I’m thinking of blogging more, this term, about what I’m teaching. In my class on Fantasy we’re starting with MacDonald’s Phantastes, and here are first thoughts.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Thoughts on the Day of the Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge,” May 1944:
We thought we could make our way in life with reason and justice, and when both failed, we felt that we were at the end of our tether. We have constantly exaggerated the importance of reason and justice in the course of history. You, who are growing up in a world war which ninety per cent of mankind did not want, but for which they have to risk losing their goods and their lives, are learning from childhood that the world is controlled by forces against which reason can do nothing; and so you will be able to cope with those forces more successfully. In our lives the ‘enemy’ did not really exist. You know that you have enemies and friends, and you know what they can mean in your life. You are learning very early in life ways (which we did not know) of fighting an enemy, and also the value of unreserved trust in a friend. ‘Has not man a hard service upon earth?’ (Job 7.1). ‘Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle; my rock and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield and he in whom I take refuge’ (Ps. 144.1f). ‘There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother’ (Prov. 18.24).
Reorientation: on a practice that helps to give me a degree of much-needed equilibrium in a frenetic and troubling moment.
Machiavelli, Discourses I.42:
It should be noted, too, in the the affair of the Decemviri how easily men are corrupted, and in nature become transformed, however good they may be, and however well taught. Consider, for instance, how the young men whom Appius chose as a bodyguard, soon became the friends of tyranny for the sake of the small advantages which accrued; and how Quintus Fabius, one of the second Ten, though an excellent fellow, was after a while blinded by a little ambition and, under the evil influence of Appius, changed his good habits for bad and became like him.
Due consideration of this will cause all legislators, whether in a republic or a kingdom, to be all the more ready to restrain human appetites and to deprive them of all hope of doing wrong with impunity.
GOD standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods.
How long will ye judge unjustly, and accept the persons of the wicked? Selah.
Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy.
Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked.
They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course.
I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.
But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.
Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations.
Phil Christman’s taxonomy of pastors. Pick your favorite!
Renovation on a bookshop in Guildford, England revealed a stunning medieval chamber, forgotten beneath the ground for some 700 years. Archaeologists have identified it as a Synagogue dating back to the year 1180. The oldest Synagogue remains in the British Isles.
Julian Lage’s new album Scenes from Above is FAB. Maybe his best record yet — adding John Medeski to his trio was a genius move. ♫
Collaboration: cherry farmers and kestrels.
I joked last week that it would make more sense if we found out that the team behind redesigning the UI for MacOS 26 Tahoe was hired by Meta not a month ago, but an entire year ago, and secretly sabotaged their work to make the Mac look clownish and amateur. More and more I’m wondering if the joke’s on us and it actually happened that way. It’s like MacOS, once the crown jewel of computer human interface design, has been vandalized.
I wrote about analog devices as luxury goods.
Listening to Joni Mitchell’s 1974 album Miles of Aisles on the remastered vinyl released by Acoustic Sounds. A wonderful record, and performed by Joni and her band at a level of musicianship that’s pretty much unimaginable today. ♫
Re: my previous post: If I discovered that anyone in my university was changing the grades I had assigned to students, I’d say: “Excellent. You do the grading from now on — I’ll forward all my students' work to you for evaluation. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to my teaching.”
It was late, the end of an exhausting term at a public university in the Midwest. I logged into our learning-management system (LMS) to answer a routine student email. The gradebook — rows and columns I had populated myself — should have been familiar. But one number was wrong.
A student who had failed my course after submitting a final exam composed almost entirely of AI-generated text now showed as having passed. The F I had entered, following my syllabus and the university’s academic integrity policy, had become a D. […]
Once I understood what had happened to my grades, I did what professors are supposed to do. I raised the matter internally. I tried to work through existing channels. I invoked the language of policy, accreditation, and Title IV compliance. I was told, politely, that the system was working as intended.
Wow.
My friend and colleague Philip Jenkins is pursuing a late Roman Welsh mystery. [UPDATE: after posting that I realized that it sounds like I’m talking about one of the last novels by a detective-story writer named Roman Welsh. But let it stand, just for fun.]
My buddy Austin Kleon on the glories of RSS. As Austin notes, I’ve been promoting RSS for years to no avail. People can easily use RSS to see only what they want to see, but instead spend their days prowling through the wreckage of social media like raccoons in a dumpster. I don’t get it.
The outpouring of new recordings prompted by tape and the LP (and, in pop music, the 45) makes it easy to overlook the fact that, in many ways, the new formats were limiting forces. They gave control of the market to big companies, which licensed the formats to smaller companies. They crowded out “amateur” performers and raised the bar for “professional” ones. They placed the responsibility for choosing which music would be recorded and made public with record-company executives, many of whom had extramusical motives in the front of their minds. And they proved so attractive that they drove the existing format — the 78 — into oblivion, and, with it, the thousands of recordings that existed only as 78s. This would be the pattern of progress for recordings in the postwar period. The new formats were advanced forms of mechanical memory, and they entered experience into the record with ever greater fidelity. Yet they were not means of revival so much as of forgetting.