Well, what if I told you there was a community that you could be a part of that was still committed to the old way of doing things? That is, the old way of being human in community: simply being in the same room with other human beings, without much of an agenda. There is an AI backlash building, and it is priming the world to long for exactly one thing: church coffee hour.
So much that was boring and conventional has become dynamic and imaginative.
A. O. Scott’s guide to Thomas Pynchon’s novels is okay, but not as good as mine.
My buddy Austin Kleon texted to tell me that whenever I return to blogging this from Nick Cave should be the first thing I post. I felt that I had to begin by paying tribute to Ella; but having done that, here comes Nick — I’d like to quote the whole post, but let’s just do this, as good a personal manifesto as I have seen:
I am essentially a liberal-leaning, spiritual conservative with a small ‘c’, which, to me, isn’t a political stance, rather it is a matter of temperament. I have a devotional nature, and I see the world as broken but beautiful, believing that it is our urgent and moral duty to repair it where we can and not to cause further harm, or worse, wilfully usher in its destruction. I think we consist of more than mere atoms crashing into each other, and that we are, instead, beings of vast potential, placed on this earth for a reason – to magnify, as best we can, that which is beautiful and true. I believe we have an obligation to assist those who are genuinely marginalised, oppressed, or sorrowful in a way that is helpful and constructive and not to exploit their suffering for our own professional advancement or personal survival. I have an acute and well-earned understanding of the nature of loss and know in my bones how easy it is for something to break, and how difficult it is to put it back together. Therefore, I am cautious with the world and try to treat all its inhabitants with care.
Photo by the great Herman Leonard. Duke is delighted, Rodgers is bemused and admiring, and Benny is trying to figure out how she does it.
I’m partly back — with the help of the divine Ella Fitzgerald.
Sting’s song “All This Time” plays a pretty significant role in my mental world. It came out a few months after my first trip to England, a trip centered on London and Oxford, and it alerted me to the wholly different texture of a Northern city, a Northern upbringing. And it made me imaginatively aware of what it might be like to grow up in a country with a Roman history — for instance, in “an edge-of-the-Empire garrison town.” It set me on a path of inquiry that made me highly receptive to what would become one of my favorite books, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Also, it’s one of Sting’s best songs. 🎵
A record that has received a lot of love but never enough love is D’Angelo’s Black Messiah. Eleven years after its release it sounds as fresh as tomorrow. 🎵
Interviewer: “You look tanned and rested.” Ange Postecoglu: “If a manager looks tanned and rested, that means he’s out of a job, mate.” Dude’s kinda crazy but I’m really glad he’s back in the PL. ⚽️
Leszek Kołakowski wrote about the
unpleasant and insoluble dilemmas that loom up every time we try to be perfectly consistent when we try to think about our culture, our politics, and our religious life. More often than not we want to have the best from incompatible worlds and, as a result, we get nothing; when we instead pawn our mental resources on one side, we cannot buy them out again and we are trapped in a kind of dogmatic immobility.
Thus Kołakowski appeals for what he winningly calls “moderation in consistency.”
A post I wrote a while back on diseases of the intellect seems relevant to this moment.
I successfully adjusted the truss rod in my guitar, ama
BBC:
In 2024, Windows was at the centre of a controversy across the German internet. It started with a job listing for Deutsche Bahn, the country’s railway service. The role being recruited was an IT systems administrator who would maintain the driver’s cab display system on high-speed and regional trains. The problem was the necessary qualifications: applicants were expected to have expertise with Windows 3.11 and MS-DOS – systems released 32 and 44 years ago, respectively. In certain parts of Germany, commuting depends on operating systems that are older than many passengers. …
The trains in San Francisco’s Muni Metro light railway … won’t start up in the morning until someone sticks a floppy disk into the computer that loads DOS software on the railway’s Automatic Train Control System (ATCS).
The Detection Club will be a BBC series in which G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers solve crimes. Time to start dreaming about ideal casting … but with Richard Griffiths no longer around, the ideal for GKC is not possible, alas. A younger Dawn French would’ve made an excellent DLS … Olivia Coleman for Christie … Must keep thinking about this.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression:
Those students who are the furthest to the left have been the most accepting of violence for as long as we’ve asked the question. That includes very liberal and democratic socialist students. But a rising tide of acceptance of violence has raised all boats. Now, regardless of party or ideology, students across the board are more open to violence as a way to shut down a speaker. What was once an extreme and fringe opinion has become normalized.
That’s what the best science fiction does: It makes us question the social arrangements of our technology, and inspires us to demand better ones.
This idea – that who a technology acts for (and upon) is more important than the technology’s operating characteristics – has a lot of explanatory power.