Wow, more than a third of the 100 best novels of all time were written in my lifetime, almost all of them in English. I guess we’re just a lot better at writing novels than non-Anglos and all those mediocrities who preceded us (Balzac, for instance).
Many people have already written about the chatbot-generated phishing scams directed at writers: We love your writing and can’t wait to promote your book etc. But what surprises me is how many of them there are. I get them almost every day now. Fortunately, it didn’t take long for spam filters to figure them out … which is interesting in itself. Such messages are unlike typical spam in most respects, so what gives them away?
Frank Hughes, A Somerset Farm (c. 1930)
Speaking of being ahead of the curve: there’s a new book on what’s wrong with the whole “cultural Marxism” discourse, but I showed what’s wrong with it in this 2018 blog post.
in Breaking Bread with the Dead I have a riff on R. A. Lafferty’s 1965 story “Slow Tuesday Night” — which, in light of this report by Charlie Warzel, puts me ahead of the curve and puts Lafferty waaaaaay ahead of the curve.
The Unofficial Angus Fan Club has been vocal lately, so here you go, guys.
If you happen to see me this week and I am muttering to myself or laughing maniacally, this is why.
Halfway through one of my lectures [at the Kyiv School of Economics], the air-raid siren went off. We relocated to this old Soviet-era building and went two or three stories underground into a bomb shelter with huge blast doors. We continued the class. And the students were beaming. It lifted me up to see their enthusiasm, their commitment. It also reinforced something very deep about our common humanity, which is that we humans like to learn, even in a time of war.
I also couldn’t help but notice that these students had a very different understanding of safety than American students. When American students want a safe space, it’s because they don’t want to hear threatening ideas. For Ukrainian students, safety means learning without bombs falling.