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• [marginalium] On Ernst Junger and his war-time diaries and a descent into magic — 4 Jan 2022
• [marginalium] An excellent article on the Antikythera machine — 4 Jan 2022
• [marginalium] On the Jesuit tradition — 2 Jan 2022
• [marginalium] On the view that there is no fate worse than death — 2 Jan 2022
• [marginalium] Misconceptions About the Innateness of Emotions and Ideas — 2 Jan 2022
• [article] It's not 'just' a placebo — 28 Dec 2021
  The phrase “it’s ‘just’ a placebo effect” is used to wave away inconvenient findings that some alternative therapies work, because we don’t know how they work. But many of us frankly don’t know how any medicine works and this blind one-directional faith is often misguided.
• [article] The trap of scientific evidence — 18 Dec 2021
  The scientific claim of ‘no evidence’ both indicates that we have evidence something isn’t true, and that no one has really looked. This fact bears forth the alluring capacity for science to sweep inconvenient truths aside rather than tackle them.
• [marginalium] Land Acknowledgement as moral exhibitionism — 4 Dec 2021
• [article] The beauty of stress — 30 Nov 2021
  Stress is one of the most valuable pieces of biological technology we own. Don’t confuse ancient lion chases with email notifications. Our responses to modern stressors are just as well calibrated then as now. The difference is that some stressors we choose.
• [article] The amygdala is a distraction — 13 Nov 2021
  The amygdala doesn’t determine your fear response. You do. Don’t focus on calming the amygdala, focus on calming your response.
• [marginalium] We typically think of our idyllic past as one of egalitarian hunter gatherers — 27 Oct 2021
• [article] Meaning and its patterns in the brain — 26 Oct 2021
  The brain primarily links chunks of meaning into patterns of neural pathways. Pathways and patterns of meaning help us intuitively solve the problems of everyday life. But they also trap us in those patterns, and stop us from seeing beyond them.
• [article] Animals First — 10 Oct 2021
  When we use the architecture of the brain to scaffold our thinking about the mind, we come to learn that humans are primarily animals first.
• [article] Amusing Ourselves to Death — 21 Sep 2021
  Since the invention of the telegraph, information has become increasingly atomized, incoherent, and irrelevant. Our media technology encourages entertainment, not discourse. Information ‘from nowhere’, ‘to no one’ about which we can do nothing. We don’t have to lean in.
• [marginalium] Having a concept of death, far from being a uniquely human feat, is a fairly common trait in the animal kingdom — 21 Sep 2021