When You Can’t Know for Sure:
Something has shifted in how it feels to hold a belief. Not in a single moment of rupture, but gradually, the texture of knowing has changed. You encounter a claim, find it plausible, repeat it, and then something nags. Was that real? Did I just pass along something that was generated, confabulated, assembled from statistical patterns with no referent in the world? The question doesn’t resolve cleanly. You move on, but the ground feels slightly less solid than it did before.
June 11, 2026
The Apparatus of Disbelief: Miranda Fricker in the Age of Synthetic Media
There’s a specific kind of unease that’s become familiar lately that is not quite paranoia, not quite cynicism, but something in between. You watch a video clip and notice a faint wrongness about the mouth. You read a statement attributed to someone and realize you have no clean way to verify it. You see a wave of comments all expressing the same view in subtly different words and wonder, briefly, if any of those people exist. Then you move on, because what else can you do.
June 8, 2026
When the Hinges Loosen
It’s not fear of a specific thing. It’s not worry about an outcome that might or might not happen. It’s something more structural, a feeling that the floor beneath your thinking has developed a give to it, a slight flex when you press down, where before there was solid ground.
June 5, 2026
Epistemic Anxiety and the Examined Life:
There’s a particular kind of distress I’ve been hearing about more and more in practice. It doesn’t always come in labeled as anxiety. Sometimes it is described as exhaustion. The specific fatigue of someone who has spent too long trying to verify things that resist verification. Sometimes it arrives disguised as cynicism, or as a creeping suspicion that the person doesn’t quite trust their own judgment anymore. What they’re describing, when you really listen, is the experience of having lost their footing in reality; not dramatically, not all at once, but slowly, like ground that turns out to have been softer than you thought.
June 2, 2026
The Philosopher Who Tried to Save Authenticity From Itself
There’s a move that happens in a lot of conversations about authenticity where someone will say something like: but who decides what’s authentic? Isn’t it all just subjective? And the implicit answer is usually yes. Authenticity is whatever feels real to you, internally verified, self-sourced. The whole point is that nobody else gets a vote.
June 1, 2026