Compact Substack

1 week ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

I’m about to go on a much-needed vacation and scrambling to get things in order, so just a quick recap of what we published at the magazine this week: Kay Craig on an attempt to write fiction with AI Robert Bellafiore on NatalCon and whether natalism can stop being weird Norman Matloff on the downside of the influx of foreign PhD students Dan McCarthy on the anti-war right’s growing doubts about Trump Adina Glickstein on the collapse of Urbit, Curtis Yarvin’s tech project Holly Buck on why...

2 weeks ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

Around 2012-13, one of the many tech hype cycles that have punctuated the past few decades reached its crescendo. I’m referring to the craze for Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), which began when a cluster of new startups started promoting free, open-enrollment courses taught by faculty from top-tier universities like Stanford, Harvard, and MIT.

3 weeks ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

I first came across the blog Unqualified Reservations, written under the memorable byline “Mencius Moldbug,” sometime in the second Obama term, around the same time the tech press started catching onto the burgeoning ranks of monarchists in and around Silicon Valley. One key incident that raised the profile of Moldbug and his acolytes at the time was the transgender former Occupy leader and Google engineer Justine Tunney’s petition to the White House demanding that it: “1.

3 weeks ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger |Ashley Frawley

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:14:56Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Geoff Shullenberger and Ashley Frawley discuss Andrew Doyle’s new book The End of Woke, which Ashley reviewed in Compact. Discussion about this episodeAnchored by Geoff Shullenberger and Ashley Frawley, Blame Theory takes a seriously playful look at the ideas that have shaped our minds and our world, to ask: How have we ended up here, and whom or what can we blame?

1 month ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

In a recent Financial Timesfeature, the literary scholar Orlando Reade traces a phenomenon that has also been of interest to me for over a decade: the influence of René Girard on a growing subset of the American right. The starting point of Reade’s discussion is the conversion experience of sorts that JD Vance experienced at a 2011 speech given by Peter Thiel at Yale Law School.