Essays
Mostly attempts to understand something by writing about it. The subjects wander rather freely — science, music, memory, markets, politics, art, whatever happened to become sufficiently irritating or beautiful that I could not quite leave it alone — and I certainly do not claim equal competence in all of them. That is partly the point: writing is often how I discover what I actually think, including the unpleasant cases in which the answer turns out to be different from the one I started with.
Agency, mind and the physical world
- I Choose, Therefore I AmAgency, determinism, and god in the causal gap
- L’invitation au voyageA post-modernist rhapsody about drugs and the meaning of life
Markets, machines and academia
- The Money-Making Black BoxWhy, despite its triumphant successes in so many worlds, AI still struggles to beat the market — and what should convince an investor that it finally has
- All we need is trustReducing the friction between academia and industry
Music and history
- A secret chordWhat is that secret chord that makes Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah such a hit?
- No peace until the stars endWhat makes Non potho reposare a quintessential Sardinian song? A sixteenth-century tale of love and hatred that wouldn’t shame Shakespeare
- Never forgottenThe 1981 Soviet rock opera Juno and Avos, Count Rezanov and Concepción Argüello, and how accurately the story is told
- An E minor homecomingChopin and George Sand in the cold cell of Valldemossa, and why Prelude No. 4 sounds so incredibly touching
- Like the last ray of MayMandelstam, Brodsky, Chénier, Cavaradossi, the great-grandparents, and Chopin’s C minor prelude. One word unites them: freedom
- Nocturne for a good manCan music transform a person?
- Quasi una tragediaA first computer, a DOS game, and Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata
- The one-drop preludeLucid dreaming, Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri, and the Raindrop prelude
Art, antiquity and other marginalia
- His Master’s voiceContemporary art, a famous music record label, and the Big Bang theory — how do they all connect?
- An ancient Greek ego boostOn Homeric epithets