In February 1949, Harper’s published the essay “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” by its managing editor, Russell Lynes. There, he observed a new structure determining prestige in the country: where once wealth and family were the markers of s…
In reply to Meir. Thank you for this—you took my request for suggestions seriously, and it deserves a serious answer on both fronts. The arrangement that bewildered you was a bet on three things Substack once did better than I could do alon…
For the first part: I have, for my limited time following your blog, found it bewildering that you kept a “source of truth” on this site and ran it via WordPress, a CMS designed for blogging, but instead of allowing people to subscribe to i…
This morning, Substack announced that it would be integrating Pangram scans to detect AI content in its posts. I wanted to spend my day revising a chapter of my next book, and later this week, I was thinking of writing a post on the “Memex”…
I have forty-four long-form posts since 2019 for your reading pleasure below, but perhaps you’d like to read a few words on how they came to be first?I am happier writing for myself than I ever was writing for anyone else (although I will d…
Author’s note: This is a draft of an introduction to the Generative Unconscious. It will be improved for a time. The chapters linked at the end are all drafts as well, but you can get the gist of the book now. You can download a rough draft…
the florilegium at highland house a native plant gardener's logbook We were in Japan for two weeks. We spent most of our time in Tokyo—I will write about the Ginza district on the main blog—but this Florilegium post covers Kyoto; Nikko will…
I rarely watch sports. The last Super Bowl I watched was in New Orleans, not the one in 2025, but the one in 1986, when the Bears won. Lately, bingeing Netflix’s Formula 1: Drive to Survive has sparked a renewed interest in Formula 1 for me…
In 1969, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson made a 24-minute video in which they improvised a dialogue playing stereotypical positions in the American art world. Holt performed the role of an intellectual, conceptual New York artist; Smithson p…
I write a lot about art and architecture, landscape, and the impact of technology on culture, but I haven’t written about coding since the 1980s, when I sold my first article to Creative Computing magazine. Back then, I was a high school ki…
For why I undertook this counterfactual project, please see here. This is part of my Stochastic Histories series of parafictions. In 1610, the Great Fire devastated Vilnius, capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The catastrophe arrived w…
stochastic histories /stəˈkæstɪk ˈhɪstəriz/ n. pl. [from Gk. stokhastikos “capable of guessing,” from stokhazesthai “to aim at, guess at” + L. historia “narrative, account”] 1. Fabricated historical narratives generated through iterative pr…