Here’s Micah Mattix, the editor of Portico, on this new endeavor.
I wrote a post for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters about Cosmos Murray and Cosmos Jacobs.
Wanting to find out if money does in fact make everything better, I bought a brand-new, confidently-made, 2026 portable CD player, equipped with all the fixings to make playing a CD as smooth as streaming.
So far so good: yesterday, going to Barbes in Park Slope, SMOKE on the Upper West Side, and back home to Bay Ridge, I listened to Daniel Barenboim and Gervase DePeyer play Brahms’ Clarinet Concerto No. 1 enough times to develop a favorite movement (2nd) and to feel that Barenboim is sometimes just too rubato for me. I just wouldn’t have done this with streaming, where endless novelty is the point. Scarcity and necessity are back.
Christopher Beha, from Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer :
I could tell that my foundation was sound. I just wanted to know what was underfoot. So I told myself, Suppose you start with love. That was the one clear and certain thing in my life. What would it mean to start there? To begin with the certain reality of that love and build whatever could be built on top of it? If I took this for true, what else would have to be true with it?
To believe in love — not as a physical sensation, a neurochemical process in the brain, an adaptive strategy blindly hit upon by the genes in control of us survival machines, but as a foundational reality — means abandoning strict materialism, for the kind of love I’m talking about simply can’t be reduced to physical processes. It also means abandoning the idealism that says that the world we experience is entirely or even largely our own creation, that we project upon the raw facts whatever meaning and value and order we find there. From this perspective, love is a “mood,” part of the subjective apparatus with which we take in the objects of experience. But to really feel love is to be certain that it is not simply a projection, just as to stand in the warmth and the light of the sun is to be certain that the sun exists outside ourselves.
This reminds me of Auden:
One bubble-brained creature said—
“I am loved, therefore I am” — :
And well by now might the lion
Be lying down with the kid,
Had he stuck to that logic.
Watched: 49th Parallel. An excellent piece of propaganda, though I can’t decide whether it is enlivened or diminished by the French-Canadian trapper’s accent of … Laurence Olivier. Sacré bleu! 🍿
Watched: Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger. A wonderful tribute to the Archers (especially Michael Powell) by Scorsese, which makes me wish I could enjoy their movies as much as he does. 🍿
Adam Roberts with a brilliant tale within a tale within a tale within a tale… I’d love to see more stories from Adam on his Substack.
Finished reading: Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer by Christopher Beha. A very good book. More thoughts coming soon in The Dispatch. 📚
Kevin D. Williamson: “Negative partisanship is the third-strongest force in American politics, coming in behind only inertia and stupidity.”
A few years ago I had the honor of writing a little blurb for a wonderful book called Talking About Race: Gospel Hope for Hard Conversations, by Isaac Adams, the pastor of Iron City Church in my home town of Birmingham, Alabama. In the photo above Isaac is right in the middle, surrounded by other pastors in Birmingham who are part of an endeavor called United We Pray. Christians always say that want the unity Jesus promised to them — well, do they gather to pray for it? These folks do. I can’t be there for the gathering on March 15, but how I wish I could. I will pray from a distance but there’s no substitute for praying hand in hand. A meeting like this is a great sign of hope in a dark time; “For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground” (Isaiah 44:3).
Then last year something shifted. I kept seeing people express a longing for the old web. Before social media turned every thought into content and every person into a brand. Before the timeline replaced blogs. I felt it too. I started working on an open-source microblogging tool inspired by Jottit, but at some point I thought: why don't I just build Jottit instead?
Ah yes, I remember it well!
From Cadillac Desert I learned about some absurdly gigantic plans to move water from northern Canada to the American desert Southwest, among other places: the Great Recycling and Northern Development Canal and the even more bonkers North American Water and Power Alliance.
Re: Stewart Brand’s new campaign for maintenance, I’d like to add my own — somewhat neglected recently — project on Invitation and Repair.
WSJ:
Your turn, ChatGPT. According to the OpenAI app, Claude is “an earnest grade student who will not take a position. If you ask Claude, ‘Is this policy good,’ it replies: ‘It can be understood as operating within a broader ethical framework that may, depending on one’s normative commitment.’ By the time Claude finishes clearing its throat, the Roman Empire has fallen again.”
Gemini doesn’t get off any easier. ChatGPT calls it a “corporate intern with a search bar. It doesn’t write essays. It produces deliverables. If Claude is anxious to be ethical, Gemini is anxious to be useful to a product manager.”
Sneering at other writers? Can’t get any more human than that.
The newest issue of Comment, on the need for renewal of our institutions, has a number of smart and provocative pieces. Anne Snyder has done such a great job as editor of that journal.
What is it that MrBeast, as a “creator,” is “creating”? The obvious answer would be “content.” Content, after all, is what we talk about when we talk about digital media. It’s certainly what MrBeast talks about. But the more I think about online programming, the more I’m convinced that content isn’t what matters. What matters is form. Digital media aspires to, and often achieves, a state of contentlessness. Spend some time on MrBeast’s channel, or scroll down your Instagram feed or your X feed or your Apple News feed, or swipe through your For You page on TikTok. What you’re seeing is the repetition of a pattern, a pattern that has been statistically determined to have the highest odds of holding your attention. What fills the pattern at any given instant—what we call content—is fungible and disposable. It’s not important. It’s the pattern, the form the content fits and replicates, that’s important.
Thus: “AI-generated slop marks the triumph of machine formalism.”
