Notes

十年前的上水，十年后的深圳湾

“How uv got so fast”:

The problem was setup.py. You couldn’t know a package’s dependencies without running its setup script. But you couldn’t run its setup script without installing its build dependencies. PEP 518 in 2016 called this out explicitly: “You can’t execute a setup.py file without knowing its dependencies, but currently there is no standard way to know what those dependencies are in an automated fashion without executing the setup.py file.”

This chicken-and-egg problem forced pip to download packages, execute untrusted code, fail, install missing build tools, and try again.

PEP 658 [putting package metadata directly in the Simple Repository API] went live on PyPI in May 2023. uv launched in February 2024. uv could be fast because the ecosystem finally had the infrastructure to support it. A tool like uv couldn’t have shipped in 2020. The standards weren’t there yet.

Wheel files are zip archives, and zip archives put their file listing at the end. uv tries PEP 658 metadata first, falls back to HTTP range requests for the zip central directory, then full wheel download, then building from source. Each step is slower and riskier. The design makes the fast path cover 99% of cases.

Some of uv’s speed comes from Rust. But not as much as you’d think.

pip copies packages into each virtual environment. uv keeps one copy globally and uses hardlinks (or copy-on-write on filesystems that support it).

uv parses TOML and wheel metadata natively, only spawning Python when it hits a setup.py-only package that has no other option.

Where Rust actually matters

uv uses rkyv to deserialize cached data without copying it. The data format is the in-memory format. This is a Rust-specific technique.

Rust’s ownership model makes concurrent access safe without locks. Python’s GIL makes this difficult. […]

uv is fast because of what it doesn’t do, not because of what language it’s written in. The standards work of PEP 518, 517, 621, and 658 made fast package management possible. Dropping eggs, pip.conf, and permissive parsing made it achievable. Rust makes it a bit faster still.

pip could implement parallel downloads, global caching, and metadata-only resolution tomorrow. It doesn’t, largely because backwards compatibility with fifteen years of edge cases takes precedence. But it means pip will always be slower than a tool that starts fresh with modern assumptions.

“Why Millennials Love Prenups”:

For much of the twentieth century, judges almost always refused to enforce prenups, fearing that they encouraged divorce and thus violated the public good. They were also concerned that measures to limit spousal support could lead to the financially dependent spouse—usually the woman—becoming reliant on welfare. Nonetheless, in the twenties, as divorce rates increased, potentially pricey payouts became a topic of national debate. As the sociologist Brian Donovan observes in the 2020 book “American Gold Digger: Marriage, Money, and the Law from the Ziegfeld Follies to Anna Nicole Smith,” a veritable “alimony panic” set in. To avoid paying any, men transferred deeds, created shell companies, and, in New York, set up “alimony colonies” in out-of-state locales such as Hoboken, where they wouldn’t be served with papers. Even though courts were equally loath to award alimony—“Judges publicly criticized alimony seekers as ‘parasites,’ ” Donovan writes—the perception that men were being fleeced persisted.

There had been limited cases since the eighteenth century in which prenuptial contracts were recognized in the U.S., but these typically pertained to the handling of a spouse’s assets after death. The idea of a contract made in anticipation of divorce was considered morally repugnant. In an oft-cited case from 1940, a Michigan judge refused to uphold a prenup, emphasizing that marriage was “not merely a private contract between the parties.” You could not personalize it any more than you could traffic laws.

But by the early seventies there was no stemming the tide of marital dissolution: the divorce rate had doubled from just a decade earlier. In 1970, a landmark case, Posner v. Posner, was decided in Florida. Victor Posner, a prominent Miami businessman, was divorcing his younger wife, a former salesgirl. He asked the judge to honor the couple’s prenup, which granted Mrs. Posner just six hundred dollars a month in alimony. The judge, in his decision, acknowledged the cultural shift: “The concept of the ‘sanctity’ of a marriage as being practically indissoluble, . . . held by our ancestors only a few generations ago, has been greatly eroded in the last several decades.”

In the early eighties, following protests by women’s organizations, New York State had passed a new law that declared that all marital assets would no longer go by default to the titleholder—typically the husband—but would have to be divided according to “equitable distribution.” Judges were given a number of factors to consider in determining what was equitable, including the contributions of a “homemaker” to the other spouse’s “career or career potential.”

[T]hose living in poverty are typically splitting not assets but debts. In many cases, it’s “coerced debt”—the result of credit-card applications filled out by a spouse without a partner’s knowledge, for instance.

[Y]ounger generations might be seeking out prenups because there’s greater awareness now of the cost of litigation, both financial and emotional. […] [S]ome partners “file motion after motion just to wear down their victim, just to force them to try to walk away with less.”

We sign prenups in pen, but our lives are written in pencil; plans can easily get erased, vows smudged to the point of illegibility. “That’s why older people cry at weddings,” one divorce attorney told me. “Because we know that young couples don’t know what they’re getting into.”

applesque

“Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?”:

Every day, another major corporation or elected official or distant family member is choosing to speak to you in this particular voice. This is just what the world sounds like now. This is how everything has chosen to speak. Mixed metaphors and empty sincerity. Impersonal and overwrought. We are unearthing the echo of loneliness. We are unfolding the brushstrokes of regret. We are saying the words that mean meaning. We are weaving a coffee outlet into our daily rhythm.

《當〈房思琪的初戀樂園〉被稱爲「豔屍文學」》：

「豔屍文學」這個說法本身，我不認爲是一個僞命題。文學與藝術創作史中，大量創作者致力於創造出美麗的女性死亡的畫面。這裏的「美麗」，首先是這個死去的女性外貌必須美麗，她不可能是垂垂老矣，也不可能身材臃腫。在準備死亡的時候，她必定妝容完美，神情優雅；死亡發生的那一刻，這個女性甚至會帶上一絲仙氣。倘若是上吊死的，必定是一滴清淚一抹白綾，吊在繩上容色如初；倘若是高空墜亡，那衣服大概會仙氣飄飄，跌落之後姿勢優美，最好是紅色盛裝躺在雪地裏，映襯出最醒目的亮色。

德國比較文學學者 Elisabeth Bronfen 的 1992 年著作《Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic》，把西方創作中美麗女性的死亡作爲一個母題，分析對象包括維多利亞時代的繪畫、哥特小說、波德萊爾、普魯斯特、荷里活電影等，奧菲莉亞之死便是其中一個引述的重要例子。該作認爲，男性創作者面對死亡焦慮時，通過把死亡投射到女性身上，凝視女性的死亡，達致把死亡變成一種可控、可理解、可凝視的事物；女性死亡不只是死亡，而是被刻意美化的，是美麗、純潔、寧靜、具有象徵性，體現了文化對秩序、美、與控制的渴望。

魯迅在《幫閒法發引》一文中，這樣描述一個幫閒打諢的人如何描寫女性之死：「死的是女人呢，那就更好了，名之曰『豔屍』，或介紹她的日記。如果是暗殺，他就來講死者的生前的故事，戀愛呀，遺聞呀……而這位打諢的腳色，卻變成了文學者。」

若要下一個定義，我認為「豔屍文學」是指文藝創作中，作者對美麗女性死亡的奇觀式想像。它和東亞十分瞭解的死亡美學有一定共通之處，但又不完全一樣。這個年輕美麗的女性死亡場面，是對浪漫、青春乃至情色的寄情，甚至是在死亡那一刻賦予的某種神性；但唯獨不是死亡本身。唯獨不是面臨死亡時的痛苦、靈魂的熄滅和肉體的衰敗，唯獨不是一個鮮活人生本該發生的無限可能未來被攔腰斬斷，唯獨不是當威脅降臨時，一個人類本着求生欲和死神堂堂正正地搏鬥，最後遺憾但有尊嚴地輸掉這場比賽。

然而，當下網絡討論中用「弱女敘事」乃至「豔屍文學」批評《房思琪的初戀樂園》（以下簡稱《房》）一書，我認爲是不成立的。[…]《房》一書的刻劃，基本與豔屍圖景期望的目的背道而馳：整個故事慘烈邪惡，施暴者的畫面醜陋，當事人的痛苦真實，沒有人會讚美這樣的圖景，沒有人會嚮往這樣的死亡。

倘若「豔屍文學」概念本身還能溯源一二，所謂「弱女文學/敘事」我認爲幾乎是個僞概念。[…] 文學應當是平等的，或者說，虛構作品刻劃不同人的精神世界這件事，應當是平等的。沒有哪一種人是不值得被文學書寫的。文學的作用也不是「振奮人心」，如果是的話，我們只需要不停重寫各個版本的《基督山伯爵》就好了。

《房》一作以及其後世影響，最大的功績之一，就是使得一個犯罪現象被命名和看見。[…] 當有人可能不幸面臨類似處境，卻又無法釐清自己的困惑時；當有人想要控訴，卻很難說清自己的遭遇時——如今只要簡單地說出這個名字，我們就明白了。

“The Word ‘Religion’ Resists Definition but Remains Necessary”:

[The Romans’] notion of religio once meant something like scruples or exactingness, and then came to refer, among other things, to a scrupulous observance of rules or prohibitions, extending to worship practices. It was about doing the right thing in the right way.

To arrive at the modern category of religion, scholars now tend to think, you needed a complementary ‘secular’ sphere: a sphere that wasn’t, well, religious. That’s why the word’s modern, comparative sense wasn’t firmly established until the 17th century – Hugo Grotius’s De veritate religionis Christianae (1627) is one touchstone – at a time when European Christendom was both splintering and confronting unfamiliar worlds through exploration and conquest. Even as religion could be conceived as a special domain that might be isolated from law and politics, the traffic with ancient and non-European cultures forced reflection on what counted as ‘true religion’. It’s just that, when Europeans looked at India, Africa, China or the ancient Mediterranean, they sifted for Christian-like (and often Protestant-like) elements: a sacred text to anchor authority, a prophetic founder to narrate origins, a set of theological doctrines to sort out orthodoxy and heresy, and perhaps duties that offered a path to salvation. If a tradition didn’t provide these, scholars might helpfully supply them.

[T]he biblical writers do not stand before the universe feeling compelled to develop a worldview; they stand within a covenantal drama, entwining law, story and communal identity.

True, where science posited impersonal forces, traditional thought posited personal ones. But the underlying move from observed regularities to theoretical constructs was similar; what Europeans wanted to call religion was a pragmatic explanatory framework, reasonable given the available evidence, and part of the same conceptual space as folk biology, folk psychology and everyday causal reasoning.

[S]uccessful reference doesn’t depend on getting the description right. What matters is the causal connection between our words and the things they’re meant to denote. […] Causal theories of reference explain why our words can target the same class of object even when our conception of it shifts, and when the boundaries of the class shift, too.

‘Religion’, like many social kinds, functions in both ways. Anthropologists can use the term to describe practices that their participants would never call religions, yet, once the label circulates, it acquires a reflexive power: believers come to organise their self-understanding around it. In this respect, religion is a product of classification that helps to shape the reality it describes.

The map may not be the territory, but we’d be lost without it.

“On Citations, AI, and ‘Not Reading’”:

[T]he problematic way in which we use referencing as a signaling mechanism rather than purely as an epistemological phenomenon.

There is more to read in the contemporary world than can be read within a single lifetime. Therefore, all reading is subject to a type of economic decision making that rests on time as the unit of currency that is to be spent by an individual.

karpathy reviews LLMs’ year of 2025:

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) emerged as the de facto new major stage to add to this mix. By training LLMs against automatically verifiable rewards across a number of environments (e.g. think math/code puzzles), the LLMs spontaneously develop strategies that look like “reasoning” to humans - they learn to break down problem solving into intermediate calculations and they learn a number of problem solving strategies for going back and forth to figure things out (see DeepSeek R1 paper for examples). These strategies would have been very difficult to achieve in the previous paradigms because it’s not clear what the optimal reasoning traces and recoveries look like for the LLM - it has to find what works for it, via the optimization against rewards.

Unlike the SFT [supervised finetuning] and RLHF stage, which are both relatively thin/short stages (minor finetunes computationally), RLVR involves training against objective (non-gameable) reward functions which allows for a lot longer optimization. Running RLVR turned out to offer high capability/$, which gobbled up the compute that was originally intended for pretraining. Therefore, most of the capability progress of 2025 was defined by the LLM labs chewing through the overhang of this new stage and overall we saw ~similar sized LLMs but a lot longer RL runs. Also unique to this new stage, we got a whole new knob (and and associated scaling law) to control capability as a function of test time compute by generating longer reasoning traces and increasing “thinking time”. OpenAI o1 (late 2024) was the very first demonstration of an RLVR model, but the o3 release (early 2025) was the obvious point of inflection where you could intuitively feel the difference.

We’re not “evolving/growing animals”, we are “summoning ghosts”.

Supervision bits-wise, human neural nets are optimized for survival of a tribe in the jungle but LLM neural nets are optimized for imitating humanity’s text, collecting rewards in math puzzles, and getting that upvote from a human on the LM Arena. As verifiable domains allow for RLVR, LLMs “spike” in capability in the vicinity of these domains and overall display amusingly jagged performance characteristics

Related to all this is my general apathy and loss of trust in benchmarks in 2025. The core issue is that benchmarks are almost by construction verifiable environments and are therefore immediately susceptible to RLVR and weaker forms of it via synthetic data generation. In the typical benchmaxxing process, teams in LLM labs inevitably construct environments adjacent to little pockets of the embedding space occupied by benchmarks and grow jaggies to cover them. Training on the test set is a new art form.

LLM apps like Cursor bundle and orchestrate LLM calls for specific verticals:

1. They do the “context engineering”
2. They orchestrate multiple LLM calls under the hood strung into increasingly more complex DAGs, carefully balancing performance and cost tradeoffs.
3. They provide an application-specific GUI for the human in the loop
4. They offer an “autonomy slider”

“The Bitter Lesson”:

The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin. The ultimate reason for this is Moore’s law, or rather its generalization of continued exponentially falling cost per unit of computation. Most AI research has been conducted as if the computation available to the agent were constant (in which case leveraging human knowledge would be one of the only ways to improve performance) but, over a slightly longer time than a typical research project, massively more computation inevitably becomes available. Seeking an improvement that makes a difference in the shorter term, researchers seek to leverage their human knowledge of the domain, but the only thing that matters in the long run is the leveraging of computation. These two need not run counter to each other, but in practice they tend to. Time spent on one is time not spent on the other. There are psychological commitments to investment in one approach or the other. And the human-knowledge approach tends to complicate methods in ways that make them less suited to taking advantage of general methods leveraging computation.  There were many examples of AI researchers’ belated learning of this bitter lesson, and it is instructive to review some of the most prominent.

We have to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run. The bitter lesson is based on the historical observations that 1) AI researchers have often tried to build knowledge into their agents, 2) this always helps in the short term, and is personally satisfying to the researcher, but 3) in the long run it plateaus and even inhibits further progress, and 4) breakthrough progress eventually arrives by an opposing approach based on scaling computation by search and learning. The eventual success is tinged with bitterness, and often incompletely digested, because it is success over a favored, human-centric approach.

One thing that should be learned from the bitter lesson is the great power of general purpose methods, of methods that continue to scale with increased computation even as the available computation becomes very great. The two methods that seem to scale arbitrarily in this way are search and learning.

The second general point to be learned from the bitter lesson is that the actual contents of minds are tremendously, irredeemably complex; we should stop trying to find simple ways to think about the contents of minds, such as simple ways to think about space, objects, multiple agents, or symmetries. All these are part of the arbitrary, intrinsically-complex, outside world. They are not what should be built in, as their complexity is endless; instead we should build in only the meta-methods that can find and capture this arbitrary complexity. Essential to these methods is that they can find good approximations, but the search for them should be by our methods, not by us. We want AI agents that can discover like we can, not which contain what we have discovered. Building in our discoveries only makes it harder to see how the discovering process can be done.

“Verifiability”:

In this new programming paradigm then, the new most predictive feature to look at is verifiability. If a task/job is verifiable, then it is optimizable directly or via reinforcement learning, and a neural net can be trained to work extremely well. It’s about to what extent an AI can “practice” something. The environment has to be:

• resettable (you can start a new attempt),
• efficient (a lot attempts can be made) and
• rewardable (there is some automated process to reward any specific attempt that was made).

The more a task/job is verifiable, the more amenable it is to automation in the new programming paradigm. If it is not verifiable, it has to fall out from neural net magic of generalization fingers crossed, or via weaker means like imitation.

“The space of minds”:

The computational substrate is different (transformers vs. brain tissue and nuclei), the learning algorithms are different (SGD vs. ???), the present-day implementation is very different (continuously learning embodied self vs. an LLM with a knowledge cutoff that boots up from fixed weights, processes tokens and then dies). But most importantly (because it dictates asymptotics), the optimization pressure / objective is different. LLMs are shaped a lot less by biological evolution and a lot more by commercial evolution. It’s a lot less survival of tribe in the jungle and a lot more solve the problem / get the upvote. LLMs are humanity’s “first contact” with non-animal intelligence. Except it’s muddled and confusing because they are still rooted within it by reflexively digesting human artifacts, which is why I attempted to give it a different name earlier (ghosts/spirits or whatever).

“People Are Too Big to Fit Inside Our Heads”:

As long as we’re alive, we never completely coincide with ourselves. We’re free to go beyond what we’ve been and change. To treat someone as an object that you can understand and predict, therefore, is a bit like killing them, as Bakhtin writes. It’s to deny what’s most deeply human in us.

“Why the World Should Worry About Stablecoins”:

“For the rest of the world, including Europe, wide adoption of US dollar stablecoins for payment purposes would be equivalent to the privatization of seigniorage by global actors.” This then would be yet another predatory move by the superpower.

Yet the [Bank for International Settlements] is also concerned that stablecoins will fail to meet “the three key tests of singleness, elasticity and integrity”. What does this mean? Singleness describes the need for all forms of a given money to be exchangeable with one another at par, at all times. This is the foundation of trust in money. Elasticity means the ability to deliver payments of all sizes without gridlock. Integrity means the ability to curb financial crime and other illicit activities. A central role in all this is played by central banks and other regulators.

《當偶像突然變成系統敏感詞》：

即使追星和國家敘事表面上都有情緒、儀式、象徵物，即使有人會問：它們難道不是同一種情緒動員機制嗎？但它們的本質恰恰相反。

那是因為，國家的儀式、口號、循環播放的聲音，是排他的、單向的、要求一致性的：它把人組織成一個「必須相同」的整體，你必須相信、必須感動、必須站立、必須沉默。

而我們在演唱會里感受到的，卻是完全不同的東西：它是非強制的、開放的、自願的；它允許每個人帶着自己的傷口、自己的故事、自己的目光進入這個共同體。

比起在古拉格相關的文本中尋找可以譴責古拉格的點，更重要的是，詢問這些文本如何使得古拉格成為可能，（這些文本）可能至今仍在自圓其說，讓難以忍受的真理直到今天仍被廣泛接受。關於古拉格的問題，提出的角度不應是做錯了什麼（把問題降至理論的維度），而應該把古拉格作為一個存在着的現實來討論。

“I am a Stranger” [我是陌生人] by Xiang Biao [项飙], as an introduction to the book Hello Stranger [你好，陌生人], CITIC Press (2025).

Translated (with abbreviation) by David Ownby; supplemental translations and emphases mine.

[I]t was only in modern times that “stranger” became a relatively stable concept, after a long period in which the idea occupied a prolonged intermediate status somewhere in between.

只有到了现代，“陌生人”成为一个相对稳定的概念，他们长期处于既不是敌人也不是客人的中间状态。

In fact, the realization that there are many people in the world that we don’t know—and that these people might at the same time be connected to us—is itself a modern phenomenon.

意识到世界上有很多我不认识的人，而且这些人可能和我有关，这本身是一个现代现象。

If one of the defining features of the modern era is that people came to understand that distant strangers might be related to them, today the reverse seems to be occurring: we are starting to feel that people we know are unfamiliar to us. Ultimately, this kind of alienation also means that we become strangers to ourselves, unable to recognize who we truly are and what we really want.

如果说，在经典的现代状态下人们意识到陌生人是跟自己有关的，那么在今天，人们感到认识的人和自己无关。到最后，“陌生化”也意味着自己成了自己的陌生人。自己不能够认得自己究竟是谁，不知道自己要什么。

Strangers remain strangers, never becoming friends, enemies, or guests, never communicating ambiguity, surprises, shadows, or highlights.

一个个陌生人就是一个个清晰的陌生人，他们不会转变成朋友、敌人、客人，不会带来暧昧、惊喜、阴影、高光。

Life has become transparent yet impermeable, part of the abstraction of the public sphere. Transparency clearly implies the notion of public—a space where everyone is fully exposed and has no place to hide—but this public is not constructed through our mutual interactions. Instead, it is shaped by third-party systems that permeate every aspect of our lives. These third parties define all individuals, dictate their behavior, and hold them directly accountable. A public sphere formed through horizontal interactions between individuals is not transparent but rather porous; the public sphere established by a unified third party is abstract and transparent.

生活变得透明而不透气，是和公共的抽象化联系在一起的。透明显然意味着公共——大家在这里一览无余甚至无处遁形，但这个公共不是由无数个体通过互动搭建出来的，而是靠一个全面贯穿我们生活的第三方系统捏合而成的。这个第三方定义所有的个体，规定所有个体的行为，所有的个体都直接对第三方负责。通过个体间横向互动而形成的公共是不透明的，而是透气的；通过一个统一的第三方建立的公共是抽象的也是透明的。

When everything is transparent, this kind of abstracted public can lose its content. For example, moral considerations may become meaningless. People have moral questions largely because of limited information. When things are not transparent, people need to make judgments and choices, which is why they need morality, which allows people to continue to interact meaningfully even in the absence of transparency.

当一切都是透明的，抽象的公共性往往也失去了内容。比如道德考虑可能变得虚无。人类之所以有道德问题，很大程度上是因为人们信息有限。在事情不透明的情况下人们需要做出判断和选择，这时候人们就需要道德，道德使人和人可以在不透明中继续有意义地交往。

In a transparent world, a person’s fate is already determined by the powers that be; an uncertain future is an individual’s misfortune and it has no meaning. At the same time, if a person truly conforms to the rules of the transparent world, these unpredictable events can be overcome and transformed into predictable ones. The meaning of life seems to lie in overcoming one’s own opaque experiences according to the slogans that hang on the walls and in the air, thereby becoming a person everyone can recognize. Finally, transparency is the way society is organized, an image through which people understand personal and social relationships, and thus also becomes their objective state of existence.

在透明的世界，人的命运已经被系统的力量决定了，未卜的前途是个人的不幸，它们没有意义；同时，如果一个人真正符合了透明世界的规则，这些未卜事件都可以被克服，变成可卜。人生的意义似乎就在于按照那些写在墙上、挂在空中的标语来克服自己那些不透明的经历，变成人人认可的人。归根到底，透明是社会组织的方式，是人们理解个人和社会关系的一个意象，从而也成为人们客观的存在状态。

The sense of being a stranger felt by the small-town test-takers reflects the nature of Chinese social life, which again is transparent but impermeable. We see the transparency in the fact that their life trajectories and achievements accord with the standards and expectations set by the system, leading to the expected stamp of approval. The impermeability lies in their inability to freely express their personal struggles, hesitations, and anxieties. While they have earned approval, what they lack is recognition in the sense of being understood and seen. Approval is the system’s evaluation of an individual’s achievements based on predetermined standards, determining whether to reward or punish. Recognition, by contrast, involves agency: it is one subject’s comprehension of another subject—seeing that person’s emotions, thoughts, struggles, and history, with no relation to testing, judgment, or rewards and punishments.

小镇做题家的陌生感，反映了社会生活“透明不透气”的特征。他们生活的透明性体现在，他们的成长轨迹和成绩符合体系规定的标准和预期，被毫无悬念地认可。他们体会到的不透气，体现在他们无法从容地表现个人的挣扎、犹豫和苦恼。他们获得了“认可”，欠缺的是“认得”。认可是系统根据既定的标准，评价一个人的成果，决定给予奖励还是惩罚。认得，则是一个主体对另外一个主体的理解，是一个人对另一个人的情绪、考虑、挣扎和历史的看见，它不涉及考验、判断和奖惩。

The issue we are currently facing is not merely that approval has replaced recognition; more critically, approval has become the very basis of recognition. The idea that “love is conditional”—you will only be loved if you prove you are worthy—is a significant reason why many young people feel from an early age that life is a burden. Most of them do not lack love, but the conditional nature of love instilled by family, school, and society has turned nurturing into a burden. The condition for obtaining love and understanding is to first obtain approval. The reason many people sacrifice so much time and effort in pursuit of approval is precisely because this is the first step to earning recognition—when I prove that I am normal and successful, I earn attention, understanding, and love.

我们现在面临的问题，不仅仅是认可取代了认得，更严重的是，认可成了认得的基础。“爱是有条件的”——你要证明你值得爱，爱才存在——是不少年轻人从小感到生活沉重的重要原因。他们中的大部分人并不缺乏爱，但是家庭、学校和社会灌输的爱的“条件感”让滋养变成了负担。而获得爱和认得的条件，就是要先获得认可。很多人之所以要牺牲这么多时间和精力来追求认可，正是因为这是他们获得认得的基础——通过证明我是正常的、成功的，以获得关注、理解和爱。

Husserl argued that the process by which we know the world is not one of discovering an objectively existing external world, but rather one of perceiving the world through experience. Therefore, the nature of one’s experience—the “lifeworld”—determines the kind of world one perceives. Following Husserl’s concept, Schütz emphasized the lifeworld as the “paramount reality of everyday life.” It is the only real world for the individual because it is the world people realize directly through their own experiences; it is not defined by concepts or theories, but formed directly by the senses and experience. Existence beyond the lifeworld, such as the “educational system,” “labor market,” or “technological sector,” is virtual. Habermas extended this further, arguing that the mutual understanding formed through direct human interaction in the lifeworld is the foundation of effective democracy; we must be wary of the “system” (especially state power and market forces) encroaching upon the lifeworld. Although we may not agree that the lifeworld is the foundation of the entire social meaning system, we must admit that the lifeworld directly affects our cognition of society and ourselves. A narrow lifeworld weakens a person’s experiential foundation; they may have a strong self-consciousness, but they lack the “stock of knowledge at hand” (Schütz) to form a rich understanding of others or careful judgments of social situations, thus failing to establish effective distance.

胡塞尔认为，我们认识世界的过程，并不是一个客观存在的外在的世界等待我们去发现，而是我们通过经验来认知世界。所以，什么样的经验（生活世界）决定了我们会感知到什么样的世界。舒尔茨沿用胡塞尔的生活世界概念，强调它是“前概念存在”，是对个人来说唯一真实的世界，因为它是人们直接根据自己的经验而意识到的世界，它不是靠概念、理论去定义的，而是感官和经验直接形成的。超越生活世界的存在，比如“教育系统”“劳动力市场”“科技界”都是虚拟性的。哈贝马斯进一步延伸，认为生活世界里通过人和人直接交流形成的互相理解，是有效民主的基础；我们必须警惕“系统”（特别是国家权力和市场力量）对生活世界的侵占。尽管我们不一定同意生活世界是整个社会意义系统的基础这个说法，但是我们不得不承认，生活世界直接影响我们对社会和对自己的认知。狭窄的生活世界使人的经验基础变得非常薄弱，他可以有强烈的自我意识，但是没有形成可以调用的“知识储备”（舒尔茨）对其他人形成丰富的理解，对面临的社会情况形成仔细的判断，从而不能形成有效间隔。

The understanding that “we are all the same” can also lead to alienation. ... We may be lonely because we can’t find anyone like us, but we may also be lonely because everyone around us is just like us. The meaning and destination of life have already been defined; everyone is a copy of one another. There is nothing to say, and no need to speak. I call this “negative empathy”.

“大家都一样”的想象也会导致陌生化。一个人感到孤独，可能是因为你找不到和你相似的人，但也可能是因为当你放眼望去，到处都是和你相似的人。生命的意义和归宿都已经被定义好了，大家都是对彼此的复制。无可言说，不需要言说。所以我称之为“反向共情”。

“Negative empathy” is a construct created by humans. The “utilitarian assumption” is one aspect of this process of construction. The utilitarian assumption does not mean imagining one another as competitors but refers instead to the idea that people should understand the world and handle interpersonal relationships based on this assumption. Since everyone makes their own calculations when doing things, it is best not to ask too many questions, nor is there any need to do so. The utilitarian assumption also serves as a reminder to focus attention on matters that can bring tangible benefits, and not to concern oneself with matters that have no direct consequences. This differs from judging others according to one’s standards or putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. When you do either of these, the “self” is clearly defined, and the assumption is that others are the same as oneself. // However, negative empathy and utilitarianism do not have a clear sense of self as their starting point. They emphasize that all people “ought” to be the same, and one should align one’s thoughts and actions with this “ought.” It is not about putting yourself in another’s shoes, but rather “putting others into your shoes.” The utilitarian assumption is, in a certain sense, also a self-protection mechanism. It does its best to eliminate the emotional, complex, subtle aspects of life that cannot be optimized, making the world simple and transparent, making thoughts swift and smooth, a single logic capable of explaining everything.

“反向共情”是一个人为建构的结果。“功利化假设”是其建构过程中的一个侧面。功利化假设并不意味着把彼此想象成竞争对手。它指人们应该按此预设去理解世界和处理人际关系。既然大家做事情都有各自的计算，所以最好不要多问，也不必多问。功利化假设也是在提醒自己：把注意力集中在那些最能够带来真金白银的事情上，对没有直接关系的事情没必要去管。这和以己度人、由己及人不一样。以己度人和由己及人中的“己”是明确的，从确定的自我意识出发，假设别人和自己是一样的。而反向共情和功利化假设并没有一个清晰的自我意识作为出发点。它强调的是所有的人“应该”一样，要按照这个“应该”来设定自己怎么想和怎么做，不是以己推人，而是以人推己。功利化假设在一定意义上也是一个自我保护机制。它把生活里那些情感上的复杂、细微、不能功利化的内容尽量剔除，世界从而变得简单而透明，思考因此快速而丝滑，单一的逻辑可以解释所有的事情。

Another mechanism for constructing negative empathy is “dehistoricization,” which involves discarding to the extent possible those parts of one’s life that are undignified, do not meet mainstream expectations, and are unrelated to current interests.

建构反向共情的另一个机制是“去历史化”，即把自己生命中不体面的、不符合主流期待的、和眼前的利益追求没有关系的那些部分尽量切除。

When we say “hello, stranger,” it does not mean that we consider ourselves natives of a particular place or even people who have found a place to settle down. However, to reflect carefully on the subjectivity of the statement “I am a stranger” and think about the state of stranger-making, we cannot think of it from the perspective of a stranger or an outsider. What we need is a new “grounded” way of thinking.

“你好，陌生人”，我们说这句话，并不意味着我们认为自己是本地人，是已经找到安身立命之所的人。但是，要细致地分析“我是陌生人”这样的主体性位置，反思陌生化的状态，又不能够以一种陌生人、局外人的方式来思考。我们需要的可能是一种“安生式”的思考。

So if Heidegger’s notion of dwelling focuses on the relationship between humans and nature, and humans and themselves, Pan’s adaptation emphasizes social relationships and social ethics. My idea of “groundedness” aims to combine these two concepts.

借用潘光旦的话，⁠我们可以说海德格尔的栖息是“人本主义”的（关注人和自然、人和自己的关系），位育是“人文主义”的（强调社会关系和社会伦理）。“安生”希望把这二者结合起来。

A grounded style of thinking is based on the awareness that changing the status quo cannot be achieved through a single action or decision but rather requires a new understanding of life. From this new understanding, new behaviors, new relationships, and new meanings of life emerge. This new understanding must be grounded in concrete reality and confront various complexities: Why do I always feel like a stranger? Why do I unconsciously compare myself to others? Why is it so difficult to accept certain criticisms? Rather than making a blanket judgment about life—Why isn’t life the way I want it to be? why is everything unjust and unequal?—grounded thinking involves “consciousness-raising” of one’s own experiences.

安生式的思考是基于这样的意识：改变现状，不能靠某个行动、某个抉择，而必须对生活形成新的理解，从新的理解出发长出新的行为、新的关系、新的生活意味。这种新的理解必须是基于具体现实的，直面各种纠结（为什么我总觉得自己是个陌生人？为什么我会下意识地和别人比较？为什么我难以接受这样或那样的评论？），而不是要对生活做总体的好坏判断（为什么生活不是我想要的样子？为什么一切都是不正义、不平等的？）。

To develop a grounded way of thinking, the first step might be to treat thinking as a practical process, that is, to recognize that thinking is inseparable from observation, memory, bodily perception, expression, and dialogue. […] Whether we are getting to know acquaintances, recognizing strangers, or understanding ourselves, we first become aware of the specific scene, and then understand the people within that scene through the scene itself. […] This emphasis on the scene first implies viewing a person as a condensation of their historical experiences. […] The scene also implies that we must pay full attention to people’s positions within social relationships. […] Recognizing strangers and engaging in grounded thinking is a constantly repetitive process; it needs to occur repeatedly within the “flow of life” and requires a scene for observation and reflection.

要发展安生的思考方式，第一步可能是把思考处理为一个实践过程，即意识到，思考是和观察、记忆、身体感知、表达、对话不可分割的。[…] 不管是在了解熟人、认识陌生人，还是认识自己的时候，我们都是先意识到具体的场景，再通过场景来理解场景中的人。[…] 对场景的重视，首先意味着把人看作他的历史经历的浓缩。[…] 场景也意味我们要充分注意人们在社会关系中的位置。[…] 认得陌生人、安生式的思考是一个不断反复的过程，它需要在“生活流”里重复发生，需要一个观察和思考的场景。

“Reading Lolita in the Barracks”:

A bugle call jolts you awake, bringing the dislocation of waking up in a strange place. You’re expected to spring up and fold your sleeping pad. If there's a straggler, the entire platoon must hold a punishing pose resembling a downward dog, often for a full hour. To this day, you still don’t understand why people pay to do yoga.

While I was sad to leave the friendships I'd forged in that blitz, I was suspicious of this orchestrated intimacy — one that must be reliably reproducible in Nonsan, under the engineered conditions of shared misery and resentment toward our drill sergeants. Was this kind of ready-made camaraderie the particular fiction that underwrites the enterprise of war? In the end, I’d never see most of them again. Perhaps friendship is what’s born of shared sensibilities, and we reserve the word camaraderie for what’s born of shared hatred.

Yongsan Garrison is the strangest place I’ve ever been. Having lassoed a prime stretch of land in the now-fashionable Itaewon district, it occupied more than half the area of Central Park, right in the heart of Seoul. But on Google Maps — coordinates (37.54, 126.98) — you’ll find a conspicuous blank space where it should be.

To put legions of young men on the cusp of manhood together is to create a petri dish of male ego. The military can serve as, to steal a phrase from D. W. Winnicott, a permanent alternative to puberty.

Even within the same rank, your month of enlistment mattered. An August recruit (me) was forever junior to a July recruit of the same year; it was common to call someone by their enlistment month. I was, for a time, simply “August.”

Officially, after lights-out at 10 p.m., there were two hours of voluntary study. It's a standard policy on every base to have a 연등실 (延燈室), which has the uncharacteristically poetic translation of "the Room Where the Lights Stay On."

Two or three hours every few nights were hardly enough. I began finding ways to outwit the system during my day job. Books were too conspicuous, so I printed out magazine articles, essays, and book chapters in what was surely unauthorized use of military computers. I shuffled these printouts in with my translation tasks, all practicing, in Gulag slang, tufta — “the art of pretending to work.” As long as the papers were in English, the officers didn't notice. Once I'd finished, off to the shredder they went.

Books brought from outside required navigating the military’s censorship apparatus. There was an official list of banned books — selected with the predictable logic of the conservative administration — that included Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang’s anti-neoliberal critique, Bad Samaritans. (Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century made the list in 2016.) Every book brought onto the base required an approval stamp from a censoring officer.

As a private joke with the bureaucracy, I submitted Lolita for approval. To the censoring officer, it was just another book written in a foreign language. He stamped it without comment. My copy still bears the imprint: “Military Security Clearance Passed.”

In the outside world there’s a divide between public and private morality: the stickler for recycling who’s a terror to her friends; the man kind to his neighbors but votes for tyrants. In the barracks this boundary vanished. There was no public life, only private morality in its most naked form, namely, your character.

The empathy literature fosters can be turned to any end — to help or to harm, to liberate or to oppress — as Nehamas notes, “well-read villains, sensitive outlaws, tasteful criminals, and elegant torturers are everywhere about us.”

The dubious gift of military service is that most South Korean men are sufficiently tested. For those of us honest with ourselves, we know how petty we can be.

Yet, as Rorty warns, in that very quest for autonomy lies a potential for cruelty: “our private obsessions with the achievement of a certain sort of perfection may make us oblivious to the pain and humiliation we are causing.” Which is to say, I may not have been cruel, but that doesn't mean I was virtuous.

“Escape Artists”:

Romantasy’s protagonists tend not to bear the burden of personhood too heavily: they are perfectly plastic creations, stiff to the touch but moldable as needed.

Romantasy sex scenes function not as spicy interludes between events but as critical moments of world-building and character formation, much like song-and-dance sequences in musical theater.

The adjectives “primal” and “feral” appear frequently in romantasy, most notably in the work of Maas, who has made something of an art of using them as much as possible.

Series such as Twilight and Harry Potter “molded generations of young readers who have grown up but still crave big fantasy novels — now with a dose of erotica,”

At the highest level of abstraction, this kind of remixing carries a whiff of what the critic Jason Farago termed, in 2023, the “glacially slow Ferris wheel” of contemporary culture, “cycling through remakes and pastiches with nowhere to go but around,” although down in the trenches of fan culture it is a sign of the genre at work.

Romance and fantasy are each dominated by distinct tropes, but romantasy takes this feature and turbocharges it. The internet, and TikTok in particular, has made it easier than ever for the selection of tropes to precede the acts of reading and writing. In January, Katy Waldman reported for The New Yorker that trope-oriented hashtags allow romantasy “authors to tune their creative process to the story elements that are getting the most attention online,” just as readers can use them to sort through the digital muck and locate the stories most to their liking, be they “broody protector,” “shadow daddy,” “morally gray,” “secret stalker,” “star-crossed lovers,” “opposites attract,” “Hades and Persephone,” “magic academy,” “virgin,” “dark elves,” or, among many others, “I can fix him.”

The romantasy protagonists sure are powerful (and they never give up), but, at critical junctures throughout their stories, they also exhibit a strange, inert kind of power, as if they have all the trappings of agency but none of its substance. The scholar Regis noted that the heroines of traditional romance novels win a “provisional” freedom in their happy endings: “freed from the barriers to her union with the hero,” they are nevertheless bound by their relationships to society. The empowered women of romantasy experience a provisional freedom not by virtue of the patriarchy, but by virtue of the fairy tale as literary form. Living in non-allegorical Secondary Worlds, especially ones with imperatives toward happy endings, the prominent characters of romantasy are overdetermined, by fate and by trope alike.

In each book, the author resolves the crucial mess of matchmaking by leaning on some variation of the concept of “mates” who are paired in a poorly understood metaphysical sense.

A lifelong relationship set in motion and then in stone by the conspiring universe: dream of the failed Hinge user, overwhelmed by options and a surfeit of power to choose.

In this regard, the protagonists in romantasy are more archaic than those found in literary fiction, where characters tend to develop over the course of the narrative via a series of decisive actions. In the realist novel, if the actions that characters take are to mean anything, it’s because they occur under the illusion that the outcome is open-ended until the very moment it isn’t. […] The inevitable conclusion of the story presses only lightly against the plot, maintaining the necessary fiction that the choices made in the novel are like the choices made in life, where the things we do and why we do them matter precisely — even only — because they could have been otherwise.

The romantasy badasses, on the other hand, are stranded somewhere between prophecy and personhood. Most of the decisive, soul-forming decisions they, in theory, would have to take are avoided thanks to a deus ex machina or the machinations of destiny.

[T]he characters cannot come alive as actors in their own stories, as agents in their own timelines. It’s freedom from fate that imposes the possibility of action and the obligation to act. And action — that way of touching existence, being inside of experience, engaging with the mess of life — is what makes the world, to use Keats’s phrase, “the vale of soul-making.” It’s also what makes it, for that matter, the vale of adulthood.

As shaggy plots amble along for hours and hours of reading time, the novels deliver sexual resolution in place of narrative resolution. When physical climaxes are shatteringly achieved, all discomfort with the plot-that-is-no-plot (are we still waiting for the King of Hybern to attack?) melts away into a pleasant, sticky dew.

The power of the fairy tale in the post-adult age lies in its ability to recuperate the energies of a life of action and meaning in a form that doesn’t require getting off the couch. The conspiracist senses that for her, as for Feyre and Violet, the most important decisions about her life have been already made by forces over which she has no control, which have the power to end the world as she knows it. This realization spurs not action but a pantomime of action, the inhabitation of a story with heroes and villains in which the individual is shrunk to near nothing in relation to overwhelming systemic or natural forces, a story that endlessly renews itself through commentary and elaboration, setting off an ever-swelling surge of fantasy. There is, in the end, no escape: in their stilted figurations of the human, their worlds of suspended action, their sexed-up technicolor frivolity, romantasy novels are our great monuments to reality.

The air of tragedy and paralysis that overhangs so much of American life is, perhaps more than declining rates of marriage or property ownership, the real source of strength for the particular type of fairy-tale narrative that has come to dominate our literature. Because what are you supposed to do with your time between now and the end of the world? What should you do with your one adult life?

“LLMs Make Legal Advice Lossy”:

It is a totally normal part of a functioning lawyer’s day to mentally scale levels of abstraction like this, picking and choosing where to stand the client, what to point at, and what to leave out.

Getting good at neither coddling nor firehosing clients is a significant part of the difference between being a good law student and being a good lawyer. If you learn all the rules, exceptions, and citations and stop there, you are at best fully qualified to practice law badly. Practicing law is often partly teaching law, but unless the job is law professor, rarely are we called upon to teach anybody everything on any particular point. Hiring a lawyer is not attending law school secondhand in installments.

To summarize a summary is not just to compress an already compressed explanation, but also, often, to reword it. Choice of words can be important in what I do. Not inevitably in the cartoonish way those with little experience of the law tend to suppose, where failing to say exactly the right thing makes no magic. In a more serious way affecting how much advice my clients need, longer-term.

When a client uses a chatbot to effectively rewrite my guidance, I lose control of how worthwhile terms get introduced. I lose control of how they’re sprinkled through the text later, to develop fluency. Both content and presentation end up on invisible autopilot. There is no bright line between those in the law.

I need to keep pushing myself, and setting clients up to push me, toward plainer, shorter, better organized writing. We also need to stay on the level. If clients are in positions that drive them to interpose chatbots between us, whether out of verve for the tech or simply under time crunch, I should be making it clear that’s something they should unhesitatingly tell me. I should be prompting them to say so.

“Sam Altman’s Dirty DRAM Deal”:

[T]he shock wasn’t that OpenAI made a big deal, no, it was that they made two massive deals this big, at the same time, with Samsung and SK Hynix simultaneously.

Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different. It’s entirely conceivable they wouldn’t have both agreed to supply such a substantial part of global supply if they had known more.

[I]t sure seems like a primary goal of these deals was to deprive the market.

Normally, the DRAM market has buffers: warehouses of emergency stock, excess wafer starts, older DRAM manufacturing machinery being sold off to budget brands while the big brands upgrade their production lines…but not in 2025.

Companies had deliberately reduced how much DRAM they ordered for their safety stock over the summer of 2025 because tariffs were changing almost weekly.

Because of the hesitancy to purchase as much safety stock as usual, RAM prices were also genuinely falling over time.

Korean memory firms have been terrified that reselling old equipment to China-adjacent OEMs might trigger U.S. retaliation.

Caixin on Global Central Bank Gold Purchases Hit 2025 High:

2022 年以来，黄金市场发生了一些结构性变化，包括私人、官方部门的需求显著增加，黄金不再是短期的避险工具，而是被越来越多视为长期战略资产和资产配置的核心。这个变化降低了黄金对传统驱动因素，比如美元、实际利率的敏感度，同时增加了市场的韧性。

大部分非发达国家的黄金储备是很低的，但正是这些官方机构的配置需求让传统的黄金定价模型失效。[…] 传统分析框架中，金价主要受实际利率、通胀及美元指数等周期性因素驱动，央行购金被视为这些因素导致的“结果”；而现在反而像“鸡生蛋、蛋生鸡”，去美元化的进程和金价的涨幅呈现非常显著的正相关，官方机构正在结构性增持黄金。

cycling is at the same time the most useful and useless skill i picked up in the past year

Li, Yiyun. The Book of Goose. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2022).

America and fame: they are equally useful if you want freedom from your mother.

美国和名气：如果你想摆脱你的母亲、获得自由，这两者均有用。

The secrets inside me have not left much space for a fetus to grow.

我内心的秘密让可供胎儿成长的空间所剩无几。

If dead people had no choice but to become ghosts, Fabienne’s ghost would only scoff at the usual tricks that other ghosts take pride in. Her ghost would do something entirely different.

如果死去的人别无选择，仅可变成鬼魂，法比耶娜的鬼魂只会嘲笑这些其他鬼魂引以为傲的寻常把戏。她的鬼魂会做出一些截然不同的事。

Well-proportioned children are a rare happenstance. War guarantees disproportion, but during peacetime other things go wrong. I have not met a child who is not lopsided in some way. And when children grow up, they become lopsided adults.

身心均衡的儿童是难得的。由于战争，失衡成为必然，可在和平时期，其他方面出现问题。我没见过一个一切正常、没有偏差的小孩。而当小孩长大后，他们变成畸形的大人。

We were almost one person. I do not imagine that the half of an orange facing south would have to tell the other half how warm the sunlight is.

我们简直等于一个人。我猜，朝南的半个橙子无须告诉另外一半阳光有多暖和。

Most adults struck us as peripheral, some more annoying than others. But we liked the ceremony, the grave of a recently dead woman strewn with the more recently dead flowers.

大多数成年人在我们眼里无关大局，有些比其他更讨厌，但我们喜欢这仪式，把才刚死去的花铺在一位刚死去不久的妇人的坟上。

How do I measure Fabienne’s presence in my life—by the years we were together, or by the years we have been apart, her shadow elongating as time goes by, always touching me?

我怎么计量法比耶娜在我人生中的存在——用我们在一起的岁月，或用我们分开的岁月？在分开的岁月里，她的影子随时光的流逝而拉长，始终触及我。

Fabienne believed that we must always test the limits of our bodies. Not drinking until thirst scratched our throats like sand. Not eating until our heads were lightened by hunger.

法比耶娜认为，我们应该时时测试我们身体的极限。渴到喉咙像被沙子擦痛时才喝水。饿得头晕眼花才吃东西。

Time corrupts. And we pay a price for everything corruptible: food, roof beams, souls.

时间使东西变质。我们为一切易变质的东西付出代价：食物、顶梁、灵魂。

“Sad people don’t often know that they are sad and bored.”

“悲伤的人常常不知道他们既悲伤又空虚无聊。”

I did not speak with my parents unless I had to. I did all my chores without their bidding because I hated to give them an opportunity to disturb the blanket of quiet mystery I carried around myself at home. I was not a child who could bring comfort to anyone, and I had no such desire.

除非迫不得已，我不跟我的父母讲话。无需他们吩咐，我主动做所有我分内的家务，因为我不想让他们有机会搅乱我在家时给自己披上的沉默、神秘的外衣。我不是一个能让谁获得慰藉的孩子，我也不渴望成为这样的孩子。

When she—no, the woman she was speaking for—asked god why he had sent her baby to the earth only for him to die, I stopped writing. “That’s a funny question the woman is asking,” I said.

“What’s so funny?”

“All people are sent to the earth to die,” I said. “God even sent his own son to the earth to die.”

当她——不，是那个借她之口在讲话的女子——问上帝为什么把她的宝宝送到人间却不让他活下去时，我停下笔。“这女人问的问题未免可笑。”我说。

“哪里如此可笑？”

“每个被送到世间来的人都是来送死的，“我说，“上帝甚至把他自己的儿子送到人间来送死。”

What’s the difference between knowing a story and writing it out? But the questions I should have asked, which I did not know how when we were younger, were: Isn’t it enough just to know a story? Why take the time to write it out?

I now have the answer, for her and for myself. The world has no use for who we are and what we know. A story has to be written out. How else do we get our revenge?

知道一个故事和把它写下来有什么区别？我该问的其实不是这个……而是：光知道一个故事不够吗？为何要花时间把它写下来？

现在我有了答案，既是给她也是给我自己的。世人不把我们是谁、我们知道什么当一回事。一个故事必须写下来。否则我们怎么替自己报仇雪耻？

It was not that I had any moral issue with lying, but lying to someone would only make that person important to me.

不是因为我觉得撒谎有违道德，而是因为对某人撒谎，只会使那人在我心目中的地位变得重要。

Perhaps that was my intuition, acting sensibly and disarmingly baffled, as though the world were a mystery beyond my capacity, which I had accepted without protest, along with the fact that I, too, was part of that mystery, defying my own understanding.

直觉体现在那方面，装傻时装得合情合理，教人消除疑窦，仿佛这世界是一个超出我理解能力的谜，我心甘情愿地接受，连同接受事实上我也是那个谜的一部分，拒绝让自己搞懂自己。

We forgive many people for what they cannot do for us, but not our mothers; we protect our mothers more than we protect others, too. Sometimes I think it may be just as well that I cannot have my own children: I can count more things I would not be able to do for them than what I could; and I would rather march through life without the futile protection from my children. People often forget that it is always a gamble to be a mother; I am not a gambler.

我们原谅许多人，原谅他们不能为我们做的事，但我们不原谅我们的母亲；我们也保护我们的母亲胜过我们保护其他人。有时，我觉得我不能有我自己的孩子反倒是件好事：我能数出我无法为他们做的事多于我可以做的；我宁愿潇洒地走完人生，不要我的孩子来徒劳地保护我。人们时常忘记，当母亲永远是一场赌博；我不是赌徒。

People close to you at one moment may disappear the next moment, but the sky is always there, whether you have a roof over your head or not.

这一刻与你亲近的人，下一刻也许消失不见，但天空始终在那儿，不管你的头顶有没有一片遮风挡雨的屋檐都一样。

Two people who are constantly seeking experience rarely settle for each other.

Two people enduring experience rarely meet in life.

That’s why Fabienne and I were meant for each other. We were the perfect pair, one seeking all that the other could experience.

两个不断追求生活经历的人很难迁就彼此。

两个背负着经历的人很难在生活中相遇。

正因为如此，法比耶娜和我是天作之合。我们是完美的一对，一方追求另一方可能经历的所有事。

Happiness, I would tell her, is to spend every day without craning one’s neck to look forward to tomorrow, next month, next year, and without holding out one’s hands to stop every day from becoming yesterday.

快乐，我会告诉她，是度过每一天时不用引颈盼着明天、次月、来年，不用伸出手阻止每一天变成昨日。

Life is most difficult for those who know what they want and also know what makes it impossible for them to get what they want. Life is still difficult, but less so, for those who know what they want but have not realized that they will never get it. It is the least difficult for people who do not know what they want.

活得最不易的人知道他们想要什么，也知道是什么阻挠他们得到他们想要的东西。同样活得不易但并非最不易的，是知道他们想要什么却还未意识到他们将永远无法如愿的人。对不知道自己想要什么的人来说，生活一点不难。

Often I imagine that living is a game of rock-paper-scissors: fate beats hope, hope beats ignorance, and ignorance beats fate. Or, in a version that has preoccupied me: the fatalistic attracts the hopeful, the hopeful attracts the ignorant, and the ignorant, the fatalistic.

我时常把活着想象成一个石头剪子布的游戏：命运击败希望，希望击败无知，无知击败命运。或者换一个让我念念不忘的版本：听天由命的人吸引满怀希望的人，满怀希望的人吸引蒙昧无知的人，蒙昧无知的人吸引听天由命的人。

It baffles me that often songs and poems are written about love at first sight: those who claim to experience the phenomena have preened themselves, ready for love. There is nothing extraordinary about that. Childhood friendship, much more fatal, simply happens.

我不懂歌曲和诗为何常常描写一见钟情的爱：那些声称体验过这奇迹的人，事先精心打扮自己，为迎接爱做好准备。那样的一见钟情没什么大不了了。儿时的友谊含有更多命中注定的成分，说来就来。

“Is there an hour that is neither day nor night?” she said. “No. So you see, you and I together, we cover all the time, we have everything between us.”

“有没有一个时间点，既不属于白天也不属于黑夜？”她说，“没有。所以你瞧，你和我合在一起，我们涵盖全部的时间，我们相依为伴等于拥有一切。”

I felt like the country rat in the La Fontaine fable we had read at school. How immense the world is, the rat exclaims when he sets out for an adventure, congratulating himself that he is no longer a country rat but a creature of sophistication. And when he sees an oyster on the beach, he tells himself that a worldly eater will enjoy an oyster, so he sticks his head between the open shells. Like the rat, I was caught. I was doomed.

我觉得自己好像我们上学时读的《拉封丹寓言》里那只乡下的老鼠。这世界多么辽阔，当那只老鼠出发要去探险时，它高喊，庆贺自己不再是一只乡下的老鼠，而是一个精明老练的家伙。它看到沙滩上有一只牡蛎，它对自己说，见过世面的食客会懂得品尝牡蛎，于是它把头伸进打开的壳里。和那只老鼠一样，我被夹住。我完蛋了。

(By half—that expression, which I had learned from listening to the girls, has become one of my favorite phrases. By half, by half of that half—even now, I like to repeat it to myself when I am in a dividing mood. Halve life’s pain, and we are not pain-free. Halve life’s joy, there is still joy enough to be halved. Truly life can be a funny business, too prodigal by half, also too stingy by half. I have a habit of speaking to my geese as though to myself: You’re too silly by half. You’re too proud by half.)

（加倍——我通过谛听那些女生讲话，学来了上述表达，现已成为我最爱的短语之一。加倍、再加倍——即使到今天，我仍喜欢在处于做算术的心情时对自己重复这个短语。把人生的快乐加倍，不会抵消我们的痛苦。把快乐减半，依然还有足可减半的快乐。的确，人生有时是一场恶作剧，加倍挥霍又加倍吝啬。我有个习惯，和我的鹅讲话像在跟我自己讲话似的：你们加倍可笑。你们加倍自豪。）

I arranged my nightdress with the scalloped hem on the bed, spreading it out to mark the shape of my body and folding the two sleeves in front of the chest like an angel’s. It was so soft and so pretty, but I knew that if I made an exception for it, soon I would make exceptions for the rest. No, I would not take anything from the school but only what truly belonged to me.

我把我带荷叶边的睡袍放到床上摊开，铺成我身体的样子，然后将两个衣袖折叠于胸前，摆出类似天使的姿势。那睡袍如此柔软、如此美丽，但我知道，倘若我破例把它装进行李，很快我会破例把剩下的全装走。不，我不会从学校拿走一点东西，我将只拿真正属于我的。

Of all the people in the world, how many of them, looking into their own conscience, can say with unwavering certainty that they have never betrayed someone in their lives—ten, five, none? If so, why do we often make a fuss about betrayal? So many movies and books, so many broken marriages and torn friendships. The knives we stick into one another’s backs—perhaps those knives have their own wills. They take a grand tour, finding a hand here and a back there. We cannot blame the hands, just as we cannot sympathize with the backs. They are equally recruited for the knives’ entertainment. The world is never short of knives.

全世界的人里，有多少人扪心自问，能够斩钉截铁地说他们这辈子从未背叛过谁——十个、五个、一个也没有？倘若如此，我们为什么经常对背叛小题大做？这么多电影和书，这么多破碎的婚姻和决裂的友谊。我们互相在背后捅刀子——也许这些刀子有它们自己的意志。它们巡游四方，在各地觅得一只手、一个背。我们无法责备那些手，诚如我们无法同情那些背。它们是同样被招募来供那些刀子取乐的。这个世界绝不缺少刀子。

The past few months felt like a trance. No one stays in a trance forever, true, but no one, shaken awake, lives on without feeling a void inside. A trance is a displacement. A trance is a wound.

过去几个月感觉像一场催眠。诚然，没有人永远停留在催眠状态里，但被摇醒后，没有人不会在继续生活下去时感到一种内心的空虚。催眠是一次脱位。催眠是一个伤口。

Fabienne pressed her hands hard on my ears. I stayed still, and then heard her shriek, not through the air, but through our bodies. Even with my ears muffled I knew the shriek was terrifying, more animal than human. If a child cried for help, someone would hear it, but no help would come for us now, because Fabienne was no more than an injured animal. Somewhere in a house a baby would be awakened from sleep and cry. A dog wandering in the alley would be running home, frightened, with its tail tucked in.

Fabienne shrieked once more, and then pulled her hands away from my ears. In a voice nearly inaudible, she said, “It’s going to be pain and pain and pain and pain from now on, don’t you see it, Agnès?”

法比耶娜把她的双手紧贴在我的耳朵上。我一动不动，接着我听见她的尖叫，不是通过空气而是通过我们的身体传来。即使我的耳朵被捂住，我也知道那叫声吓人，更像动物而不是人发出的。如果一个小孩大哭求助，有人会听见，但此刻没有人来救助我们，因为法比耶娜不过是一头受伤的动物。在某处的一间屋子里，有个睡着的婴儿会被惊醒，大哭。一条在巷子里游荡的狗会惊恐地夹着尾巴跑回家。

法比耶娜义尖叫了一声，然后松开捂着我耳朵的手。她用近乎不可闻的声音说：“从今往后将是痛、痛、痛、痛，你看不出来吗，阿涅丝?”

I now know that so much of our story began with Fabienne’s exultation and despair, both out of my reach. For as long as I could be the outlet of her exultation and her despair, life was bearable, even interesting, to her. I was the whetstone that sharpened her mind’s blade; I was the orange that she cut into effortlessly. All the same, I could not save us. It was not boredom that defeated us, it was not defeat that made us drift apart. Not every child is born with an untamable force within her. It is the world’s job to avert its eyes, writing that force off as childish tantrum, as immaturity. It is a child’s job to forbear that force until she, too, can write it off and sail into a safer adulthood. Fabienne had no words to describe her exultation and despair, and I had no way to grasp them, but she was not alone in her extremes. The lucky ones have waited out the storms. The really lucky ones who have learned a few tricks to tame the untamable—however momentarily—have made their names. I am not sophisticated enough to claim that I understand those geniuses, but I know what they have put in their symphonies and concertos, what they have put on their canvases or in their books, is what made Fabienne shriek in the cemetery. Through her hands I had heard her pain: there was something immense in her, bigger, sharper, more permanent, than the life we lived. She could neither find nor make a world to accommodate that immense being.

我现在明白，我们的故事在很大程度上始于法比耶娜的狂喜与绝望，两者我都达不到。只要我可以让她通过我来发泄她的狂喜和绝望，生活对她来说就可以忍受，甚至有意思。我是磨刀石，我把她刀子般的心磨得锋利；我是那颗她毫不费力切开的橙子。尽管如此，我照样救不了我们。击败我们的不是无聊，使我们分道扬镇的不是落败。不是每个小孩生来骨子里都有一股难以驯服的力晕。世人的职责是不要正视，把那股力最当作小孩子闹脾气，当作不成熟而勾销。儿童的职责是克制那股力量，直至能把它扼杀，昂首成为大人，让自己更加安全。法比耶娜找不到语言描述她的狂喜和绝望，我没有办法理解她的狂喜和绝望，但活在这极端中的人不只她一个。其中幸运的人等待风暴过去。真正幸运的人学会几招技巧，驯服这不可驯服的力量——无论多么昙花一现——扬名天下。我不够老练世故，无法声称我理解那些天才，但我知道，他们在交响乐和协奏曲里所表达的，他们在画布上或书里所呈现的，正是使法比耶娜在墓园发出尖叫的东西。隔着她的手，我听见她的痛：她的心中有个庞然大物，比我们实际的人生更大、更鲜明、更永恒。她既找不到也创造不出一片能容纳那庞然大物的天地。

“Just and Loving Seeing”:

It was a dual, almost paradoxical experience of both feeling that something I already know was getting articulated with a level of detail that I am myself incapable of—a level of detail I wasn’t even aware was possible—while also feeling provoked by it.

It is interesting how something can both feel like a clearer picture of what you already know and also a provocation. When an idea that I have had comes back to me in higher resolution, I notice that a lot of the details of how I’ve thought about it fail to add up. I recognize these as my thoughts, but also I see that they show me to be confused.

[W]e can imagine there is a limit where our actions can’t be further improved, and that limit is the Good.

The world has endless detail, variety, and nuance. Any attempt to define the right thing to do in the abstract (saying, for instance, that we should aim for human flourishing) will fail to take reality’s details into account. But when Murdoch says that the aim is to move toward the Good, she isn’t proposing an abstract goal; she’s saying that our aim should be to see reality as clearly as possible. If we can just see reality clearly, we will know what is Good in this specific situation.

[A]s Jane Psmith puts it, “the ‘authentic you’ is an incoherent half-formed ball of mutually contradictory desires and lizard-brain instinct.” (Murdoch calls the authentic you “a tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams.”)

She parts ways with the romantics and the existentialists in that she doesn’t believe in the notion that value comes from within.3 She doesn’t believe that things are good because we like them; she thinks that what is Good is independent of who we are; it is possible for us to feel good about the wrong thing. Hence, we cannot trust our inner voice; we need to figure out if it is right.

“Why you need your whole body – from head to toes – to think”:

But why are we so reluctant to consider the brain as just another part of the body? There’s no evidence that the brain is made of a different kind of ‘physical stuff’ from the rest of the body.

We need to start with the cells that compose our humble toes before zooming into the mystery of the brain. Why? Because our cells solve the biggest and most urgent problem of this great and mysterious adventure called life without a brain, and before we had a brain: how to stay alive.

[B]ecause our body is a living system governed by the basic law of self-preservation, this means that all our experiences are necessarily embodied self-experiences. In perceiving and experiencing the world, we ‘smuggle in’ our own fundamental self-survival goals.

A growing body of evidence from neurobiology and biochemistry suggests that cognitive categories such as ‘sensing’, ‘memory’ and ‘learning’ can be applied non-metaphorically to the behaviour of simple organisms such as bacteria.

[A]ll bodily cells and their complex interconnections [are] fundamental for cognition, not just neurons. Among our cells, the immune system plays a very special role, working in tandem with the neural system to help us build the ‘self’.

To put it bluntly: one can experience without thinking, but one cannot think without experiencing. Experiences come to the surface of being through the body, and not through the minds, or some sort of homunculus sitting in our heads, trying to ‘make sense’ of a world he doesn’t see, because the world is hidden in the black box of the scalp. We don’t perceive the world through some sort of inner solitary lens situated in our heads. We perceive the world through every single cell of our body.

Interestingly, that famous Rodin sculpture was supposed to represent not a philosopher, but a poet – Dante, the author of The Divine Comedy. The artist represented the poet sitting at the door of the Inferno and other worlds, contemplating the space in between, the border, the passage between life and death. Perhaps what Rodin was trying to show us was that the meaning of all this lies not hidden inside one’s head, but in what lies in between us, the world, and others.

“A Tale of Two College Towns”:

For Wikipedia, the college town is one where an institution of higher learning “pervades” the life of the place. Good enough. I like this verb, “pervade.” In cities or towns that have enough other things going on—places we wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, call “college towns”—it’s rather the place that pervades the school.

At its best, the small college in a small college town functions this way for the nonstudent residents, as a slightly mysterious world within the world that, while pursuing its own ends, expands everyone’s sense of what is possible.

For this to happen at all, the college has to be its own distinct place, present and familiar but in some ways opaque.

The otherworldly character of the liberal-arts college’s mission is obvious enough here: young Puritan theocrats studying, among others, older Puritan theocrats so that they can responsibly govern a Puritan theocracy. We are talking about shining cities on hills here. The SLAC makes up one component in a uniquely American fusion of utopianism as a tool of social reform, education as a tool of social mobility, and free real estate.

Horowitz rather diplomatically describes the reaction of the “college men” to this incursion:

They have perceived the especially diligent student as the “grind” and the student seeking faculty friendship as the “fisherman” or “brownnose.” Such terms of derogation have been necessary because college life has always had to contend with a significant number of students who have wanted no part of it—the outsiders. To the early colleges came some men for whom higher education was intended, those studying for the ministry.

Liberal education was for a very long time reserved to an elite—whence the word “liberal,” befitting free men—who were a small minority in Western societies. Gradually, except by the standards of the world at large, Americans began democratizing privilege.

Another way to put it is that America tried, for a brief moment, to build a welfare state—which is to say, a democratic civilization—and we did a lot of it through our schools. When the tide of opinion turned against welfare states, the school-based parts of our system were the only parts that were widely enough used to survive.

People expect a relatively small, selective, and liberal-arts-focused school to be a little weird. But the land-grant college or public university offers itself up as a public service, and is judged, probably unfairly, by different rules; meanwhile, it also crosses into more people’s daily lives more often and more dramatically, and thus offers itself up to be judged. Anthropologists have a useful term, “schismogenesis,” for that tendency of human beings to define ourselves by exaggerating and accentuating our differences from a nearby “other,” often two-thirds imaginary.

It baffles and enrages me that so much talent and earnestness comes together to create a student culture full of harried young people who let ChatGPT do all their homework for them because they don’t think they have time to get the education they pay for, but who also cut themselves or spiral into depression because they fail a test. It takes more than human ingenuity to make so little of so much. One is tempted to resort to demonology to explain it.

“Earnest dilettantism.” “Patience for everything.” “Gargantuan” and “quixotic” projects done “with total seriousness and dedication.” When a college town lives up to its potential, these are its hallmarks.

In any case, the biggest source of tension between the University of Michigan and its surrounding town is housing, [which] in fact [] pits out-of-town corporate landlords against local landlords. It amuses me that this conflict involves the very trait in which this particular town and this particular gown most resemble each other: the shared desire to appear liberal and public-spirited without bearing the costs and inconveniences of liberality and public-spiritedness.

[T]he liberal-arts college, small or huge, is an essentially humanist enterprise, and that too many of the people who run them have been cowards about admitting it.

Briefly, anyone who offers an account of human knowing and being in which we are not comparable in some ways to but actually reducible to machines is not a humanist. Nor is anyone who denies our potential for good, whether by adopting a Schopenhauerian disgust with people as such or by denying the meaningfulness of the distinction between good and evil themselves. Liberal education doesn’t absolutely require political liberalism, but it requires that you think there is such a thing as “freedom,” that it is a thing people rightly aspire to, and that you acknowledge the existence of “people.”

To hate the mind, to assign curiosity or disinterested love of a subject no place in one’s account of human motivation, to see every sign of particularity or individuality as “pretentiousness” or “elitism”: All of this is finally anti-human.