Notes

“Everything Is Not Fine in the Art World”:

Auction houses rely on this sleight of hand. Their job is not to measure value. Their job is to perform it. Sarah Thornton wrote about this clearly in Seven Days in the Art World (2009), where she describes auctions as rituals rather than markets, spaces where belief is manufactured through choreography. Reading her work changed how I saw these rooms. The scripts, the coded gestures, the artificial suspense, the carefully timed applause, the way the room breathes in unison. None of it reflects the truth of what art is worth or what artists need. It reflects the truth of what the ritual requires. In that sense, last week’s evening sales looked exactly the way they meant to look: The paddles, the rhythm, the polished certainty. Everything was arranged to reassure the public that the system still works, that art still circulates as a luxury investment, cultural currency, and global status symbol.

Scarcity, visibility, community, and narrative are all tools that shape value. Artists do not need to mimic these strategies. They only need to understand how these tools are used and how they circulate.

《大埔火災，用「誤殺罪」追責的侷限》：

樓宇火災鮮少是單一失誤引發的「意外」，而更常是多重系統性故障的惡性連鎖，可能是設計的先天隱患，亦可能是日常維護的疏漏，以至緊急應變的失效。這些環節往往橫跨企業的層層部門與多位人員，難以鎖定單一「元兇」。這種分散性不僅模糊了因果鏈條，更讓傳統的個人化追責模式顯得力不從心。

一些法律觀點曾探索「聚合模式（aggregation approach）」的可能，即透過彙集多名員工的個別作為或疏忽，累積形成公司的整體犯罪意圖與行為。這一模式旨在捕捉公司失能的分散本質：單一員工的疏忽或許微不足道，但多重瑣碎失誤的疊加，可能構成系統性嚴重疏忽。然而，這創新想法在 R v HM Coroner for East Kent, ex parte Spooner (1989) 88 Cr App R 10 一案中遭明確否定。法院堅持，誤殺罪的證明要素必須針對「被告本人」獨立成立，而不能透過「拼湊」多人的零散證據來「合成」公司罪責。

此中諷刺，正如法律學者 James Gobert 於 1994 年《公司犯罪性：四種過錯模式》（Corporate Criminality: Four Models of Fault）一文所論，「人格化原則」正於無需要之處發揮最佳效用：在小型企業中，高管通常親身參與營運，輕易滿足該原則的要件，但此時他們自身已可能承擔個人刑事責任，對公司層面的追究則顯得多餘，所以阻嚇功能反而微弱。反之，於最需追責之巨型企業，高層往往透過遙距指揮、鮮少親涉基層日常運作，導致該原則難以適用，從而使公司整體的系統性失責得以逍遙法外。

為更有效回應現代公司治理的複雜性與多維度挑戰，香港或可借鏡英國於 2007 年生效的專門立法——《公司誤殺罪及公司過失致死法（Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007）》。

它明確將機構或公司在特定業務領域（如建築業）的安全謹慎責任轉化成法定管理義務，變相強調企業必須履行預防性義務，主動設計並實施全面的安全管理系統，以確保施工現場等高風險環境的安全。企業無法再簡單以「個別員工疏忽」作為推諉藉口逃避整體問責；相反，法律要求其檢視任何結構性缺失，例如管理流程的設計、資源分配的不足，或安全協議的執行不力。

《公司殺人罪及公司過失致死法》另一項創新體現於第 8 條，並罕見地將傳統上由審判法官在引導陪審團時口頭闡述的責任標準，直接以立法形式明文化。

第 8 條還提醒陪審團「可以」進一步考慮機構的內部文化與慣例，以捕捉更深層的組織動態 […]

《被推上火線的竹棚：大埔火災後的資訊失真和焦點錯位》：

作為一項古老技藝，竹棚在其他地區越來越少見。近年來大陸多數城市已禁止用竹棚，2021 年住建部要求全面淘汰竹腳手架，香港和澳門成為為數不多讓竹棚存續的陣地。但今年 3 月，香港政府以安全為由，要求 50% 以上的公共項目必須使用金屬棚架，同時表示未打算完全淘汰竹棚，對此民間反對和支持聲並存。

香港建築業界使用大量竹棚有其重要理由。香港樓間距小、巷道窄，相比標準化的金屬架，竹棚能更靈活地適應不同施工環境。何炳德解釋，香港有許多樓齡超過 50 年的老樓，若搭建金屬棚架，需採取螺絲磚牆等更多設備、材料，住戶未必能接受。相較之下，竹枝重量輕，搭棚工人用「一把刀仔」就能工作，搭建速度快也靈活，作業空間需求小。

另有業內文章指出，面對香港常見的強風天氣，品質好的毛竹具有彈性但不易斷裂，這讓竹棚在大風中能適度搖擺而不塌，金屬棚架雖剛性強，但可能因局部失效而整體傾覆。在酷暑天，竹棚也不如金屬容易導熱發燙。

通常來說，建新樓或拆樓時用金屬棚架更好， 若是在舊樓中維修冷氣機等情況，使用竹的懸空棚架更為合理，兩者可以是互相補充而非取代的關係。

竹棚一邊組成大陸網民對「香港已經落後」的敘事想象，另一邊承載港人對身份認同焦慮的投射。大陸知名經濟評論人「西西弗評論」就指出，爭論的本質在於「這次災難是因為香港不像大陸導致的，還是因為香港變得更像大陸導致的」。

令許多人擔憂、憤怒之處在於，竹棚或在變成轉移焦點的「替罪羊」。

“How Good Engineers Write Bad Code at Big Companies”:

To pure engineers - engineers working on self-contained technical projects, like a programming language - the only explanation for bad code is incompetence. But impure engineers operate more like plumbers or electricians. They’re working to deadlines on projects that are relatively new to them, and even if their technical fundamentals are impeccable, there’s always something about the particular setup of this situation that’s awkward or surprising. To impure engineers, bad code is inevitable. As long as the overall system works well enough, the project is a success.

[I]t’s a mistake to attribute primary responsibility to the engineers at those companies. If you could wave a magic wand and make every engineer twice as strong, you would still have bad code, because almost nobody can come into a brand new codebase and quickly make changes with zero mistakes. The root cause is that most big company engineers are forced to do most of their work in unfamiliar codebases.

A pretty high percentage of code changes are made by “beginners”: people who have onboarded to the company, the codebase, or even the programming language in the past six months.

[The big companies are] giving up some amount of expertise and software quality in order to gain the ability to rapidly deploy skilled engineers onto whatever the problem-of-the-month is.

“Bringing Sexy Back”:

But the pushback against #MeToo reveals a certain peril to storytelling as politics, not only in the retraumatization evident in the practice of revealing one’s most intimate harms before an infinite online audience, which could always include those listening in bad faith. But also, a discursive market opened up in which trauma became a kind of currency of authenticity, resulting in a doubled exploitation. This idea, while not very nice, lingers in the use of harm as an authoritative form of rhetorical defense. The problem here is not what is said, but how it is used. A friction has since emerged between an awareness of weaponization of harm and emotion and the continued need to express oneself as vulnerably as possible in order to come off as sincere. This friction is unresolved.

Punishing strangers for their perceived perversion is a form of compensation for a process that is already completed: the erosion of erotic and emotional privacy through internet-driven surveillance practices, practices we have since turned inward on ourselves. In short, we have become our own panopticons.

When it became desirable and permissible to transform our own lives into content, it didn’t take long before a sense of entitlement emerged that extended that transformation to people we know and to strangers.

Such unproductive and antisocial behavior [of submitting screenshots, notes, videos, and photos with calls for collective judgement] is justified as a step toward liberation from predation, misogyny, or any number of other harms. But the punitive mindset we’ve developed towards relationships is indicative of an inability to imagine a future of gendered or sexual relations without subjugation. To couch that in the language of harm reduction and trauma delegitimizes both.

However, it is always too easy to blame the young [for sexlessness]. It was my generation that failed to instill the social norms necessary to prevent a situation where fear of strangers on the internet has successfully replaced the disciplinary apparatus more commonly held by religious or conservative doctrine.

I could not let the natural processes of erotic discovery take their course, so caught up was I in judging myself from the perspective of strangers to whom I owed nothing.

There wasn’t some deterministic quality in myself that made me like this. My desire was not fixed in nature. My sexual qualities were transient and not inborn. What aroused me was wonderfully, entirely situational.

A situational eroticism is what is needed now, in our literalist times. It’s exhausting, how everything is so readily defined by types, acts, traumas, kinks, fetishes, pathology, and aesthetics. To me, our predilection for determinism is an expected psychological response to excessive surveillance. A situational eroticism decouples sensation from narrative and typology. It allows us to feel without excuse and to relate our feelings to our immediate embodied moment, grounded in a fundamental sense of personal privacy. While it is admirable to try and understand ourselves and important to protect ourselves from harm and investigate critically the ways in which what we want may put us at risk of that harm — or at risk of doing harm to others — sometimes desires just are, and they are not that way for long. Arousal is a matter of the self, which takes place within the body, a space no one can see into. It is often a mystery, a surprise, a discovery. It can happen at a small scale, say, the frisson of two sets of fingers in one’s hair at once. It is beautiful, unplanned and does not judge itself because it is an inert sensation, unimbued with premeditated meaning. This should liberate rather than frighten us. Maybe what it means doesn’t matter. Maybe we don’t have to justify it even to ourselves.

“The Claims of Close Reading”:

In our work, we assumed—before anything else, before any evidence—that there was meaning, and that we were rational, and we decided that we treat texts, ourselves, and each other this way.

On the first day of each new class, I tell my students about the philosopher Donald Davidson’s idea of radical interpretation. To make sense of a foreign language, or indeed any language, Davidson argues, a listener must begin with a stance of good faith by assuming that the person they’re listening to has rational beliefs and is making meaning. This must happen before the listener can begin to interpret what that meaning is and whether she agrees with it.

“The Fatal Flaw in Using Bitcoin as a Currency”:

The value of any currency never depends on rigid control of money supply. The most basic economics textbook will tell you that any value depends on the balance of supply and demand. To ignore money demand is to court disaster — because the demand for money is not stable.

The original issuers of paper currency understood the importance of money demand. In 10th century China, paper currency was introduced with a simultaneous legal requirement that taxes to the government be paid in paper. This immediately created a demand for paper currency alongside its supply, which gave it value. As long as the supply of and demand for paper money were balanced, value was maintained. When demand for the new paper currency fell short of what the government chose to supply, inflation and hyperinflation were the inevitable result.

This lack of an automatic demand for crypto is a problem, but not the fatal flaw which prevents crypto acting as a currency. The flaw is that bitcoin supply can only rise, not fall.

this must be the funniest thing i’ve ever typed

“The Invention of the Modern Self”:

The history of modern selfhood […] centers on the inescapable and ultimately unresolvable tension between a desire for uniqueness, accompanied by a belief in the power of self-transformation, and the recognition of how deeply we are shaped by our biology and social origins.

[T]he modern self, at least in its European and North American varieties, [is] a kind of paradox. On the one hand, in the 18th century, as the mental grip of religion weakened, “the idea spread that ordinary people had the potential for autonomy and were capable of exerting their liberty, whether in the choice of spouse, occupation, religious beliefs, or governing bodies.” But at the very same time, “individuals came to be viewed as creatures shaped by social conditioning…. Original sin lost its hold, but seeping into its place [came] the idea that our identities are formed by class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, profession, and marital status.”

“The existential struggle between being a ‘we’ and an ‘us’”:

In extending the existential and phenomenological importance of ‘the Look’ to collective (rather than individual) experience, Sartre draws a distinction between the ‘we-subject’ (le nous-sujet) and the ‘we-object’ (le nous-objet). Since nous in French is used for the first-person plural, in English we could translate Sartre (as his American translator Hazel Barnes did) as drawing a distinction between the ‘we’ and the ‘us’. Sartre himself was wary of deriving theoretical insights from mere grammatical categories, especially when many languages do not even use or differentiate between a first-person plural pronoun. But, as the philosopher Sarah Pawlett-Jackson argues in The Phenomenology of the Second-Person Plural (2025), pronouns came into use precisely in order to capture a particular form of lived experience, a particular phenomenological standpoint.

In order to experience the world from a ‘we-perspective’, certain basic criteria need to be met. First of all, there must be a plurality of subjects who are undergoing the experience. If I am the only person enjoying the sunset, my enjoyment is felt by me as an individual subject, rather than by we as a plural subject. Secondly, the subjects must be unified in some sense. If a stranger sitting near me is enjoying the same sunset, it would be presumptuous to say that we experienced it together unless our enjoyment has been communicated to one another. We haven’t created the necessary unity.

[W]hereas a we-experience can take place between a dyad, an us-experience is necessarily triadic in its structure. A felt sense of ‘us-ness’ can arise only in relation to an external Third element.

With us-experiences, one can speak of a plural or collective double-consciousness. The members of the ‘we’ are no longer singularly conscious of a shared object of experience, but are doubly conscious of themselves as an object of experience. In this sense, an us-experience arises because of a collective relation to an external Third.

[U]s-experiences can be less harmonious, consensual and self-endorsed than we-experiences since their constitution hinges on these external impositions.

Yet the ‘us’ is not simply the dark and depressing side of the ‘we’. As Sartre went on to show in his later work of existentialist Marxism, it is often from the alienated, marked and stereotyped ‘us’ that collective struggle, political action, and a coordinated and resistant ‘we’ emerges. In becoming conscious of one’s position in the social world, you, and others like you, can prompt a response of resistance to dismantle and overcome the social constraints that one collectively faces with others. An emancipatory transition from an ‘us’ to a ‘we’ takes place when the external Third loses salience in lieu of an internal unification and organisation that comes about to reclaim agency over ‘them’.

Henrik Karlsson:

I notice two kinds of happiness in the diary: a soft joy, which makes me ease up and feel more like myself, and a hard one that again and again leads me into shame.

The soft one is private—I struggle to share it with others—whereas the one that drives me into misery is social.

[The hard one is a] happiness I have to share. I want to force it upon people. I’m ashamed but I can’t stop myself: the excitement, it seems, comes from being seen as the sort of person that this or that person desires.

It was a strange mix of relief and discomfort to meet a person who loved me in the Erich Fromm sense (“I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.”) A relief because it was like decompression to let go of all of the fear and insecurity that made me shape myself for approval, and to feel my own sense of curiosity and value unfold. But discomfort because it put me on a collision course with the life I had been living and many of the people I interacted with. When I understood my values, I had to confront the pain of looking stupid and having people get angry at me when they disagreed with my decisions; I had to let go of the safety of social status and the coping mechanisms I had relied on.

The Witness on the newcomer injunctions in Hong Kong:

高等法院在 2019 至 2020 年間，先後應機場管理局、港鐵、律政司及警務處申請，批出共 6 項臨時禁制令，分別針對阻礙機場及港鐵站運作、阻礙或破壞紀律部隊宿舍、「起底」及滋擾警務人員及家人、在網上發布煽動暴力言論，以及於 2020 年底應律政司申請，頒令禁止「起底」及滋擾司法人員及家人。

翻查資料，當時高院原訟庭頒發此 6 項臨時禁制令，均是應原告方單方面申請（ex parte application）批准。被告一方多數列為「非法及故意作出申索書中…所禁止的任何行為的人」 （persons unlawfully and wilfully conducting themselves in the acts prohibited… of the indorsement of claim），沒有確切身分。

上述 6 項禁令頒發時，均屬臨時禁制令（interim injunction），並於獲頒臨時禁制令同年，獲法院批准延長「至正式審訊或另作命令（until trial or further order）」。

臨時禁制令（interim injunction）與永久禁制令（permanent injunction）的分別，在於後者一般都是在官司完結後頒布，例如在誹謗案件中，如原告一方勝訴，他可要求法庭頒布永久禁制令，禁止被告一方繼續發布誹謗言論。

而臨時禁制令，則通常是在審訊未完結、甚至未開始之前，原告可基於情況緊急、若不立即禁制被告行為會造成無法彌補的損失為由，以及向法庭證明案件牽涉重要而須審訊的議題（serious question to be tried），向法庭單方面申請批出臨時禁制令。

在一般民事案件中，法庭頒令臨時禁制令生效「至正式審訊或另作命令」，是常見做法，由於原告及被告雙方均有利益，一般會積極推動審訊進行。

但上述 2019 至 2020 年間申請的幾項禁制令，被告人均是「無名氏」，因禁制令並非針對確切身分人士，而是任何作出受禁行為的人。

如沒有被告或其他人介入審訊，除非原告，即律政司及警方主動撤銷禁制令，否則目前禁制令不會自動失效，「所以依家臨時禁制令，變相係永久禁制令。」

英國近年亦有不少針對非特定被告人的禁制令，以打擊近年常見的「流水式示威」。惟英國最高法院在 2023 年一宗案例中訂明，此類針對任何後來干犯受禁行為的禁制令（newcomer injunction），其有效地域、時間須有嚴格限制，以免萬一沒有人挑戰，禁制令會永遠生效。

法院確實有酌情權頒布此類禁制令，惟申請人須證明頒布禁制令，是為了保障其他公民權利、制止反社會行為，或為達致其他法定目標的迫切需要（compelling needs）。 判詞又指，除非真的沒有其他替代方法以達致相同目標，而相關禁制令只會維持一段短時間，並會於短期內審訊，以讓雙方能正式就理據作爭辯，否則一般不應頒布此類禁制令。

英判詞指，這種禁制令應被視為特殊的措施，且須符合相稱性，故必須訂明嚴格時間及地域限制，「以使它們無法超越其所依賴的迫切情況（that they neither outflank or outlast the compelling circumstances relied upon）」。最高法院又認為，除非有人申請延長，並提供理據延續禁制令，否則此類禁制令應在一年後失效。

坐了夺命（literally）小巴，但是遇上一个只开 80 出头的佛系司机，太子到落马洲开了 35 分钟，命保住了。

“The growing problem with China’s unreliable numbers”:

Rather than one single number, statisticians usually produce three. The expenditure approach to GDP — which many countries consider the best way to capture activity in a modern economy — measures consumption, investment and net exports.

The production approach instead tries to capture companies’ output minus their inputs. The income approach estimates what individuals and businesses earn and pay in tax. In theory, the three different approaches should equal each other.

Until 1993, China went a fourth way. Its material product scheme, the offspring of an approach pioneered in the Soviet Union, counted commodities and goods produced across state-run factories.

Eager to understand its own growth as it reopened to global trade, and under pressure to improve its data, Beijing drew on international guidance. Canada’s national statistical agency launched a partnership with the NBS in the 1990s.

All other large economies publish quarterly breakdowns of the expenditure approach to GDP, including investment, consumption and net exports. They also publish subcomponents of those broad categories, which can provide useful insights into what is driving the headline figures. […]

China does not publish this data. Emerging Advisors, a consultancy, says that across 40 emerging economies it tracks, only four others do not publish such quarterly data, and they are countries with economies based on hydrocarbons. “We can’t stress enough how abnormal this is for an economy of any significant size,” noted economist Jonathan Anderson in a report this year.

Instead, China publishes quarterly data based on the production approach, which is harder to analyse. The expenditure GDP data is only published in nominal terms for the whole year.

Indeed, its contribution to annual growth has remained positive throughout the property slowdown and implying some significant source of new investment.

Logan Wright, who leads the China research team at Rhodium, argues that the NBS has not “as far as we know” explained this “offset”.

Given the greater detail that is available, economists rely heavily on the fixed asset investment data to reconstruct the missing GDP data that they would get from other countries.

A recent study by the Reserve Bank of Australia, which cited the significance of Chinese demand for iron ore, used it as part of a series of calculations to estimate quarter-on-quarter expenditure breakdowns. A Brookings paper on provincial growth targets published in March also used it to derive infrastructure investment as a proportion of GDP.

In a 2020 paper, Holz, the Hong Kong academic, identified a “pattern” whereby “the NBS removes data from publication that reveal the poor quality of PRC statistics” at times when the figures “should show significant slowdowns”. Subsequent discontinuations have included the loss of a land sales data series in 2023 and the temporary suspension of youth unemployment data in the same year.

China’s data is “low credibility” but people will not “throw . . . [it] out the window”, says Rosen, pointing to the need for “reference points” for trillions of dollars of existing foreign direct investment in China.

There is evidence that the NBS has for years adjusted the data it receives from local governments, often downwards, to counteract regional over-reporting. Hsieh and his co-authors in 2019 estimated that these adjustments averaged 5 per cent of total GDP each year from the mid-2000s, but were still insufficient to counter such over-reporting.

What counts as an “architecture” in discussions on Linux architecture support:

For example, Linux supports the User Mode Linux “architecture”, which lets the kernel run as an unprivileged process inside an existing kernel for testing purposes. By most normal definitions, User Mode Linux isn’t really a CPU architecture, even if the code for it lives alongside the kernel’s other architecture support code. On the other hand, the kernel considers all PowerPC CPUs to be one architecture, regardless of whether they’re running in big-endian or little-endian mode; most distributions count those as two architectures because software compiled for different endiannesses must be packaged separately. Even without architecture-wide incompatibilities like that, several architectures also offer different “levels” or optional extensions that make describing a piece of software’s requirements a bit difficult. RISC-V has, at the time of writing, 48 different standards adding a larger number of extensions.

“The Ozempic Era Should Change How We Think About Self-Control”:

Someone who is overweight may have just as much willpower as a thinner person but need to deploy this willpower against stronger desires for food. In effect, thinner individuals might be getting credit for winning a battle that they never had to fight.

We can get clearer about the effects of GLP-1 drugs on self-control by drawing on a distinction between two different ways of acting moderately, which traces back to Aristotle. The first kind of moderate action lines up with how most people think of self-control: effortfully resisting doing something that you believe you shouldn’t do. The ancient Greek word for this form of moderation is enkrateia, which is usually translated into English as ‘continence’ (despite its contemporary associations with bladder control).

As we’ve seen, Ozempic does not seem to make those who take it more continent; it doesn’t help them resist strong temptations to eat more than they think they should. Rather, taking GLP-1 drugs brings people closer to the other form of moderation: sophrosyne, which is usually translated as ‘temperance’. While the continent person experiences many tempting desires and successfully resists them, the temperate person doesn’t face temptations in the first place.

[B]eing a highly self-controlled person seems mainly to involve using proactive strategies to avoid and manage temptations, rather than being good at directly and effortfully resisting them through sheer willpower.

Frankly, I still don’t feel totally comfortable with the idea of Ozempic for both the lack of evidence of its long-term side effects and, more importantly, the feeling that it risks eroding agency. Is the anesthesia of the appetite true “temperance,” or just a mimicry of the virtue?

noir^3

now i’m really having difficulty dealing with good weather

“Review: Leah Libresco Sargeant’s ‘Dignity of Dependence’”:

Sexism has two pillars: the insistence that female biology is moral destiny, and the insistence that female moral destiny is inferior.

What is at stake is nothing less than affording women access to the tumult of total humanity. To propose that a woman’s biology consigns her to a single corner of the moral universe is to force her to undergo a violent truncation — a shrinkage of the sort that always attends the indignity of specialization.

Nothing innovative here, but the phrase the tumult of total humanity is so majestic that I can’t help gazing at it.

“An Ant Is Drowning: Here’s How to Decide if You Should Save It”:

Queries like ‘Do individual ants deserve moral concern?’ risk conflating the scientific question of whether ants are sentient, the ethical question of whether only sentient beings deserve moral concern, and the practical question of whether a policy of caring for ants in a particular way is achievable or sustainable.

Scientifically, we can assess how likely particular beings are to possess capacities like sentience, by evaluating the available evidence. Ethically, we can assess how likely these capacities are to matter morally, by evaluating the available arguments. Practically, we can then put it all together to assess how likely these beings are to matter – and how to factor this into the way we live our lives.

“The Hidden Costs of Masking for Women With ADHD and Autism”:

The harder someone works to appear ‘normal’, the more their difference disappears from view – and the less the world learns to make room for it. In hiding to belong, they only deepen the loneliness that made them hide in the first place.

In a perfect world, of course, I would lean toward unmasking. And I know many of you who are neurodivergent – and just as tired of pretending – would agree. It would be a relief to move through the world as our full selves, without apology. But the truth is, that kind of openness comes with risk. We still live among people who judge and criticise, who prefer – often unconsciously – those who resemble themselves.

“Women Undergoing IVF” (translations mine):

What makes it even more difficult is that your entire life schedule becomes tied to it. You can’t plan what you’ll do next because it entirely depends on your hormone levels—something beyond your control. All aspects of your daily life—work, socializing, rest—must unconditionally give way to the treatment.

When we say these women have subjectivity, it doesn’t mean their decisions are completely free and unconstrained. On the contrary, what I observed is a form of subjectivity arising under structural pressure, or, a situational, struggling subjectivity. Throughout the long IVF process, they learn, make decisions, and communicate with doctors. This process itself is a profound practice of subjectivity. They internalize external expectations, such as those from family or society, and eventually articulate them as “my own decision.” Behind the statement “I want a child to complete my life,” there may be concerns for marital stability, anxiety about age, or imaginations of a “normal” family life. It is subjectivity operating in complex situations to translate external pressure into internal needs.

I want to portray the resilience, contradictions, and genuine realities of women navigating the intersections of technology, the body, family, and social structures. This fluid and situational subjectivity is the most authentic insight I’ve gained from my research.

“The Goon Squad”:

But I can’t get entirely behind the few-bad-apples theory. Nor can I so neatly separate the gooners as a whole from the rest of us. Think about it for a second: What are these gooners actually doing? Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms. Parasocially fixating on microcelebrities who want their money. Broadcasting their love for those microcelebrities in public forums. Conducting bizarre self-experiments because someone on the internet told them to. In general, abjuring connective, other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone. Does any of this sound familiar? Do you maybe know some folks who get up to stuff like this? It’s true that gooners are masturbating while they engage in these behaviors. You could say that only makes them more honest.

at least i was shown the first rung of the ladder

“The Art of the Impersonal Essay”:

By the mid-nineties, the mind you were encouraged to develop, at King’s, was basically unchanged from the one students were expected to form in the mid-fifteen-hundreds. (The college was founded by Henry VI in 1441.) A discursive, objective, ironical, philosophical, elegant, rational mind. I was none of those things. I was expressive, messy, chaotic, and increasingly infuriated. A lot of my fury was directed at the university itself. The more I heard about the prior lives of my fellow-students, the more enraged I became.

I understood all three men to be “personal essayists” in the sense that they cared passionately about their subjects, but they themselves were rarely figures in any particular piece; their energies were directed elsewhere. And I followed their example, channelling my furies into coolly expressed explication, description, analysis.

That tone, for better or worse, has stayed with me. I was trained to write like this, and I write like this. I just can’t bleed out onto the page as some people do, or use all caps or italics to express emotion, even when I know it’s what’s expected and that many people not only prefer it but see it as a sign of authenticity. The essay-writing habits of my school days have never left me. I find I still don’t want people to relate to what I’m saying in an essay, or even be moved by the way I say it. (With fiction, I feel the opposite.) I just want to think out loud about the things that matter most to me.

Full disclosure: these strands are drawn, essentially, from four big isms. Feminism, existentialism, socialism, and humanism. Only the first is still fashionable, and the last has been so debased, misused, and weaponized over the centuries as to be almost unspeakable in polite company. Still, these were the ideas that formed me as a teenager, and they linger on in the way I think and write. No matter what the topic in the rectangle may be, they lie in wait, nudging me, correcting me, reminding me of what it is I really think. What I actually believe.

In practice, they are like an annoying quad of parental figures, tutting if they spy me, for example, treating a living being as a means rather than an end—even rhetorically, even for a moment—or sighing dolefully when I use that totalizing term “the people,” which can obscure at least as much as it illuminates. They make every essay a battle.

Though I’ve never wanted any reader (or anyone, really) to “relate” to me, exactly, I have always wanted to be “in relation,” which is different. We aren’t required to be like one another or even to like one another to be in relation. We just need to be willing to create and enter spaces in which solidarity is one of the possibilities. For many readers, of course, solidarity may still prove impossible. It may be impractical, unthinkable, a betrayal of their own systems of thought, or simply “cringe.” But I try to write in such a way that the possibility persists. That’s what the practice of essaying is, to me: a stumbling attempt to re-create, in language, a common space, one that is open to all. It’s in that optimistic spot that I set out my stall, yes, and my ideas and arguments such as they are, sure, but without demanding to see anyone’s identifying papers in the opening paragraph. Because that’s one thing I’ve learned, over the years. Sometimes, in order to create this more open space, you have to loosen your hold on your beloved isms.

“To essay” is, of course, to try. My version of trying involves expressing ideas in a mode open enough, I hope, that readers feel they are trying them out alongside me. While I try, I am also striving to remain engaged (and engaging) yet impersonal, because although the personal is certainly interesting and human and vivid, it also strikes me as somewhat narrow and private and partial. Consequently, the word “we” appears in my essays pretty frequently. This isn’t because I imagine I speak for many, or expect that my views might be applied to all, but because I’m looking for the sliver of ground where that “we” is applicable. Because once you find that sweet spot you can build upon it. It’s the existentialist at my desk who is best placed to find that spot. She says to herself: Almost all of the people I know (and I myself) have experienced pain. And absolutely all of the people I know (and I myself) will die.

Aside from the fact that I never meant to be an essayist in the first place, one detail that has surprised me most during the past twenty years is that I have, in fact, written more personally in the essay form than I ever expected or intended. Still, as I look back on my “I,” across so many essays, I notice that the person typing out this “I” remains very hard to pin down, even for me. For starters, it’s never quite the same “I” who’s typing the word “I,” because of the way time works. Because of the way life is.

If my own “I” remains a various thing—as I have written about too often—it is its very variousness that forces me to acknowledge the points of continuity: the fundamentals. What I honestly believe, as a human being.