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.
Typesetting Races before the Age of Linotype:
On the afternoon of Saturday, February 19, 1870, a young compositor named George Arensberg astonished the printing world when he achieved a feat few thought possible: setting more than two thousand “ems” of solid minion type in a single hour (about 760 words, or 13 words a minute).
My son is my biggest fan.
‘The digital colonization of flyover states’: how datacenters are tearing small-town America apart. We’re dealing with our own version of the situation here in the Waco area. The first common thread is the contempt the techbros have for any resistance. They make no attempt to win hearts and minds; they just try to trample everyone in their path. The second common thread is their ceaseless lying about water use: a new data center about 30 miles from me denies that it will be using any water from Lake Whitney. It is, we are told, pure coincidence that the data center happens to be located on the lakeshore.
Our Monterey oak is 10 years old — seems like it was a baby just yesterday.
In word and deed, in speech and action, then, we utter our Amen to God. If there is a conclusion to draw here, it is this. Christian wisdom consists in letting God be God, in hearing and consenting to God's great declaration in the gospel that the time is fulfilled, the end of the ages has come, and salvation, fulfillment, peace are established in our midst. Christian wisdom consists in lining ourselves up with that truth. In one sense there aren't any great depths to the Christian life — no mystical doctrines to learn, no tricks of the spiritual life to master, no experiences to cultivate. What there is instead is the quiet, daily business of setting our hearts on what God has done for us. We are to love what God is and what God has done; we are to direct our lives toward him as our goal, and to make him our supreme delight and joy. And we are to learn that in our praises and our daily living, our chief task is this: to echo in what we say and what we do that great Yes which God speaks in his Son, and to find in him none other than the way of life. To do that is to utter the Amen through him, and to begin to live to the glory of God.
