Brent - lesser daemon

16

May

I just want people to not have to be so afraid

Every now and then I come across something that reminds me how deeply out of touch I am. This week it was this trend piece about West Village TikTok girls. Ultimately it is the same story that gets written once every few years: young people are terrible and they change neighborhoods for the worse. In other news the pope is Catholic.

The article made me think about this Brian Philips essay about the constant feeling of financial safety and comfort being out of your reach, a feeling that so many millenials have been grappling with for most of their lives.

3 min read

15

May

The Joys of Undercommitting

I terminated the lease on my art studio today. I feel pretty sad about it: I'm very fond of the space and its people, I've made good friends and cool work there, and especially while I was working from home it was great for my mental health in a lot of ways. But once I started working hybrid it became a lot harder to make it in - on my work from home days I wanted to like, do laundry and dishes, not schlep half an hour there and back - and once my mom got sick it became functionally

2 min read

13

May

Mother's day

People talk a lot about milestones in the grieving process. The first month after someone dies, the first birthday you miss. I guess Mother's day is my first major one.

You don't really think about how losing someone can change your relationship to the calendar until it happens. The very existence of the holiday felt like a slap in the face this time. All these people rubbing the fact that their moms are still alive in my face.

Obviously this is not anyone's intent and I have no desire for people to be afraid to, like, enjoy the lives or

1 min read

09

May

Who Is To Blame?

I think about responsibility a lot. Though the relevant muscles have atrophied quite a bit I did start out as a philosophy student after all. In a time when it feels to me like whatever threadbare moral fiber our nation used to have has eroded to nothing I wonder how much any one of us is to blame.

The thing about moral responsibility is that it necessarily requires agency. If it's not possible for us to have acted differently than we did, we can't really be blamed for our actions. If someone else threw me off a cliff and I

3 min read

08

May

The ChatGPT Cheating Crisis Was Inevitable

Once again I find myself writing about the latest AI outrage cycle, this one sparked by an NYMag article about the rampant abuse of ChatGPT in higher education. It should surprise no one that kids are using AI to cheat constantly and we are about to see a generation of functionally illiterate college graduates hit the workforce. Seems bad!

I feel obligated to point out that the article is a more than a little sensationalist and references a study claiming that 90% of students are using ChatGPT that isn't particularly rigorous. Its narrative also nicely cherry-picks a truly despicable guy

6 min read