Dhananjay Jagannathan

Put Rohit on the list, too, come to think of it.

Indian-Americans are frequently embarrassing. Cf Nimrata Piyush Vivek and Usha.

TURN
THE
VOLUME
UP

Top tier.

Beautiful design. But they really should've made it the N train (or the W).

Yes! And as a reminder, the "paper of record" that happens to be headquartered here doesn't even have a City desk any more. Support local journalism. Turn off the outrage machine. I am particularly pleased to be a @hellgatenyc.com subscriber, since it is worker-owned.

Zohran Mamdani has the Mamdate of Heaven.

You don’t start a conversation by screaming nonsense. That’s more or less what Peterson does in his public persona, whether though dress or speech.

Derek’s overarching claim here — that clothing communicates, in a standard language, cultural affiliation while affording possibilities of individual expression within that affiliation, is likewise one of the central claims of my chapter on clothing in my forthcoming book CULTURE AS CONVERSATION.

Easy: what voters know rounds to zero.

No neede for expensyve consultinge firmes. Heere ys a planne for excellent higher education:

1) Hire manye facultye
2) Small class syzes
3) Emphasyze engagemente & delighte
4) Sustayne & cultivate a varietye of fieldes and disciplines, even currentlye unfashionable ones -- thys ys ed, not retail

You can read the rest of the essay here, which is partly about how I came to study ancient Greek political thought and partly about the current mess our political culture is in, with reference to two recent interviews by Isaac Chotiner and Ezra Klein: culturedopinion.substack.com/p/on-public-...

Got ‘em both yesterday and I barely feel anything! Last year’s vaccines packed more of a punch, for whatever reason.

Cultured Opinion | Dhananjay Jagannathan | Substack Philosophical and personal essays about culture, politics, music, food, travel, &c. Click to read Cultured Opinion, by Dhananjay Jagannathan, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

Subscribe (for free!) to Cultured Opinion to read more (you'll get the essay later this week): culturedopinion.substack.com

in this town who supported the war – most people there supported it – were not, in my experience, evil or stupid. Yet the war was plainly an evil and stupid thing. It had no justification, no clear goal, and tens of thousands of innocent people in Iraq, including so many children, had already died."

"Twenty years ago, at the height of the Iraq War, I left the benighted small town in Texas in which I grew up. To this day, when I meet someone else from Texas, who is usually from somewhere like Dallas or Houston or San Antonio, and tell them where I’m from, they tend to wince. The people I knew...

I'm teaching Plato's Gorgias this week, so I was moved to write a (wild) essay about how reading the dialogue changed my life, got me interested in whether philosophy was an alternative to the seemingly endless irrationality of political life, and why the latest Chotinering has me feeling depressed.

Oh my

Yet more cultural illiteracy. I refer to my parent’s cousins this way. One of my father’s cousins is among the relatives I am closest to. She’s my aunt, and we refer to cousins as sisters and brothers sometimes too!

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Graham Greene; Marilynne Robinson; Julian Barnes

HEPATITAS ANDRONICUS

Ro/Nikki/Bobby

One of the most striking things about Zohran Mamdani’s campaign is that its visual-cultural aesthetic is so unabashedly South Asian, the sort of thing that works in NYC (cf AOC’s ¡classic! poster). Imagine Kamala Harris or Rohit Khanna or Nimrata Haley or Piyush Jindal doing the same!

It’s a full-on arrangement / reinterpretation, not just a cover!

This is so much better than I could ever have expected.

But hey I don't know, Raphael Warnock was a health care activist and a pastor in his pre-political life, not a Blackwater mercenary who admitted he joined the Marines because he wanted to "play soldier".

Democrats and other left-leaning folks in this country are, of course, desperate for alternatives to the gerontocracy (the news story today about Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton is so depressing) but not everyone is a Raphael Warnock who can simply go from an essentially private life to a US Senate race.