Announcing my first book, with my style of longform narrative journalism and philosophy @wwnorton. It's about the clash between governing by top-down rules versus discretionary decision-making, in law, in sports, in the household. Pre-order now. wwnorton.com/books/fewer-rul…

Would Peter Singer count as a “scholar activist”?

If we don't start teaching our elementary school kids Workday, how will they know how to use it when they are on-boarded for their first job at 26?

History lesson, well known to analytic philosophers. The president of Rockefeller University wanted a report on what good the philosophy department was doing. The report said a faculty was thinking about the meaning of proper names. The President closed the whole program.

Higher-ed administrators spend money on software as though it is durable infrastructure, like a building, when it is in fact a perishable long term liability. Meanwhile, tenure-stream teaching staff is a long term liability, when it is in fact durable infrastructure.

Hopefully in five years, not fifty, we will realize that social media is the cigarettes for this generation of children. These companies literally paid PTAs to market its shit at schools. nytimes.com/2026/06/04/us/so…

College students & their parents: "There aren't going to be any jobs left for me in the future." Me: We've had a chronic shortage of physicians, engineers, STEM teachers, skilled trades, aviation and maritime workers. Them: I don't mean those jobs.

I'm grateful to @DouthatNYT for inviting me on his podcast to discuss the fate of the liberal arts and humanities in the age of AI. I hope that all those who follow higher ed and care about the liberal arts will listen. nytimes.com/video/opinion/10… nytimes.com/video/opinion/10…

“Finally...an introductory reader with a distinctively 21st-century orientation towards philosophy. These original essays are... philosophy at its best and most engaging.” @ProfBarryLam, host of @HiPhiNation, on Too Weird To Believe, Too Plausible To Deny

The paradox of AI-writing detectors: Any detector reliable enough to determine a paper wasn't AI-written serves as reliable data to train AI to write papers that do not sound like AI.

The academia-publishing complex evolved whereby this is expected: "People need sleep (Sennett 1961, Thompson et al 2004). Without enough sleep, people get grumpy (Fine and Harper, 2021). " So don't be too shocked if someone didn't actually read Thompson et al 2004.

The only thing I'll say about the Guardian's 100 greatest novel list is that putting all English lit together with all novels translated into English is weird. Just have a list of English lit, and a list of translated into English.

Instead of “is college worth it, is college valuable, will college survive?,” would it help to transform the question to “is high school enough?” It’s been “yes” for 60% of people, pre-AI. So the question should be “is high school enough for the remaining 40% also?”

This is hard to answer because large fanbases in philosophy generate very irritating traits in people. Better to ask which philosophers have the LEAST annoying fanbase, and the answer is pretty obviously David Hume, Bertrand Russell. More recently, Harry Frankfurt.

Besides the insurance payouts, the likeliest thing to come out of this hack is that Unis will hire a consulting firm to audit, and they will recommend some expensive intervention for faculty to create redundant course material, and there will be new training videos to watch.

An under-discussed fact in public discourse,but long known to historians is that debt-financing of war is directly responsible for the downfall of many countries and global empires. Spain, pre-revolutionary France, The Ottoman Empire; addiction to war kills economies.

Academics have, often for virtuous reasons, shot themselves in the foot. They want book deals, their physical books to sell, and be assigned, but then they photocopy everyone else's work and distribute it for free, or assign e-books, undermining the business of publishers.

"Christian Miller provides a crisp analysis of the many faces of dishonesty in modern life, from cheating to lying and fakery, so that we can confront them wisely and effectively. An honest book for dishonest times." Barry Lam, Professor of Philosophy, University of California Riverside; author of Fewer Rules, Better People: The Case for Discretion; host of Slate's Hi-Phi Nation podcast @HiPhiNation Grateful to Professor Lam. Link in the comments...

The tech industry spent 20 years structuring things on screens to addict everyone from toddlers to grandparents. Now they’re putting AI tools everywhere and creating friction to using tech without AI. And we, teachers, are supposed to be tasked with teaching "responsible AI use"?

I used to think that one way to respond to imaginative resistance to analytic philosophers using thought experiments is to stick to real life cases, so I became a documentarian of them. Tonight I learned that some people will resist the existence and significance of those too.

The Missing Genre: Why Political Philosophers Should Be Writing to get Netflix deals open.substack.com/pub/hiphin…