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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All posts (325)
Post-mortem of “Colombia 2026 Election: Falsification Matrix” (registered 2026-01-26,building on “A Constraint Story: Why Colombia’s Election Defies Standard Forecasting,”2026-01-17). Scored 2026-08-18 against the matrix’s own pre-registered thresholds.Mechanical resolution first; interpretation separated and...
For the month of September 2026, I’m going to break from posting. I want to spend some time thinking about what this blog is for and what might change, which might be nothing. During the month, anything I might have wanted to publish will be scheduled for October.
Companion to “The Book Nobody Can Recommend.” That essay argues fiction’s distinctive offer is an occupiable position — a stance you can sit inside long enough to meet its costs. This one is the working table that follows from it, kept separate because it is a tool rather than an argument. Genre labels sort by...
A critic can recommend a book that changed him. What he cannot do is recommend, at scale and in advance, the book that would change him next — because what a critic sells is continuity of criteria, and that book’s whole function is to break them. This isn’t a complaint about any particular paper. It’s a description...
“Ultimately there are people who want to live, not in a world of reconciliation, but in a world without repercussions… ,,, It takes a lot to “cut a parent (or a sibling) off.” Usually it’s a question of safety, whether psychological or physical. And even then (and here I’ll speak from personal experience) we keep...
The berth was the tightest on the short arm and everyone said so. Notwithstanding had understood, coming in, that this was the thing to be glad of. Cane had traded a good adjustable for the curtain — heavy stuff, weighted at the hem — and after he hung it you could not hear the trolley run at all. He had packed out...
On what language models made cheap, what they left exactly as expensive as it was, and why the difference is the whole argument A scheduling manager writes the rule that shifts get posted on Thursday for the following Monday. From where she sits, it is obviously good: it gives three days’ notice where there used to...
There are two ways to sue a technology company for what its algorithm did to you. One of them hands the company a constitutional shield. Right now, nobody is choosing between them on purpose. In March, a Los Angeles jury found that Meta and Google had negligently designed products that injured a young woman who had...
Compose 1000 x 1000 composite images in the Xerox style. https://chaoclypse.itch.io/xerox-hell
A guide to building the kind of friendships where you can actually be yourself You’re about to meet more new people in a shorter stretch of time than at almost any other point in your life. You’ll sit next to strangers in lecture halls, share a bathroom with someone you met last Tuesday, and get invited to things by...
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