ANATOLY IVANOV / PROSE / CATEGORIES / LANGUAGE AND MEDIA

HOW NOT TO ASK INTERESTING QUESTIONS WHEN INTERVIEWING

JOURNALISM / PSYCHOLOGY / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2024-07-23

I wonder how Peterson used to work as a clinical psychologist with his patients back in the day? Imagine a 15-minute session with Elon Musk: Ah, doc, I have this sort of crisis of… Peterson: It’s the prior axiomatic interpretive structure you have. Then you have the chaotic potential  + 

CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA, THROUGH A HIPSTER’S LENS

CINEMA / JOURNALISM / PHOTOGRAPHY / REVIEWS / 2024-05-25

“Civil War” is a must-watch, especially for the fellow Americans. Even the normal ones. Not exclusively the A24 investment finance type of Americans with seed money from Guggenheim Partners, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan and SunTrust. I wish my dad would have given me a  + 

THERE IS NO TRUTH

JOURNALISM / PHILOSOPHY / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2024-05-01

We acknowledge there are many different truths. I’m certain that the truth exists for you and probably for the person sitting next to you. But this may not be the same truth. This is because many people merge facts about the world with our beliefs  + 

STRUGGLING ARTIST? GIVE AWAY YOUR WORK FOR FREE.

ART THEORY / ECONOMICS / SOCIETY / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2024-01-02

Yann Le Cunn, a Chief AI Scientist at Meta, writes that only a few book authors make significant money from book sales, so most books should be freely available for download. The lost revenue for authors would be small, and the benefits to society large by comparison.  + 

STUDY BIOLOGY OR FACE THE CONSEQUENCES

BIOLOGY / ECONOMICS / JOURNALISM / ESSAYS / 2023-12-30

We’ve had opposite extremes — capitalists & communists, Adam Smithians & Karl Marxists — completely miss the obvious. Humans are not rational, deterministic “utility functions” optimizing for individual or collective “good”. Free markets’ invisible hand will correct?  + 

I’M A CONSUMER, WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT?

ECONOMICS / SOCIAL MEDIA / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-10-25

“I’m a consumer, what’s wrong with that?” The way you consume? The quantity? The fact that luck gave you an opportunity to NOT be an animal, to use that neocortex to create a better world, maybe?  + 

HOW TRILINGUAL IS CHATGPT IN 2023?

COMPUTERS / LINGUISTICS / REVIEWS / 2023-09-05

What would a trilingual like myself do with a ChatGPT? Torture it with correspondence tests, of course. Here’s the result: 🤪 ChatGPT: If we were to use English proficiency as a base and attribute a numerical score of 100 to it, I would rank my  + 

$100 TO READ AND BACKUP MY OWN TWEETS. PER MONTH.

SOCIAL MEDIA / OUTSIDE NEWS / REVIEWS / 2023-08-24

Oh, now Twitter asks me to pay 100 USD per month to read and backup my own tweets on my server. Since early July 2023, I can no longer GET my own posts, sort them into 3 distinct languages and store them in my own  + 

IF ALEXEI MEDVEDEV REACTIVATES THEIR ACCOUNT, YOU’LL STILL BE FRIENDS

CINEMA / POLITICS / SOCIAL MEDIA / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2023-08-19

When I saw a “person missing” announcement in my Facebook feed, I somehow didn’t quite understand… “What’s going on? How so?” The usual, the so commonly trivial was going on — the death of an interesting person who did so much for Russian culture.  + 

RUSSIANS DON’T CARE

ECONOMICS / LINGUISTICS / POLITICS / ESSAYS / 2023-06-13

You know what? Russians still living in Russia, the remaining 140 million of them, don’t care about the war. Nor do they care about their rulers or the Western sanctions. Or the Western companies having left or banned. Russia is stuck in yet another historical  + 

ИСКУССТВО КИНО – THE LAST ISSUE TO PRINT

CINEMA / JOURNALISM / ESSAYS / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2023-05-24

Искусство Кино — published since 1931 and thus, together with “Sight & Sound” and “Cahiers du Cinéma” one of the earliest magazines to cover the film industry, art and theory — has printed its last issue. Yes, my work has been featured in it. But  + 

HOW TO BE HAPPY? MY 5 MINUTES DIALOGUE WITH CHATGPT

COMPUTERS / HEALTH / LINGUISTICS / ESSAYS / 2023-05-16

My conversation about human happiness with ChatGPT took 5 minutes. Question: According to what is currently known to science, what 50 factors, listed from most influential to least, influence a human (male, with an IQ above 100) self-reported feeling of happiness  + 

NO MORE TINDER FOR RUSSIANS

POLITICS / SOCIAL MEDIA / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2023-05-06

The Match Group withdraws from Russia. Tinder, OKcupid, Hinge… will all vanish from Russian social space by June 30. Meanwhile, The Russian Government™ is planning — finally, again, for real this time — to launch RuTube… and close access to YouTube.  + 

THE BLOCK FOREVER ARCHIVE

PSYCHOLOGY / SOCIAL MEDIA / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-05-02

Only thoughtless people do crazy things, publish emotional photos, record damming TikToks, break up “forever”… relying on the “Delete Chat” and “Block” buttons of messengers and social apps. Those unable to think ahead imagine they will never face the consequences. Our digital footprint describes our  + 

THE ARGUMENT BY FUZZY CONCEPT

LINGUISTICS / PHILOSOPHY / PSYCHOLOGY / ESSAYS / 2023-02-11

The “argument by fuzzy concept” fallacy is second only to ad hominem… An argument of intellectual indoctrination, laziness and dullness which, if pressed, degenerates into circular reasoning, requiring, at best, a definition by negation (“not hate, not lust, not friendship, not nⁿ…”) Got a World  + 

“OFF THE CLOCK” AND INTO MOMS’ DIARIES BY LAURA VANDERKAM

LITERATURE / PRODUCTIVITY / REVIEWS / 2022-11-15

“Off the Clock” – Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done… by Laura Vanderkam. Oh, wow. Such a promising title. Again. Bless those who helped increase my reading speed! Because this book is 1% trite time management advice and 99% memory recalls of various mothers  + 

HALF OF AMERICANS HAVEN’T READ A SINGLE BOOK THIS YEAR

LITERATURE / SOCIETY / LINKS / 2022-10-26

Over 50% of Americans haven’t read a book in 2022. Nearly 25% of adults have not read a book in 1-2 years. 11% haven’t read a book in 3-5 years. And 10% of US adults haven’t read at least 1 full book in the past  + 

“CHEAP SEX” BOOK REVIEW – IT’S GONNA COST US MORE THAN WE THINK

BIOLOGY / ECONOMICS / HEALTH / SOCIETY / REVIEWS / 2022-09-19

“Cheap Sex” is a great book by sociologist Mark Regnerus to compliment David Buss’ “Evolution of Desire”. It describes the current personal and interpersonal sexuality / gender relations state of affairs in the US. The local trends and stats which do or will impact the  + 

“HOW EMOTIONS ARE MADE” BOOK REVIEW (PSST… WE DON’T KNOW)

BIOLOGY / HEALTH / LINGUISTICS / REVIEWS / 2022-09-05

“How Emotions Are Made“ is yet another weird book with a promising title, written for someone without any knowledge of science, its methods and branches. Possibly for those of us who skipped biology classes in school and haven’t read anything about neuroscience ever since? The  + 

THE OPAQUE AND CONVOLUTED ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION

ARCHITECTURE / LINGUISTICS / ESSAYS / 2022-05-29

I wonder how much time architects spend writing instead of designing? The typical text that describes a random contemporary house is something else… “Architecture, specifically the house, is an act of enabling shelter, a vessel through which in turn enables habitation and the ongoing experience  + 

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