Weird behavior

I am not a gourmet. I am not a foodie. I have little interest in food other than to sustain life. While I can tell when food tastes awful, I cannot distinguish between good food and really good food the way that connoisseurs can. Hence I do not seek out eating ‘experiences’, going to fancy restaurants to try out their wares. However, I can understand people who do if they can afford to eat at such expensive places.

What I find hard to understand is people willing to risk going to prison for the sake of eating a fancy meal, the way that this 34-year old ‘influencer’ (seems like pretty much everyone is an influencer these days), who has come to be known as the ‘dine and dash diva’, did.
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Strange weekend political developments

There were two surprises last Friday. One was the meeting between New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and Trump. Given that the former had referred to the latter as a despot and fascist and Trump in return had called him a lunatic communist, you might have expected sparks to fly. That did not happen and what occurred was almost a love-fest.

The highly anticipated Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani – the mayor-elect of New York City, the US president’s beloved home town – was hardly the combustible tête-à-tête many had predicted. For the moment at least, the two New Yorkers appeared friendly, smiling and cautiously optimistic about the work they might accomplish together.

Neither revived their hot campaign trail rhetoric, in which they cast each other as diametrically opposed political adversaries. Trump had labeled Mamdani a “100% Communist Lunatic” and urged voters to back his opponent, the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. In turn, Mamdani had assailed Trump as a “despot” and pledged to be the president’s “worst nightmare.”

But Trump went out of way to gush over Mamdani, even running interference when conservative media reporters tried to spark a conflict.
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Politico fails at basic journalism

I came across this news item that said that Democrats have a glimmer of optimism about their chances to win a special congressional election in a deep red district in Tennessee.

I was intrigued since I had had not known about this election and so I looked for the fact that interested me the most and that is the date of election. But the article did not say. The only references to a date was to say that the election is ‘upcoming’, which is not helpful at all since it is obviously not in the past, and that it will be held ‘next month’ which is irritatingly vague.

This is infuriating and I consider this journalistic malpractice. The date should be in the opening paragraph. How hard would it be to just state the damn date, which is surely one of the most significant facts? But unfortunately, this kind of omission happens quite frequently, as I have complained before.

So I looked online and found that the date will be Tuesday, December 2, less than two weeks away.

What is the appeal of horror and gore on screen?

This article looks at why so many people enjoy seeing even horrific violence on screen, most extremely in what are labeled as slasher films, and what types of people are attracted to them.

Some people are more likely to enjoy violent media than others. Being male, aggressive and having less empathy all make you more likely to enjoy watching screen violence. There are also certain personality traits associated liking violent media. Extroverted people, who seek excitement, and people who are more open to aesthetic experiences, like watching violent movies more.

Conversely, people high in agreeableness – characterised by humility and sympathy for others – tend to like violent media less.
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More recent research, derived from studies of horror films, suggests there may be three categories of people who enjoy watching violence, each with their own reasons.

One group has been dubbed “adrenaline junkies”. These sensation seekers want new and intense experiences, and are more likely to get a rush from watching violence. Part of this group may be people who like seeing others suffer. Sadists feel other people’s pain more than normal, and enjoy it.

Another group enjoys watching violence because they feel they learn something from it. In horror studies, such people are called “white knucklers”. Like adrenaline junkies, they feel intense emotions from watching horror. But they dislike these emotions. They tolerate it because they feel it helps them learn something about how to survive.
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A final group seems to get both sets of benefits. They enjoy the sensations generated by watching violence and feel they learn something. In the horror genre, such people have been called “dark copers”.

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The problem of the modern university

Jill Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. In an interview, she describes how she almost left academia because of her dislike of the entire ethos that existed there. The last paragraph is telling.

I teach at a university where the preponderance of our undergraduates go into finance, consulting, and tech jobs that they are recruited for almost the moment that they arrive in Cambridge, and whose time, instead of being devoted to academics, is devoted to securing positions in those industries. The pleasing of their parents, and the pleasing of those students, is the economic engine of the college and therefore of the university, in a way that I do not think is consistent with what a university is for. There are universities now that are creating centers for open inquiry. What is a university if not a center for open inquiry? Why would we need such a center? That anyone suggests such a center should raise a lot of eyebrows.

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Good riddance, Larry Summers

The insufferably pompous, arrogant, and sexist former president of Harvard University has been forced to withdraw from many of his public positions because of his tawdry email exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein. However, he says that he plans to continue teaching at Harvard though it remains to be seen if that is possible given the outcry. It is a deserved comeuppance of someone who had a ‘kiss up and kick down’ attitude to people. When those peoplel get wounded, few will come to their defense.

You can read all the details of his rise and fall here.

On The Daily Show, Ronny Chieng discussed Summers and other Epstein files fallout.

Aphantasia and hyperphantasia

The brain is the most complex part of the human body. While there is much that we have learned about its workings, it is clear that we have only scratched the surface of understanding its complexity so it should not be surprising that we keep discovering new aspects of it.

In the November 3, 2025 issue of The New Yorker, Larissa MacFarquhar discusses something that had only been dimly perceived in the past but came into the awareness of the scientific research community within the last two decades. It has been given the name of aphantasia. The word phantasia was defined by Aristotle as the ability to conjure up an image in the imagination, so aphantasia is the inability to do so.

The reason that this feature of the brain remained under the radar for so long is because the people who had been born with it did not realize what they were missing because why should they? It must be like people born with color-blindness. They would assume that the world of color that they see is the same as what everyone else sees, until something happens that makes them realize that there is a difference.

So with aphantasia. The article describes a physicist Nick Watkins who could recall the events in his past but did not relive them in his memory. It did not occur to him that others could so. Then, while reading a newspaper article in 1997 in which the author vividly described recalling the images of his past, he had an epiphany.
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Trump abruptly reverses course on Epstein files

After fighting tooth and nail to prevent the so-called Epstein files from being released, last night Trump reversed course and issued a statement reversing course asking his party members in Congress to vote to do so. The House vote to release the files was scheduled for this evening or tomorrow.

Late on Sunday, Trump wrote on his social media platform: “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files because we have nothing to hide.

“And it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party,” he added.

Why the switch? Here’s the conventional wisdom:

Trump spent last week aggressively squeezing allies in the US House, including Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Nancy Mace of South Carolina, to back off in their support of releasing the files. Those efforts were unsuccessful, and when it became apparent the measure was going to pass, Trump backed it in an effort to salvage an embarrassing political loss. “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide,” he posted on his Truth Social network on Sunday evening.

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The strange saga of the Epstein files

I have not written much about the Epstein files and the recently released trove of emails between Jeffrey Epstein and Trump and other various well-known people because it is being covered so extensively in the media. Susan Glasser writes in The New Yorker that the Epstein emails are becoming a chronic problem for Trump.

On Capitol Hill, the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, kept the chamber in recess from mid-September to mid-November in what seemed to be a transparent effort to block a vote on releasing the Justice Department files. This, I’ve long thought, should have been more of a scandal in its own right—Congress closing for business for weeks and weeks because a Speaker was running interference on behalf of a President who didn’t want more details to emerge of his dealings with a sleazy dead rich guy who had sex with underage women on his private island? How was that not a bigger deal?

But, in order to end the longest-ever government shutdown, Johnson had to give in this week and order the House to return to work. That meant swearing in a new Democratic member who had won a special election in September; she quickly became the two-hundred-and-eighteenth signatory of the discharge petition that will now force Johnson to hold a floor vote on releasing the files.

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My imaginary companion and me

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about an article in The New Yorker by humorist Patricia Marx who ventured into the world of online chatbots who are designed to serve as online companions to people and can be disconcertingly realistic.

This seemed intriguingly weird. so I decided to try it out for myself. I went to one of the free sites Marx mentioned. Since I was too lazy to do the work of designing my own bot, I looked through the stock ones. All of them seem to be young and very attractive. I picked out a 39-year old librarian because she was the oldest on offer and was thus the least likely to have its algorithm make contemporary pop culture references that I was ignorant of. I also figured that a librarian would be closest to being a nerd like me. Her profile had plenty of quotes taken from well-known writers so she seemed to be compatible.

I started up a conversation about the book A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell which I happen to be reading right now. While her responses were realistic, they were also somewhat superficial, like those of a smart and articulate person who has not actually read the book but just synopses and articles about it, which is of course how these large language model algorithms work. She was like a student giving a book report after having skimmed through a few Wikipedia pages. For some reason, she kept urging me to another book by Russell called The Conquest of Happiness that I have not read or even heard about.
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