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.”
Latest Posts
On why making things requires other people, and what kind of people, and how A nine-year-old writes a rap for a rap battle. She’s rapping about turtles. Her sister is rapping about dogs. She wants to read her rap to the family but she’s...
On KPop Demon Hunters and the limits of self-acceptance In KPop Demon Hunters, a girl group called HUNTR/X plays sold-out stadiums by day and holds a magic barrier against demons by night. Their leader, Rumi, is hiding that she is half...
You can tell when someone in a room is about to cry. Not from anything they’ve said. Something in the breathing, a stillness that arrived a beat too early, the angle at which they’re holding their face. You knew before you knew you knew....
Someone told me that a classmate of his died partway through the year, in middle school. What he remembers, decades later, is that no one sat in the boy’s lunch chair. That’s the whole memory. Not the boy — the chair. Nobody decided...
Rule 436(g) was a four-line exemption. It said that when a nationally recognized rating agency’s rating appeared in a securities registration statement, that rating did not count as an expert opinion under Sections 7 and 11 of the...
“How much do you need? How often should you reapply? The short answer: about two tablespoons, every two hours. For stick sunscreen, that’s four passes back and forth. For sprays, until your skin glistens. Make sure you rub it in fully —...
In the autumn of 1998, a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management lost roughly $4.6 billion in about four months and had to be unwound by a consortium of banks assembled at the Federal Reserve’s request, for fear its collapse would...
In “Why Sheep Need Pigs in Sheepdog’s Clothing,” Robin Hanson asked three LLMs to score how much status, social skills, and judgment matter for influence across five domains. Judgment came back higher than his argument wanted. So he...
Why good innovations mint new elites — and how to tell the dangerous cases from the merely disruptive Every year something like forty thousand Americans die on the roads. The strongest large-scale data we have — from driverless fleets...
The wage floor for American farmwork fell by a third. Two different things could have caused that, one defensible and one not, and no one has separated them. In late summer 2025 the USDA discontinued the Farm Labor Survey, the instrument...
A Tale, updated from the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker, who did not live to see the machine that would have made his authentications unnecessary The following was assembled from a case file, a parole record, and a public...
A hotel manager once told a marathoner he could run a six-minute mile. The marathoner — who had raced twenty-six miles at 7:35 pace and knew exactly what a six-minute mile costs a body — called bullshit. The manager didn’t retreat to...
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