Cafe Bedouin
Cafe Bedouin
Cafe Bedouin
This is my show. It’s a blog as hupomnemata. Michael Foucault defined hupomnemata as a personal notebook similar to a spiritual journal but with a different goal. He did not want “to pursue the unspeakable, nor to reveal the hidden, nor to say the unsaid [like a spiritual journal does], but on the contrary to capture the already said, to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the self.”
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Who this is for: Anyone who has stood at the edge of a room wishing it were warmer, livelier, more alive — and suspected they might be the one who could change it but didn’t know how. Useful for parties and dinners, work offsites, group...
Why sacred texts, intelligence tests, and our newest machines all draw their power from seeming unchangeable — and why that is the very thing that hollows them out. The keyboard you are reading this on is badly designed, and everyone...
Brains, eyes, environments, and why no trajectory of intelligence we can actually inspect supports the idea of monotonic improvement toward “superintelligence.” Start with an animal that should embarrass us. The mantis shrimp has twelve...
Here is what happened. Over a few hours, a conversation with an AI model produced a biologically grounded framework connecting protein metabolism, mitochondrial function, connective tissue loading, circadian biology, gut-brain signaling,...
Our bodies do not have a maintenance mode. Every system that keeps us functional — muscle mass, bone density, mitochondrial capacity, neuronal connectivity, immune calibration — is maintained only in response to demand. Remove the demand...
Note: Commentary on Nebel, A., Kling, A., Willamowski, R., & Schell, T. (2024). Recalibration of limits to growth: An update of the World3 model. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 28, 87–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.13442 What the...
David Sinclair’s secret pill is the decoy. His longevity contest is really a bid to privatize the measurement of aging itself — and a Saudi sovereign wealth fund is paying to host the carving of the ruler. The pill is a decoy. The most...
A seller-side report from the vote market. Yesterday’s essay reconstructed the vote market from its transaction records — responsiveness regressions, the forty-year evangelical purchase, the post-1998 European repricing. Transaction...
For forty years, the best empirical work on policy responsiveness has produced two findings that do not fit together. The first: when the preferences of low- and middle-income Americans diverge from those of the affluent, the...
A currency does three separate things. In 2026 they started moving in opposite directions at once — and the job everyone watches is the one that matters least. In the first quarter of 2026, three measurements of the dollar’s standing...
The U.S.–China relationship is usually described as a rivalry. Its core mechanism is a recycling machine — and the people who pay for it don’t get a vote on either side. In 2025, as tariffs climbed and “decoupling” became the organizing...
2026 is a margin call on strategic ambiguity — and the underwriter is liquidating its own book Start with the bases, because they explain everything that follows without anyone having to assert a theory. After 2001, the United States...