MONDAY: Friend, do you believe that numbers exist?

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2025

Inquiring minds wanted to know: We mentioned this morning that President Trump has been on a jag of late. At Mediaite, you can read about the kinds of outbursts and bizarre claims which get disappeared—and thereby normalized—by major orgs in Blue America like the New York Times.

That said:

Increasingly, the madness is general over the American discourse. The madness gets reported at Mediaite, and it comes from many directions. So it goes when the so-called "democratization of media"—including the invention of the podcast—reinvents Huey Long's impossible dream in the following way:

"Every influencer a king."

From here, we'd like to move to the strange start of this book review in yesterday's New York Times. In his opening paragraph, Jordan Ellenberg makes a somewhat peculiar claim about some of the last century's greatest minds. 

Dual headline included:

Can Math Be Violent? For 3 Scholars, the Answer Was Yes
In “The Great Math War,” Jason Socrates Bardi takes on a battle for the soul of numbers that divided the experts of its day.

It may surprise most readers to learn that, just a century or so ago, some of the era’s greatest mathematical minds were enlisted in a debate about whether numbers exist. You’d think, after millenniums, we’d have gotten that straight. But it’s not that simple, as Jason Socrates Bardi explains in his new book, “The Great Math War.”

That's the start of the review. According to Ellenberg—and we're not exactly saying he's "wrong"—some of our greatest mathematical minds were trying to determine whether numbers exist. 

(The headlines describe those giants as "experts.")

We'd like to discuss that peculiar claim—it goes straight to the heart of the later Wittgenstein's murky / jumbled / instructive work—but experience over the past thirty years has taught us that we shouldn't.

Friend, do you believe that numbers exist? We humans are remarkably good at building tall buildings, less skilled almost everywhere else.