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I’m Bryan Kam, and I’d love to hear from you! I aim to respond within two days.

My other blog

An Audio Experiment
I’ve started a podcast, which, like this blog, is called Clerestory. The initial structure is that I speak for 20-30 minutes about topics…
The Muses
In recent weeks it has occurred to me that I know next to nothing about the muses. Their enumeration — nine by most counts (also known as an…
Epicurus and Happiness
Today I’m thinking about Epicurus’ view of happiness. This section comes directly between the two passages on the future (“We must remember…
Epicurus and Death
Epicurus is sometimes seen as anti-Stoic. Certainly Epictetus and other Stoics seem to have reviled him, as I wrote yesterday. Epicurus was…
Epicurus
Epicurus has had a tough time of it since he wrote and taught (~341–270 BCE). It’s a good thing he was level-headed about posterity: We must…
Freedom
A few years ago, at my discussion group, we read Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958): PDF of the Essay Two Concepts of…
Heritability of variability
Yesterday I wrote about Darwin’s foreshadowing of r/K selection theory. Today I’ll argue that The Origin of Species also predicts punctuated…
Darwin and r/K selection
Today I’m thinking about Darwin and r/K selection theory. Wikipedia had led me to believe that this was an idea of Robert MacArthur and E. O…
Five-Day Fast
Last week, from Monday 2 November to Friday 6 November 2020, I did a self-run writing retreat at home, during which I also fasted. For those…
Oxygenic Photosynthesis
In the beginning, there was anoxygenic photosynthesis. OK, not in the beginning beginning, but at least before oxygenic photosynthesis…

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