Hannah Kim

I love it when the bassist whips out the bow ugh 😩

once your email storage is full you should be allowed to graduate from it. no more emails for you. you’ve seen enough emails. you’re free now

New SEP entry for "Aesthetics in Chinese Philosophy: Painting and Calligraphy" just went live!!! Very excited to have this published.

plato.stanford.edu/entries/chin...

my local park is full of hundreds of snow sculptures and someone has been adding museum labels

Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of t...

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪

I wanna hear more, will dm :)

How fun!! Hope it's a great discussion

Just bought tickets to go to a Hatsune Miku concert. She's a virtual pop star so really curious what the experience will be like! Also first time going to a concert for research so that'll be interesting...

Yesss pears are underrated!

Korean Philosophy: From a Comparative and Intercultural Perspective, International Conference
October 5–6, 2026, Hildesheim University

www.uni-hildesheim.de/glophi/2026/...

Organized by The North American Korean Philosophy Association (NAKPA) under the auspices of Prof. Sool Park.

Future is unclear but good news for my house plants

The ‘bel’ in ‘decibel’ is for Alexander Graham Bell.

Since the ‘B’ in 'dB' is a name-derived unit, it is capitalized when abbreviated.

The always-worth-reading Hannah Kim on Rental Family and labor.

"The first human job was a creative one involving classification and invention. Labor wasn’t something Adam had to do to survive; it gave him a way to introduce order and meaning."

A medieval illustration of a hedgehog with grapes skewered on its spines

It was believed in medieval times that hedgehogs had spikes so they could roll over fruit to carry home to their children, which is not true but is a really cute idea

hold on i gotta take this

Ireland announces scheme to provide basic income for artists The Basic Income for Artists (BIA) project is believed to be the first permanent one of its kind in the world.

After a trial over the last few years, Ireland has launched a permanent scheme giving a basic income of €325 a week for artists.

2,000 will be eligible, and successful recipients will be chosen at random from applicants, who must be "professional artists" (definition tbc).

the people who want you to believe that generative AI can paint like Picasso tend to gloss over the fact that Picasso didn’t have hundreds of Picassos to learn from. He had to make something new, which a model trained on old art is definitionally incapable of doing.

Fine essay about RENTAL FAMILY, one of my favorite (and one of the most woefully underseen) films of the year.

My latest for the inimitable @brightwalldarkroom.com!! Rental Family gave me a lot to think about & I enjoyed writing about the emotional + relational labor found in it. Also still excited about the Brenaissance 🤠

Thanks & agreed, it's beautiful (... from inside! 😆)

Feels like -33F outside & lake Michigan is frozen as far as I can see. Missing Tucson!

There are supporting pertormances and there are load-bearing ones, turns so essential to a movie’s existence that without them the whole structure might crumble to the ground. At first glance, Benicio del Toro's Sergio St. Carlos might seem a mere sidekick, the buddy who gets One Battle After Another's Bob Ferguson out of a jam and gives up his own freedom so the movie's protagonist can go free. But sit with it a little, and you might realize Sergio is no one's second fiddle. He's the hero. In the midst of a story about would-be revolutionaries agitating for sudden change, Sergio embodies the opposite - not acquiescence, but methodical, sustained resistance. Unlike the French 75's headline-grabbing pyrotechnics or the Christmas Adventurers Club's sinister cabal, Sergio's "Latino Harriet Tubman situation" has no name, no manifesto or underground lair, just a wide-spreading network of ordinary people waiting for their moment to do the right thing. It's no accident that Sergio's public-facing persona is as a teacher of judo, the art of turning your opponent's aggression against them. (Paul Thomas Anderson pitched del Toro the character by sending him a picture of a tiger in a kimono.) He may prize the ancient rifle he loans to Bob, but he hardly seems like the type to fire it. When he guides Bob's daughter, Willa, through her kata, his main advice is simple: "Don't forget to breathe." He gives Bob the same counsel, in different words: "Ocean waves, ocean waves." Barely a month after One Battle's release, the streets of Halloween were dotted with Sergios, glasses halfway down their noses, a few small beers at their side- a tribute to del Toro's instantly iconic performance. But it's also a tribute to what Sergio stands for, his patience, his decency, his ability to stay cool while never giving up the fight. Viva la revolución.

Benicio del Toro up first at @nyfcc.bsky.social awards. And here’s my booklet essay, for his Best Supporting Actor win.

of joy, of art!

That, too!

every seat in a movie theater should have an "I have to pee" button and if enough people press it they should be able to pause the movie

This is a cool-- and totally reasonable-- question! Sometimes I wonder about us thinking about our lives as a story vs us thinking of ourselves as characters and the difference between them. Obviously there's overlap but the latter would survive the "loss" of plot-driven narrativity...

Had my first drum lesson in like 15 years and it was so fun 😭 learned a few afro-cuban beats. what a perfect start to the year

My two moods of the year. Happy end of 2025!!

my latest for LA Review of Books!!

I feel like "storytelling" was everywhere (at least pre-pandemic)... and suddenly it disappeared! I wondered whether narrative is now driven more by character or mood rather than plot-- and what all that means.

Thus redacted Zarathustra