We Know Only Men: Reading Emmanuel Levinas on the Rez
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a meditation on what is to be done after catastrophe
1st place, Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics (2025)
Eight generations of my family are buried at New Hope, the cemetery in Stilwell,
Oklahoma that marks the terminus of the Trail of Tears. Starting there, this essay
reads the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas — his lectures on the Talmud, his ethics of
radical alterity — against the Cherokee concept of ga-du-gi and the Huguenot
villagers of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon who sheltered Jews under Nazi occupation. Two
displaced cultures, separated by an ocean and a century, arrive at the same demand:
act first, think later. The piece asks what survives when a catastrophe destroys not
just lives but the very conditions that let events mean anything — and lands,
with Jonathan Lear, on radical hope.
The Last Culture War (Lecture 34)
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a work of science fiction set in 2056
Envisioning the Future of Computing contest
A piece of speculative fiction framed as the final lecture of an MIT course in the
year 2056, looking back on what history will call the “Second Breakthrough” — a
shift in how artificial intelligence enables moral reasoning and ethical discourse.
Beneath the science fiction is a serious argument: that genuine moral reasoning
requires preserving the full dimensionality of ethical life rather than collapsing it
into principles or utility functions, and that the real danger is “ethical
lock-in” — freezing today's moral understanding into something we can no longer
revise.