Tongue but no door is an on-again, off-again blog (mostly) by a handful of graduates of Bard College. People who have posted at least once since the last time we lost all of our data include Ruth (a neuroscience graduate student), Adrianne (a public radio maven), Monica (a public defender), and Kiran (a graduate student in political theory), but the bulk of the work is done by Anthony Mohen and Todd Johnson.

Anthony is an NYU law student with a thing for philosophy (of law, and sometimes the mind, in particular). Todd is a UC Irvine graduate student in computer science, particularly interested in machine learning, computational biology, and AI.

We post a lot about science, particularly as it appears in popular press and on the intertubes. We also pretend to understand politics, what makes for a good beer, media, and all sorts of other things.

The domain name is a bit of corrupted Foucault. The relevant passage, which comes from Fearless Speech, goes like this:

The first one [...] is the sort of orator who is so harmful for a democracy. And I think we should determine carefully his specific characteristics.

His first trait is that he has “a mouth like a running spring” – which translates the Greek word “athuroglossos.” “Athuroglossos” literally refers to someone who has a tongue but not a door. Hence it implies someone who cannot shut his or her mouth.

Way back (in February 2003) when we were looking for a name for the place where our blogs lived, this seemed to us (Todd and Monica, particularly) like an amusingly apt description of a blogger.