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Daily log archive for Dec 2025. Go to the current daily log, or browse the archive index.

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2025-12-15

M.F. Husain Museum in Qatar

India’s best-known artist gets his own museum—in Qatar

Although he died 14 years ago, aged 95, M.F. Husain is India’s best-known modern artist. He recently became its most expensive, too: earlier this year one of his works sold at auction for $13.8m, a new record for an Indian painter. The opening of Lawh wa Qalam (The Canvas and the Pen) in Qatar adds one more item to Husain’s list of achievements, for it is the first museum outside India dedicated to a single Indian artist.

Why is the museum in Doha and not, say, Pandharpur, the town of Husain’s birth? The artist, who was Muslim, fell foul of Hindu nationalists, who claimed to be offended by his frequent depiction of Hindu goddesses in the nude. By the mid-2000s the harassment had become intolerable: death threats, vandalism of his artwork, an attack on his home by Hindu militants and an estimated 900 legal cases registered against him. He left India in 2006 and never returned, living between Dubai, Doha and London. “It is a sad day for India,” the editor of the Hindu, a newspaper, wrote at the time.

Mubi Podcast with creator of Jiro Dreams of Sushi

JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI... and David Gelb changes how people eat it

David Gelb changed how the world looked at food documentaries. I watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi not too long after it first came out. Over the years, I have also followed the numerous food documentaries (including Gelb's Chef's Table and it's various spinoffs and knockoffs) define an entire genre of documentary film-making.

This podcast was a nostalgic trip down memory lane and had some interesting insights on how the whole phenomenon began.

2025-12-12

Gyms in airports

The first study quoted in this post had 12 participants. They were all in their 20s.

Enough said! 🤷🏽‍♂️

#gym #airport

2025-12-11

Berluti Knot

Recently switched to this knot from the Parisian knot, and I am super happy with it 😊!

2025-12-10

MCP donated to Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF under the Linux Foundation

Donating the Model Context Protocol and establishing the Agentic AI Foundation \ Anthropic

The comments on the HN Post are brutal, and I suspect accurate.

Anthropic wants to ditch MCP and not be on the hook for it in the future -- but lots of enterprises haven't realized its a dumb, vibe coded standard that is missing so much. They need to hand the hot potato off to someone else.

MCP is overly complicated. I'd rather use something like https://utcp.io/

This sounds more like anthropic giving up on mcp than it does a good faith donation to open source.

Anthropic will move onto bigger projects and other teams/companies will be stuck with sunk cost fallacy to try and get mcp to work for them.

Good luck to everyone.

tbf I do believe MCP has its uses. It just hasnt lived up to its hype yet and it's complicated to implement in a remote scenario. Moreover, for local MCPs using stdio, you might as well use regular tool calls instead

The Best Philosophy Lectures

The Best Philosophy Lectures on YouTube

Great to see Ellie Anderson on there. She is one of my favorite philosophy YouTubers.

On Brainrot

On Brainrot #europe #twitter #misinformation

The conservative commentator Erick-Woods Erickson observed on his Substack this week that Twitter has now convinced large swaths of the American right that Europe has been completely overrun by Muslims, that the United Kingdom is on the verge of becoming an Islamic nation, and that Sweden has fallen.

But reality tells an entirely different story. Muslims make up less than eight percent of Sweden's population. Non-natives account for less than thirteen percent of Germany. There are problems, certainly, real ones that deserve serious attention, but the online discourse had inflated them into an existential civilizational collapse that simply isn't happening at the imagined (and much tweeted about) scale.

Erickson's broader point is about what - precisely - has happened to our discourse and our decision-making. The Trump administration, he argues, has been captured by people whose entire education, whose entire worldview, whose entire paradigm of reality itself has been gleaned from Twitter.

Erickson and I would likely disagree on 90% of the issues that come up on his podcast. But I think he's 100% on the money when it comes to this - our current epistemic disaster. He is quite accurately describing a phenomenon that has metastasized across the entire information ecosystem, across all political orientations, across geographic boundaries and cultural contexts.

We've entered the era of "brainrot" - though the term itself feels almost too glib // flippant for the scale of our cognitive and cultural crash out. Somewhere in the last decade and a half, something fundamental broke in how human beings process information, form beliefs, and engage with reality. We became a global fragmentation of doom scrolling, context-lacking, uncurious, blindly accepting, regurgitating masses.

2025-12-04

The 2025 archetype gift guide

Dazed has a very interesting set of gift guides - broken down by archetypes. Here are my personal favorites

2025-12-02

The Cost of Living

I was sitting in a Copenhagen cafe (Original Coffee Istegade to be exact) and they had a stack of Kinfolk magazines. I wanted to stay off any screens so I just started reading all the back issues one by one and stayed for the entire day.

This article especially caught my attention: The Cost of Living - Kinfolk

It's paywalled online and not availble in full. But here is a lovely quote from it.

The essential problem is much the same now as it was then: What we think we want, and what actually makes us happy are, in the end, not the same things. Thoreau’s solution is surprisingly practical and has the tone of an economics lecture rather than the pulpit. “The cost of a thing,” he writes, “is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” 

When we devote ourselves to our jobs and push ourselves to acquire the outward signs of success, we often vastly under-estimate the amount of “life-cost” we will pay to attain our goals. Once awoken to this cost, Thoreau saw it everywhere: the effort made to dress elegantly, curry favor among neighbors and business associates, the fear of insolvency. At one point he notes that most of his neighbors would rather appear in public with a broken leg than with patched trousers (“distressed” garments had yet to come into fashion).

"life-cost" is such an amazing concept.

The Philosophical Stance Against Having Children

The Growing Anti-Natalist Movement in Japan – SAPIENS

Many critics paint anti-natalism as a movement rejecting generational continuity and its followers as selfish, short-sighted, and nihilistic. Critiques of childlessness in general have only grown in tandem with rising pronatalist policies across the globe. Current U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, in a 2019 speech at a The American Conservative gala, implied the childless are “sociopaths” unmoored from the well-being of their “communities,” “families,” and “country.” Others have described them as “hedonists” chasing a life of pleasure. Philosopher Ben Ware compared anti-natalism to the folly of techno-utopianism for believing that it has found the solution to worldly suffering.

These critiques are unfair and either wholly inaccurate or overly simplified. Anti-natalists have a wide range of motivations, often related to the broader social, political, and economic circumstances that shape their understandings of reproductive choice, parenthood, and the future. Anti-natalist movements around the globe do not always agree with one another or share the same concerns.