘maybe’ of William James” walks through how James’s open-ended “maybe” about life’s worth maps onto an existential situation of not being entirely sold on life’s value, landing on his 1895 line that “it is up to each of us to, literally, make of life ‘what we will’.” He’s also written a piece with Clancy Martin on fatherhood and existentialism, contrasting the movement’s philosophers with the pragmatist tradition. Given that Kaag succeeded you as WJS president, his whole body of work — Sick Souls, Healthy Minds, Hiking with Nietzsche — sits right in your wheelhouse.

Massimo Pigliucci, Figs in Winter — he has a “Suggested Readings” post specifically on Stoicism and Existentialism, prompted by years of student and reader questions about similarities, connections, and differences between the two traditions, and about combining them into a personal philosophical practice.  It’s Stoic-existentialist rather than pragmatist-existentialist, but given your own move from academic philosophy toward “philosophy as a way of life” territory, it’s a close cousin of the conversation you’re having.

Kaag & Clancy Martin, “What the childless fathers of existentialism teach real dads” (Aeon):

https://aeon.co/essays/what-the-childless-fathers-of-existentialism-teach-real-dads

• Kaag, “Is life worth living? The pragmatic ‘maybe’ of William James” (Aeon) — the one on James’s 1895 lecture, since I quoted from it above:

https://aeon.co/essays/is-life-worth-living-the-pragmatic-maybe-of-william-james

• Pigliucci, “Suggested Readings” on Stoicism and Existentialism (Figs in Winter):

https://figsinwintertime.substack.com/p/suggested-readings-8ab

Claude, who has explored the pragmatism-existentialism connection?

• Richard Bernstein, Praxis and Action (1971) — the classic direct comparison of pragmatism and existentialism on action/freedom.

• Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism — his “prophetic pragmatism” draws heavily on existentialist themes of contingency and tragedy; a chapter on this pairing also appears in the Routledge volume Cornel West and Philosophy, by Clarence Johnson.

• John Lachs (your own dissertation advisor) — Stoic Pragmatism and In Love with Life fuse James/Dewey pragmatism with existential concerns about finitude and mortality. Given your history with Lachs, this may be the most natural entry point.

• Sidney Hook’s 1959 Antioch Review essay “Pragmatism and Existentialism” — not a book, but foundational; a pragmatist’s take contrasting the two on truth and freedom.

• For the truth-theory angle specifically, there’s scholarship on James’s influence on Sartre’s existentialism, largely via a posthumously published 1948 text, Truth and Existence, where Sartre engages James’s pragmatic theory of truth against Heidegger.

Nothing currently occupies the exact title Existential Pragmatism — so that territory does still look open, as you’d noted before.

Happy credo

If It’s not the only good, it’s still one of the better ones. “While I am opposed to all orthodox creeds, I have a creed myself; and my creed is this. Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. The creed is somewhat short, but it is long enough for this life, strong enough for this world. If there is another world, when we get there we can make another creed.” — Robert Ingersoll Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience

“An aim of perennial philosophy is to locate deep, satisfying answers that make sense of the human predicament, that explain what makes human life meaningful, and what grounds and makes sense of the quest to live morally. Existentialism is a philosophical expression of the anxiety that there are no deep, satisfying answers to these questions, and thus that there are no secure foundations for meaning and morality, no deep reasons that make sense of the human predicament. Existentialism says that the quest of perennial philosophy to locate firm foundations for meaning and morals is quixotic, largely a matter of tilting at windmills. There are three kinds of existentialism that respond to three different kinds of grounding projects—grounding in God’s nature, in a shared vision of the collective good, or in science. The first-wave existentialism of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche expressed anxiety about the idea that meaning and morals are made secure because of God’s omniscience and good will. The second-wave existentialism of Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir was a post-Holocaust response to the idea that some uplifting secular vision of the common good might serve as a foundation. Today, there is a third-wave existentialism, neuroexistentialism, which expresses the anxiety that, even as science yields the truth about human nature, it also disenchants. The theory of evolution together with advances in neuroscience remove the last vestiges of an immaterial soul or self that can know the nature of what is really true, good, and beautiful. We are gregarious social animals who evolved by descent from other animals and who are possessed of all sort of utterly contingent dispositions and features that result from having evolved as such an animal. Our fate is the fate of other animals. This collection explores the anxiety caused by this third-wave existentialism and some responses to it. It brings together some of the world’s leading philosophers, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and legal scholars to tackle our neuroexistentialist predicament and explore what the mind sciences can tell us about morality, love, emotion, autonomy, consciousness, selfhood, free will, moral responsibility, law, the nature of criminal punishment, meaning in life, and purpose...” — Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience by Gregg Caruso, Owen Flanagan

The [Other] Huckster Shaman Who Founded a Cult

…Castaneda, raised in a well-to-do family, was a two-faced fabulist who grew into a seductive con man. He hung with hipster intellectuals, soaking up Nietzsche and Sartre, whose ideas he mixed with local ghost stories — and voilà, the teachings of Don Juan. “He lied because he loved to,” Marshall writes. “Lying was for him an art” for this “wonderful, fantastic, fabulous liar.” 

…https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/04/books/review/american-trickster-ru-marshall.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

What We Should Learn From Nordic Happiness

…Norway is now richer than the United States per capita, and Norwegian workers are more productive than American workers, with higher output per hour. Scandinavians live longer than Americans, and people are happier. The five Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden — all rank among the six happiest countries in the world in the World Happiness Report, based on Gallup polling…

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/04/opinion/norway-nordic-social-democracy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness by Arthur C. Brooks

“…Matter-of-factly, he told me about his virtual job, dating apps, social media friends, and video gaming. But then, flatly, he said this: “I feel like I’m living in a simulation.” I asked others if they felt the same way. “Yes, yes—that’s it,” they told me. Life felt unreal: full of false rewards, empty accomplishments, therapeutic talk, and fake experiences, all curated to pass the time as painlessly as possible. I drilled down further: What exactly was missing? And this is where the penny finally dropped for me. What was missing was the one thing that can never be simulated: meaning. Again and again, people said that life was busy but not meaningful. That experiences and relationships felt meaningless. Or that they didn’t know what they were meant to do in work and life. The meaning of life: such a big question that it is the root of a lot of jokes. But it’s no joke in real life, especially when you can’t find it, like millions of people today. To understand why, let’s back up a little to talk more broadly about happiness, which happens to be the subject I study and teach. Researchers define happiness in a variety of ways, but the clearest characterization for me is one that brings meaning into the happiness equation, literally: Happiness = Enjoyment + Satisfaction + Meaning In other words, the happiest people enjoy their lives, take satisfaction in their activities and accomplishments, and have a sense of the meaning of their existence. Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning…” — The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness by Arthur C. Brooks https://a.co/012tqBz8

Re-reading Sartre’s lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism | Aeon Essays

On 29 October 1945, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre emerged alone from the Paris Métro. He was about to deliver a lecture titled ‘L’existentialisme est un humanisme’ (‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’) at the Club Maintenant. No one had any idea it was going to become one of the most famous lectures of the 20th century. As Sartre walked towards the venue, he saw a huge crowd of people gathered outside. He wondered if Communists were protesting him and whether he should go home. He pushed ahead – really only because he’d made a professional commitment.

While the crowd parted for celebrities, no one knew what Sartre looked like. He didn’t tell anyone who he was, and as he slowly nudged his way towards the front, he was jostled about by brutal scrimmages for seats. The room was overheated and overcrowded. Fifteen people collapsed. An hour late, Sartre climbed to the stage to defend existential philosophy against his critics and argue that existentialism is a humanism. He had no notes, his hands remained in his pockets, but he was well prepared. He said what he came to say and then left.

The hosts of Sartre’s lecture, Jacques Calmy and Marc Beigbeder, had a modest budget. They bought simple ads in newspapers. Their wives posted fliers in Latin Quarter bookstores. Calmy worried: ‘With a title like that! Existentialism!’ Just two months earlier, Sartre had publicly stated: ‘My philosophy is a philosophy of existence; I don’t even know what Existentialism is.’ (Still, Simone de Beauvoir writes in her autobiography: ‘In the end, we took the epithet that everyone used for us [existentialism] and used it for our own purposes.’) Along with recent accusations that Sartre’s novel Nausea (1938) was anti-humanist, they hoped the title might at least be a ‘paradoxical provocation’…

Skye Cleary

https://aeon.co/essays/re-reading-sartres-lecture-existentialism-is-a-humanism

Candyland and the Nature of the Absurd - Existential Comics

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/58

At the Existentialist Cafe - Existential Comics

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/660