Alan Jacobs

Zadie Smith: 

To me our neighborhood is not just the middle-class moms with their expensive pushchairs or my writer friend across the park, but instead a place of many layers, where people are going through all kinds of struggle, many of whom I now know personally. The [local parish’s food pantry] makes me ask myself: How do you want to be connected in the world, and how do you want to be in communion with people?

Anglicanism is meaningful to me in that way. I’m not in any way an effective, good, or faithful Anglican. I am at the larder far less frequently than I should be. But I’m interested in the idea that this particular space in Willesden provides something which, at least in contemporary capitalism, seems very hard to find elsewhere. (I cannot speak for Anglican churches elsewhere.) It’s meaningful to me, in the radically local sense Philip Larkin got at in “Church Going,” as a specific place where for hundreds — or maybe thousands — of years, people have gathered for this purpose: to be quiet, to be in communion, to be with one another. These human souls can be abject, they can be lost, they can be rich or poor, hold a great variety of political views or none at all. The door is open. 

As an Anglican who, unlike Zadie Smith, has “metaphysical concerns,” heck, even a set of beliefs, I say: This is a good start. 

Anastasia Berg:

Last spring, it became clear to me that over half the students in my large general education lecture course had used artificial intelligence tools, contrary to my explicit policy, to write their final take-home exams. (Ironically, the course was titled Contemporary Moral Problems: The Value of Human Life.) I had asked them about some very recent work in philosophy, parts of which happened to share titles with entirely different ideas in medieval theology. You can guess which topics the students ended up “writing” about. 

Well, of course they did! What I just can’t get over is the number of professors who think that making an “explicit policy” against AI use will have any effect at all on students’ behavior. The overwhelming majority of college students will have chatbots do their work for them unless we teachers make it impossible for them to do so. Certum est.

Nate Anderson at Ars Technica:

When the professors realized how widespread this was, they contacted the 100-ish students who seemed to be cheating. “We reached out to them with a warning, and asked them, ‘Please explain what you just did,'” said Fagen-Ulmschneider in an Instagram video discussing the situation.

Apologies came back from the students, first in a trickle, then in a flood. The professors were initially moved by this acceptance of responsibility and contrition… until they realized that 80 percent of the apologies were almost identically worded and appeared to be generated by AI.

So on October 17, during class, Flanagan and Fagen-Ulmschneider took their class to task, displaying a mash-up image of the apologies, each bearing the same “sincerely apologize” phrase. No disciplinary action was taken against the students, and the whole situation was treated rather lightly — but the warning was real. Stop doing this. Flanagan said that she hoped it would be a “life lesson” for the students. 

Seems to me the most likely “life lesson” would be that there are no bad consequences for cheating with AI. 

(By the way, Nate, a staff writers for Ars, is yet another of my former students doing cool stuff in the world.) 

Re-upping my 2023 essay on Murray:

My thesis can be simply stated: There is today no more important writer for North American Christians to read than Albert Murray — a man who, as far as I know, had no religious belief whatsoever. But he held as his guiding principle an idea that Christians today cannot flourish without adopting: “the blues idiom” — otherwise known as life in the briar patch.

Exodus 35: 

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. 

I wrote a few years ago about the men and women of cunning. One of the writings I’m most proud of.