Kieran Setiya

1 month ago | the-tls.co.uk | Kieran Setiya |Nikhil Krishnan |Charles Foster |Noga Arikha

Three years before he vowed, in “Carrion Comfort”, not to feast on despair, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins grieved the physical decay of growing old: “And wisdom is early to despair: / Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done / … So be beginning, be beginning to despair”. We age, decline and die, like everyone we love. Yet despair is not, to put it mildly, a popular stance.

Jun 3, 2024 | msn.com | Kieran Setiya

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Jun 3, 2024 | theguardian.com | Kieran Setiya

Earlier this year, the cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison on seven counts of wire fraud. It’s safe to say that his life has not gone according to plan. But was the plan itself immoral? By his own account, Bankman-Fried aimed to accumulate wealth for philanthropic causes: “earning to give”, in the idiom of the effective altruist movement, of which he was a supporter.

May 24, 2024 | theatlantic.com | Kieran Setiya

Professional comedy, which most of us consume in modest doses, is not how humor infuses our day-to-day lives. Nor are proper jokes, with feed lines and punch lines, the primary vehicle for laughter. Instead, top billing goes to the wisecracks we share with family and friends—those spontaneously funny, though often mocking, remarks that leaven our daily chatter.

Feb 29, 2024 | ksetiya.substack.com | Kieran Setiya

I first encountered Josiah S. Carberry, Professor of Psychoceramics at Brown University, in Joel Feinberg’s Harmless Wrongdoing, the fourth volume of his epic tetralogy, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law. Its acknowledgements end with this tidbit:Finally, I must mention Professor Josiah Carberry, word of whose death has just reached me. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. On his behalf it must be said, in all fairness, that his actions were rarely as bad as his intentions.