Exodus 35:Β
The children of Israel brought a willing offering unto the LORD, every man and woman, whose heart made them willing to bring for all manner of work, which the LORD had commanded to be made by the hand of Moses. And Moses said unto the children of Israel, See, the Lord hath called by name Bezaleel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah; and he hath filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship; and to devise curious works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in the cutting of stones, to set them, and in carving of wood, to make any manner of cunning work. And he hath put in his heart that he may teach, both he, and Aholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. Them hath he filled with wisdom of heart, to work all manner of work, of the engraver, and of the cunning workman, and of the embroiderer, in blue, and in purple, in scarlet, and in fine linen, and of the weaver, even of them that do any work, and of those that devise cunning work.Β
I wrote a few years ago about the men and women of cunning. One of the writings Iβm most proud of.Β
This video of Bill Evans, Eddie Gomez, and a sitting-in drummer (in Copenhagen I think, 1966) is astonishing. Absolutely riveting from beginning to end.
I accidentally used the flash on my phone early this morning, but I enjoy the painterly look the phone’s software created here. I tend to like computational photography best when it’s trying unsuccessfully to imitate actual light.
Dorothy L. Sayers, from her essay “Why Work?” (1942):
War is a judgment that overtakes societies when they have been living upon ideas that conflict too violently with the laws governing the universe…. Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes: they happen when wrong ways of thinking and living bring about intolerable situations; and whichever side may be the more outrageous in its aims and the more brutal in its methods, the root causes of conflict are usually to be found in some wrong way of life in which all parties have acquiesced, and for which everybody must, to some extent, bear the blame.
It strikes me that this is equally true of the culture war that Americans have been fighting with one another for quite some time.
Every day is a good day to read WisΕawa Szymborska’s “Children of Our Age.”
I’ve been teaching Newman’s Apologia, and that’s difficult because of his … well, do we call it extreme delicacy and precision or do we call it evasiveness? Thoughts here.
Tim Wu:Β
In health care, private equity firms have sought to reorganize the industry into what they openly call a platform model. What that means in practice is squeezing more work from doctors and nurses while raising prices. Likewise, rental housing has suffered from the rise of a corporate-housing platform: the centralizing of rental homeownership along with steady increases in rents. The result is not just bad policy but also a cultural blindness: An entire generation has grown up thinking that extraction, as opposed to building, is the path to riches.
I keep hearing that “we’re living in a post-literate society,” but worldwide literacy levels are the highest in human history. When people say “post-literate society” what they mean is “a North American and/or Western European society in which a smaller percentage of people read books than in 1950, and are correspondingly more likely to get information and entertainment from audio, video, and short-form texts.” Which is a big thing! But it has nothing to do with literacy. I would bet that the average today reads and writes more words-per-day than the average person in 1975 did, when TV ruled the media world. Almost every “post-literacy” jeremiad or lamentation acknowledges this βΒ e.g. β but their authors can’t be bothered to come up with a phrase that accurately describes what they are rightly concerned about.
A fascinating look at the etymology of the Greek word doulos β βslave.β The cognates are remarkable.
I donβt think I appreciated how much a democracy depends upon regular people standing up to defend their rights and their powers against the elites who try to usurp them. These days people are happy to give up their rights and power if they can find some strongman or strongwoman willing to take it. This is a much larger part of human nature than I thought.
The tech media is largely failing to tell this story, so Iβll mark the moment: fall 2025 is when the new Luddite movement really began to accelerate. For the first time in a long time, there is palpable energy β positive energy β in tech. Itβs directed away from the Big Tech companies, and toward alternative platforms and mindsets. Many people are trying to opt out of Big Tech altogether.
Come with me! Come with me to FREEDOM!
The Most Revd Dr Laurent Mbanda, Chairman, Gafcon Primatesβ Council: “As has been the case from the very beginning, we have not left the Anglican Communion; we are the Anglican Communion.”
Finished reading: Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon. I’m not yet ready to do a review β that will have to wait for a second reading β but I will say that the people who see this as the third in a detective trilogy, following Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013), are mostly wrong. The essential point of this book is to trace a line that links the multiple timelines of Against the Day (2006) to the next-door-to-ours hippiecentric moral universe of Vineland (1990) βΒ a connection made pretty explicit when in the final chapter we see a U-boat (βan encapsulated volume of pre-Fascist space-timeβ) that travels through an alternate dimension in just the way that the Chums of Chance travel in Against, and then read a letter from Skeet Wheeler, on his way to California, quite obviously the father of Vinelandβs Zoyd Wheeler. This alternate history of our world runs from the Chicago World’s Fair to the Tunguska Event to Prohibition to the rise of European fascism and ultimately to Reagan’s America. But passage from one terminus to the other takes us through what the narrator of Mason & Dixon (1997) calls “Worlds alternative to this one” β which is why you need a shadow ticket. π
The hype is expected β new tech runs on speculation. You can feel the residue of the last 30 years of booms. There is a sense that people missed their chance to get rich on the internet, on ecommerce, on the app store, on social media, on crypto, on meme stocks, on NVIDIA. The hype bubbles get inflated because individuals donβt want to miss their chance at another windfall, and companies donβt want to get displaced by any nascent technological shifts. The history of tech has calcified into stories of dramatic wins and unforeseen downfalls, and what results is a tech culture of near compulsory participation in prediction rather than creating value or serving needs.
The whole talk is great.
Dan Cohen is officially my hero:
I have begun adding art museum [Model Context Protocols] to my custom rig in Claude, including connectors to the collections of the Met and the Art Institute of Chicago. With the article databases our team has attached to Claude through our MCP server, my test setup has reached a level of comprehensiveness that enables me to turn off web retrieval (RAG) entirely, and I now can rely solely on library- and museum-augmented responses. The results are very promising. When I ask about βCubism,β for instance, instead of web-based regurgitation, Claude returns a good array of articles on Cubism, as well as representative artwork that has been digitized by museums and related curatorial text.
Learn more about Model Context Protocols here. @dancohen is my hero because he is not accepting the defaults imposed the AI megafauna but instead is engaged in an imaginative critical filtering that is, IMO, paving the way for how smart university leaders could leverage LLMs for legitimate educational purposes β instead of just trying to obey and please Sam Altman.
Cover of the first edition of To the Lighthouse (1927), designed and drawn by Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell.
John Piper, Llan-y-Blodwell, Shropshire 1964
