Barry Lam

This week I put piles of Lao Ga Ma spicy chili crisp on a chicken parm, a shwarma with tabbouleh wrap, and on guacamole. This is a culinary travesty and I need help.

Mucilaginous vegetables are very difficult to get right (even the name is wretch inducing), and also the smell is famously like a bodily fluid that also induces a similar reaction ...but in defense of okra all of the objectionable features can be excised with the right technique.

If I had to cut out all the passages in my manuscript that made me cringe, I'd be left with very little.

“If there is no one there to smelt it, there can be no one who dealt it.” -Bishop George Berkeley.

From the askphilosophy community on Reddit Explore this post and more from the askphilosophy community

Spill the beans now, who is this? It isn't me. www.reddit.com/r/askphiloso...

Most people think the future of academia consists of robots doing all the teaching, when we all know it is going to be administrators adopting ten new pieces of management software yearly, then making everyone watch endless streams of training videos about how to work it.

The The is fantastic.

Best piece I've read in awhile.

The Epstein files will be the Mueller report of Trump II.

That's a generational highlight right there.

If you tally up the direct costs of the wars and military adventures of the US from Vietnam through Iraq and Afghanistan, along with all of the downstream costs including veterans health care and interests on the debts incurred, you get about 35% of total US debt.

The promise of paying for stuff, newspapers, magazines, apps, games, streaming, was so they wouldn’t have to sell our data and sell us ads. Now everything I pay for also bombards me with ads and sells my data. Is there any point at which companies will stop trying to squeeze this lemon?

No need to regret, this wasn't a call out, it was a statement of solidarity.

Plenty of men are ashamed to wear a bathing suit also. I'm a t-shirt guy.

The people selling a virtual world where the machine thinks, lives, talks, and fucks for you keep telling all the people who aren’t buying they’re wasting their time thinking, living, and fucking with other people.

The US auto industry is already uncompetitive without the prohibitions against BYD from the US market. I think it’s a matter of 15yrs where this country’s cars are going to look to the rest of the world like wood burning stoves look to us. We’ll be a backward country of horse and buggy drivers.

Learning to hate polyester. My gym clothes eternally stink, requiring vinegar soakings. It accounts for 35% of microplastic pollution because you launder it and the fibers just wash into the ocean and never break down.

The framing is the problem with Mellon grantmaking is social justice orientation. I disagree. All grantmaking with top-down constraints skews research unhealthily. A big foundation for Christian humanities will have the same problem. We need a lot of foundations funding different kinds of research.

Government grant-making in the US also has a long history of strings-attached, depending on the political leanings of the administration. In Republican administrations, lots of civil war stuff. So even there, top-down initiatives will have constraining effects. Maybe funding shouldn't be grant-based

The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities Is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation the last best hope for American arts and letters—or is it killing them?

The framing of this by Tyler Austin Harper is that the problem with Mellon is social justice orientation. I disagree. All grantmaking with top-down constraints skews research in unhealthy directions. We need lots of foundations funding research of all kinds. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Just want to express two completely unrelated opinions, because it’s what I think about on commutes.

1. If only one 60s American rocker gets the Nobel in poetry, it should have been Paul Simon.

2. The older I get, the more I think When Harry Met Sally isn’t just good, but a masterpiece.

I feel like "most outstanding peer reviewer" is an award that you want to get, but not one you want to announce.

YouTube video by Hi-Phi Nation Sizzler 1991 Promo video with Twin Peaks soundtrack

I did a remix, in the spirit of 1991. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW6J...

Its the world you experience in the black lodge.

YouTube video by Hi-Phi Nation Sizzler 1991 Promo video with Twin Peaks soundtrack

I was born to make this video. 1991 is when America peaked. (sound on.) youtu.be/dW6JlPnP33o?...

I wonder if the right lost their shit when Ricky Ricardo performed every 10 episodes of I Love Lucy.

No idea what counts as “theory”!

I've watched this once a year for the last decade. On my death bed, I will watch this, reminisce, feel nostalgic, and then welcome the end, all in 4:41sec.

With all due respect to Substack, it is parasitic on good journalism, not a replacement for it. Substack is the place where people consume news and research and provide commentary on it. I haven’t seen any evidence that Substack can pay to do rigorous, fact-checked reporting on newsworthy events.

Okay, I thought there was other news I hadn’t heard of. He’s my governor and I would prefer just about any other Democrat to him in the primaries. Prop 50 was a win, but he’s not a very good governor.