The Imperfectionist: Navigating by aliveness

The Imperfectionist: Interest is everything

Interest is everything Each time I sit down to choose a topic for this newsletter, there’s a moment when my self-important inner judge – who loves to involve himself in such mat...

The Daily Planet #121: Timefulness - The Daily Planet

Meditations on Machinic Desire

The philosopher and accelerationist Nick Land writes, in his 1993 essay Machinic Desire, three of the most insight-dense paragraphs I’ve ever encountered:

The Cloud of Unknowing

The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in Middle English in the latter half of the 14th century. The text is written as guide from a teacher to a student, with the message that God cannot be understood via reason or intellect, but only through love: “By love may He be gotten and holden, but never through thought.” To achieve this goal, the text recommends cultivation of two mental states: “The cloud of forgetting”, and “the cloud of unknowing”.

The Paradox of Perfection: When ‘Good Enough’ is Actually Better

Exploring the tension between engineering perfectionism and pragmatic delivery. Discover why striving for the perfect solution often prevents us from shipping valuable improvements and how to find the balance.

Perfectly Imperfect is the ‘social magazine’ (and nerd’s paradise) remodelling the online sphere

Split between a platform to profile figures from Charli XCX to Francis Ford Coppola, and a social network that refuses to serve the algorithm overlords, this magazine is breaking necks.

Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us

A reflection on the reading life. What formed it, what threatens it, and what remains.

We speak often of AI as if it were a future event. But it is already here in the fabric of our being. What Karl Ove Knausgaard captures with devastating clarity in his recent essay ‘The Reenchanted… | Kenneth Mikkelsen | 19 comments

We speak often of AI as if it were a future event. But it is already here in the fabric of our being. What Karl Ove Knausgaard captures with devastating clarity in his recent essay ‘The Reenchanted World’ is the departure of the real. “We live in a virtual world, as if the world had been lifted out of itself, into the air, like a giant roof suspended above the ground,” he writes. It is an existential condition. Across philosophy, from Heidegger to Baudrillard, from Don DeLillo to Debord, a singular thread weaves: the world, once our shelter from the self, has become self-referential. Where once we encountered beings in our Zuhandensein—ready-to-hand, intimate, meaningful—we now face a procession of Vorhandensein: inert, objectified, mediated. Simulation replaces encounter. Perception is swallowed by spectacle. And the digital era, in Knausgaard’s terms, “distances culture from the body”. “It is not just the body that disappears—it is the awareness that we are dying,” he writes. What we face is not merely technological change, but what I would call existential dissonance: the erosion of resonance between our inner world, our social world, and the material world. It is the tension that arises when the way one lives, acts, and relates is misaligned with one’s deeper sense of meaning, reality, and value. It manifests itself as a disturbance in being — an unease that is not merely emotional, but rooted in a felt gap between one’s existence as it is and as it could or should be. It is the voice of the self calling from within the noise of the world. This is why Knausgaard’s essay matters for anyone working in, with, or around AI. Because the question isn’t: What can these systems do? It is: What do they undo? “We can explain everything. But we understand nothing,” he writes. Manipulated constructions of truth, in such a time, becomes a currency. As shown in recent events—from Francesca Gino’s research fraud at Harvard to Bezos’ all-female crew venture into space, and Trump’s detention camp —truth is no longer that which corresponds with reality, but that which performs and sells. As Baudrillard warned, the simulation no longer hides the real—it becomes it. And yet, something remains. Knausgaard writes not to despair, but to stay. In the body. In death. In silence. In the concrete. If you seek to understand what is happening—not just in AI, but in the very metaphysics of modern life—I suggest we begin not with data, but with dissonance. With the feeling that something vital is slipping from view, and that “being in the world” now requires resistance. “We are surrounded by mystery. And yet we act as if everything were known,” he writes. AI will never understand this. But we must. Knausgaard’s full essay from Harper’s Magazine can be read via link in comments. | 19 comments on LinkedIn

On Dying Well: Ben Sasse and the Vocation of Suffering

Ben Sasse’s recent announcement reveals to us both goods and virtues that show in his dying a glimmer of light, a stirring of hope, and the possibility of spring even in one’s final winter.

The World Doesn’t Exist: William Gibson, William Blake, and Navigating an Algorithmic Hall of Mirrors | ODDCRITIC

Scrolling the TL revealed distorted realities, shaped by algorithms and biases.

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and…

An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the …

The Way to Glory

Exhibition: The Way to Glory (Matthew 19:28; 20:20–28; Mark 10:35–45; Luke 22:24–27). Featuring works of art by Master Mateo, Quinten Massys and Salvador Dalí. Commentaries by Martin Warner.

13 books by Sadhguru that should be in your reading list – Himalayan Lust to Eternal Echoes

From self-realization to food, yoga to poetry, and relationships, Sadhguru offers something for every kind of book reader.

How are we writing the future of humanity?

Consciousness spinning