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Jun 16, 2025: Me after spending the morning reading the NYT’s hot takes on A.I. Against my usual practice, I’ve actually been reading the Times lately. …
Jun 16, 2025: Leo Belgicus
Jun 16, 2025: Tech journalists as mind donors.
Jun 14, 2025: Finished writing: Paradise Lost: A Biography by Alan Jacobs. Joseph Addison said, “We have an actual interest in everything [Adam & Eve] …
Jun 14, 2025: Finished reading: Buckley by Sam Tanenhaus. First thoughts here. 📚
Jun 13, 2025: A wonderful explanation by David Bennett of the gloriously eccentric harmony of the Beach Boys' “God Only Knows.”
Jun 13, 2025: NYT (gift link): “What does a human slowly going insane look like to a corporation? It looks like an additional monthly user.”
Jun 12, 2025: Pet Sounds and a Last Word — for Brian.
Jun 12, 2025: Two quotations on doing what I hate.
Jun 12, 2025: I wrote about why I love demos, with lots of examples.
Jun 12, 2025: AI as Normal Technology | Knight First Amendment Institute: The methods-application distinction has important implications for how we measure and …
Jun 11, 2025: Danny Castro: As if all of this hassle wasn’t enough, consider the fact that you have to tend the turntable like a fire, flipping and adding logs as …
Jun 11, 2025: Beautiful engravings by Rachel Reckitt, for a never-published edition of The Mill on the Floss.
Jun 10, 2025: Hopewell Cemetery (1831), near Ashville, Alabama.
Jun 10, 2025: I wrote about The Devils’ Citadel (focusing largely on Humphrey Jennings), and now here’s The Devils’ Citadel Extended (focusing largely on John …
Jun 10, 2025: A useful mental exercise: when people say “AI isn’t going anywhere” or “AI is here to stay,” substitute for “AI” the word “cancer.” A great many …
Jun 10, 2025: Whether on Twitter or Bluesky, nobody learns anything.
Jun 10, 2025: I have two words for the administration of Ohio State University: sales resistance.
Jun 10, 2025: Rowan Williams: It’s an odd thing to say about the figure of Jesus in the Gospels, but I’ve always been struck by it — from time to time there’s a …
Jun 10, 2025: Drawing every pub in London
Jun 10, 2025: Terry Eagleton's tribute to Alasdair MacIntyre is the best I've read so far: All this makes MacIntyre one of the great moral philosophers of the 20th …
Jun 9, 2025: While Wes and I are on the road, Teri is sending us Angus updates.
Jun 5, 2025: This post by Ed Simon marking the 150th anniversary of Thomas Mann’s birth reminds me that I have some pretty interesting posts — if I do say so …
Jun 4, 2025: Several replies to my newsletter wanting — perhaps demanding is the word — pictures of Angus. Your wish is my command.
Jun 4, 2025: I wrote a longish essay on the “total action” of the detective story — and what obligations the author of such a story has (or …
Jun 3, 2025: Pub day!
Jun 3, 2025: When Busman’s Honeymoon, the play co-written by Sayers and Muriel St Clare Byrne, opened in London it did so at the Comedy Theatre … which reminds me …
Jun 2, 2025: Sometime in September 1935 Sayers finished Gaudy Night and sent it to her publisher, Gollancz. Victor Gollancz wired Sayers on 26 September to say …
Jun 2, 2025: In late 1936 the publishers Hodder & Stoughton asked Dorothy L. Sayers to complete the novel Dickens left unfinished at his death, The Mystery of …
Jun 2, 2025: This week has turned out to be more complicated than I thought it would be, so I won’t be able to do my audio posts on Paradise Lost. But I have …
Jun 1, 2025: J. M. W. Turner, Coastal view at sunset with fishing boat returning to port
Jun 1, 2025: In 2014 I suggested that people ask themselves a question: How would you act politically — what kinds of arguments would you make, what kinds of laws …
May 31, 2025: My dear mother-in-law, Margaret Collins, is one hundred and one years old. Here’s the email she just sent me — the general context being my wife …
May 30, 2025: I have a quite distinct memory of writing a long post, at some point fifteen years ago or so, on Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels. But I can’t find …
May 30, 2025: John Gruber: “This year I again extended my usual invitation to Apple, but, for the first time since 2015, they declined.” Apple execs demonstrating …
May 30, 2025: Once I get the hang of this podcasting thing I’m gonna start calling myself the showrunner of ayjay.org.
May 30, 2025: As I explain at the beginning of this, um, episode? — I guess it’s an episode — I don’t know how to podcast, I don’t even know how I …
May 30, 2025: I’m so pleased to see that Resentment, the first — but I hope not the last — feature film to be written and directed by my friend Noah Millman, …
May 29, 2025: Statement of principles: There’s no such thing as “artificial intelligence” Chatbot interfaces to LLMs are exceptionally prone to abuse in many …
May 29, 2025: I wrote about the plusses and minuses of Gioiatopia.
May 28, 2025: Psychoanalyzing Anthropic’s Claude.
May 28, 2025: Robin Sloan: I can’t think of an example, in the last decade or so, of compute and capability moving closer to the user, rather than farther away. In …
May 28, 2025: For me, the competition for Best Wodehouse Novel comes down to The Code of the Woosters and Uncle Fred in the Springtime. Uncle Fred, more properly …
May 27, 2025: A fantastic essay on Blake’s Laocoön by Adam Roberts. I must write about this at some point….
May 27, 2025: In one of the Nero Wolfe books Archie Goodwin calls his typewriter the “alphabet piano,” so that’s what I’m gonna call my …
May 26, 2025: Architectural designs from The City and Country Builder’s and Workman’s Treasury of Designs by English garden designer Batty Langley (1696-1751)
May 26, 2025: Civil-official husu, Korea (19th century)
May 26, 2025: Some people will struggle to believe that I did this, but I wrote about Auden’s bad wrong essay on detective fiction.
May 24, 2025: ONE-NIL TO THE ARSENAL ⚽️
May 23, 2025: My ol’ buddy Chuck Mathewes writing brilliantly about Alasdair MacIntyre: It was the spring semester of 1991, my senior year at Georgetown …
May 23, 2025: Steven Pinker’s new essay on Harvard is outstanding: fair-minded, well-reasoned, clearly-argued, and full of links to articles that provide …
May 23, 2025: The Taming of the Shrew, illustrated by Valenti Angelo
May 23, 2025: Phil Christman on Paul Elie's new book: It is perfectly normal not to be able to decide whether or not we believe in a religious doctrine. It is …
May 23, 2025: Alasdair MacIntyre: Lux æterna luceat ei, Domine.
May 22, 2025: Finished reading: What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade, which I wrote about, at some length, here. 📚
May 22, 2025: I wish tech writers were more consistently mindful of the distinction between (a) announcing the development of a product and (b) actually shipping …
May 22, 2025: The May update for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.
May 22, 2025: Coming soon
May 21, 2025: Sara Hendren: Kafka announced to us long ago that the meaning of life is that it stops. True enough. But [Jennifer] Banks walks the reader alongside …
May 21, 2025: John Siracusa: “The recent Apple Intelligence fiasco has revealed that the company is further away from properly prioritizing software …
May 20, 2025: Magnolia season
May 20, 2025: Half-listening to the NBA game and when someone said “Julius Randle” I heard “Jewish Rambo” and now I want to see that movie.
May 20, 2025: If you ask any of the LLMs to summarize a book or article, they do so with some accuracy. If you ask them to provide relevant quotations from the text …
May 19, 2025: Cal Newport: The current energized narratives around AGI and Superintelligence seem to be fueled by a convergence of three factors: (1) the fact that …
May 19, 2025: While media attention remains focused, as always, on elite universities, this story is a sobering reminder of the reality at less selective and less …
May 19, 2025: I think about this post by Adam Roberts at least once a week: When I was a kid I memorised — don’t laugh — the Bene Gesserit ‘Litany Against Fear’, …
May 19, 2025: Monica Hesse: To be able to be an ordered and logical and discerning thinker is more important in this current era than it has been in at other …
May 19, 2025: Kathleen Guthrie, Flowers with Fish
May 18, 2025: Crystal Palace’s Chris Richards: “I think growing up, I never watched the FA Cup. I’m from Alabama, so we definitely didn’t have …
May 16, 2025: Richard Gibson: Despite Montaigne’s concerns, we cannot help but comment upon one another. We are irrepressible commenters. (In the essayist’s case, …
May 15, 2025: The brief dream of the human intellect.
May 15, 2025: Geri Waddington
May 15, 2025: I wrote about Pandaemonium, a unique book, brilliantly compiled by the documentary film director Humphrey Jennings. First of two (or maybe three) …
May 15, 2025: Jamie Smith on what to expect from an Augustinian pope: Already in his first “Urbi et Orbi” address, for example, one could hear Pope Leo’s vision …
May 15, 2025: Finished reading: Fantasy: A Short History by Adam Roberts. An outstanding survey. I’m amazed first of all by how many fantasy novels Adam has …
May 14, 2025: Tom Killion
May 14, 2025: An interesting exercise: Ask several chatbots to do this: “Please summarize, with comparisons, the ethical concerns about each of the major AI …
May 14, 2025: Google’s search results have become so bad that I recently subscribed to Kagi, and so far it’s been great. And because the subscription includes …
May 14, 2025: Angus loves his crate.
May 14, 2025: The fact that professors and administrators as well as students are becoming inappropriately reliant on chatbots should tell us something: For most of …
May 14, 2025: I wrote about a slightly comical musical experience.
May 13, 2025: Re: Ross’s column on the virtues of ideological art, I think there are far more virtues to art that resists or defies our familiar categories. …
May 13, 2025: TIL that the official title of King George III’s dentist was Operator for the Teeth.
May 13, 2025: I wrote about John and Paul.
May 13, 2025: My bet is that Nico Harrison will trade the rights to the number 1 pick to Cleveland in exchange for Tristan Thompson. 🏀
May 11, 2025: I had a good time corresponding with Phil Christman about John Milton, his great big poem, and Wlliam Blake.
May 9, 2025: This seems a good time to mention that the “X is dead” discourse has been mighty strong these past few years, and I wrote about it here …
May 9, 2025: I am blessed to have spent a career working in places that feature expanses of grass and many trees, but today, as I made my way to the office while …
May 9, 2025: I wrote about why it may not matter that much if we’re in a period of cultural stagnation, and what matters instead.
May 8, 2025: End-of-term vibe
May 8, 2025: Kevin Miyazaki’s “fictional publication containing only facts.”
May 8, 2025: Papam habemus e Chicago!! (Honestly, I have no idea what to make of this decision … I never imagined they’d elect an American of any description.)
May 8, 2025: The new pope may be chosen to Continue the legacy of Francis Re-establish the legacy of JPII and Benedict Open new doors to the Global South Manage …
May 8, 2025: Underscore: “Where I see Apple’s biggest mistake in their current line of thinking is that while I pay Apple huge sums of money each month, they don’t …
May 8, 2025: AI making people sad.
May 8, 2025: Right now dozens of megachurch pastors are reading this and shouting “WHERE’S MY AI AVATAR JESUS???”
May 7, 2025: Erin Kissane: “The evidence of the past decade and a half argues strongly that platform corporations are structurally incapable of good governance, …
May 7, 2025: I wrote about electric guitar tone.
May 7, 2025: University Parks, Oxford (2011)
May 7, 2025: Thumbing through some old photographs, I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find these from the summer of 1990. First, my beloved doing her …
May 6, 2025: “Last Monday I got to excommunicate a guy,” he recounted.
May 5, 2025: As some readers will have noted, I’ve been digging through old digital photos, and am surprised and rather pleased to discover that some of …
May 5, 2025: Photo from 2004 of a place I want to visit again: the Popo Agie River in Wyoming, roaring down from the Wind River Range. The river rises in multiple …
May 4, 2025: Why not do both?
May 3, 2025: First author copy has arrived!
May 3, 2025: I do love to see a renovated old theatre.
May 2, 2025: When schools think literacy is optional to education.
May 2, 2025: David Brooks: But I do think we’re on the cusp of a great cultural transition. On the one hand, the eternal forces of dehumanization are blowing …
May 2, 2025: Robin Sloan: “Everybody’s always talking about chips, and I guess I just want to insist, they are more than any thing else PRINTED, and the print in …
May 2, 2025: On the changing length of literary sentences.
May 2, 2025: Global Flourishing Study: On the whole, the pattern is striking. Some countries with the greatest wealth and longevity may have achieved these goods …
May 1, 2025: Michael Tsai: Apple is still special relative to most other companies. But clearly the tenor has changed. For me, the two big things are, first, that …
Apr 30, 2025: My beloved above Rydal Water, on the way from Ambleside to Grasmere (2011)
Apr 30, 2025: Some of my students in contemplative poses at Rievaulx Abbey (2011)
Apr 30, 2025: Boscastle, Cornwall (2004)
Apr 30, 2025: I’ve been thinking for a while now about consumption — on being a consumer, “consuming content,” etc. — and I’ve posted some …
Apr 30, 2025: “Truth is so darkened nowadays, and lies so established, that unless we love the truth we will never know it.” — Pascal
Apr 30, 2025: Robin Sloan: “It feels totally appropriate to say to OpenAI, Google, and the rest: sure, build all the data centers you want … just be sure to budget …
Apr 30, 2025: Imagining a serious rapid transit system for L.A., via Sam Holden
Apr 30, 2025: typosignet
Apr 29, 2025: “Being an Arsenal fan is just constant suffering, but it’s the suffering I love” — Wojciech Szczesny. I don’t love it. ⚽️
Apr 29, 2025: David Zahl on his new book about grace, The Big Relief. “Grace is the best thing there is.”
Apr 29, 2025: From Ethan Iverson I learn about the Paul Motian Archive. What a fascinating peek into the life of one of the most wide-rangingly active gigging …
Apr 28, 2025: YMMV, but 81.4% of my frustration with my phone disappeared when I removed email apps from it. (I already had no social media, of course.)
Apr 28, 2025: James Catnach, “Destruction of the Houses of Parliament by Fire," 1834, woodcut.
Apr 28, 2025: Angua making a new friend at the vet.
Apr 28, 2025: Simon Armitage’s translation of the Old English poem “Deor” is beautiful. “As that passed over may this pass also” is …
Apr 28, 2025: The enlightenment tag on my blog is I think an interesting one, and includes this morning’s post.
Apr 27, 2025: I wrote a message for my Buy Me A Coffee supporters.
Apr 26, 2025: I’m eagerly awaiting the press release from Real Madrid announcing that they fully support their player, who was completely justified in …
Apr 26, 2025: Hooray for the restoration, but someone’s gonna have to explain this poster to me. 🎥
Apr 26, 2025: NBA players feature a range of visible accoutrements: headbands, full sleeves, elbow sleeves, knee sleeves, full-length leg sleeves, wristbands. …
Apr 26, 2025: FYI, when something appears that’s relevant to a post of mine, or when I simply have further thoughts, I will often update the original post …
Apr 25, 2025: I wrote about why LLMs, and their makers, don’t care about thinking.
Apr 24, 2025: “We must now say, ‘I am Pope Francis.” But I am not Pope Francis. I am Spartacus.
Apr 24, 2025: “When we read too quickly or too slowly we understand nothing.” — Pascal
Apr 24, 2025: I’ve updated my post on Harvard’s conflict with our President with a couple of interesting quotations.
Apr 24, 2025: Talbot Brewer: If personal growth were only for children, it would be a mistake to look to parent-child relations for general insights into the …
Apr 23, 2025: My envy of what José Naranja does is profound.
Apr 23, 2025: Ross Douthat’s recent “Age of Extinction” column is vital: This isn’t just a normal churn where travel agencies go out of business …
Apr 23, 2025: Hoping for adventure (as always)
Apr 23, 2025: Brad Holland’s Shakespeare illustrations
Apr 21, 2025: A few thoughts on Pope Francis — lux aeterna luceat ei — and his successor.
Apr 18, 2025: My annual Good Friday tradition: listening to Arvo Pärt’s Passio 🎵 ✝️
Apr 18, 2025: Noah Millman: Yet one thing that is true about the Haggadah is that it is emphatic about liberation being in God’s hands. That’s why the text very …
Apr 17, 2025: Holy Week recommendation: the Netherlands Bach Society performing the St Matthew Passion. ✝️ 🎵
Apr 17, 2025: I wrote about Robert Caro’s way of telling a life story.
Apr 16, 2025: Brad Mehldau’s cover of “Little Person” is just sublime. 🎵
Apr 16, 2025: My friend Jim Beitler on Tolkien, Lewis, George Herbert, and trees.
Apr 16, 2025: Not really interested in the Bauhaus Clock screensaver, but if it were based on John Harrison’s H4 I’d be saying TAKE MY MONEY.
Apr 16, 2025: I’ve got a post up on Harvard’s argy-bargy with the Administration — mainly quotations, which I’ll probably be adding to.
Apr 14, 2025: If my favorite MTV Unplugged has always been 10,000 Maniacs, that may be because they look like a band started by my fellow graduate students. …
Apr 14, 2025: The broken head of Christ ✝️
Apr 14, 2025: 🎥 I recently watched The Last of the Mohicans (1992) for the first time since it came out, and my main thoughts are The best actor in the movie, by …
Apr 14, 2025: I wrote about defining humanism.
Apr 9, 2025: John O’Connor
Apr 8, 2025: Great to see this from my friend Sara Hendren AKA @ablerism — I’ve seen it and it’s both fascinating and moving.
Apr 8, 2025: I wrote about stumbling over a word in a Japanese movie.
Apr 7, 2025: Ta Hio: The Great Learning, translated by Ezra Pound (1928): If the rulers of states think only of amassing riches, they will be surrounded, …
Apr 6, 2025: On my recent trip to Illinois I continued to experiment (mostly ineptly) with film photography.
Apr 6, 2025: Among the American journalists who covered the Second World War, the best writer was A. J. Liebling. Here is he describing his efforts to get to the …
Apr 4, 2025: From the end of the Civil War to the beginning of World War II: 74 years From the end of World War II to now: 80 years
Apr 4, 2025: would that it were so simple
Apr 4, 2025: Elizabeth Bruenig: “Christianity is about moving fast and breaking things, but not in the direction the tech Christians seem to have in mind.” ✝️
Apr 4, 2025: Clara Collier: Molly Haskell first described the problem in 1975, in her classic study From Reverence to Rape: “Women, in the early and middle ages …
Apr 4, 2025: Oregon News: The group examined the question: “What happens in your brain when you walk down the street?” and they concluded that urban environments …
Apr 4, 2025: I wrote about authors and their handwriting.
Apr 3, 2025: Nah, they’re right. 100%.
Apr 3, 2025: Occasinally I re-post old essays and reviews of mine to my own site. Today I’ve posted my 2015 review of Adam Roberts’s extraordinary …
Apr 3, 2025: Two quotes from The Economist on AI.
Apr 2, 2025: David Hockney
Apr 2, 2025: Phil Christman: “In a sufficiently torpid service — one in which the leaders are running on sheer willpower, as I often am simply in showing up — the …
Apr 2, 2025: Brad East says Christians are conspiracy theorists! Hmmm … I wonder who paid him to say that.
Apr 2, 2025: Last of the prairie photos. It was great to see dear friends and familiar places.
Apr 2, 2025: Cloth from the Mariano Fortuny textile factory, Venice
Apr 1, 2025: You find some odd things in archives, for instance: an 8 June 1943 letter to Sayers from Marshall & Snelgrove, with whom DLS had left corsets to …
Apr 1, 2025: Oh right, people are talking about “our post-literate age” again.
Mar 31, 2025: The Maradona shrine in Naples is something to behold. ⚽️
Mar 31, 2025: Muybridge/Muggeridge/Muggridge/Muygridge/Maybridge
Mar 31, 2025: Jonathan Rauch: Americans talk right now as if everything is disappointing and life is bad. And we need to understand that as a society — not just …
Mar 31, 2025: I wrote about Paul Kingsnorth and the SCT.
Mar 31, 2025: I just discovered the World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts.
Mar 30, 2025: An oddity of musical recording: Records can sound quite different on CD & streaming & vinyl because they’re mastered differently for …
Mar 30, 2025: The nightmarish 1936 North American cold wave was soon followed by the nightmarish 1936 North American heat wave. California’s escape from both …
Mar 30, 2025: Silver pair-cased verge escapement watch with silver sun and moon dial by Humphry Adamson, London; from the Clockmakers' Museum.
Mar 29, 2025: Angus is reassured by my return.
Mar 29, 2025: The bokeh on the iPhone camera’s Portrait mode looks just awful. But on the positive side, after a week in the North it’s nice to return …
Mar 26, 2025: The correspondence of Dorothy L. Sayers and … Ezra Pound.
Mar 24, 2025: This book was written by Dorothy L. Sayers’s husband, Atherton “Mac” Fleming, and indeed was dedicated to her. (“To my wife, …
Mar 24, 2025: Y’all know how much I love to see my former students go on to do cool things. Today, working in the Wade Center, I ended up sitting next to my …
Mar 24, 2025: When people critique “capitalism,” they usually mean one of two things: The currently dominant system of international free trade and …
Mar 24, 2025: “Brilliance in controversy is a corrupting accomplishment. Always to play to win is to take one’s standards from one’s opponent, and local …
Mar 24, 2025: I wrote about The Box.
Mar 23, 2025: Iowa morning
Mar 23, 2025: “This is the day the Lord has made!” said the very elderly lady in the breakfast room in the Hampton Inn of West Des Moines. “Let us …
Mar 21, 2025: “I see nothing objectionable in the total destruction of the earth, provided it is done inadvertently.” — Evelyn Waugh
Mar 21, 2025: Packing for my visit to dear old Wheaton, where I will be digging into the vast Sayers materials in the Wade Center. I am bringing the three books …
Mar 21, 2025: Of course it’s a word! It’s what happened to Eustace Scrubb.
Mar 20, 2025: I wrote about the spirits that brought discouragement for early-20th-century women.
Mar 19, 2025: Ian Leslie: The fundamental problem with any intervention that tries to eliminate certain behaviours from an LLM is that it creates incentives for …
Mar 18, 2025: Karen Swallow Prior is working her way through Paradise Lost at her Substack, and graciously asked me if I wanted to write on any one of the twelve …
Mar 18, 2025: Learned this past weekend that Half Price Books pays even less for DVDs than it does for books. I didn’t know that was possible.
Mar 18, 2025: The reducing valve and the therapeutic index
Mar 16, 2025: John Betjeman, from “The Conversion of St. Paul”
Mar 16, 2025: John Ruskin, “Study of Dawn: the first Scarlet on the Clouds”
Mar 15, 2025: I responded to a Robin Sloan post by advocating a “distributed localism.”
Mar 15, 2025: Rachel Ruysch, “Posy of Flowers, with a Beetle, on a Stone Ledge” (1741)
Mar 15, 2025: Keita Morimoto, “Crossroad” (2025), acrylic and oil on linen
Mar 15, 2025: Evelyn Waugh, from The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz — …
Mar 15, 2025: I wrote about Perfect Days last year, but this reflection by my friend Noah Millman is a deeper dive.
Mar 14, 2025: I wrote about the long slow process of returning to vinyl records.
Mar 13, 2025: Just wrote a March update for my BMAC supporters.
Mar 13, 2025: Another Houston treasure: the Beer Can House
Mar 13, 2025: The Electric Ladyland car, from the Houston Art Car Parade
Mar 13, 2025: I wrote about green tea and mescaline — and other ways of opening doors to the demonic.
Mar 12, 2025: Claire Leighton
Mar 11, 2025: Dana Gioia, 2003: Although conventional wisdom portrays the rise of electronic media and the relative decline of print as a disaster for all kinds of …
Mar 11, 2025: Montgolfier’s balloon ascending. Larger image here.
Mar 11, 2025: I wrote about the 1938 film of Shaw’s Pygmalion — and especially about Wendy Hiller’s amazing performance as Eliza. 🎥
Mar 9, 2025: Troy Jollimore: Even though I am certainly angry at those students who choose to cheat, the fact is that I also care about them and feel a certain …
Mar 9, 2025: William Deresiewicz: Deep reading means first of all close reading: the scrupulous examination of the text for patterns of language and image, …
Mar 9, 2025: Ross Barkan: Reading is time well-spent and since time is a vanishing resource, getting the most of it must be a fundamental human goal. In this age …
Mar 8, 2025: Future me (from the Dylan subreddit)
Mar 7, 2025: “I See the Birds” — beautiful new song by Jon Guerra. If only more devotional music (that’s Jon’s phrase for what he does) …
Mar 7, 2025: Finished reading: Perplexing Plots by David Bordwell. A really remarkable book, which argues — employing an astonishingly wide range of examples — …
Mar 7, 2025: I wrote about Cat People (1942) and the Hollywood Unsuitable Wife.
Mar 6, 2025: Medieval pocket calendars
Mar 6, 2025: Topographical map of New York City and environs, 1854
Mar 6, 2025: My father in Christ really knows how to put the spiritual pressure on.
Mar 5, 2025: I am unusually sensitive to loud and abrasive sounds, so I am particularly interested to see how sound design can contribute to calm environments (or, …
Mar 5, 2025: The great John Fuller writes about Auden’s Shield of Achilles. He’s not quite persuaded by my argument about the organization of the book, …
Mar 5, 2025: I wrote about what a bad writer Freeman Wills Crofts is, but basically I just wanted the chance to use the phrase “Fang Apparatus.”
Mar 3, 2025: In the new Hedgehog Review I write about the best book — by miles — yet written on Terrence Malick. 🎥
Mar 3, 2025: In which I describe my writing “methods."
Mar 2, 2025: David Thomson: “This is the great American film about the highest artistic dreams leading you to madness.” 🎥
Mar 1, 2025: Finished reading: Lonely Magdalen by Henry Wade. A remarkable Golden Age detective novel that starts as a police procedural, then around halfway …
Feb 28, 2025: Sara Hendren: How do we distinguish our ordinary suffering from the unacceptable, and what do families and cultures and states do about it? …
Feb 28, 2025: Austin made this at the Laity retreat last week. So great to hang with him. What a smart, funny, talented guy.
Feb 28, 2025: I’ve been trying to figure out how I might resume my thoughts on Douthat’s thoughts on belief, and I’m still musing, but I got a big …
Feb 28, 2025: A usefully long piece on our our cities ended up with so many “aesthetically forgettable but highly profitable buildings.”
Feb 28, 2025: Noticing that Jeff Tweedy and A. C. Newman have Substacks now, I’m starting to think that I’m the last person over fifty who doesn’t …
Feb 28, 2025: I also wrote about my upcoming retirement.
Feb 28, 2025: I wrote, and then updated, one last post on the ridiculous current kerfuffle about Wheaton College.
Feb 28, 2025: designed by Milton Glaser, 1963
Feb 27, 2025: Recently on Mac, Spotlight has been failing miserably. I’ll search for a term that appears in dozens of filenames and Spotlight will return two …
Feb 27, 2025: Here’s my friend Jono Linebaugh with a lovely reflection on mercy, drawing on Auden’s great long poem The Sea and the Mirror. (I should do …
Feb 26, 2025: Mary Harrington on speaking at the recent Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference at London’s ExCel Centre: As for Excel, I …
Feb 26, 2025: After this year’s first session of playing in the garden hose.
Feb 25, 2025: Nicholas Carr: Muñoz’s lecture is itself a long and challenging one. He had to spend a long time at the lectern to deliver it, and the audience had …
Feb 25, 2025: I wrote about what to do when you think an author might be racist — or otherwise morally deficient.
Feb 24, 2025: This new post by Timothy B. Lee is exemplary. Lee is the best guide I’ve found to the most recent developments in AI research and practice: …
Feb 24, 2025: “It’s got nothing to do with Vorsprung durch Technik, y’know?”
Feb 23, 2025: Just back from an amazing weekend at my beloved Laity Lodge, where I got to hang out and kinda-collaborate with some astonishingly gifted people, …
Feb 23, 2025: So long (for now) to the canyon.
Feb 21, 2025: I wrote about Douthat on belief.
Feb 19, 2025: When in 1792 the noted engraver and cartographer John Cooke (1765-1845) moved from Drury Lane, London to Mill Hill, he made this card to show friends …
Feb 19, 2025: I don’t use Chrome so I can’t use this, but I love the idea of a productivity blocker.
Feb 19, 2025: The story of the Raphael Cartoons is complicated and fascinating. This photo shows how they were conveyed from Hampton Court Palace to the South …
Feb 18, 2025: I wrote a brief essay that starts from an idea of Phil Christman’s and commends (in one respect anyway) Noam Chomsky. You can’t pigeonhole …
Feb 18, 2025: “I regard neither a class of error nor an example of it as one stone which has made me stumble: I learn to distrust my trot in general and set …
Feb 18, 2025: Never call a lawyer a daffy-down-dilly.
Feb 18, 2025: The great lost Rimbaud manuscript … found?
Feb 17, 2025: A nice little inside joke in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise: When Lord Peter is told that he must leave the advertising agency in …
Feb 17, 2025: “Attention must be paid.”
Feb 17, 2025: Productivity rain dances.
Feb 17, 2025: I wrote about Miss Climpson.
Feb 16, 2025: Katie Roiphe’s profile of the late great Janet Malcolm is superb.
Feb 15, 2025: Those of you who’ve been hipped to the traditional-folk scene by A Complete Unknown (and maybe before that by Inside Llewyn Davis) should enjoy …
Feb 15, 2025: Phil Christman’s gentle pushback to my recent comments on Resistance-blogging is unsurprisingly good. What he’s doing makes a lot of …
Feb 14, 2025: Margery Brews of Norfolk, in the year of our Lord 1477, writes to her “right well-beloved valentine.”
Feb 13, 2025: Today I’ve been going around singing R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” in the voice of Comic Book Guy. You’re welcome.
Feb 13, 2025: Two quotations on two visions of “human survival.”
Feb 13, 2025: I wrote about true crime and the rise of the detective story.
Feb 11, 2025: Further adventures in analog: Currently listening to John Coltrane, Ballads, on vinyl. ♫
Feb 11, 2025: Our son Wes in the Tate Gallery London, summer 1996. Taken (by Teri, I’m almost sure) with our beloved Nikon FE-2, which we still have, though …
Feb 11, 2025: Here’s the amazing Robin Sloan thinking patiently and carefully through the fundamental question about AI: Is it okay? It’s perfect that …
Feb 11, 2025: Tyrants need disability accommodations too
Feb 10, 2025: I wrote a post for my BMAC supporters on why I won’t be making a pivot to political writing, and what I’ll be doing instead.
Feb 10, 2025: I wrote about why the detective story becomes popular when it does — or one reason anyway: another will come in another post.
Feb 7, 2025: At the V&A:
Feb 7, 2025: From the Bohemian Club:
Feb 5, 2025: John Ruskin, from Unto This Last: No human actions ever were intended by the Maker of men to be guided by balances of expediency, but by balances of …
Feb 5, 2025: This Nick Carr post is closely related to two essays of mine (one of which he quotes): “Something Happened By Us” and “Some …
Feb 5, 2025: David Stromberg: In the end, [Milosz’s] The Captive Mind also speaks to those left on the other side of the curtain, warning them against …
Feb 5, 2025: Ancient writers at their desks. Even back then some people knew how to apply ass to chair.
Feb 4, 2025: My dear friend Wesley Hill has written a lovely brief book about Easter.
Feb 3, 2025: A fascinating history of the Clock of the Long Now project.
Feb 3, 2025: Milton’s “Areopagitica” isn’t what it’s often said to be.
Jan 31, 2025: A short post on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Orsinia.
Jan 30, 2025: Rosemary Hill: [In the seventeenth century] John Aubrey, the first person to make a serious study of stone circles, put his finger on the problem: …
Jan 30, 2025: Re: Oliver Burkeman’s 70% rule — “If you’re roughly 70% happy with a piece of writing you’ve produced, you should publish it. If you’re …
Jan 30, 2025: Hey kids! Let’s play Uranium Rush! Don’t forget the Geiger counter!
Jan 29, 2025: Next month I’ll be leading a retreat at Laity Lodge where the artist-in-residence will be Dana Tanamachi. Her “book covers” that …
Jan 29, 2025: Over at my big blog, I wrote a couple of Kane-related posts: one on an interesting audio technique, and one on what Mank did and didn’t do.
Jan 29, 2025: “Mister Kubrick, I’m ready for my close-up”
Jan 28, 2025: I’ve kept this boxed set around for nearly fifty years just so I can show people the order the Narnia books are meant to be read in. CC: @frjon
Jan 28, 2025: I wrote about the best alternative to “trying to get Management to take your side”: persuasion.
Jan 28, 2025: As I pulled into the parking garage this morning I had the strangest feeling that I was being watched.
Jan 27, 2025: I’ll just say one thing before putting this phone in another room: It’s remarkable how many usable hours there are in a day when you’re not farting …
Jan 26, 2025: Watching Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin (2015) is like watching a wuxia movie made by Tarkovsky. I’ll have to see it at least once more …
Jan 24, 2025: For people who want to understand our moment not just in terms of politics, but also in historical, moral, and spiritual terms, this essay by Mana …
Jan 24, 2025: Note to self: Add chapter to Sayers biography: The intersection of Dorothy L. Sayers’ detective fiction with advanced technologies like artificial …
Jan 24, 2025: Continuing to experiment with shooting on 35mm film, this time Fujicolor 200. The process of experimentation could be very long….
Jan 23, 2025: Timothy B. Lee: “The vibe in the AI industry today feels a lot like the self-driving industry in 2018.” A compelling comparison.
Jan 23, 2025: Benedict Evans: If I need something that does have answers that can be definitely wrong in important ways, and where I’m not an expert in the …
Jan 22, 2025: Some enterprising publisher needs to commission me to write a book about The Band.
Jan 22, 2025: Robert Christgau in the Village Voice, December 1969, on two albums released four days apart: “Abbey Road captivates me as might be expected, …
Jan 22, 2025: When we’re out for a walk, Angus frequently looks up at me as if to say, “Are you enjoying this as much as I am??” When I’m …
Jan 22, 2025: From a couple of years back, two quotations on slow reading.
Jan 22, 2025: Nicholas Carr: Take fact checking out of that intimate, human setting, turn it into an industrial program of outsourcing, crowdsourcing, or …
Jan 22, 2025: I wrote a bit about Garth Hudson and the importance of The Band.
Jan 21, 2025: Three statements from the early modern era on what humans are, and can become.
Jan 20, 2025: Charlie Stross, who before becoming a novelist was a pharmacist, has written part 1 of a guide to poisons and poisoning — but for novelists, not …
Jan 20, 2025: My friend and former colleague Ralph Wood has written a lovely tribute to his old teacher Norman Maclean — author of A River Runs Through It.
Jan 20, 2025: I wrote a New Year’s post for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.
Jan 20, 2025: I wrote about writing: books, essays, blog posts, notebooks.
Jan 18, 2025: Seba Jun: one of one.
Jan 18, 2025: Currently listening: Nujabes, Spiritual State ♫
Jan 18, 2025: Two quotations on what exists. The twoquotes tag is a favorite one of mine.
Jan 18, 2025: Noah Millman: That experience, of meeting the audience on the dreaming plane, is what Lynch excelled at above any other director I can name. More …
Jan 18, 2025: My former colleague Beth Felker Jones: Christopher Hays “writes of a God who does bad things and has to learn better. He writes of a God who …
Jan 17, 2025: Every few days I read another piece about 😱The Tragedy of Literature In Our Post-Literate Society 😳, and when I do I always want to ask the authors …
Jan 17, 2025: A terrific post by Damon Krukowski about the brilliancies and inconsistencies of the Whole Earth Catalog and its offshoots. I remember poring over The …
Jan 17, 2025: I wanted to read a post from a Substack I’m not subscribed to, and I could read it for free if I downloaded the Substack app. So I did. After …
Jan 16, 2025: WALKIES???
Jan 16, 2025: Here Brad East considers Houellebecq’s Submission in light of P. D. James’s The Children of Men — a good comparison. I reviewed Submission …
Jan 16, 2025: Yes, this is an old theme of mine, but re: doomscrolling, you don’t have to be there.
Jan 16, 2025: Leah Libresco Sargeant: There is already copious evidence that we cannot sustain a modest euthanasia regime. Though advocacy for euthanasia began …
Jan 16, 2025: Cross section of Étienne-Louis Boullée’s design for Newton’s Cenotaph, 1784 — from the invaluable and endlessly fascinating Public Domain Review, …
Jan 15, 2025: If you’re absolutely determined to use a social media platform, then sure, Free Our Feeds is a good idea. But the essential protocols are already in …
Jan 15, 2025: Wonderful clouds partly covering the full moon this pre-dawn. I found myself wondering what John Ruskin, who was obsessed by clouds, would say about …
Jan 15, 2025: Poster by Tall Paul Kelly.
Jan 15, 2025: Typography!
Jan 13, 2025: Didn’t have a proper telephoto lens — this is from my iPhone camera at 10x — but it was fun to watch the aoudad meandering about when I was up …
Jan 10, 2025: Samuel Arbesman on humanistic computation. I really hope Sam can Make This Happen in a serious way.
Jan 10, 2025: This story of a massive archaeological dig in the Orkneys is utterly compelling.
Jan 10, 2025: A nice brief profile of my parish church. There’s much more that could be said about its success, and maybe one day I’ll share my …
Jan 9, 2025: Neighbors
Jan 7, 2025: An excerpt from Nick Carr’s outstanding new book: In their early form, online social networks reflected, at least by analogy, traditional …
Jan 7, 2025: Is any group of people more self-deluded than committed multitaskers? Nass assumed that people would stop trying to multitask once shown the …
Jan 7, 2025: Over at Mockingbird, where they usually feature trashy pop music and dumb movies, I’ve decided to bring some class to the joint by writing on …
Jan 7, 2025: I continued my series on the family and its challenges with a post on contractualism.
Jan 7, 2025: I’ve hiked down from the (offline!) mountaintop to handle some business, so while I’m here I’ll post a few things and then be …
Jan 5, 2025: What 15 Very Different People Hope to See in 2025 | NYT: Colson Whitehead: “I have no hopes for 2025. Humanity is disappointing. We killed the …
Jan 4, 2025: Oscar Wilde had his palms read — and sketched.
Jan 3, 2025: I quit Netflix six or seven years ago, and would never have come back … but when I learned that they’re doing Wallace & Gromit: …
Jan 3, 2025: One of the best things I did last year was to inspire a couple of Austin Kleon’s collages.
Jan 3, 2025: Lo, how a rose … and Angus photobombing it
Jan 3, 2025: St. Birgitta writing out her account of the Nativity. She seems to have been an exceptionally large woman.
Jan 2, 2025: Welcome to the Public Domain in 2025
Jan 2, 2025: Theodore Butler, “New York Harbor, Daytime” (1915), in the Louvre
Jan 2, 2025: A Gospel page from the Nunnaminster Book
Jan 2, 2025: “Good news! Jesus is just like you!"
Jan 2, 2025: I’m not Jewish, I’m … English.
Jan 1, 2025: Thomas W. Nason, illustration for Donald Hall’s Here at Eagle Pond (1990).
Dec 31, 2024: Re-upping from a year ago today: Why I don’t keep track of how many books I read.
Dec 31, 2024: Do yourself a favor and listen to the incomparable Ella sing “What Are You Doing On New Year’s Eve?”
Dec 30, 2024: Martin Van Buren “proceeded swiftly from senator to secretary of state, vice president and president. And though he failed to win a second term, …
Dec 30, 2024: New entry in my series on family, about the poet Robert Hayden.
Dec 30, 2024: foggy, Christmassy, spooky
Dec 30, 2024: Damien Walter: “Just give Adam Roberts a Hugo already. It’s getting embarrassing! Like not giving Taylor Swift her Grammys.”
Dec 29, 2024: Mike Sacasas channeling Lewis Mumford: “Life cannot be delegated.”
Dec 28, 2024: Got to thinking English thoughts when I came across this photo, taken in 2011 on the way up Wansfell Pike. Larger version here.
Dec 28, 2024: On impulse, I made a list of places in England I’ve visited.
Dec 28, 2024: Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations I.5: I will not by the noise of bloody wars and the dethroning of kings advance you to glory: but by the …
Dec 25, 2024: Christmas presents!
Dec 25, 2024: “Wild Mountain Thyme” is one of the world’s loveliest songs, and thousands of singers have recorded it, so you might think that it …
Dec 25, 2024: This is better.
Dec 25, 2024: Angus did not like wearing his Christmas bandanna as a babushka. We immediately removed it.
Dec 25, 2024: From a sermon preached by John Donne on the evening of Christmas Day at St. Paul’s in 1624: God made Sun and Moon to distinguish seasons, and day and …
Dec 24, 2024: My guitar hero, Martin Simpson, playing “The Cherry Tree Carol.”
Dec 24, 2024: As a conniseur of these matters, I’m here to tell you that the best Darlene Love Letterman Christmas performance was this one. 2010.
Dec 23, 2024: I hate Twitter with the white-hot intensity of ten thousand suns. Bluesky is very different: I only hate it with the white-hot intensity of a thousand …
Dec 23, 2024: Century-Scale Storage: “If you had to store something [digital] for 100 years, how would you do it?”
Dec 23, 2024: One year I will do an Advent series on the O Antiphons, but in the meantime: O Oriens, O Earendel.
Dec 23, 2024: Continuing my series on family, I reflect on Anita Desai’s novel Clear Light of Day. I’m posting one such meditation per week, to give …
Dec 21, 2024: St. Nicholas Banishing a Storm
Dec 20, 2024: where does Dasein go when he’s feeling down
Dec 20, 2024: I wrote about the difference between being an influencer and doing a job of work.
Dec 20, 2024: Robin Sloan: “Cults: yes. They have been necessary, at all times in all places, for the long-term transmission of art of any/every kind. Maybe …
Dec 20, 2024: Great Is Caesar A snippet of memory, featuring the great literary critic Cleanth Brooks. Transcript
Dec 20, 2024: In which I explain to Ross Douthat that we cannot make pop culture great again — but that’s okay! There’s good news!
Dec 20, 2024: Dennis Overbye is retiring, which mens he has to give up his business card that identifies him as the New York Times Cosmic Affairs Correspondent.
Dec 19, 2024: ⛩️ View of snow at Benten HIll, Kinryūzan Temple, Asakusa, 1853, by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861). Woodblock print. From the Ashmolean’s Advent …
Dec 18, 2024: A Raphael angel, from the Ashmolean.
Dec 18, 2024: Another Clare Barry piece, this one a stylized image of Oxford’s lovely Botanic Garden.
Dec 18, 2024: Clare Barry has designed postage stamps for a certain imaginary country.
Dec 18, 2024: Every night I unplug my Precious Moments-style nativity scene, and every morning I re-inflate it. As it rises up again, often Mary’s headscarf — …
Dec 17, 2024: The Chicago Tribune has named my staggeringly talented friend and former colleague Shawn Okpebholo Chicagoan of the year in classical music.
Dec 16, 2024: Either Adam Roberts and I happened to be writing about The Mill on the Floss at the same time or he is surreptitiously arguing with me.
Dec 16, 2024: I’m continuing my meditations on family with a post on The Mill on the Floss.
Dec 14, 2024: Umberto Eco (1999): But what I really want to talk about is beans, and not just beans but also peas and lentils. All these fruits of the earth are …
Dec 14, 2024: In which I do a close reading of a literature professor’s desk in 1985.
Dec 14, 2024: Fun to come across these, from back in the heyday of the Oxford American — also when I wrote for the mag. (Perhaps unrelated facts. You be the judge.) …
Dec 14, 2024: Autumn finally makes an appearance in central Texas.
Dec 13, 2024: The Sermon on the Mount
Dec 13, 2024: Mozi is probably an excellent app for people who say things like “Great to see that you’ll be in Davos too — and we just connected in …
Dec 12, 2024: See the false gods fall over on their backsides when confronted by the GLORY of the ANGEL of the LORD!
Dec 12, 2024: Schools for Philosopher-Carpenters, by Alex Sosler: The modern economy was built on the work of hands: agriculture, industry, manufacturing. We’ve …
Dec 12, 2024: I hate pushing books to the back of bookshelves — I like them lined up neatly along the front edge of the shelf. But now I am forced to push them …
Dec 12, 2024: Further contributions to a demonology.
Dec 11, 2024: I’ve had it with the Santafication of my neighborhood, this arrant Clausism. I stake my claim: not Santafication but JUSTIFICATION by faith in …
Dec 11, 2024: I’m not sure I’ll often shoot with film, because (a) it’s expensive and (b) I make a lot of mistakes, but film really does produce a …
Dec 10, 2024: Phil Christman on Adam Roberts: “That Roberts, who can do humor, pathos, style, and big ideas with such dazzling effectiveness, in book after …
Dec 10, 2024: A post about family — the first of several to come.
Dec 9, 2024: Before it was called Wrigley Field
Dec 9, 2024: I’ve had precisely the same experience with the NYT that Freddie has: Me: Here’s a time-sensitive piece, are you interested? NYT: We like …
Dec 9, 2024: what is this new devilry
Dec 8, 2024: I always hate it when this happens
Dec 8, 2024: A brilliant essay by Adam Roberts on Frankenstein, A.I., and the relationship between intelligence and forgetting.
Dec 8, 2024: Eno: In my own experience as an artist, experimenting with AI has mixed results. I’ve used several “songwriting” AIs and similar “picture-making” …
Dec 7, 2024: The restoration of Notre Dame de Paris ought to be for all of us an apocalypse, that is, a revelation of what is possible, of the great power and …
Dec 7, 2024: I have long been meaning to transition from Safari to Firefox, but updating to Sequoia has forced my hand: Safari is now unusable, prone to long …
Dec 7, 2024: Googling “dog constipation” and praying that tomorrow I won’t be googling “dog diarrhea.”
Dec 7, 2024: How an art historian helped the restoration of Notre Dame de Paris.
Dec 6, 2024: Michael Kimmelman on the restoration of Notre Dame de Paris: “I can’t recall ever visiting a building site that seemed calmer, despite the …
Dec 6, 2024: Caroline Dewison
Dec 6, 2024: So: my poor wife has broken her humerus, near the top of her arm. You can’t put a cast on such an injury, you just have to put it in a sling, …
Dec 6, 2024: Phil Christman: You cannot finally justify yourself to nihilists. Plato’s Socrates tries at least twice – in the Gorgias and in the Republic. It …
Dec 6, 2024: My buddy Austin Kleon has made a cool winter-solstice zine about LIGHT — which, as it turns out, is the Advent theme also. “The people who …
Dec 5, 2024: John Herrman: All but the most visible, verified-by-default Democrats (and fellow travelers) on X spent the last election alongside the rest of the …
Dec 4, 2024: Taking a break from my life as a nurse to say that I’m currently listening to Ethan Iverson’s Playfair Sonatas — though …
Dec 4, 2024: I wrote about the two major reasons to extend tolerance towards ideas you disagree with.
Dec 4, 2024: The Architectural Drawings at All Souls College, Oxford: Wren and Hawksmoor
Dec 3, 2024: Each of the six volumes of Churchill’s history of the second world war has a Theme. Here’e the one for the final volume.
Dec 2, 2024: Stuart Ritchie: “As ever, you have to wonder whether the field of Alzheimer’s research has a disproportionate level of bad science, or whether …
Dec 2, 2024: One day he was so happy, so healthy, and the next….
Dec 2, 2024: In Christianity Today my colleague SJ Murray has an essay on why Christians need to rediscover Boethius. See also her very cool Boethius Project.
Dec 2, 2024: I wrote about memory, gratitude, and story.
Dec 2, 2024: The tiniest hint of autumn here
Dec 1, 2024: Kevin Williamson: The miracle at Cana isn’t water becoming wine — any old magician could do that sort of thing. Whatever it was that Jesus was about, …
Dec 1, 2024: Fara Dabhoiwala: “And then, a few months ago, everything changed. On a hunch, I asked the V&A for the ultra-high-resolution scans that had …
Nov 30, 2024: Currently listening: Ralph Vaughan Williams, Oboe Concerto 🎵
Nov 30, 2024: Keita Morimoto
Nov 30, 2024: I wrote about why writing on Substack, though cool in many ways, is not going “indie."
Nov 30, 2024: Why do so many songs present the phrase “caught in the middle” in exactly the same (musical) way? Adam Neely has a brilliant answer.
Nov 28, 2024: Thomas Merton somewhere talks about being thankful in a situation but not for the situation. That applies to us because my beloved has broken her …
Nov 27, 2024: I wrote about the (or my) conservative disposition.
Nov 27, 2024: With Advent approaching, ‘tis the season to read Auden’s Christmas Oratorio For the Time Being — ideally in this lovely edition, edited …
Nov 26, 2024: This has been a three-Blackwing job and it’s not done yet.
Nov 26, 2024: Excellent maps of the Divine Comedy — I wish I had come across these years ago, to use in class. (But the ones in the Sayers Penguin translation are …
Nov 26, 2024: I never read people’s Holiday Gift Guides … except for Robin Sloan’s.
Nov 26, 2024: Macquarie Dictionary’s Word of the Year is “enshittification” — an excellent choice. And this also gives me the chance to say that …
Nov 26, 2024: When asked about the chatbot “hallucinations,” data scientist Jörg Pohle says, “I don’t have hallucination or bias problems because …
Nov 23, 2024: My recommended Substack policy: First, establish the maximum monthly amount you’re willing to pay. Then, choose monthly rather than annual …
Nov 22, 2024: Freddie: “If I had to have American policy be determined by polling the userbase of X or the userbase of BlueSky, I would choose the latter and …
Nov 22, 2024: Picasso, “Leaping Bulls”
Nov 22, 2024: Adrian Vila
Nov 22, 2024: I wrote an update for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.
Nov 22, 2024: I wrote about what we might call the Re-enchantment Movement.
Nov 21, 2024: I’m probably going to regret this, but I’ve enabled crossposting from micro.blog — Home of the Truly Cool — to Bluesky. I won’t be …
Nov 20, 2024: A bookplate designed by M. C. Escher
Nov 20, 2024: The Economist: “New work led by Roza Kamiloglu, a psychologist at the Free University of Amsterdam, provides evidence that there are just two …
Nov 20, 2024: Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), Ferry on the Fuji River. Colour-woodblock print, about 1832
Nov 20, 2024: Here’s a fabulous three-song set by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.
Nov 18, 2024: My colleague Philip Jenkins settles a few persistent myths about the Council of Nicaea. It’s one of those events about which people always feel …
Nov 18, 2024: Charles Thurston Thompson, Side view of packing case and horse-drawn ‘van’ for transport of Raphael Cartoons from Hampton Court to South Kensington …
Nov 17, 2024: In which I recommend a lovely new novel. 📚
Nov 17, 2024: Currently listening: Bill Evans, The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 (Live) ♫. Of the many glorious performances on this record, perhaps …
Nov 17, 2024: Frank Auerbach — who died last week — “Albert Street II”, 2010
Nov 17, 2024: On a foggy morning, this streetlight in my neighborhood offers a gentle alien-invasion vibe.
Nov 16, 2024: Weather forecasts in central Texas: Five days out: 90% chance of rain Four days out: 80% chance of rain Three days out: 60% chance of rain Two days …
Nov 16, 2024: A brilliant essay on orphans and robots from Adam Roberts. An idea-filled essay that’s generative of further ideas.
Nov 16, 2024: I am somewhat compensated for the non-arrival of Fall by continuing blooms (thanks to the gardening work of my beloved).
Nov 16, 2024: Barney Ronay on the likelihood of Saudi Arabia hosting the World Cup: “This will stand as surely the most wretched, bloody, damaging act in the …
Nov 16, 2024: An exhibition of trade catalogs! This is so down my alley.
Nov 16, 2024: Ian Leslie: “Once you start thinking about the distinction between charisma and charm you see it everywhere.” It’s true!
Nov 15, 2024: It’s true what they say: I would make a darn good Archbishop of Canterbury. But I have too much on my plate right now to take on another job. Sorry.
Nov 14, 2024: Phil Christman: All those “writing in the age of Trump” essays aged like milk. I still don’t want to reread them even now that we’re in a Second Age …
Nov 14, 2024: Waiting for a family member to come home.
Nov 14, 2024: Extremely Online and Incredibly Tedious | Rhian Sasseen: We have entered a cultural moment in which it is fashionable to admit to language’s …
Nov 13, 2024: Rebecca Solnit on David Graeber: That joy: maybe this is how everyone should feel about ideas and the ways that they open up or close off …
Nov 12, 2024: Paul Nash’s woodcuts depicting Genesis 1
Nov 11, 2024: Angus is either unaware of or indifferent to the work I need to get done this morning.
Nov 11, 2024: Ethan Iverson on swing, bebop, and Lou Donaldson. ♫
Nov 10, 2024: Jamie Smith: When I suggest we need more Christian politics rather than less, I can imagine my secular progressive neighbor getting anxious, as if …
Nov 9, 2024: Hell’s org chart
Nov 8, 2024: Pupil at work in Dulwich Mausoleum (1812)
Nov 8, 2024: Here’s a quick post that’s a bit about journalism and a bit about hypertext and the power of the link. Note that while most social media …
Nov 7, 2024: A story in mosaic
Nov 5, 2024: In ev’ry government, though terrors reign, Though tyrant kings, or tyrant laws restrain, How small of all that human hearts endure, That part …
Nov 4, 2024: The estimable and always thoughtful A. M. Juster reviews The Shield of Achilles. I am grateful for his kind words about my introduction, sorry that I …
Nov 4, 2024: Based on that new post of mine, my friend Rick Gibson is having a t-shirt made up for me.
Nov 4, 2024: My one comment about the election — or rather the discourse surrounding the election — requires me to explain how people misread Joan Didion’s …
Nov 4, 2024: Mushrooms, drawn by Beatrix Potter
Nov 3, 2024: My Substack account has gotten completely out of control, and I can best deal with that by deleting my account. I will soon create a new one and …
Nov 3, 2024: My thoughts on Nicholas Jenkins’s magnificent new book on Auden, The Island, are in the new issue of The Hedgehog Review.
Nov 1, 2024: Craig Mod – AKA @craidmod.com: Where am I typing these words? I’m sitting in a tiny café on the edge of a small city, surrounded by a lifetime …
Nov 1, 2024: Here I am, as usual, trying to get us to be clear about what questions we’re asking.
Nov 1, 2024: A distinction that it took me a very long time to learn: what I need to write versus what I need to publish. Increasingly I find that I prefer to …
Oct 31, 2024: Marian Evans (George Eliot), from a letter to Charles Bray in 1859: I have had heart-cutting experience that opinions are a poor cement between human …
Oct 31, 2024: Mary Delany, paper mosaic. Ca. 1775
Oct 30, 2024: A decade ago, I wrote an essay about what seemed to me a strange development: the centrality of literature to many people’s Christian faith. I …
Oct 30, 2024: Gold sword-scabbard button with garnets, Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, early AD 600s
Oct 30, 2024: On my big blog as a Mathom-house.
Oct 30, 2024: I’m always negotiating the relationship between micro.blog and my big blog, but I’m getting closer to a system in which micro.blog is a box of …
Oct 29, 2024: I despise Man City, but Rodri’s Ballon d’Or is absolutely deserved. He’s been the best player in the world for two or three years …
Oct 28, 2024: Nick Heer: “If software is judged by the difference between what it is actually capable of compared to what it promises, Siri is unquestionably …
Oct 28, 2024: I wrote about Court and Spark, an album in its fiftieth year.
Oct 28, 2024: At the galleys stage of my biography of Paradise Lost — an exciting moment because I don’t have to use Word any more. Here are the epigraphs.
Oct 28, 2024: I wrote about articulateness — and the lack thereof — in American Presidents and Presidential candidates. Not so much about politics as about our …
Oct 28, 2024: Nick Cave: I experience a certain vague ‘spiritualness’ within the world’s chaos, an approximate understanding that God is implicit in some latent, …
Oct 27, 2024: Listening to: Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles ♫
Oct 27, 2024: How to hibernate
Oct 27, 2024: Researchers say AI transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said. And some of the things it invents are psychotic.
Oct 27, 2024: Adam Roberts has a Substack! This should be cause for general rejoicing, and everyone should subscribe. And pay the man! He’s been offering top …
Oct 24, 2024: Maybe this is a good season for me to re-up my old post on being informed but not absorbed.
Oct 24, 2024: The atlas of drowned towns
Oct 24, 2024: Gecophone crystal detector radio set no. 1, complete with instruction handbook, around 1923
Oct 24, 2024: In the middle of Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett, I came across a funny/insightful passage I thought I might blog about — only to discover that it has …
Oct 23, 2024: A very happy boy after playing in the hose.
Oct 23, 2024: Sometimes teaching — or the kind of teaching I do, anyway — forces you to confront certain dramatic juxtapositions, as I was recently reminded.
Oct 23, 2024: I’m delighted that Davide Mascioli, who had first thought of the Space Exploration Logo Archive as a website, decided to turn it into a series …
Oct 22, 2024: Truthless. I am psyched. I would be under any circumstances but especially because of my long career as a fabulist.
Oct 22, 2024: My question for those who make an economic defense of the liberal arts is always this: If the liberal arts cease to be financially rewarding, will you …
Oct 22, 2024: Bruce Herman, “Meditation”
Oct 22, 2024: I’m going to spend some time with my first-years today discussing the skill of critical ignoring. First step: encouraging them to remember that …
Oct 22, 2024: At this stage of a campaign season, journalism consists largely of frantically shouting at people who would never in a million years vote for …
Oct 22, 2024: Freddie: There’s no major topic in American media that’s covered with less openness to new perspectives than education, no subject that’s more of a …
Oct 21, 2024: In which I prove to be over-trustful in news reports.
Oct 21, 2024: At Padre Island National Seashore you can drive on the beach — if you have a 4-wheel drive vehicle, you can do that for sixty miles, until you come to …
Oct 18, 2024: Via this post from Sara Hendren — AKA @ablerism — I see that I need to read Dougald Hine. One sentence from Hine’s book sums up so much that is …
Oct 17, 2024: So here I am praising David Brooks for … thinking some of the things I think, I guess. But I can’t help it if he and I are both right!
Oct 17, 2024: The response by Gemma M. (whom I don’t know) at my most recent BMAC post is fascinating to me, and truly moving.
Oct 17, 2024: Mark 7:34. I should get points for biblical literacy instead of being rejected.
Oct 16, 2024: Dots
Oct 16, 2024: dozing
Oct 16, 2024: Hotel labels!
Oct 15, 2024: Perfect pairing in the mail today.
Oct 15, 2024: Here in Waco, from 5pm this afternoon to 9am tomorrow morning the temperature will drop fifty degrees. Fifty.
Oct 15, 2024: Kieran Healy on his Modern Plain Text Computing class: To help address these challenges, modern computing platforms provide us with a suite of …
Oct 15, 2024: Phil Christman: I was curious about students’ causal arguments about this sudden eclipse of pleasure reading — again, the They who killed their love …
Oct 14, 2024: This Met exhibition on Sienese painting looks wonderful.
Oct 12, 2024: M. John Harrison: The middle aged — that is, those between about thirty five and fifty years old — are afraid of the way old people view the world. …
Oct 11, 2024: So a few minutes into the train wreck of the Biden-Trump debate James Carville turned off the TV, put Hank Williams on the stereo, and ate some pot …
Oct 11, 2024: Whenever I am tempted to think that all those years I spent on social media were wasted, something happens to remind me that I got to connect with …
Oct 11, 2024: Nicholas Carr: It would be foolish to suggest that dead speech will supplant living speech in all cases. Automation has its limits. Just as there are …
Oct 10, 2024: Richard Rorty’s bastard children.
Oct 10, 2024: Mandy Brown wrote a wonderful post that I responded to, and now she’s back with an even better and deeper post. Even as I grow increasingly …
Oct 10, 2024: Brad East asks “What does an idol promise?” — and then answers the question. A useful reminder that the Church needs a stronger idolology. …
Oct 10, 2024: It has never occurred to me that someone meeting a philosopher might ask “What are your sayings?”
Oct 9, 2024: There’s no way I’ll be watching Megalopolis, but the broader point Matt Zoller Seitz makes here is a very good one: Movies like …
Oct 9, 2024: There’s a lot of this.
Oct 8, 2024: Meaghan Ritchey does a fascinating interview of Nicholas Ma, whose new documentary Leap of Faith looks fantastic — and extremely important.
Oct 8, 2024: Baylor is having an A.I. week and I’m not super happy about it.
Oct 7, 2024: Angus would like you to know that he is two years old today!
Oct 7, 2024: John Naughton on Dave Winer: Like many of us, he realised that what came to be known as the blogosphere could be a modern realisation of Jürgen …
Oct 7, 2024: My primary problem as a guitarist: by the time I have achieved, or am on the verge of achieving, bare competence in playing a song, I hate the song so …
Oct 7, 2024: The moon.
Oct 7, 2024: Kevin Williamson: There are public housing projects nearby, whose residents complain the local housing authority has neglected. And maybe …
Oct 6, 2024: I’m very excited about Ian Leslie’s forthcoming John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs, and I love the cover of the U.K. edition. (The U.S. …
Oct 6, 2024: Angus meekly and gratefully received his blessing.
Oct 6, 2024: I wrote about writing for money and writing for no money.
Oct 5, 2024: David Karpf: Maybe someday Altman’s ideas about AI will prove out, but for now, his approach is textbook Silicon Valley mythmaking. In these …
Oct 4, 2024: From the same story, Oliver at his desk with notebook fountain pen typewriter PC with WordPerfect installed What more could a writer need?
Oct 4, 2024: Oliver Sacks’s notes on Tourette’s syndrome
Oct 3, 2024: Teaching The Nine Tailors to 16 first-year students and they are into it. I am rather shocked by their enthusiasm. We’re three-fourths of the …
Oct 3, 2024: I like to visit the corner of our department where we keep office supplies, which I adore. Pencils, pens, highlighters; sticky notes in all sizes and …
Oct 3, 2024: A powerful and much-needed word from Sara Hendren, AKA @ablerism: I think the clamor among young people to gather diagnostic names for imperfection — …
Oct 2, 2024: You’ll never hear a better version of “Amazing Grace” than this. Indirectly via Ted Gioia. ♫
Oct 2, 2024: Why I’m not blogging much these days.
Oct 2, 2024: My friend and colleague David Corey told me that this is how he explains to his students how musical fugues work. What a cool animation.
Oct 1, 2024: Yeah, sure, y’all keep looking stuff up on the “internet,” I’ll just be over here with my REFERENCE BOOKS.
Oct 1, 2024: It seems, my dear friend, that the brains of the greatest men contract when they are gathered together, and that where there are more wise men, there …
Sep 30, 2024: I approve of the design and typography of this poster.
Sep 30, 2024: Decades ago I started porting my Desires and Preferences to my Reason, but WOW are there still a zillion bugs in the code.
Sep 30, 2024: Real talk: The best version of Rhapsody in Blue is the arrangement for piano, especially as played by Gershwin himself. The best version of …
Sep 27, 2024: Currently reading: Passions of the Soul by Rowan Williams. This book is exactly what I need right now. 📚
Sep 27, 2024: Ove at the Hog Blog, I wrote about how Montesquieu teaches us the value of triangulation. (That may sound somewhat forbidding, but I promise, …
Sep 27, 2024: The primary work of the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop is letter cutting in stone, and you couldn’t find a better example than this: You can pursue …
Sep 27, 2024: Stone carving by the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop for Clare College, Cambridge.
Sep 26, 2024: TIL (from John McWhorter) that long ago the opposite of business or busyness was busiless.
Sep 26, 2024: Lord Peter meets Colonel Mustard.
Sep 25, 2024: Justin Smith-Ruiu: And little by little I began to wake up to the fact that I am, like everyone else in the academic humanities, really just scraping …
Sep 25, 2024: Dominic Armato: “Content Creator” is a title that inadvertently tells on itself. It’s a tacit admission that the nature of the “content“ is …
Sep 24, 2024: Josh Gluckstein’s cardboard coral reef
Sep 23, 2024: Two consecutive stories in my RSS feed. Turns out that if culture is being lost it’s also being found.
Sep 23, 2024: Another fascinating report on trends in American religion by Ruth Graham, the best religion reporter around. (Did I mention that she was my student? …
Sep 23, 2024: Why my model is POS, not POSSE.
Sep 22, 2024: Mexican prints at the Met Fifth Avenue
Sep 22, 2024: Listening to the readings in church this morning, I couldn’t help thinking that the epistle might serve as a good meditation for … well, …
Sep 21, 2024: Eric Fitch Daglish, from Birds of the British Isles (1948)
Sep 20, 2024: Finished reading: France on Trial by Julian Jackson. A vivid and powerful story. What a unique figure Pétain is. 📚
Sep 20, 2024: I wrote an update for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.
Sep 20, 2024: Ronald W. Dworkin: The crisis that doctors face in their new working environment is ultimately a crisis of identity. Doctors no longer know who they …
Sep 20, 2024: Fidelia Bridges, Rooftops, Brooklyn, ca. 1867
Sep 19, 2024: Everett L. Warner, New York from a Seaplane, ca. 1919
Sep 18, 2024: Brad Bigelow: The canon of well-known classics, the books one can find in just about every library and bookstore, the books most commonly studied and …
Sep 18, 2024: I linked to this before, I think, but I continue to listen obsessively to Alec Goldfarb’s new record Fire Lapping at the Creek — which is, let …
Sep 18, 2024: Robin Sloan: My writing project continues, of course. What is that project? The production of books that mix the genres and styles I love most, while …
Sep 18, 2024: Michael Chabon: I find the continuing mission of Voyager 1 so moving, for the way its name alone evokes a time of promise, for the thought of that …
Sep 18, 2024: Waneella
Sep 18, 2024: Very glad to see that Francesca Gino’s bullying lawsuit against the Data Colada bloggers has been quashed by a judge.
Sep 18, 2024: Dan Cohen: A copyright regime that precludes libraries lending scans of books they already own and care for — to loan in-copyright works sometimes, …
Sep 18, 2024: This report on defamation law reminds me that I wrote an essay on the intellectual and moral history of defamation.
Sep 17, 2024: Zadie Smith: “I think it’s important to be a bit more forgiving when they’re being those people online. I see that too — people I love, I see …
Sep 17, 2024: “Hello, Public Safety? There’s some dude outside my office window, just sitting there and staring in. Sitting and staring. It’s creeping me out.”
Sep 16, 2024: Today Robert Caro’s The Power Broker is available as an e-book, and I would love to know how many copies it will sell in that format in the …
Sep 16, 2024: Adam Roberts, “Musée des Prole Arts.”
Sep 16, 2024: I LOL’d while reading this post by Phil Christman because it captures so perfectly a certain moment in a certain subculture I know intimately. (I’m …
Sep 16, 2024: I wrote this morning about the world’s best copy editor and offered your occasional reminder of how much I hate Microsoft Word.
Sep 16, 2024: Christine Rosen’s new book The Extinction of Experience — which I blurbed — is here also, and here’s a preview in podcast/interview form.
Sep 16, 2024: Jeff Bilbro’s new book Words for Conviviality — which I blurbed — is just out, and here’s a preview.
Sep 16, 2024: Hi! I’m back!
Aug 26, 2024: I’ll be back!
Aug 24, 2024: Looking at what the next few weeks hold for me 😬 I realize that I need to take a break from micro.blog for a while. I’ll still be writing at the …
Aug 23, 2024: I just keep coming back to this one. 🎵
Aug 23, 2024: People love Big Stories, sweeping narratives that seek to describe the whole world or the last thousand years, but Big Stories always obscure two …
Aug 23, 2024: I wrote about William Blake’s sleeping giant.
Aug 22, 2024: Ted Gioia on the healing power — literally! — of music.
Aug 21, 2024: Rachmaninoff in Sydney — a report from one of my students.
Aug 21, 2024: I wrote up My Correct Views on Theological Diversity – the title being a nod-and-wink in the direction of Leszek Kołakowski.
Aug 21, 2024: You probably have not heard of Mildred Pope, but I bet you’ll be glad to learn about her.
Aug 20, 2024: When I’m writing my back would very much prefer that I do it while reclining in a comfy chair, but this photo shows why that wouldn’t really work.
Aug 20, 2024: Feels good to cross the 10K barrier. (Working on my Sayers bio.)
Aug 20, 2024: Initial letters.
Aug 20, 2024: Via Damon Krukowski, a reminder that even a basic calendar of events could be a work of art if you wanted it to be.
Aug 19, 2024: Here’s a new post for my BMAC supporters.
Aug 19, 2024: If you slip the cover art out of the plastic box that holds the Criterion edition of Perfect Days and look on the back side, you see this: …
Aug 18, 2024: China depicted by a 17th-century English artist – at the V&A.
Aug 18, 2024: Very interesting observation from Ethan Iverson: Ross Barkan and Freddie deBoer are prolific on their Substacks; I strongly recommend subscribing to …
Aug 17, 2024: Breaking news: VAR in the Premier League continues to be worse than useless. ⚽️
Aug 17, 2024: I wrote about Adam Roberts’s novel Space Satan!!! — that’s the title Adam’s son prefers and I can’t disagree.
Aug 16, 2024: I find that I’m not at all ready for the return of (European) footy, not after the Euros and the Olympics. I’d like another month or so to …
Aug 16, 2024: I wrote about Sherlock Holmes and Jacques Derrida. As one does.
Aug 16, 2024: My all-time favorite edition of Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files is this one, about an unfortunate encounter with Charlie Watts.
Aug 15, 2024: Had dinner at Red Herring tonight and the cacio e pepe was, if not to die for, certainly to kill for. Okay, maybe also to die for.
Aug 15, 2024: It finally arrived!
Aug 15, 2024: Pochettino: the only football manager on the planet who can look at the USMNT job and think: Well, it’s not as chaotically mismanaged as my last two …
Aug 15, 2024: Chelsea FC: Finally fulfilling its God-given role as a feeder club for American soccer managers. ⚽️
Aug 14, 2024: Oh cool, it’s Emo Dorothy Sayers.
Aug 14, 2024: Via Ethan Iverson, Vinnie Sperrazza gives us the backbeats.
Aug 14, 2024: Plan de l’exposition universelle de 1900. Full-size image here.
Aug 13, 2024: just before I lost that finger
Aug 13, 2024: First the Crush commercial and now this: Apple seems to have decided that the enemy they must destroy is … artists, especially ones who …
Aug 12, 2024: This article on the essential Shel Slverstein omits what I believe to be his masterpiece: Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book.
Aug 12, 2024: I wrote about something I call the diaconal charism.
Aug 12, 2024: I wrote about anarchism as a spiritual discipline.
Aug 11, 2024: Writers at their desks
Aug 11, 2024: Thesis: the first album — as a coherent work of art, not merely a collection of songs — was Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours (1955); the last …
Aug 10, 2024: The thing I love about sports is the way it can bring the world’s top political powers together.
Aug 10, 2024: USA men’s 🏀, gold medal game, shooting in the last 3 minutes: Curry made 3 Durant made 2 FT Curry made 3 Curry made 3 Curry made 3 Booker made 2 …
Aug 10, 2024: I’m really touched by Robin’s kind words here. (Also, what a great newsletter issue.)
Aug 10, 2024: So Emma Hayes leads the (formerly quite broken) USWNT to a gold medal and all the Brit footy commentators can talk about is how she got her tactics …
Aug 9, 2024: This new post by Chris Arnade — faithful chronicler of forgotten America — is harrowing. And I come away from it just praying that something good will …
Aug 9, 2024: Tradescant’s Orchard (Bodleian Library)
Aug 9, 2024: What a cool idea from Leah Libresco Sargeant: “I’d like to write a Chrome extension that delays opening certain webpages (like Twitter) and shows an …
Aug 9, 2024: I am aware that microtonal jazz-blues might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I love the new Alec Goldfarb record. ♫
Aug 9, 2024: I have no idea why, but I have received dramatically more fan mail — that is, messages of enthusiastic gratitude — about my essay on “the mythical …
Aug 9, 2024: I wrote about colonialist owls.
Aug 9, 2024: update on domain issues I still don’t have my domain issues ironed out, but (a) I am beginning to have some hope of keeping the old blog up — even though I know that …
Aug 9, 2024: I love how for the Times southern Ohio and western Nebraska are both (waves hand) “the Midwest.” How can two politicians offer such …
Aug 8, 2024: There are several annoying errors in this piece, but let me single out one: the claim that Tolkien wasn’t invited to Lewis’s wedding. No one was …
Aug 8, 2024: RE: this list, I am chiefly a bibliophile but also a bibliologue.
Aug 8, 2024: Joshua Amirthasingh
Aug 8, 2024: Part of the CBS Television Studio in New York (1978) from the Eyes of a Generation Viewseum
Aug 8, 2024: Plate made in Kütahya, Turkey (1718) in the Jameel Gallery, V&A
Aug 8, 2024: security Since It’s All About Me, when I read this and this about new security features coming in Mac OS Sequoia, I couldn’t help thinking of my recent …
Aug 8, 2024: Thanks to a bunch of people for kind and sympathetic words about my current technical issues. While I’m getting the ayjay.org domain sorted — …
Aug 7, 2024: On the possible end of my big blog, and my difficulties in getting the help I need to keep it alive. I’m starting to think that I don’t …
Aug 7, 2024: Angus strangely interested in Marvin Gaye. Well, I guess it’s not that strange, considering how cool Marvin was.
Aug 7, 2024: bookshelves Douglas Anderson, a Tolkien scholar, recently reported seeing one of his books on a shelf in a TV series. The eminent critic Michael Dirda replied: …
Aug 7, 2024: Angus says hello!
Aug 7, 2024: I wrote about how modern identity was effectively created by the Great War.
Aug 7, 2024: My dear friend Charles Marsh’s book God’s Long Summer has just been re-released as a Princeton Classic. Charles tells the fascinating …
Aug 7, 2024: Department of Putting the Best Possible Spin on a Situation: high-jumper Gianmarco Tamberi of Italy, who lost his wedding ring in the Seine during the …
Aug 7, 2024: the state and the people A few years ago I published an essay called “Miss Marple and the Problem of Modern Identity,” in which I described the rise of certain technologies by …
Aug 6, 2024: The other day I sang the praises of USWNT defender Naomi Girma, whom I’ve been watching with delight this whole tournament. Turns out Emma Hayes …
Aug 6, 2024: Whenever they cut to the beach volleyball at the Paris Olympics, I shout, “Sous les Pavés, la Plage!” (Explanation.)
Aug 5, 2024: “Your friend, Wendell”
Aug 5, 2024: David French’s interview with Justice Neil Gorsuch is great.
Aug 5, 2024: St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Lindsay, Texas.
Aug 5, 2024: WSJ: OpenAI has a method to reliably detect when someone uses ChatGPT to write an essay or research paper. The company hasn’t released it despite …
Aug 5, 2024: I wrote about styles of acting and styles of being.
Aug 5, 2024: styles of acting, styles of being One of my favorite YouTubers is Thomas Flight, who makes videos about movies. In a recent video, he contrasts the “theatrical” acting style of classic …
Aug 4, 2024: Currently listening: Danish String Quartet, Last Leaf. One of my most-listened-to records of the past five years. ♫
Aug 4, 2024: I do not have the time to be as into these Olympics as I am.
Aug 4, 2024: My new favorite athlete is Australian high-jumper Nicola Olyslagers, who before every jump looks into the camera, smiles, and talks to someone …
Aug 2, 2024: I’ve been listening to Stephen Fry reading the Sherlock Holmes canon and it’s just irresistible. 🎧📚
Aug 2, 2024: L. M. Sacasas: “My contention, then, is that when we are confronted with the opportunity to outsource the labor of articulation, we will find …
Aug 2, 2024: crisis! For many years I’ve been writing posts for my big blog using the excellent Mac app MarsEdit, but three days ago, thanks to a change in security …
Aug 2, 2024: The final (I think) post of my series on the battle for Guadalcanal is up. Here are links to each: One Two Three Four Five Six
Aug 2, 2024: One of the lighter moments from the best and most important day of my life, forty-four years ago today. Happy anniversary, my beloved.
Aug 2, 2024: Guadalcanal: 6 Around the rim of the shield Hephaestus made for Achilles is the Ocean River, the great water that (Homer believed) rings our world — Middle-earth, …
Aug 1, 2024: In a pinch, I could live here.
Aug 1, 2024: Spotify and “corporation-centered design."
Aug 1, 2024: If you want a year’s worth of ideas to explore, just read the most recent issue of Sam Arbesman’s newsletter. My head is almost literally …
Aug 1, 2024: Ah. The emails are coming.
Jul 31, 2024: Naomi Girma is the William Saliba of the USWNT. ⚽️
Jul 31, 2024: Re: this David French column on why what Christians do matters more they what they (claim to) believe, I think of this sentence from George …
Jul 31, 2024: Guadalcanal, Terrence Malick, Emerson, Horace.
Jul 31, 2024: Guadalcanal: 5 If, as I said in my previous post, to confront another soldier in war is to confront yourself, then … isn’t that other soldier … you? Yes. …
Jul 30, 2024: Recent listening: Ralph Vaughan Williams’s wondrous Fifth Symphony. ♫
Jul 30, 2024: That admirable journal Current has posted its own list of the 100 best books of the 21st century so far and if you think I’m linking to that …
Jul 30, 2024: The excellent folks at Reclaim Hosting are doing an upgrade today that is not supposed to affect access to my site (ayjay.org, blog.ayjay.org) — but, …
Jul 30, 2024: The story of the Nisei linguists — who served in the Second World War as translators, interpreters, and intelligence officers, while their parents …
Jul 29, 2024: Umbrella
Jul 29, 2024: Craig Mod on Tokyo: “The saving grace is that Tokyo has a distinct advantage over other cities in that it extends, effectively, infinitely in …
Jul 29, 2024: My multi- and super-talented friend Catherine Woodiwiss, who’s always doing something fascinating, has just launched a newsletter.
Jul 29, 2024: One of my retirement dreams is to get skilled enough at web design to do with my site something half as cool as what Roger Strunk has done with his.
Jul 29, 2024: My series of posts on the battle for Guadalcanal, and artistic representations thereof, has reached its fourth installment.
Jul 29, 2024: Guadalcanal: 4 As I noted in my previous post, the peculiar nature of the Guadalcanal campaign creates a kind of narrative frame — the arrival by sea, the fighting, …
Jul 28, 2024: Harry R. Lewis: “Today’s AI-giddy techno-optimists and techno-pessimists might heed Henri Poincaré’s caution: ‘The question is not, …
Jul 28, 2024: Rachel Haywire: “The fediverse is boring! The trade-off for the freedom that the fediverse offers comes at the cost of excitement and …
Jul 28, 2024: A fantastic post by Sara Hendren — AKA @ablerism — on how universities ought to, but do not, signal their various social obligations and purposes …
Jul 28, 2024: This meditation by Ryan Burge on the closing of the church where he has been a pastor for many years is deeply sad. The poem for such moments is …
Jul 28, 2024: A while back I noted that some enthusiastic recent writing about the great Guy Davenport doesn’t really give you a sense of how uniquely strange …
Jul 28, 2024: Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier: The [CrowdStrike] catastrophe is yet another reminder of how brittle global internet infrastructure is. […] This …
Jul 26, 2024: Guadalcanal, part 3.
Jul 26, 2024: pre-dawn
Jul 26, 2024: Guadalcanal: 3 The above is a drawing by Howard Brodie, an artist James Jones much admired. The distinctive way the Allied commanders organized the campaign for …
Jul 25, 2024: Google’s search deal with Reddit is yet another of the thousand ways in which the open web is closing.
Jul 24, 2024: I’m reading Robert Richardson’s biography of William James and I’m struggling: almost every male person in it is named either William or Henry.
Jul 24, 2024: Here is the second in a series of posts about the battle for Guadalcanal and some artistic responses to it.
Jul 24, 2024: Guadalcanal: 2 How vividly did the Guadalcanal campaign impress itself on the American imagination? Well, this movie was released around nine months after the last …
Jul 23, 2024: rainy morning in the canyon
Jul 22, 2024: For the Princeton University Press Ideas blog, I wrote about my critical edition of Auden’s collection The Shield of Achilles.
Jul 22, 2024: Guadalcanal: 1 From December of 1941 through the middle of the next year, the Japanese Army and Navy enjoyed an unbroken series of victories that carried them to the …
Jul 19, 2024: victimology I’ve been meaning for some time to write a brief post about Freddie deBoer’s case for forcing mentally ill people into treatment — or rather, about …
Jul 19, 2024: On the rise of detective fiction.
Jul 19, 2024: the rise of detective fiction In The Long Week-End, their entertaining, sardonic, and often insightful social history of England between the two world wars, Robert Graves and Alan …
Jul 17, 2024: Mark Bristol’s storyboards for Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.
Jul 17, 2024: On renewing the art of biological taxonomy: “With genetic sequences, we can now identify the fundamental building blocks of life, but we need to …
Jul 17, 2024: Anthony Lane on a new book about SF movies released in the summer of 1982: Such is Nashawaty’s command of superlatives that he merits a sci-fi yarn …
Jul 17, 2024: On Hume’s characters.
Jul 17, 2024: Hume's characters In the Oxford English Dictionary, definition II.12.a. of “character” is: “A description, delineation, or detailed report of a person's qualities. Now …
Jul 16, 2024: One thing Substack has done very well (from their perspective, that is): Get people who write on Substack to link and respond only to other people on …
Jul 16, 2024: Paul Kingsnorth says “everything is myth,” which is true, but if you want to understand how myth functions, maybe you should read my …
Jul 16, 2024: Can’t get enough typography analysis.
Jul 15, 2024: “Informed but Not Absorbed” is my new post for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.
Jul 15, 2024: On Hume’s History of England and methodological naturalism.
Jul 15, 2024: Hume puts his cards on the table I mentioned in an earlier post Hume’s purpose in writing this history — or what anyway I believe to have been his purpose: To account for and …
Jul 14, 2024: The price of liberty from squirrels is eternal vigilance.
Jul 12, 2024: Wonderful meal tonight at Segovia Wine Bar — a tiny family-owned place in downtown Waco. If you’re in the area, do please check them out.
Jul 12, 2024: Charlie Warzel: I put that question — why should people trust you? — to the pair at the end of my interview. [Arianna] Huffington said that the …
Jul 12, 2024: Matt Milliner: “Never trust an image — or a savior — without wounds.”
Jul 12, 2024: Escaramuza charra sounds, and looks, amazing.
Jul 12, 2024: On Hume’s History of England as literature.
Jul 12, 2024: Hume and literature As previously indicated, I will eventually return to Moonbound, but I need to think some things through first. For now, let’s go back twelve thousand …
Jul 11, 2024: I love seeing that this style of SF cover art — so familiar to me from the paperbacks of my 1970s youth — isn’t yet dead.
Jul 11, 2024: political proverbs Nothing good ever comes from indulging the egos of old men. Nothing good comes from indulging the ego of any politician, but the …
Jul 10, 2024: And perhaps the most contemporary of all, this 1931 portrait of Kay Francis, who, though largely forgotten today, was a huge star at the time.
Jul 10, 2024: But Steichen could also do more casual portraits, as in this wonderful shot of G. B. Shaw — an early one.
Jul 10, 2024: Sometimes he would use this formal-but-not-theatrical mode for Hollywood stars, as in this portrait of that paragon of elegantly sexy manhood, Gary …
Jul 10, 2024: And here’s Thomas Mann.
Jul 10, 2024: For literary figures, Steichen would stage his portraits formally, but not theatrically. Here’s W. B. Yeats.
Jul 10, 2024: Or this one of Gloria Swanson. (“Mr. de Mille … I’m ready for my closeup!")
Jul 10, 2024: Or this one of Charlie Chaplin.
Jul 10, 2024: But Steichen is most famous for his portraits, some of which are theatrically staged, almost a tableau vivant, like this one of Fred Astaire.
Jul 10, 2024: If I had to name the greatest photographer of all time, I’d say Henri Cartier-Bresson. But close behind would be Edward Steichen, who is, I …
Jul 10, 2024: I updated my post on England’s non-football. ⚽️
Jul 10, 2024: Best use ever of the dramatically overplayed “Mr. Brightside”?
Jul 10, 2024: All praise to Sir Ollie of Torquay!! 🏴⚽️
Jul 10, 2024: Here in the second half against 🇳🇱, 🏴 has gone back to non-football. The announcers are flipping through their in-case-of-nothingness talking …
Jul 10, 2024: In the Dictionary of National Biography, Davidson is identified as “Church of England clergyman and circus performer.” The account of his …
Jul 10, 2024: Sometimes you come across people whose stories you think simply must be made up — but aren’t. Ladies and gentlemen, please meet Harold Davidson, the …
Jul 10, 2024: This young fella struggled a bit last year, but our rainy late spring has done wonders for him.
Jul 9, 2024: un-football Barney Ronay: Even England, this England’s version of hole-in-the-head football will give you dramatic interventions, trapped energy, last-minute …
Jul 9, 2024: pointillisme
Jul 9, 2024: Jim Groom: “The archaeology of knowledge on the web over the last 25 years is dominated by the gravitational darkness of broken link errors …
Jul 9, 2024: When I first read Robin Sloan’s Moonbound, in galleys, I wasn’t, for several reasons, in the right frame of mind to receive it. I should …
Jul 9, 2024: Moonbound revisited A while back I said that I had read Robin Sloan’s new novel Moonbound and hoped to read it again. Wrong! I had not genuinely read it. Now I have, and …
Jul 8, 2024: I’ve been reading David Hume’s massive History of England, and here’s my first blog post on it.
Jul 8, 2024: the arc of Hume's history I’ve been reading David Hume’s massive and magnificent History of England, and it’s generally fascinating — though there are, it must be said, …
Jul 7, 2024: human voices My friend Rick Gibson makes a fascinating argument here. You need to read the whole thing, but a brief summary would go like this: No matter how vast …
Jul 7, 2024: Currently reading: History of England (6 volumes) by David Hume 📚
Jul 5, 2024: Will Baude: The court is motivated by statesmanship, which the country sorely needs today. The problem is that this statesmanship is a form of the …
Jul 5, 2024: I’ve written a kind of mini-manifesto explaining how I’m trying to re-humanize myself, and maybe help a few readers as well.
Jul 5, 2024: Steven Heller on typographic New York City
Jul 5, 2024: re-humanization A couple of years ago I wrote about a shift in my writerly focus from a decade-long inquiry into the enemies of attention to an inquiry into how we …
Jul 4, 2024: “To be interested in ‘the future’ is a symptom of demoralization and debility.” — T. S. Eliot, 1927
Jul 4, 2024: donkey work John Gregory Dunne, from The Studio: The Studio was simplicity itself to write. It was mainly a matter of transcribing and rearranging my notes. That …
Jul 3, 2024: Ted Gioia: “When I first came to Silicon Valley at age 17, the two leading technologists in the region were named William Hewlett and David Packard. …
Jul 3, 2024: I wrote about Fritz Lang’s movie Man Hunt.
Jul 3, 2024: Man Hunt (1941) In theory, Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt faced the same problem that many other Hollywood films of the same era (Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, for …
Jul 2, 2024: Still some wildflowers down here in the Hill Country.
Jul 2, 2024: writing time
Jul 1, 2024: On CR7 and his demons. ⚽️
Jul 1, 2024: on the edge Above you see what I believe was the key moment in today’s match between Portugal and Slovenia. After having a penalty saved, astonishingly, by Jan …
Jul 1, 2024: Siena Cathedral. (Test post.)
Jul 1, 2024: Very glad to see the NYT printing a lengthy obituary of the great Kinky Friedman, though they don’t emphasize the fact that his run for Governor …
Jul 1, 2024: I deleted my big-blog post on today’s big SCOTUS ruling. I think I have a useful point, but today’s not the time to make it. People will …
Jul 1, 2024: Just a gentle reminder of a point I’ve often made: if you read the actual text of Supreme Court opinions instead of journalists' descriptions of …
Jul 1, 2024: “What lies have I ever told? There is no need for lying, seeing that mankind are such fools … tell them the truth and they will mislead …
Jul 1, 2024: “Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying.” — Thomas Jefferson, letter from Paris to William Stephens Smith, 13 November …
Jul 1, 2024: supple and athletic minds Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1871): A new theory of literary composition for imaginative works of the very first class, and especially for …
Jul 1, 2024: Sometimes I think that the best writing set-up I ever had was 30 years ago when I had a PowerBook 100, wrote in Word 5.1, and kept my notes and ideas …
Jul 1, 2024: Will Republicans Save the Humanities? Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey: At public colleges in red and purple states like Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, …
Jun 30, 2024: Philip Jenkins, who recently wrote so kindly about The Shield of Achilles, has noted how cursory is the English Wikipedia page for Auden’s great …
Jun 30, 2024: Just sent this to my friend Adam Roberts.
Jun 30, 2024: Harsh, but not wrong
Jun 30, 2024: The great baptismal font at the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta in Siena has been restored.
Jun 28, 2024: My colleague Philip Jenkins has written a lovely commendation of my edition of Auden’s The Shield of Achilles, with a particular emphasis on the …
Jun 28, 2024: Experimenting with B&W film (llford HP5 Plus 400).
Jun 28, 2024: Finished reading: Charmed Lives by Michael Korda. One of the most remarkable memoirs I’ve ever read, full of amazing stories. The ones about (a) …
Jun 28, 2024: Another Trollope post: the counterpart to Lady Arabella.
Jun 28, 2024: counterparts More Trollopean spoilers here. One of Trollope’s more interesting habits as a novelist is the tendency to create counterparts: a character in one …
Jun 26, 2024: “The Title I have chosen for this Treatise, is a Reproach universally thrown on this Island by Foreigners, and all our Neighbours on the Continent, by …
Jun 26, 2024: After watching Ukraine-Belgium, I’m thinking that the malaise afflcting England — the English players look and sound genuinely disconsolate that …
Jun 26, 2024: I wrote about Trollope’s bluntness re: money.
Jun 26, 2024: money is magic Spoilers ahead, but come on, you know how books like this end. Trollope’s Doctor Thorne is the classic story about the poor orphan girl who turns out …
Jun 24, 2024: VAR check in the Brazil- Costa Rica match is taking so long that I’ve just turned the match off. The people who run footy are just killing the …
Jun 24, 2024: Cloud.
Jun 24, 2024: I wrote about waiting for people to realize that they’re just eating grass.
Jun 24, 2024: when you're ready to stop eating grass This is a kind of follow-up to my previous post, in which I described this blog as a venue for conserving and transmitting what I believe to be …
Jun 23, 2024: Finished reading: Vows by Cheryl Mendelson. A remarkable book! I wrote some thoughts here. 📚
Jun 23, 2024: what love wants to say Cheryl Mendelson is a philosopher, a lawyer, a novelist, and the author of a legendary book about housekeeping. (We’ve been using our copy for a …
Jun 23, 2024: Recently bought at auction [CLARIFICATION: But not by me!]
Jun 22, 2024: Fascinating: in China, bookstore book placement as political protest.
Jun 21, 2024: A little post on God’s unconditional love.
Jun 21, 2024: unconditional love Clare Sestanovich: I sat across from the missionary, pretending to drink a beer. I was new to beer, and it still tasted bad to me, the way it tastes …
Jun 21, 2024: I am interested in the Texas v. New Mexico case because I am fascinated by the perennial shortage of water in the West and horrified by our persistent …
Jun 21, 2024: IANAL, but I am fascinated by legal arguments, and will sometimes read and annotate SCOTUS opinions, for instance, Texas v. New Mexico. N.B.: That has …
Jun 21, 2024: A stop-motion animation version of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi? Yes, please. Please, please, PLEASE.
Jun 21, 2024: I wrote about how to be a non-infantile observer of the Supreme Court.
Jun 21, 2024: a numbers game The Supreme Court of the United States has been busy this week (notes this SCOTUS-watcher, whose pinned tabs include supremecourt.gov). You hear a lot …
Jun 21, 2024: It’s Lagerstroemia season here in central Texas.
Jun 21, 2024: the uncanny valley of blogging I used to call my blog Snakes & Ladders, because that reflected my belief that culture – culture-as-a-whole – is never simply ascending or …
Jun 20, 2024: I’m telling you, this kind of thing wouldn’t happen if Gareth Southgate were alive. ⚽️
Jun 20, 2024: Owen Hargreaves, commenting for Fox, was in a lather about England’s passivity even before the Denmark goal — and rightly so. They do this every …
Jun 20, 2024: I wake up every morning with a song in my head. I never know what it’s going to be, maybe something I haven’t thought about in decades. …
Jun 20, 2024: And then there’s too lo-fi … I don’t know what I took this with. My beloved on our honeymoon (forty-four years ago!) deserved …
Jun 20, 2024: On Mount Seymour in North Vancouver, 2004. My old Sony Cybershot photos have a certain lo-fi charm, to me anyway.
Jun 20, 2024: Cathedral Grove, Vancouver Island, 2006; you almost expect to see a therapod from the Jurassic browsing in the ferns.
Jun 20, 2024: The Backrooms: Origins
Jun 20, 2024: Grown-up Angus is a handsome fellow.
Jun 20, 2024: From Melissa Price’s Monarchy Book 2023.
Jun 20, 2024: I’ve written about the history and future of commissioning – i.e., getting someone or something else (a chatbot for instance) to do your …
Jun 19, 2024: Freddie: “We don’t have a communal sense of entitlement to healthcare in this country; we do have groups of people adamantly believe that they’re …
Jun 19, 2024: a parable In 1969, when the Beatles were recording the album that became Abbey Road, Paul McCartney would come in every day to record a vocal track. (He lived …
Jun 18, 2024: I love Austin Kleon’s edge indexes.
Jun 18, 2024: I end my new essay on “the mythical method” with a section on the great Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, and if you’d like to know more …
Jun 18, 2024: Soyinka and the mythical method I have an essay in the new issue of Harper’s called “Yesterday’s Men: The Death of the Mythical Method.” It traces the interest in myth and …
Jun 17, 2024: My Harper’s essay on the rise and fall of the “mythical method” is now live!
Jun 17, 2024: I wrote about Thomas of London.
Jun 17, 2024: Thomas of London The inchoate and incomplete “theology of the city” that I wrote about last week has always, is my mind, been connected to London as strongly as to …
Jun 16, 2024: Paramount Pictures studio, back in the day
Jun 16, 2024: Wondertooneel der Nature
Jun 16, 2024: Nina Jordan, Untitled, Flooded Home V, 2021
Jun 16, 2024: I gave a couple of chatbots a list of movies with dates and asked them to organize the list in chronological order. Gemini could do it, ChatGPT 4o …
Jun 16, 2024: Well, the Euros were shaping up to be a great tournament until England took the pitch. That was dire — hypercautious, unimaginative, and low-energy. …
Jun 15, 2024: Currently reading: The Studio by John Gregory Dunne. This little book has a hundred great stories but my favorite is this: When planning the …
Jun 15, 2024: more on beauty Ted Gioia: Ortega y Gasset’s entire essay [on “The Dehumanization of Art”] is brilliant, and should be required reading in college humanities …
Jun 15, 2024: Zach Rausch: “This is the challenge of our time: How do we balance the desire to give kids individual freedom and new digital technologies with …
Jun 15, 2024: Why I’m gonna read Moonbound again.
Jun 14, 2024: Why am I shooting film again, after so many years? In part because of what Craig Mod says here: We have access to such abundance — a billion photos, …
Jun 14, 2024: starting over Around a month ago, I mentioned that I had just read and really enjoyed Robin Sloan’s novel Moonbound. And that’s true! But what I didn’t say at the …
Jun 14, 2024: Shooting on film — with a Nikon F100 — for the first time in many years. The natural bokeh is great, and the texture, but wow am I out of practice. I …
Jun 13, 2024: Here’s a long post, with many links, explaining how I’ve sorta-kinda-in-a-way written a book in blog posts.
Jun 13, 2024: the wanderers and the city My earlier posts in this series (which began by reading Genesis but has since expanded) are: Orientation to the topic On fertility The country …
Jun 12, 2024: Also, here’s Robin explaining in a video the language/script/typeface he developed for his fabulous new novel Moonbound. I love the fact that …
Jun 12, 2024: Surprising moment from this interview with Robin Sloan: [Gibson-Faulkner] Theory is, of course, the great policy planning framework of the Anth, …
Jun 12, 2024: George Lois’s library — in his apartment in the West Village — is my kind of workspace. And the apartment, at $5,600,000, is a bargain!
Jun 11, 2024: An outstanding post by Mike Sacasas about technology and work — the kinds of work we value and the kinds of work we ought to value.
Jun 11, 2024: I wrote about character in the Pentateuch.
Jun 11, 2024: Damascening
Jun 11, 2024: character The book of Genesis features a large number of distinct and memorable characters: Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Esau and Jacob, Joseph. Our …
Jun 10, 2024: Portishead’s Dummy is equidistant in time from (a) now and (b) A Hard Day’s Night.
Jun 10, 2024: My pledge: I will never ever read an article about “How AI will change X” — no matter what X is.
Jun 10, 2024: What a great post by Sara Hendren AKA @ablerism : “When my teenagers play patiently and attentively with someone’s much younger children at a …
Jun 10, 2024: A friend sent me this extraordinary music video by RAYE — please do watch the whole thing. It’s a parable, a warning, a word of exhortation. It …
Jun 10, 2024: I wrote a June update for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters. I’m very grateful for those supporters because they enable me to keep blogging, which I …
Jun 10, 2024: I made a little outline of the Pentateuch — and explained why it matters that such an outline is so easily made.
Jun 10, 2024: Early Anglo-Saxon shoulder clasp
Jun 10, 2024: the Pentateuch in brief outline Prologue to the whole: The Creation (Genesis 1) The history of humanity (Genesis 2–11) Making and naming Commanding and disobeying Zooming in: …
Jun 9, 2024: Urgent insistence that I stop reading and play.
Jun 8, 2024: After watching that shameful display by the USMNT today, I would like to remind everyone that Jürgen Klopp is unemployed. Just saying. ⚽️
Jun 8, 2024: Live oak.
Jun 8, 2024: excerpt from my journal I want to write a post about why my "Cosmotechnics" essay ended up being a dead end for me. Though I need to think harder about just why I believe …
Jun 8, 2024: Rose.
Jun 8, 2024: A vital point by Zeynep Tufekci: “Misinformation is not something that can be overcome solely by spelling out facts just the right way. …
Jun 8, 2024: What if writing papers and grading papers are bullshit jobs?
Jun 8, 2024: automating bullshit jobs Me, a year ago: Of course universities are going to outsource commentary on essays to AI — just as students will outsource the writing of essays to …
Jun 7, 2024: A sobering post from Rory Smith: “There is no obvious route back to smooth sailing for the Premier League from here. The league’s reality now is …
Jun 7, 2024: A new post on Genesis.
Jun 7, 2024: Genesis: the country and the city Raymond Williams, in his great The Country and the City, shows how ancient this contrast is, and how standardized its terms are. The contrast is …
Jun 6, 2024: New boilerplate terms & conditions for every tech company in the world: “We reserve the right to do anything we want with anything we find …
Jun 6, 2024: Ted Gioia: “When I recently revisited Rick Beato’s studio for our interview, I noted that he had added more than one million subscribers since …
Jun 6, 2024: The Premier League loves VAR. Why don’t they care about fan frustration? Because neither attendance nor TV viewing is declining. It’s a …
Jun 6, 2024: A woven Book of Hours
Jun 5, 2024: Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist I: “So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that …
Jun 5, 2024: Wood engraving by R. P. Hale
Jun 5, 2024: Currently reading: The Debate on the Constitution. Reading through these documents, so brilliantly chosen and edited by Bernard Bailyn, my two …
Jun 5, 2024: I can never quite get over magnolias.
Jun 5, 2024: Charlie Stross on Microsoft Recall: “But this is an utter privacy shit-show. Victims of domestic abuse are at risk of their abuser trawling …
Jun 5, 2024: Robin Sloan on his love for stories that give you checklists. Don’t forget to pre-order his wonderful complete-with-checklist novel Moonbound.
Jun 5, 2024: Genesis: fertility.
Jun 5, 2024: I’ve twice updated my post on highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow, first with a further thought of my own, second with a correction from my friend …
Jun 5, 2024: Genesis: fertility If the defining axes of Genesis 1–11 were making/naming and commanding/disobeying, those of the Patriarchal narratives are fertility/barrenness and …
Jun 3, 2024: Damon Krukowski: “As a creator who requires more than zero for my content, I seem to be part of a conspiracy against Daniel Ek and Spotify. The …
Jun 3, 2024: The first of a few posts on Genesis.
Jun 3, 2024: Genesis: orientation The story begins with creation, and creation is largely a matter of dividing: dividing the region of order from the region of chaos (tohu wabohu), …
Jun 2, 2024: Angus, enjoying the return of the air conditioning. (As you would, were you a longhaired dog living in Texas.)
Jun 2, 2024: I decree this Take Your Dog To Work Day, because (a) it’s Sunday and there’s no one else around and (b) at home we’re nearing 60 …
Jun 2, 2024: Adam Roberts: “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well, and that counts double if a thing was never worth doing in the first …
Jun 1, 2024: We’ve been 36 hours without electricity, and as the temp climbs towards 90 I am getting frayed about the edges. Also I’m realizing how many stupid …
Jun 1, 2024: Since Elon Musk talks a lot about Iain Banks’s novels about the Culture, I am forced to recommend my own essay on those novels — from fifteen …
May 31, 2024: Kim Hong-Joo
May 31, 2024: Genesis I was disappointed by Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis, though that may have less to do with the quality of Robinson’s book than with my way of …
May 30, 2024: App-based authentication assumes that you have your phone at hand always. But I don’t and won’t. The primary alternative is a hardware …
May 30, 2024: Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic, by Tabitha Stanmore, looks interesting. I wrote my own essay about cunning folk a few years back.
May 30, 2024: clichés, yes or no Amanda Montell: Since the moment I learned about the concept of the “thought-terminating cliche” I’ve been seeing them everywhere I look: in …
May 30, 2024: Mandy Brown, inspired by Deb Chachra’s brilliant new book: “Optimization presumes a kind of certainty about the circumstances one is optimizing for, …
May 30, 2024: In the last few weeks, all of my weather apps have gone haywire, including ones with multiple sources of weather data. They say it’s raining …
May 30, 2024: Yes, authentication service, this is my device — just as it was when you asked me 45 minutes ago.
May 30, 2024: Freddie DeBoer: “For a very large swath of the human population, probably the majority, constantly forming and expressing and fighting over …
May 30, 2024: I wrote about Carol Reed’s 1947 movie Odd Man Out.
May 30, 2024: William Deresiewicz: “The notion, floated now in certain quarters, that students and parents will turn from the Harvards and Yales in disgust is …
May 30, 2024: Odd Man Out Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out is a brilliant movie about … well, that’s the question. Some people say it’s a movie about the IRA, but that’s certainly …
May 29, 2024: Thinking about thinking like Ruskin.
May 29, 2024: Ruskin revisited What follows is a kind of sequel to the introduction to Ruskin I published several years ago. Ruskin begins The Stones of Venice by identifying what …
May 28, 2024: I’ve been reading the story of David in 1 and 2 Samuel, and in this history there is a character called Doeg the Edomite, but every single time I read …
May 28, 2024: Scott Alexander: “So the question — which I don’t see anyone on either side asking in a really curious way — is: which works better? Telling …
May 27, 2024: Here’s Adam Roberts critiquing my annotations of Auden’s “Winds” – and offering a very thoughtful reading of that poem. …
May 27, 2024: Journeys Early in Terrence Malick’s masterpiece A Hidden Life (2019), Franz Jägerstätter and his wife Franziska (Fani) sit at the kitchen table in their …
May 26, 2024: Preview of a possible (but not certain) coming attraction….
May 26, 2024: The Calm Tech Institute
May 25, 2024: If it keeps raining our live oaks may end up festooned with Spanish moss, like the ones in Louisiana.
May 24, 2024: Google’s new ad campaign: “Sure, our search results have been getting worse and worse, but they haven’t been getting worse fast enough – until now!“
May 24, 2024: In which I recall an ancient and petty resentment.
May 24, 2024: a petty resentment My paternal grandfather, Elisha Creel Jacobs, was for many years an engineer on the Frisco railroad. His standard route ran from our city, Birmingham, …
May 24, 2024: My old friend Matt Milliner interviews my former student Amanda Iglesias about church architecture. Many remarkably provocative, generative thoughts …
May 24, 2024: Filling out some marketing questions for my biography of Paradise Lost. They want some potential “hooks” and I got ‘em. “We put a …
May 23, 2024: If Tuchel ends up at Man Utd — the drama queen of managers at the drama queen of clubs — I will be grabbing a big bowl of popcorn and enjoying the …
May 23, 2024: I wrote about editing and the lack thereof.
May 23, 2024: The cook as dragon-slayer.
May 23, 2024: editing A couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to re-read Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, which I hadn’t read since high school. I picked it …
May 22, 2024: Carl Montford
May 22, 2024: Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the new part-owner running the show at Manchester United, is ending remote work for the employees there. Why? Because he thinks …
May 22, 2024: I wrote about building an attention cottage, literal or metaphorical.
May 22, 2024: the attention cottage In the last few days I have come across, or had sent to me, anguished cries from people who have recently been dragged on social media and cannot …
May 21, 2024: Angus is very content after playing in the garden hose.
May 20, 2024: Peer review in academic publishing can be frustrating, especially when frivolous scholars take the task of reviewing a manuscript as an opportunity to …
May 20, 2024: A post on why I’m not going to ditch Apple although part of me really wants to.
May 20, 2024: crushed again Two of the best things I’ve read in response to the horrific “Crush” commercial Apple recently put out and half-heartedly apologized for: Mark Hurst …
May 19, 2024: This photograph faithfully represents the moment when I haven’t had my coffee yet but Angus is already running laps around the house.
May 18, 2024: I wrote something about the students-can’t-read-any-more discourse.
May 18, 2024: accountability So here’s yet another story on how students today can’t or won’t read: Theresa MacPhail is a pragmatist. In her 15 years of teaching, as the number …
May 18, 2024: Looks like I convinced at least one person to try micro.blog: Brad East – AKA @bradeast.org. He has good reasons for joining.
May 17, 2024: What an amazing post by Adam Roberts, on Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as illuminated by a dozen other things, from …
May 17, 2024: Staffage.
May 17, 2024: From John Ruskin's Fors Clavigera, Letter 7: You are to do good work, whether you live or die. It may be you will have to die; — well, men have died …
May 17, 2024: last words From Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox: For three days he lay in a coma, but once Lady Eldon saw a stir of consciousness and asked whether he …
May 16, 2024: Yousuf Karsh’s portraits deserve their great fame, and one of my favorites is this one, of Helen Taussig, who basically invented pediatric …
May 16, 2024: Phil Foden shouldn’t have gotten the Player of the Year trophy because he’s neither the best nor the most important player on his own …
May 16, 2024: Every year I re-read at least one of John Ruskin’s books, and I’ve just gone through The Stones of Venice again. No other writer lights up …
May 16, 2024: Ruskin on Color The perception of colour is a gift just as definitely granted to one person, and denied to another, as an ear for music; and the very first requisite …
May 16, 2024: Musa al-Gharbi: “Universities in general, and elite schools in particular, exist largely to launder wealth into perceptions of …
May 16, 2024: I believe every man in a Christian kingdom ought to be equally well educated. But I would have it education to purpose; stern, practical, …
May 16, 2024: Ian Paul: “When I became an Anglican (from a background of a different church tradition), I was at first quite puzzled by the choice of …
May 15, 2024: The great Shannon Mattern on cardboard boxes.
May 15, 2024: I wrote about a forthcoming essay of mine — and (more important) about a forthcoming novel that reveals some massive implications of my essay that, …
May 15, 2024: Mark Hurst: I have to give Apple credit here: the video is boldly telling us the truth. Other companies hide their true agenda, or even – if they …
May 15, 2024: the archetypal future Next month I have an essay coming out in Harper’s called “Yesterday’s Men: The Death of the Mythical Method.” In it I look at the rise — a rise that …
May 15, 2024: Auden’s The Shield of Achilles gets a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly.
May 15, 2024: temporary storage Drafts is a fantastic app, so well-designed, so capable, so powerful. For my money it’s the best “bucket” app, ideal for holding onto chunks of text. …
May 14, 2024: try not to think Fraudulent academic papers are on the rise, and will continue to be on the rise as long as academics substitute counting for judgment. The fetish for …
May 14, 2024: I always like to remind people that the real, legal, birth-certificate name of Blossom Dearie was … Blossom Dearie.
May 14, 2024: Austin Kleon’s great newsletter edition on the objects we love and live with reminds me that we still use our metronome, some sixty-plus years …
May 14, 2024: Japanese commercial art
May 14, 2024: The most Arsenal thing ever would be for Spurs to beat Man City today and then Arsenal lose to Everton on Sunday. ⚽️
May 13, 2024: This by Rob Chapman is one of a zillion videos encouraging me to ask whether I’m a beginner, intermediate, or advanced guitar player. …
May 13, 2024: I wrote about Perfect Days.
May 13, 2024: A Dissertation on the Clowns and Fools of Shakspeare
May 13, 2024: By the way, if I could belong to one of the London livery companies, I would certainly choose the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers.
May 13, 2024: If you happen to be a Freeman or Freewoman of the City of London, then you may exercise your ancient right to take sheep across London or Southwark …
May 13, 2024: Perfect Days The Richard Brody review of Perfect Days is a tone-deaf review by the most reliably tone-deaf reviewer out there. Every reviewer has limits to his or …
May 12, 2024: “The secret of good cursing lies in cadence, emphasis, and and antiphony. The basic themes are always the same. Conscious striving after variety is …
May 10, 2024: I’m old enough to remember when I could say “Hey Siri, play [X]” and get the song I asked for.
May 10, 2024: Christian Spirituality: categories The Great Texts program here at Baylor, where I teach about half my classes, begins its course of study with a series of periods: Ancient, Medieval, …
May 10, 2024: ‘Interior of Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire’, watercolour by J. M. W. Turner, 1794
May 9, 2024: intrinsic values Adam Kirsch: In his poem “Little Gidding,” written during World War II, T. S. Eliot wrote that the Cavaliers and Puritans who fought in England’s …
May 8, 2024: Apple may just have created the most tone-deaf advertisement in the history of advertising. I think I’m gonna go outside and smash my iPad with …
May 8, 2024: Dan Kois: Most alarmingly, kids in third and fourth grade are beginning to stop reading for fun. It’s called the “Decline by 9,” and it’s reaching a …
May 8, 2024: R.I.P. Steve Albini — a wonder of a recording engineer who had a simple and clear and unshakable commitment to what he thought recorded music should …
May 8, 2024: Saemoonan Church, South Korea
May 8, 2024: Early Cycladic figures
May 8, 2024: Me, a couple of years ago, stating a thesis that I’m still committed to: “In any given community, there will be a profound divide between …
May 8, 2024: Laura Brown, The Great Lakes of North America
May 8, 2024: back to the brows After reading various writings about the brows — including, first of all, this unsent letter by Virginia Woolf and this 1949 essay by Russell Lyne, I …
May 7, 2024: Book Objects
May 7, 2024: I just posted a new letter to my BMAC supporters.
May 7, 2024: Playing this morning: Khruangbin’s A LA SALA. ♫
May 7, 2024: This from Austin Kleon is great: One of the reasons I didn’t connect with writer Nicholson Baker’s recent book about learning to draw, Finding a …
May 7, 2024: It’s pub day for my critical edition of Auden’s The Shield of Achilles!
May 6, 2024: Our new bee attractor.
May 6, 2024: Doug Stowe: “My proposal … was as follows: Start with the basic elements from Greek philosophy — earth, air, fire, and water — and divide …
May 6, 2024: elegance personified (really) Last night Teri and I watched Swing Time, and afterwards played a little game: We went back to the dance scenes and tried to pause at instants when …
May 6, 2024: Hebrew illuminated manuscripts from the Italian Renaissance
May 6, 2024: Portraits of 28 Japanese metal artists
May 6, 2024: On two novels that describe scientific/scholarly integrity – or the lack thereof.
May 6, 2024: the integrity of science I haven’t forgotten about middlebrow matters, but right now my mind is on something else. Something related, though. Readers of Gaudy Night (1935) …
May 4, 2024: A good introduction to the Mondragón model. We desperately need a version of this somewhere in the USA, just to demonstrate that business-as-usual is …
May 4, 2024: Related: the Uncovering Roman Carlisle site is fascinating.
May 4, 2024: Apparently the place for relics of Roman Britain is the Carlisle Cricket Club.
May 3, 2024: P.S.A. A number of people have asked me for my thoughts about the current university campus protests. I have very few. As the novelist John Barth said when …
May 3, 2024: And finally, the Rio Grande as it emerges from the Santa Elena Canyon (whose walls reach 1500 feet in height) at the western end of the park.
May 3, 2024: The previous photo was of the Chisos Mountains in the center of the park; this one of the Rio Grande at the park’s eastern boundary.
May 3, 2024: This photo from Big Bend made me think about some of my own photos of the park, for instance this one.
May 3, 2024: refuge Bryan Garsten: Liberal societies, I want to suggest, are those that offer refuge from the very people they empower. The reach of this formulation …
May 2, 2024: I call my big blog the Homebound Symphony – for reasons explained here – but what does that Symphony hope to do? It hopes to build and …
May 2, 2024: A lovely video of my buddy Jon Guerra, in a clearing above Laity Lodge, singing about Jesus.
May 2, 2024: attention please Nathan Heller: “Attention as a category isn’t that salient for younger folks,” Jac Mullen, a writer and a high-school teacher in New Haven, told me …
May 2, 2024: This is the last day of my Great Texts in Christian Spirituality class, and I’m having my students read this 2007 sermon by Rowan Williams …
May 2, 2024: brows illustrated Russell Lynes’s 1949 essay for Harper’s, “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” — about which I’ll have more to say later — features this illustration by …
May 1, 2024: I wrote about Dorothy L. Sayers as a middlebrow writer – in future posts I’ll be exploring the “brows” and asking whether that …
May 1, 2024: Sayers the middlebrow writer Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, in The Lost Week-End (1940), their generally fascinating and informative social history of Great Britain between the …
Apr 30, 2024: Leah Libresco Sargeant: “The struggles of much bigger tech companies to make their AI corrigible suggest Catholic Answers won’t have a reliably …
Apr 30, 2024: St. Mark's Place The Five Spot, on St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan, hosted most of the great jazz musicians of the middle part of the twentieth century — Charles …
Apr 30, 2024: Finished reading: Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard. Teaching this today. It is, every time I read it, a dazzling and disturbing book. 📚
Apr 29, 2024: Finished reading: 3 Shades of Blue by James Kaplan. A brilliant book, but in its later stages immensely sad. 📚
Apr 28, 2024: Read this by Ted Gioia in conjunction with my everyone knows post. Twenty years from now, nobody will believe parents who say “But I had no idea …
Apr 28, 2024: more rational choices My recent posts on how I choose what fiction to read and what’s going on with the publishing industry share a theme: perverse incentives. (Indeed, it …
Apr 28, 2024: Old Japanese train tickets
Apr 28, 2024: Brent Nongbri on Candida Moss’s recent work: “Overall, this book has an effect that is similar to that of E.P. Sanders’s Paul and …
Apr 28, 2024: If I’m irritible over the next few days, it’s because Apple’s forced reset of my password means that all of my app-specific …
Apr 28, 2024: This award-winning building … is a glass cuboid. The world’s ten billionth glass cuboid.
Apr 26, 2024: What happened to Michael Tsai also happened to me today. Annoying as heck. All my Apple devices are confused.
Apr 26, 2024: Re: this list of sites that prohibit your linking to anything but their home page — I wonder how it would play out if a dispute about this policy went …
Apr 26, 2024: Like almost every other writer in America, I’ve weighed in on that Elle Griffin nobody-buys-books post – or one implication of it anyway.
Apr 26, 2024: advancing Elle Griffin seems to have carved out a niche for herself telling hard truths to would-be writers – which is an unpleasant but useful service, I …
Apr 26, 2024: Taken in SE Colorado, March 2023.
Apr 26, 2024: Live webcam at Valles Caldera, New Mexico. The webcam is cool but it’s one of those places that simply can’t be appreciated except in …
Apr 26, 2024: Reading this because it’s discussed, with considerable energy, in Sayers’s Gaudy Night. 📚
Apr 25, 2024: This morning I wrote my most boring post ever! It’s about citations of a literary critic.
Apr 25, 2024: influence and citation I have an essay coming out in the July issue of Harper’s which I titled “The Mythical Method” but which will probably end up with the title …
Apr 24, 2024: UW-M Special Collections – one of my favorite Tumblrs.
Apr 24, 2024: more on costs and choices Isaiah Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli”: The ideals of Christianity are charity, mercy, sacrifice, love of God, forgiveness of enemies, …
Apr 24, 2024: Matt Crawford, on Substack: Probing his riding companions, Robert [Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance] comes to understand that …
Apr 24, 2024: I wrote about how I decide what literary fiction not to read.
Apr 23, 2024: rational choices The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet. — Hugh E. Keogh There’s too much to read, right? …
Apr 23, 2024: I just love type in cases.
Apr 22, 2024: The Guardian: “As people get older, they revise the age they consider to be old upwards.” This is good for me to know, since before too …
Apr 22, 2024: Currently reading: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I wrote a post about returning to this great book. 📚
Apr 22, 2024: Gilead revisited The way we speak and think of the Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism. Very simply, it …
Apr 22, 2024: costs A brief follow-up to this post from last week: In our current climate of political assholery, no self-described “activist” can answer what I think of …
Apr 21, 2024: Me: I just spilled hot coffee all over my chest! My son: Oh no! Is the coffee okay??
Apr 20, 2024: I wrote an extremely spoilery post about Gene Wolfe’s strange novel Peace.
Apr 20, 2024: Peace, Peace N.B. This post is spoilerful. A few years ago I read a fascinating post by my colleague Philip Jenkins about Gene Wolfe’s 1975 novel Peace. I had …
Apr 20, 2024: The OED has just added 23 Japanese words, mainly involving food and entertainment.
Apr 19, 2024: High is Adam Roberts in his thriller mode. Think: Mission: Impossible on Mars. Brilliant. So much fun. 📚
Apr 19, 2024: Oleander is enthusiastic.
Apr 19, 2024: I wrote a post on how anarchic childhoods can make more politically mature adults.
Apr 19, 2024: Waxahatchee’s new album is great.
Apr 19, 2024: adult children I think there’s a strong causal relationship between (a) the overly structured lives of children today and (b) the silly political stunts of …
Apr 18, 2024: The Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher | The New Yorker: Maret is part of a growing coterie of readers who have embraced [Byung-Chul] Han as a kind …
Apr 17, 2024: Wystan and Erika The couple above are W. H. Auden and Erika Mann. The photo was taken by a student at The Downs School, where Auden was then teaching. Erika, the …
Apr 17, 2024: Audrey Hepburn taking guitar lessons — so she can play as she sings “Moon River.”
Apr 16, 2024: Someone asked me today about my micro.blog avatar, which is one of Paul Klee’s hand puppets, the one called The Philistine.
Apr 16, 2024: More stuff of mine related to that essay on “rewilding the internet”: I’ve written about mechanization and monoculture, about living …
Apr 16, 2024: Me on rewilding the internet plus having a home on the open web — and note that micro.blog is part of that home.
Apr 16, 2024: rewilding The essay by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon on “Rewilding the Internet” is absolutely essential — and you might know that I would think so if you read …
Apr 16, 2024: Daniel Parris: “A New York Times analysis of Spotify data revealed that our most-played songs often stem from our teenage years, particularly …
Apr 16, 2024: The story of the Doves Type
Apr 16, 2024: Nadine Chahine: “A typeface is a series of conversations happening simultaneously between different characters. For example, in the Latin …
Apr 13, 2024: Trying to get a pic of one of our roses, I am confronted by a photobomber
Apr 13, 2024: Start your weekend on a good note: listen to Sweet Honey in the Rock sing “Run Molly Run”
Apr 12, 2024: Butterflies and bees 🐝
Apr 12, 2024: From Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker essay on Maigret
Apr 12, 2024: People sometimes respond to my essay on anarchism by calling me a libertarian. But — to give a very brief account of an important issue — I think …
Apr 12, 2024: Good to hear that txt.fyi will be coming back. It was the best way to post chunks of text that you didn’t necessarily want on your own site or …
Apr 12, 2024: I wrote about R. K. Narayan’s marvelous Malgudi.
Apr 12, 2024: Narayan's Malgudi In his newsletter today, my buddy Austin Kleon mentions in passing the Hindu concept of the ashramas or stages of life, which is funny because I’ve …
Apr 12, 2024: One of the first reviewers of Tolkien’s Silmarillion was Richard Adams, of Watership Down fame. Spoiler: He adored it.
Apr 10, 2024: Everyone knows.
Apr 10, 2024: everyone knows Reading this Jessica Grose piece — so similar to ten thousand other reports made in recent years — on the miseries induced or exacerbated by digital …
Apr 10, 2024: I posted an update for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.
Apr 10, 2024: Sydney Railway map, 1939
Apr 10, 2024: I love to see this terrific profile of Khruangbin, one of my favorite current bands, but I miss the days when listening to Khruangbin felt like a …
Apr 9, 2024: I’m reading Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England — it won’t be released until June — and …
Apr 9, 2024: The last eclipse: “The last total solar eclipse will occur when the largest-looking moon just barely covers the smallest-looking sun. A bit of …
Apr 9, 2024: The eclipse as seen from a weather satellite (time-lapse photo).
Apr 8, 2024: I’m sorta digging these slightly wrong pictures. (“Wrong” in the sense that I didn’t remember to disable the various software …
Apr 8, 2024: The eclipse, partial right now, is overwhelming my camera sensor, but this photo still looks kinda Genesis 1-ish.
Apr 8, 2024: A justly famous image from Black Narcissus
Apr 8, 2024: I wrote about The Pilgrim’s Progress and maps thereof. This should perhaps be read in conjunction with my review, from a few years back, of an …
Apr 8, 2024: to be a pilgrim I’ve been teaching The Pilgrim’s Progress, something that always gives me great joy. I find it simply wonderful that so utterly bonkers a book was so …
Apr 8, 2024: Sabine Hossenfelder’s story in this video offers a great illustration of the perverse incentives that afflict academia.
Apr 7, 2024: A life of Benjamin Franklin with wood engravings
Apr 7, 2024: Blake’s illustrations of the Book of Job
Apr 6, 2024: A great post by Sara Hendren AKA @ablerism on places whose architecture helps us to cultivate certain “limiting virtues.”
Apr 6, 2024: More on the benefits of handmind.
Apr 5, 2024: FYI: The people at Standard Ebooks produce carefully-edited, well-formatted, free e-books. Project Gutenberg is an amazing resource, but its texts are …
Apr 5, 2024: Mikko Takkunen’s photographs of Hong Kong.
Apr 5, 2024: Dorothy L. Sayers: Vitality, bullying and bounce.
Apr 5, 2024: bounce J. R. Ackerley, author of that remarkable book My Dog Tulip, worked for the BBC for many years and in that capacity oversaw the production of The …
Apr 4, 2024: My colleague Philip Jenkins wrote about Kipling’s story “The Gardener,” and I wrote something in response.
Apr 4, 2024: The Gardener I am very pleased that my colleague Philip Jenkins has written about Rudyard Kipling’s “The Gardener,” one of the finest short stories in the world. …
Apr 3, 2024: Reading the obituaries for John Barth, I find myself thinking how odd it must be to outlive your reputation in the way he did, to be famous at thirty …
Apr 3, 2024: And one more: a Marie-Alice Harel illustration from Howl’s Moving Castle.
Apr 3, 2024: Also from the Folio Society, a Clive Hicks-Jenkins illustration from Beowulf.
Apr 3, 2024: The wood engravings of Harry Brockway — this one of the creature made by Victor Frankenstein.
Apr 2, 2024: When Karl Barth wrote to Dorothy L. Sayers.
Apr 2, 2024: a letter from Karl Barth On 7 September 1939, a week after the Wehrmacht invaded Poland and thus began the Second World War, the great theologian Karl Barth wrote, in German, …
Apr 2, 2024: Couple this piece on west Texas “sky islands” with one of my own on the same subject.
Apr 2, 2024: Y’all have heard me say this before, but one of the very best things about my job is seeing the amazing things that my students end up doing. …
Apr 2, 2024: Campus is looking nice this cool (for Texas) spring morning.
Apr 2, 2024: Max Read: “It sometimes feels like Instagram designed Threads with ‘context collapse’ as a goal to be met instead of a hazard to be …
Apr 1, 2024: Trimming the abelia this morning, I remembered my old handmind in Covidtide post.
Apr 1, 2024: Classical education vs. the factories of unreason.
Apr 1, 2024: This Ted Gioia piece echoes something I’ve been saying for years: see this tag on my blog.
Apr 1, 2024: against the factory of unreason Dear readers, I have returned! — and I say unto you, it might be interesting to read my reflections on my students’ reading ability in conjunction …
Mar 31, 2024: After what felt like a very long Lent, I almost achieved liftoff this morning when we got to the Gloria of Mozart’s Spatzenmesse. So gorgeously …
Mar 31, 2024: Jane Goodall on her 90th birthday: “When I look back over my life, I mean, my goodness, the coincidences that led me to the path where I am now …
Mar 31, 2024: Angus is so happy when his people come home.
Mar 31, 2024: An Easter present for me — author’s (or rather editor’s) copy. So beautifully made. The people at PUP are genuine masters of their crafts.
Mar 29, 2024: Some appropriate Good Friday reading, I think: the third and fourth parts of my conversation with Phil Christman.
Mar 27, 2024: Here’s the second installment of my conversation with Phil Christman about Auden.
Mar 26, 2024: An astonishing carving that may stay in the U.K. — but the art’s the thing, this day, this week.
Mar 26, 2024: I talked with Phil Christman about Auden and especially The Shield of Achilles: here’s the first installment of that conversation.
Mar 11, 2024: Over at my Buy Me a Coffee page, I wrote about what I’ll be up to for the next few years.
Mar 5, 2024: Last post before returning to Lenten silence: I’m really honored to have a place in the new edition of my buddy Austin Kleon’s newsletter. …
Mar 4, 2024: I have learned so, SO much about movies from David Bordwell, and am genuinely grieved to learn of his death. R.I.P. The tribute from Damien Chazelle …
Mar 4, 2024: A brief hello before resuming my Lenten silence.
Feb 14, 2024: I'll Be Back in Eastertide
Feb 7, 2024: Gonna be largely offline for the rest of February — see y’all in March!
Feb 7, 2024: Lawrence Keaty, from Taipei (2020)
Feb 7, 2024: Class Notes: Two Renewals In my Christian Renaissance of the Twentieth Century class, we’re reading, back-to-back, passages from Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism (1920) …
Feb 7, 2024: When Brad East asks his students what, when they visit a church, they expect to see, one of them said: “Lights.” I.e., a tech-church show.
Feb 7, 2024: Kinda thinking that this wireless diagnostics report that’s been running on my Mac for 10 hours is unlikely to finish. (All of a sudden my Mac, …
Feb 6, 2024: Arthur Aghajanian: “The statues of Armenia’s cultural giants embody a distinctive form of heroism characterized by creative acts as forms of …
Feb 6, 2024: Terry Teachout and the Last of the Conservative Critics | The Nation: But Teachout, whose natural inclination was toward equanimity and collegiality, …
Feb 5, 2024: Lindsay Zoladz in the NYT: They traded a few lines and harmonized beautifully on the chorus — her tone opalescent, his bringing some grit — but Combs …
Feb 5, 2024: I dunno, maybe I’m an aging sentimentalist, but … the Tracy Chapman / Luke Combs duet last night feels like A Moment. It feels like an …
Feb 5, 2024: It’s been more than a decade since I’ve visited The Cloisters — that’s gotta change soon.
Feb 5, 2024: Ben Werdmuller on Arc Search: “A world where everyone uses an app like this is a death spiral to an information desert.”
Feb 5, 2024: Ceci N'est Pas une Current-Events Post No no no, this is not at all about a current controversy. Hang in there, you’ll see what I mean. Recently some people — including grifters, but also a …
Feb 4, 2024: Church fusion.
Feb 4, 2024: The Queen and the Duke ♫
Feb 4, 2024: The architectural drawings of Richard of St. Victor
Feb 3, 2024: Miles and Pops ♫
Feb 3, 2024: Fascinating from Ethan Iverson on the Duke: “Who even knows the right changes to Ellington hits? I remember my first attempts to learn famous …
Feb 3, 2024: I’m on a Duke Ellington kick at the moment — there may be posts and links forthcoming — but right now I’m remembering one of the classiest …
Feb 3, 2024: When Wes Anderson designs a bar
Feb 3, 2024: I don’t feel the need to repost everything on my Big Blog here, but I’m thinking that it might be useful occasionally to link to a tag …
Feb 3, 2024: Two fantastic essays on the history of multi-channel audio by J. B. Crawford: one and two.
Feb 3, 2024: Robinson Meyer: This sincere interest in geoengineering and climate modification represents a broader shift in climate science from observation to …
Feb 2, 2024: Wendish Easter eggs – from Texas!
Feb 2, 2024: I rarely say that everyone should read something, but I’ll say that about this post by Mandy Brown.
Feb 2, 2024: Here’s a short post about one of the best Nichols & May comedy routines, which means, about one of the best comedy routines ever.
Feb 2, 2024: timing People often talk about comic timing, but what does that mean, exactly? Well, here’s an example, from one of the best comedy routines ever: Elaine May …
Feb 2, 2024: Just sent a drizzly-February-morning missive to my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.
Feb 2, 2024: I wrote about teaching Augustine’s Enchiridion.
Feb 2, 2024: Walter Crane, Flora’s Train, tile panel, 1900-1901.
Feb 2, 2024: Class Notes: Enchiridion Second in a series of reflections on what I’m teaching. Late in his life, Augustine wrote his Enchiridion in response to a request from someone …
Feb 1, 2024: These are wonderful.
Feb 1, 2024: I wrote about anarchy in The Man Who Was Thursday.
Feb 1, 2024: We’re dealing with endless displays of Potemkin AI. As Molly White says, we “need to start keeping a list of all the times some big …
Feb 1, 2024: Class notes: Anarchy, Law, Pain I’m thinking that this term, when I’m teaching a number of things I haven’t taught before, or haven't taught in a long time, I might use this blog to …
Jan 31, 2024: Ted Gioia’s “Nine Ugly Truths about Copywright” is brilliant.
Jan 31, 2024: Cory Doctorow: “AI companies are implicitly betting that their customers will buy AI for highly consequential automation, fire workers, and …
Jan 31, 2024: Noah Millman: You can’t just hate the present and long for the past, any more than you can make the future better by demanding of some nonexistent …
Jan 31, 2024: Adi Robertson: “As I’ve watched the Vision Pro go from announcement to release, it’s also seemed held back by something that has little to do …
Jan 31, 2024: I’m going in.
Jan 31, 2024: On reading Horace: “In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce talks of the “human pages” of Stephen Dedalus’s ‘timeworn …
Jan 30, 2024: Damon Krukowski: “If not Pitchfork, with more daily visitors than Vogue or Vanity Fair or the New Yorker - or GQ – then who in music journalism …
Jan 30, 2024: I deleted my micro.blog post on whether art makes us better people and replaced it with a somewhat longer one.
Jan 30, 2024: Effectual Art David Brooks: “Does consuming art, music, literature and the rest of what we call culture make you a better person?” Answer: No. Consuming art can’t …
Jan 29, 2024: As a kind of pendant to my previous post, I comment to you this by Adam Roberts, which I thought of as I was writing: When I was a kid I memorised — …
Jan 29, 2024: Maggie Tulliver and her books.
Jan 29, 2024: Maggie and her Books There’s a really extraordinary moment in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, a moment that says something profound about what we might call the …
Jan 29, 2024: A scholar named Isaac Waisberg has put together a vast collection of translations of Horace into English. This is quite interesting to me because …
Jan 28, 2024: I’m really pleased that the new AppleTV series Masters of the Air features a portrayal of Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, who ought to be, …
Jan 28, 2024: I wrote a parable about academics and practical men.
Jan 28, 2024: a small parable Occasionally I find myself in groups populated by business people, technologists, consultants, people who work in nonprofits, practitioners of various …
Jan 26, 2024: Tyler Austin Harper: “The first step is refusing to indulge in certainty, the fiction that the future is foretold. There is a perverse comfort …
Jan 25, 2024: a note on plagiarism The Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal — or, depending on your point of view, “plagiarism” scandal — has me thinking about How We Write Today. John …
Jan 24, 2024: With the Mac turning 40, a question going around is: What was your first Mac? Mine was … the first Mac, in all its 128k glory. Bought (with a …
Jan 23, 2024: Spatial knowledge impairment after GPS guided navigation.
Jan 23, 2024: In which I endorse Ted Gioia’s theses on progress.
Jan 23, 2024: placing bets The last four of Ted Gioia's seven hypotheses about meaningful progress: 4. The discourse on progress is controlled by technocrats, politicians and …
Jan 22, 2024: FWIW I’ve written before about how my own history as a fabulist makes me reflexively skeptical about certain kinds of stories that people tell. But it’s …
Jan 22, 2024: head start The Vikings was the first movie I ever saw — not in a standard movie theater, but some years after its release, at a drive-in. I remember being at …
Jan 20, 2024: Why don’t Arsenal win every game 5-0? It seems such an obvious solution to their problems. ⚽️
Jan 20, 2024: Noteworthy, I think, that neither this Becca Rothfield review of The Geography of the Imagination nor John Jeremiah Sullivan’s introduction to …
Jan 19, 2024: In which I explain what I did on the first day of a new class – and then go on a wild-eyed rant against Spotify.
Jan 19, 2024: Systematic theology? I don’t need no stinkin' systematic theology – I have Joe Mangina’s “Figural Graffiti,” in …
Jan 19, 2024: ADD revisited On the first day of my Christian Renaissance of the Twentieth Century course — mentioned here — I played for my students a few minutes of the first …
Jan 19, 2024: This $100 million gift to Spelman College ought to be praised to the skies. The megarich need to direct their money towards institutions that can …
Jan 18, 2024: John Gruber – aka @gruber – on a theme I discussed yesterday, the difference between Apple’s view of the Mac platform versus …
Jan 18, 2024: Robin Sloan says of me, “Alan can make anything sound terrific, when he loves it,” which is one of the best things anyone has ever said …
Jan 18, 2024: What Dracula is
Jan 17, 2024: If, as some think, deepfakes will become undetectable, that just might force a long-overdue reckoning with our reliance on online …
Jan 17, 2024: Howard Phipps
Jan 17, 2024: I added some links, fixed some bad links, and generally updated things at my home page.
Jan 17, 2024: I think DHH is right about Apple.
Jan 17, 2024: Lazy day.
Jan 17, 2024: DHH is exactly right: Apple has become too powerful, and with that power has come a sense of entitlement, and with that sense of entitlement has come …
Jan 17, 2024: Just discovered that Terrence Malick, Marilynne Robinson, and Joni Mitchell were all born in November 1943.
Jan 17, 2024: Jaroslav Pelikan: Origen may … have been the first church father to study Hebrew, “in opposition to the spirit of his time and of his people,” as …
Jan 16, 2024: Something I often think, prompted tonight by seeing Jamal Murray (6'4") standing next to Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid (both 7'0"): If …
Jan 16, 2024: Damon K: “A positive, progressive change to this system benefiting more people is not going to come from the top - that is what these latest …
Jan 16, 2024: The mysterious Roman dodecahedra.
Jan 16, 2024: A wonderful collection of Milton Glaser book covers.
Jan 15, 2024: Listening to the legendary Bill Evans Trio Village Vanguard sessions. Forty-five years later, I got to hear Motian play with Bill Frisell and Ron …
Jan 15, 2024: Blizzard conditions in Waco
Jan 15, 2024: I wrote a bit about what I’m teaching this term and how it will affect my blogging.
Jan 15, 2024: looking ahead Lately I’ve been posting in How to Think mode — HTT as the tag here calls it: I’ve been writing about various common-all-too-common errors in …
Jan 15, 2024: Silence, Violence, and the Human Condition I don’t believe that “silence is violence,” ever. And I doubt that anyone else would either, if they were to spend a bit of time thinking about it. …
Jan 13, 2024: Augustus John, “A Glass of Wine” (1902)
Jan 13, 2024: Mary Harrington: “A culture that valorises ‘cool’ sets us up to fail as social beings - and then sells us myriad forms of …
Jan 11, 2024: “The Arrival,” photograph by Carol Munder.
Jan 11, 2024: Legal Sauce for the Legal Goose From an an interview with Jill Lepore: I’m working on a long book about the history of attempts to amend the Constitution. And on the one hand, we …
Jan 11, 2024: BBEdit 15, in addition to getting several interesting new features, has undergone some slight but really quite pleasant adjustments to its appearance.
Jan 10, 2024: Currently reading: The Spirit of Early Christian Thought by Robert Louis Wilken. This will be my third complete reading of this great book. 📚
Jan 10, 2024: The Mouth of Orcus, in the Gardens of Bomarzo.
Jan 10, 2024: Yet another really nice one from Adrian Vila.
Jan 10, 2024: Mark Hurst: Marc Andreessen is right – love doesn’t scale.
Jan 10, 2024: Bertolucci Some years ago I read an article about sociopathy – I don’t remember the author or where it appeared, but I do recall the description of a boy who …
Jan 10, 2024: Nineteenth-century plans for a chunnel.
Jan 9, 2024: I wrote a mid-season report on Arsenal. ⚽️
Jan 9, 2024: Arsenal mid-season report This side is not a contender for the league title — not even close. At this point I'm not confident that they can hold on to a Champions League place: …
Jan 8, 2024: The bacchanal is coming.
Jan 8, 2024: From an edition of Kipling’s The Day’s Work
Jan 8, 2024: On going beyond the SCT — the Standard Critique of Technology.
Jan 8, 2024: beyond the SCT My 2021 essay on “cosmotechnics” begins thus: In the 1950s and 1960s, a series of thinkers, beginning with Jacques Ellul and Marshall McLuhan, began …
Jan 6, 2024: Kashmir Hill: “My black clamshell of a phone had the effect of a clerical collar, inducing people to confess their screen time sins to me. They hated …
Jan 5, 2024: Making an Iron Age-style shield out of willow bark.
Jan 4, 2024: The Next Turn of the Wheel This is the novelist Janet Burroway, writing about her experience making a fifth edition of a textbook for creative writing classes: Unusually, this …
Jan 4, 2024: A superb essay by Witold Rybczynski on ornament in architecture.
Jan 4, 2024: Strange sights in the pre-dawn fog.
Jan 3, 2024: John DePol
Jan 3, 2024: Model box for ‘Endgame’ by Samuel Beckett, designed by Tallulah Caskey, for the National Theatre, London
Jan 2, 2024: Mark Helprin: “Tending a fire enforces a sense of patience and tranquility. In that way it is like sailing a boat. You’re engaged by it and …
Jan 2, 2024: How a Catholic modernity killed Dracula.
Jan 2, 2024: The Real Value of a Catholic Modernity In 1996 the philosopher Charles Taylor delivered a lecture – later to be published with several responses – called “A Catholic Modernity?” But do you …
Jan 1, 2024: And here is a Tiffany window from a Philadephia church. It and its companion piece were saved from destruction by a man who bought them, along with …
Jan 1, 2024: Here’s an Agnes Northrop window, this one at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Jan 1, 2024: The Met has acquired “Garden Landscape,” a window made by Agnes Northrop in Lewis Comfort Tiffany’s workshop. Since the window is …
Dec 31, 2023: On the last day of the year, I wrote a post on why I don’t do end-of-year posts.
Dec 31, 2023: Who's Counting? I’m not doing an end-of-year roundup of what I’ve written this year, or what I’ve read, or what I’ve watched, or what I’ve listened to, or where I’ve …
Dec 30, 2023: Finished reading: The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn. A lovely novel, at once melancholy and hopeful, about learning to cope with a changed world, …
Dec 29, 2023: I wrote a post for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.
Dec 29, 2023: I wrote about listening to Wagner. ♫
Dec 29, 2023: Venkatesh Rao: Much of the social energy of the old internet has now retreated underground to the cozyweb. Except for a few old-fashioned blogs like …
Dec 29, 2023: on Wagner As part of my ongoing project to understand myth and mythmaking in the modern era I have been sitting down to a full encounter with Wagner’s Ring …
Dec 28, 2023: Francis Spufford on picking through the ruins of Christendom: Those of us who, despite everything, think there’s something precious in the words …
Dec 27, 2023: I wrote about a Christmas present I received.
Dec 27, 2023: Man, Moon, Book My family gave me a wonderful Christmas present: the Folio Society edition of Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo …
Dec 27, 2023: More landscape photographs by Charlotte Ladefoged
Dec 27, 2023: Stefan Collini: “Carlyle’s forte as a social critic was not likely to lie in making practical suggestions. The denunciatory sublime was his preferred …
Dec 27, 2023: NYT: ”Despite these difficulties, there can be a reluctance among the clergy to talk about their own troubles. Ministry is often seen as a calling …
Dec 26, 2023: The good Earth.
Dec 26, 2023: the good earth Fifty-five years ago, on Christmas Eve 1968, astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders were orbiting the moon. It was while in lunar orbit …
Dec 26, 2023: St. John & St. Mark, from the Lambeth Bible
Dec 25, 2023: Christmas coma setting in.
Dec 25, 2023: Lo how a rose
Dec 25, 2023: Merry Christmas!
Dec 22, 2023: More here
Dec 22, 2023: A post on George MacDonald and Christmas — though be warned, this one’s a bit of a tearjerker.
Dec 22, 2023: Christmas gifts In introducing the writings of George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis made a fascinating point which can only be quoted at length: What [MacDonald] does best …
Dec 21, 2023: The game Monopoly basically copied an anti-capitalist game created by one Lizzie Magie: The Landlord’s Game.
Dec 20, 2023: Finished reading: The Corner that Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner. A strangely riveting book, and unlike anything I have ever read. I don’t …
Dec 20, 2023: The notebook of Anni Albers.
Dec 20, 2023: My first thought when I read the-fediverse-is-the-future pieces is: Great, now whenever anyone anywhere online is posturing, preening, snarking, …
Dec 20, 2023: The Morgan Beatus Manuscript
Dec 19, 2023: Brian Eno, from a 1995 diary entry: Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. …
Dec 19, 2023: The Feast of the Annunciation is on March 25, but the lectionary gives us the story also on the fourth Sunday of Advent, so this is a good time to …
Dec 19, 2023: Old wine-and-spirit trademarks
Dec 18, 2023: Last night at St. Alban’s, we had an utterly wonderful service of Nine Lessons and Carols. The history of the service — it’s relatively …
Dec 18, 2023: Charlie Warzel: “A shift away from a knowable internet might feel like a return to something smaller and purer. An internet with no discernable …
Dec 18, 2023: I wrote about library catalogs, analog and digital.
Dec 18, 2023: Expectation.
Dec 18, 2023: Pope Francis Allows Priests to Bless Same-Sex Couples - The New York Times: But the new rule made clear that a blessing of a same-sex couple was not …
Dec 18, 2023: cost-benefit Carolyn Dever, writing about the ransomware attack on the British Library: We’re past the days of card catalogs, alas: the modern library has long …
Dec 17, 2023: Twenty minutes early for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols and the house is already mostly full. We’re almost in the back row.
Dec 16, 2023: A battle between Sean Dyche’s current and former clubs should be called the Diet of Worms. (Niche, I know.) ⚽️
Dec 15, 2023: James Bennet: “My fellow editorial and commercial leaders were well aware of how the culture of the institution had changed. As delighted as they were …
Dec 15, 2023: Brewster Kahle: “Why should everyone care about this lawsuit? Because it is about preserving the integrity of our published record, where the great …
Dec 15, 2023: words, words, words Many of our arguments are fruitless because we don’t know the meaning of the words we use. And we don’t know the meaning of the words we use because …
Dec 15, 2023: Over at the Hog Blog, I write about why I don’t think there’s any such thing as self-censorship.
Dec 13, 2023: To the young blonde FexEx driver blasting D’Angelo’s Black Messiah from her truck: Respect. Total respect.
Dec 13, 2023: multiple social diseases 18 Warning Signs of a Deadly New Lifestyle - by Ted Gioia: — but they’re not all symptoms of the same disorder — or anyhow not in the same way. …
Dec 11, 2023: repair as scapegoat Matt Crawford: Superficially, litter and the rusting carcasses of salvaged cars are both an affront to the eye. But while litter exemplifies that lack …
Dec 11, 2023: Bill Bryson: Imagine a form of baseball in which the pitcher, after each delivery, collects the ball from the catcher and walks slowly with it out to …
Dec 11, 2023: An amazing new newsletter issue by @ablerism (Sara Hendren) – y’all need to get on this train!
Dec 11, 2023: art for humanity's sake Daniel Walden: Criticism of this kind is a misuse of learning to muddle discussion for the sake of scoring points rather than to clarify it for a …
Dec 11, 2023: Kevin Williamson, typically trenchant: “CLEAR has some fancy high-tech hoo-haw on the front end — biometric scanners and whatnot — but what it …
Dec 10, 2023: David Byrne: “I think the phrase that was used with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was ‘cultural imperialism.’ I thought, That’s not quite right. I …
Dec 9, 2023: Finished reading: The World of Odysseus by M. I. Finley. what an extraordinary book. I am filled with regret that I didn’t read it decades ago, …
Dec 9, 2023: Nap time.
Dec 9, 2023: Simple snapshot of a totally ordinary sight.
Dec 8, 2023: Chris Beha: “I sometimes think that the modern world’s true cultural divide is not between believers and unbelievers but between those who think life …
Dec 8, 2023: The Reason for the Season.
Dec 8, 2023: Just learned from my buddy Austin Kleon about Mishka Westell’s art.
Dec 8, 2023: An extraordinary story on how redwoods survive fire.
Dec 8, 2023: exam time! I often give my students take-home exams that ask them to explicate (give a close reading of) passages from books we are reading. They are asked to …
Dec 7, 2023: self-repair [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“600”]Michael Torevell, News of Great Joy, mixed media and digital …
Dec 6, 2023: Annie Soudain, Winter Glow, reduction lino print, 2017, appearing with this wonderful essay by Adam Nicolson.
Dec 6, 2023: My problem with “brokenism."
Dec 6, 2023: brokenism “Everything is Broken,” Alana Newhouse wrote in an essay that I see quoted all the time. But of course when you look into the essay and into other …
Dec 6, 2023: I’ve decided that the social media landscape is irredeemable, but this new project by my old internet friend Erin Kissane — Erin is an absolute …
Dec 6, 2023: Matthew Crawford on a broken tail light that cost $5600 to repair: On this particular luxury pickup truck, moisture in the tail light caused the …
Dec 5, 2023: Campus lookin’ real purty today.
Dec 5, 2023: Austin Kleon’s new post on reading is fantastic. I will have things to say about it when I can clear a little time. I think if I could only subscribe …
Dec 4, 2023: As some of my readers know, the theme of the new issue of Plough — repair — is right down my alley.
Dec 4, 2023: This collection of links by Michael Tsai raises the question: Do I actually own anything I have “bought” digitally? Books, movies, TV shows, games — …
Dec 4, 2023: Future Mann I don’t know how many people read my recent series of posts on Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers — but then, I don’t know how many people read any …
Dec 4, 2023: My case for bringing back the blog — though not the “blogosphere.”
Dec 4, 2023: bring back the blog Long long ago, in a galaxy far far away, when I was still on Twitter. I was misquoted there. I’m probably still being misquoted there, but I don’t …
Dec 4, 2023: Advent is the perfect season to begin Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. Just saying.
Dec 4, 2023: My friend Jessica Martin is a priest at Ely Cathedral, and lately they’ve been having freezing fogs. Here’s a snapshot from a recent …
Dec 4, 2023: I just posted an update for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.
Dec 1, 2023: a Beatly note One of the many provocative (or brilliant) (or crazy) assertions Ian MacDonald makes is his Revolution in the Head concerns the relationship between …
Nov 30, 2023: A worry about the future of blogging.
Nov 30, 2023: Venkatesh Rao: Despite its very different political-economic DNA, the blogosphere has become enshittified as clearly as Facebook, Google, or Amazon. …
Nov 30, 2023: David French: “I’d argue that the more politically engaged you are, the harder it is to avoid bespoke realities. The most politically engaged of …
Nov 30, 2023: I wrote about what strikes me as a very odd comment by Scott Alexander.
Nov 30, 2023: I wrote about what, until I can find a better term, I’m calling conceptual Marxism.
Nov 30, 2023: Scott Alexander suggesting the criteria that make someone an Effective Altruist: 1. Aim to donate some fixed and considered amount of your income …
Nov 30, 2023: works for me I find this interesting: John Gruber reports that more of his listeners on The Talk Show use Overcast than Apple Podcasts. I used to love Overcast, …
Nov 30, 2023: conceptual Marxism In most respects, the concerns of Marx & Engels are very different than those of today’s Left, but in certain other respects their work, …
Nov 29, 2023: A lovely collection of Christmas writings, edited by my colleague-of-many-years Lee Ryken.
Nov 29, 2023: Bob Dylan is playing geographically appropriate covers.
Nov 29, 2023: Jessica Grose: I’ve spent the past couple of weeks talking to teachers about their experiences with online grade books like Schoology and Infinite …
Nov 29, 2023: As a counterpart to my post this morning about musical demos, see Richard Gibson’s brief essay on notebooks and unfinished novels.
Nov 29, 2023: I wrote about why musical demos are so often better than the finished product. One of the most common effects of modern musical production is to make …
Nov 29, 2023: Nick Heer: “None of this made the web better for people. This formula of insubstantial content already reeks of something generated by a system rather …
Nov 29, 2023: sound and effects I recently listened to a 2020 BBC radio documentary on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. Very interesting in several respects, two of which I’ll …
Nov 28, 2023: the personal blog and essayism Brian Dillon: Essays, ancient or modern, can seem precious in their self-presentation, like things too well made ever to be handled. Touch them …
Nov 27, 2023: Wikipedia: “The tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered in the Valley of the Kings in 1922 by excavators led by the Egyptologist Howard Carter, more …
Nov 27, 2023: John Stuart Mill: So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight …
Nov 27, 2023: Neil Gaiman, as quoted by Cal Newport: “people are leaving [social media]. You know, Twitter is over, yeah Twitter is done, Twitter’s… you stick a …
Nov 27, 2023: If you don’t shut up I’m gonna give you such a
Nov 27, 2023: writing about the Beatles [I’m taking this one down — didn’t intend to make an enemy, but evidently that’s what I did. And it’s just a blog post after all, no loss to the …
Nov 26, 2023: The blur
Nov 25, 2023: Why I’m inclined to think that the chance of achieving any restraint on AGI development is nil.
Nov 25, 2023: A brief explanation of how, when I teach a class, I try to have a structure and a story.
Nov 25, 2023: two summative thoughts about AI One: There was until recently a battle for the soul of AGI research and development, a battle between the stewards and the exploiters. The stewards …
Nov 24, 2023: structure and story I regularly teach in the Great Texts program here in Baylor’s Honors College, which is based on the old University of Chicago model pioneered by – or …
Nov 24, 2023: Matthew Butterick: “If AI companies are allowed to market AI systems that are essentially black boxes, they could become the ultimate …
Nov 23, 2023: Post-feast mood
Nov 23, 2023: The one constant for us at Thanksgiving: butternut squash and leek soup. Anything else I can skip, but there would be violent protests if I didn’t …
Nov 23, 2023: UW-M Special Collections
Nov 23, 2023: WSJ: “So it turns out that of the two largest crypto exchanges, one was a fraud and the other was a money launderer. Whoever could have guessed? …
Nov 22, 2023: costs, continued Once you face the real human costs of your preferred policies in peace or war, you may then Warmly embrace them; Accept them with a shrug; Work to …
Nov 22, 2023: mood
Nov 22, 2023: source
Nov 22, 2023: “You have to brace yourself for the bozos.” — Werner Herzog
Nov 22, 2023: Doctor Who crossstitched
Nov 21, 2023: Now this is what I call a magazine cover.
Nov 21, 2023: Kinda weird to hear Julian Lage strumming, but this is a sweet tune.
Nov 21, 2023: West Texas haboob.
Nov 21, 2023: Good times and bad times for the humanities.
Nov 21, 2023: Jennifer A. Frey: When Zena Hitz explains the Catherine Project (a series of online and in-person seminars) or when Nathan Beacom describes a revival …
Nov 20, 2023: An update on motives.
Nov 20, 2023: an update on motives The other day I wrote: Freddie (like many people, it seems) is critical of the reasons Ayaan Hirsi Ali has cited for her conversion to Christianity. …
Nov 20, 2023: Paul Kingsnorth: “So: out with St George, I say, and in with one of the nation’s original native patrons (in early medieval England there were …
Nov 20, 2023: Great to see this tribute to Philip Johnson’s Chapel of St. Basil, a wonderful building. Note that this central quadrangle is a kind of …
Nov 18, 2023: second thoughts, worse thoughts? A week ago I explained that I had written and then decided not to publish a post on Israel and Gaza. At least one of my readers thought this was a …
Nov 17, 2023: In which I respond to Freddie about what religion does.
Nov 17, 2023: candles Freddie: Why do religions comfort? They comfort because the stories they tell involve divine beings who know everything and who can, often, save us …
Nov 17, 2023: I’ve almost completely given up on podcasts, but have become a heavy user of the BBC Sounds app. The 4-part BBC radio series on Seamus Heaney is worth …
Nov 17, 2023: Starting the day listening to my friend Sara Hendren (@ablerism) interviewed by Krista Tippett. So great. I never say “Everyone should …
Nov 17, 2023: I’m rarely envious, but okay, I’m envious.
Nov 16, 2023: David Stoll: “The call to decolonize anthropology sounds as distinctively American as the Statue of Liberty. If even anthropologists must …
Nov 15, 2023: A significant change in Siri dictation over the past few months: commas. Commas that I don’t ask for. Lots and lots of commas. This has made dictation …
Nov 15, 2023: I wrote about Adam Roberts’s excellent new novel.
Nov 15, 2023: Slanted and disenchanted The most delightful thing about Arthur C. Clarke’s famous comment that “any smoothly functioning technology gives the appearance of magic” is how …
Nov 15, 2023: I wrote about the importance, when thinking about politics, policy, and war, of learning what everything costs.
Nov 15, 2023: what everything costs As long as resources are finite, any political or social policy helps some people at the expense of others. Any serious thinker will admit this and …
Nov 15, 2023: Many years ago, when I was teaching at Wheaton College, someone put me on the mailing list for the Houston Catholic Worker newspaper. No idea who, or …
Nov 14, 2023: Oh great: “A new study suggests that explosive events in space have the potential to temporarily switch off the natural shield that protects us from …
Nov 14, 2023: Jon D. Schaff: “Perhaps the great neglected work of our time is Alan Jacobs’s The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis.” I’m …
Nov 14, 2023: Me, writing in 1996: In Sartre's political world there were only oppressors and oppressed: fascism stood for the former, communism for the latter. …
Nov 13, 2023: Everybody needs an inspirational quotation over their desk, and this is mine
Nov 13, 2023: Kevin Williamson comes to Waco to cover the Texas Nationalist Movement convention. “The Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM) has been making a …
Nov 13, 2023: My final post – for now anyway – on Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers. It’s been fun.
Nov 13, 2023: Mann's Joseph: 7 Last post in a series. Previous installments: Prelude One: the invention of God Two: the gods of the nations Three: Hermes and Thoth Four: …
Nov 12, 2023: NYT: What’s an example of when a publisher or someone else in the [publishing] business disagreed with you and they turned out to be right? Andrew …
Nov 12, 2023: Premier League players are acclimating themselves to the tyrannous reign of VAR: It’s become increasingly common for players who score to avoid …
Nov 12, 2023: Rowan Williams: I would venture to guess that the people we would least like to spend a long time with are those who have answers to every question …
Nov 11, 2023: Ian Frazier: “According to the best scientific data currently available, both the average and the mean temperatures of Hell have risen 3.8 degrees …
Nov 10, 2023: I wrote a post but didn’t publish it.
Nov 10, 2023: time well spent Today I spent a few hours I didn’t really have to spare writing a long post about Israel, Hamas, and Gaza. Why? Because I had to. It was …
Nov 10, 2023: Charlie Stross: “I’d like to talk about something that I personally find much more worrying: a political ideology common among Silicon Valley …
Nov 10, 2023: My sixth post on Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers is about triangulation.
Nov 10, 2023: AI is a Terrifying Purveyor of Bullshit. Next Up: Fake Science
Nov 10, 2023: Mann's Joseph: 6 Herodotus (II.42) informs his readers that “the name by which the Egyptians know Zeus is Amun.” Egyptian religion underwent constant change, and …
Nov 9, 2023: Dostoevsky’s Demons was being serialized in Russia at precisely the same time (1971-72) that George Eliot’s Middlemarch was being serialized in …
Nov 9, 2023: A new and accurate map of the World (1641)
Nov 9, 2023: “Tommy, you’re cheapening the value of your signature!"
Nov 9, 2023: signatures After Thomas Mann moved to Princeton in 1938, he resumed research on Joseph and His Brothers, and consequently checked out many books on Egypt from …
Nov 9, 2023: Chipi-chipi this morning. (My wife learned that word many years ago when visiting the Guatemalan highlands, where there’s a lot of chipi-chipi. …
Nov 8, 2023: A book on a barn. No, I don’t mean a book about a barn, I mean a book literally on a barn.
Nov 8, 2023: The last official lighthouse keeper in the United States is named Sally Snowman.
Nov 8, 2023: So far I have five posts on Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers: On Joseph and his ancestors On Joseph and the gods of the nations On Joseph …
Nov 8, 2023: Mann's Joseph: 5 One of the most fascinating, and to me surprising, elements of Joseph and His Brothers is the way Mann leans into the simplest of mythical themes: …
Nov 7, 2023: St. Pancras Station has the best Christmas tree evar
Nov 7, 2023: Josh Barro: Land acknowledgements are widely derided as farces and, generally, I agree that they are. When Microsoft sets aside time to open its …
Nov 7, 2023: A fantastic post by my buddy Austin Kleon on the artists Robert Irwin and David Hockney and the writer Lawrence Wechsler. The themes Austin notes here …
Nov 6, 2023: Edited: 66 minutes in, and I really don’t think Chelsea will score against 9 men. ⚽️
Nov 6, 2023: Cabel Sasser on the DAK catalog
Nov 6, 2023: On Joseph and Akhenaten.
Nov 6, 2023: Mann's Joseph: 4 This is Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who renamed himself Akhenaten. In every surviving representation of him he is immediately recognizable; no one else …
Nov 5, 2023: As a long-time Arsenal supporter, I am not happy with the club leadership’s behavior. ⚽️
Nov 5, 2023: time to shut up As an Arsenal supporter who believes that Arsenal did indeed get robbed on that Newcastle goal, I am not a fan of this statement. For several reasons: …
Nov 5, 2023: NYT: “The possibility of collision isn’t the only problem with cramming low Earth orbit past capacity. Starlink satellites are already hampering …
Nov 4, 2023: Mann's Joseph: 3 This difference we have identified between Jacob and Joseph is essential to the story that will unfold, for whether Joseph is a better or worse …
Nov 3, 2023: sigh
Nov 3, 2023: Paul Davids is a guitarist who, a while back, did a neat YouTube tutorial on Paul Simon’s “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover.” But …
Nov 3, 2023: A very large 1867 Map of the Country Twelve Miles Round London.
Nov 2, 2023: How Jeff Tweedy had his “come to Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid” moment. I don’t think I’m ever gonna like “Dancing …
Nov 2, 2023: beyond belief Last month I published a piece over at the Hog Blog on biblical and theological illiteracy among scholars — basically a summary of some recent work by …
Nov 2, 2023: A Generall Historie of Plantes should probably be a large book.
Nov 2, 2023: The “rewiring of childhood” and the parents who are enabling it — even when they know they really shouldn’t.
Nov 2, 2023: ignorance, vincible and invincible ‘Childhood has been rewired’: [Jonathan Haidt:] ‘TikTok and Twitter are incredibly dangerous for our democracy. I’d say they’re incompatible with the …
Nov 2, 2023: Gypsy Rose, an iconic lowrider.
Nov 1, 2023: Malcolm Gladwell thinks the disposable diaper is a “perfect innovation.” Maybe he should think again. Best essay about diapers I’ve …
Nov 1, 2023: Second post on Joseph and His Brothers.
Nov 1, 2023: Mann's Joseph: 2 Joseph, unlike his ancestors, delights in the gods of the gentes: he knows their names and attributes. He thinks about them, he plays in his mind with …
Oct 31, 2023: Robin Sloan pitches his forthcoming novel: “The year is 13777. There are dragons on the moon.”
Oct 31, 2023: My first substantive post about Thomas Mann’s great Joseph and His Brothers.
Oct 31, 2023: Mann's Joseph: 1 There’s a long Prelude to the tetralogy — called “Descent into Hell” — which I may discuss later on. After the Prelude we enter the first of the four …
Oct 29, 2023: RSS access is the only thing that makes reading Substack newsletters tolerable for me. If I had to go to their site, with its combination of the most …
Oct 29, 2023: I wrote a new post for my supporters at Buy Me a Coffee.
Oct 29, 2023: I wrote about Francis Spufford’s utterly wonderful new novel Cahokia Jazz.
Oct 29, 2023: greetings from Cahokia Among the novels written in the 21st century that I have read, my favorite is Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz. (I’m going to call the author “Francis” …
Oct 28, 2023: I’m a big fan of the rooftop lounge at the Austin Central Library.
Oct 27, 2023: My lens was fogging up when I took this one, but I sort of like the effect.
Oct 27, 2023: The smoker.
Oct 27, 2023: the smoker They came, as all extremists do In time, to a sort of grandeur … — Richard Wilbur, “The Undead” There’s a kind of patio in front of this hotel and a …
Oct 27, 2023: Why they don’t accept this word I can’t even imagine!
Oct 27, 2023: I’m beginning a series on Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers.
Oct 27, 2023: A remarkable visual reconstruction of Tenochtitlan.
Oct 27, 2023: Mann's Joseph: Prelude I recently read Thomas Mann’s tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers — one of the more extraordinary reading experiences of my recent years. I had started …
Oct 26, 2023: Was Gollum a philologist?
Oct 26, 2023: Smeagol, philologist I’m sure others have said this before — I doubt I have many thoughts about Tolkien that others have not had before me — but I am reflecting on this …
Oct 26, 2023: This person with so many open browser tabs – how monstrous! Here’s what I do: See something interesting online Save to Instapaper and …
Oct 26, 2023: Ezra Klein: “One reason I left Twitter long ago is that I noticed that it was a kind of machine for destroying trust. It binds you to the …
Oct 25, 2023: Tove Jansson
Oct 25, 2023: adjusting expectations One thing we’ve learned over the past few years is that lawyers who are good on social media and television aren’t necessarily good in the courtroom. …
Oct 25, 2023: Damon Krukowski: “Bandcamp may be a small fraction of the music industry as a whole – digital downloads currently account for only 3% of …
Oct 25, 2023: I wrote (several years ago, but just now posted) about the wayfaring mind.
Oct 25, 2023: the wayfaring mind What follows is a talk I gave some years ago at Smith College. It weaves together some common threads in my work, and draws on some previous published …
Oct 24, 2023: Rita Blanca National Grasslands in the Texas panhandle; photo by Sean Fitzgerald. Larger photo here.
Oct 24, 2023: George Saunders, Texan
Oct 24, 2023: Mithraeum of Santa Maria Capua Vetere in Caserta
Oct 24, 2023: BRB, I gotta take all these unused minutes to the
Oct 23, 2023: My old friend Noah Millman with a moving meditation on his own first name – and on “the crooked timber of humanity.”
Oct 23, 2023: In which I am ambivalent about Nicola Griffith’s warning to writers.
Oct 23, 2023: one cheer for "negative experience" Nicola Griffith: Once you have the reader’s empathy, though, you must keep it. You must persuade the reader to trust you enough to lower their guard, …
Oct 23, 2023: the nature of the transaction Ross Douthat addressing prospective donors to universities, the kind who keep giving to Harvard and Yale: If you want actual influence over American …
Oct 23, 2023: FWIW, one of my favorite things I’ve published in recent years is this reflection on the big Blake exhibition at the Tate Gallery.
Oct 22, 2023: The pumpkin artist
Oct 22, 2023: would it kill you to allow the occasional German word
Oct 20, 2023: I’ve made a case for reading the news less often.
Oct 20, 2023: periodicity This piece from the Dispatch (possibly paywalled) on how The New York Times misled its readers with an overly “Hamas-friendly” headline makes a valid …
Oct 20, 2023: I’m really worried about Bandcamp, which is a unique and probably irreplaceable service. At this point, there’s one thing we all ought to …
Oct 19, 2023: A fascinating account of the endlessly variable and thus confusing history of the word “Palestine.”
Oct 19, 2023: Anthony Lane on the science of happiness: Whether there is still a place for the steady intellectual grind is open to question. Readers and …
Oct 19, 2023: Clocks, cathedrals, and one of my favorite poems.
Oct 19, 2023: But even at night ... Tom Johnson: Clockmakers, flush with commissions, let their horological imaginations run wild. They mounted every last thing they could think of on …
Oct 19, 2023: Ida York Abelman, “Man and Machine”
Oct 19, 2023: Chantal Montellier
Oct 19, 2023: Ib Antoni Jensen
Oct 18, 2023: Available in May 2024.
Oct 18, 2023: I wrong a longish and complicatedish post on conceptual screens and diseases of the intellect.
Oct 18, 2023: diseases of the intellect Twenty years ago, I had an exceptionally intelligent student who was a passionate defender of and advocate for Saddam Hussein. She wanted me to …
Oct 17, 2023: Hi, we’d like to join your LinkedIn network
Oct 16, 2023: My old internet friend Erin Kissane on Meta in Myanmar: “My aim with this series is to give mostly-western makers and users of social technology …
Oct 16, 2023: Mark C. Taylor: I do not think human beings are the last stage in the evolutionary process. Whatever comes next will be neither simply organic nor …
Oct 16, 2023: My friend Tim Larsen: “Yes, I’m one of those people who had a Netflix DVD subscription right to the very end: 29 September 2023.”
Oct 16, 2023: I wrote about the imperative to repair things that are only mostly dead.
Oct 16, 2023: only mostly dead The other day I wrote about the absolute cataract of essays and articles these days proclaiming the death of something — something, anything, …
Oct 16, 2023: Paul Johnson, Dies Natalis
Oct 15, 2023: V&A
Oct 14, 2023: Shadows on the driveway
Oct 14, 2023: This eclipse is pretty weird.
Oct 13, 2023: Just texted a friend: “So much of my life with technology revolves around (a) realizing that what I had thought was a feature is a bug and (b) …
Oct 13, 2023: I wrote a kind of follow-up to my “Resistance in the Arts” essay, focusing mainly on the Beatles.
Oct 12, 2023: begin here The essay that I published earlier this year on “Resistance In the Arts” was largely inspired by my reading of one book, Ian MacDonald’s …
Oct 12, 2023: A newly discovered, and shockingly pristine, Tomb of Cerberus.
Oct 12, 2023: Charlie Warzel: “Musk has turned X into a deepfake version of Twitter—a facsimile of the once-useful social network, altered just enough so as …
Oct 12, 2023: Good to see Brad East’s review of Andrew Wilson’s excellent book on the making of the post-Christian West – a book I …
Oct 11, 2023: Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Prayer is not thinking. To the thinker, God is an object; to the man who prays, He is the subject. Awaking in the presence of …
Oct 11, 2023: This is a fascinating story, with a nice bonus element: the phrase “interpretive mowing.”
Oct 11, 2023: I commend to you all the wisdom of Sturgeon.
Oct 11, 2023: the wisdom of Sturgeon It seems that literary fiction is dead — it even has a gravestone. Capitalism? Also dead. Tradition and conservatism apparently achieved a …
Oct 11, 2023: Alexander Chee: “No one is likely to shame you for not having read Dracula, the way they do The Mill on the Floss or Middlemarch, though perhaps they …
Oct 11, 2023: I wrote about being a senior citizen who’s ready to own his introversion.
Oct 11, 2023: back to my books Pretty much all my life I have been fighting against my instinctive introversion, and now that I have turned 65, I’ve decided to stop fighting. I hope …
Oct 9, 2023: vehicles to devices Here is Ivan Illich, from Energy and Equity (1974), his book written in the midst of a global energy crisis that heightened everyone’s sense of our …
Oct 9, 2023: Taking the curve at high speed
Oct 7, 2023: First chiminea fire of the season!
Oct 7, 2023: My old friend Noah Millman has written a very interesting piece on Asteroid City – quite different from my own take, but not contradicting it.
Oct 7, 2023: This is what Angus looked like the day we brought him home. Today he’s one year old!
Oct 7, 2023: The goddess and the Madonna — a remarkable essay by Matt Milliner.
Oct 6, 2023: When I’m adding items to our shared Reminders lists, I try to be as informative as possible.
Oct 6, 2023: Great to see Jack Fisk getting some attention he has long deserved. “Genius” is not by any means too strong a word.
Oct 6, 2023: I wrote about biblical illiteracy among scholars, and why I think the role model for such scholars ought to be Bertie Wooster.
Oct 6, 2023: I wrote about the murder of Seamus Heaney’s cousin and the two poems he wrote about it.
Oct 6, 2023: the danger of eulogy In 1975 Seamus Heaney’s second cousin Colum McCartney — whom it seems he did not know personally — was murdered by members of the Glenanne Gang, …
Oct 5, 2023: As I keep saying: Arteta and Southgate between them are trying ensure that Saka’s career will be over by age 25. Grrrrrrr. ⚽️
Oct 5, 2023: Max Rushden: “Do VARs have to be referees? They are different skills. How much would those in charge of it, the referees’ body PGMOL, benefit …
Oct 5, 2023: Who is more at fault, the person who always chooses Reply All or the person who, by CCing rather than BCCing, made the Reply All possible?
Oct 4, 2023: From a 1962 Limited Editions Club printing of Around the World in Eighty Days.
Oct 4, 2023: NYT: “Most major U.S. cities now have at least three times as many security guards on the street as sworn police officers, even though guards …
Oct 4, 2023: Richard Gibson: “‘Why I Write’ is often handed to students as an encouragement to ponder their own motivations, becoming, in effect, …
Oct 4, 2023: The problem with this meme is its assumption that, for the people in question, there’s anything beyond Phase 1. But what if Phase 1 is the …
Oct 4, 2023: Addressing a letter in the days before standardized addresses could be difficult.
Oct 3, 2023: A complex book needs a complex annotation method: multiple highlighting colors, underlining, detailed notes on the endpapers (not shown). My ideal job …
Oct 3, 2023: Damon Krukowski: “Independent musicians can’t even talk about coordinated collective action against our corporate overlords - like organizing a …
Oct 3, 2023: I wrote about Jane Austen and parents.
Oct 3, 2023: Austen and parents One of the most notable traits of Jane Austen’s fiction is its gently ironical attitude towards many of its own readers. Consider Emma, for instance. …
Oct 2, 2023: Many pages read, many notes made, and … a thousand pages still to go. 😵💫
Oct 2, 2023: “There is a militant type of mind to which the hostilities involved in any human situation seem to be its most interesting or valuable aspect; …
Oct 2, 2023: I’m thinking about anarchism again.
Oct 2, 2023: a path forward It’s certainly true that power corrupts, but it’s more true that the corrupt are drawn to power, so ultimately it doesn’t matter whether power is …
Oct 2, 2023: I just came across a writer who says his role is to be a truth-teller. I’d feel better about that if I saw any indication that he had ever been …
Oct 1, 2023: Printers kinda suck, but printing is great.
Sep 30, 2023: Just a tiny little reminder, should you need one, that Prince Rogers Nelson was a One of One. “You know I wrote this while I was lookin’ in the …
Sep 30, 2023: PGMOL: “The goal by Luiz Diaz was disallowed for offside by the on-field team of match officials. This was a clear and obvious factual error and …
Sep 30, 2023: I wrote about an extremely poor NYT piece on the Data Colada / Francesca Gino kerfuffle.
Sep 30, 2023: I'm with "the bloggers" Noam Scheiber’s report on the controversies surrounding the work of Francesca Gino is … well, it’s terrible. Let me count (some of) the ways. Let’s …
Sep 29, 2023: W. H. Auden died fifty years ago today, and I’ve written a brief reflection, with many links.
Sep 29, 2023: Auden, fifty years later W. H. Auden died fifty years ago today. He is the single most important writer and thinker in my life, and has been ever since, in my very last class …
Sep 28, 2023: Michael John Goodman: For me (though I am sure others will disagree!), the artistic power of the Kelmscott Chaucer is in the harmonious balance that …
Sep 28, 2023: It took me a long time to find a WordPress theme that (with a few minor tweaks) made my big blog look the way I want it to look, but I finally did.
Sep 28, 2023: Had I known about this passage from Dorothy Day’s diary, it would have been really useful to me for The Year of Our Lord 1943 and Breaking Bread With …
Sep 28, 2023: Looks like there’s a gator on the Brazos, Ma.
Sep 28, 2023: This is magnificent: The Kelmscott Chaucer online.
Sep 28, 2023: Jason Bailey: A phrase like “streaming movie” or “theatrical release” or “documentary podcast” communicates what, where and why with far more …
Sep 27, 2023: We got new windows in our house today, modern double-glazed windows to relace the single-pane ones that were original to the house (built in 1956). …
Sep 27, 2023: Brad East on AI sermons is just outstanding: “Study and writing aren’t a mere means to an end—unfortunate but unavoidable. Both entail a crucial …
Sep 27, 2023: department of corrections danah boyd: “Over the last two years, I’ve been intentionally purchasing and reading books that are banned.” The problem here is that none, literally …
Sep 27, 2023: Wes Anderson: “If you work with people at different ages and you’re giving them a lot to do, you can see how it really is so much easier when …
Sep 26, 2023: Today Angus took his first selfie (with my son). We’re all so proud.
Sep 26, 2023: If you’re a Chicagoan, and probably only if you’re a Chicagoan, you’ll appreciate Anders Erickson’s video on Malört — a liqueur that John Hodgman …
Sep 26, 2023: A little slice of the typographical history of New York City
Sep 25, 2023: SO GLAD to see that Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz is out in the UK. I had the privilege of reading drafts, one chapter at a time, and even in that …
Sep 25, 2023: I posted a small piece of autobiography from a book I wrote 15 years ago.
Sep 25, 2023: What happens when you shoot a 50-year-old roll of film.
Sep 25, 2023: my testimony This is an except from my least-read book, a small treatise on narrative theology called Looking Before and After. Much of the book concerns the …
Sep 24, 2023: If I could make one rule change to American football, it would be: eliminate kicking (punts & field goals) to NBA basketball, it would be: …
Sep 24, 2023: This is gonna take a while. Currently reading: Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann 📚
Sep 24, 2023: Good to see this warning from Barney Ronay. A prediction: If Arteta doesn’t significantly reduce Saka’s workload, he’ll be finished as a top player by …
Sep 24, 2023: A report from Swedish schools: “As young children went back to school across Sweden last month, many of their teachers were putting a new emphasis on …
Sep 22, 2023: Jesus is “the lens in the dark box.”
Sep 22, 2023: Charlie Warzel: “Using Google once felt like magic, and now it’s more like rifling through junk mail, dodging scams and generic mailers.”
Sep 21, 2023: My iPhone: updated, but the new StandBy feature doesn’t work. My Apple Watch: won’t update, which is especially unfortunate because it has ceased to …
Sep 21, 2023: Legitimate WHOA: Archeologists discover a wooden structure that’s half a million years old.
Sep 21, 2023: Note to makers of Spelling Bee: INANITION, MONITION, and TITIVATION are all English words and ought to be on your list. Thank you for attending to …
Sep 20, 2023: I don’t understand how Eric Hoel can say that Substack isn’t a walled garden when large chunks of it are behind a paywall. That’s kinda the definition …
Sep 20, 2023: Freddie deBoer: “Sometimes I think the great American rite of passage is when you go from a youth full of Ritalin to an adulthood full of Xanax. All …
Sep 20, 2023: I wrote about Truffaut’s The Wild Child.
Sep 20, 2023: The Child of Nature and the Citizen Francois Truffaut’s The Wild Child is a truly remarkable movie that has never gotten the attention it deserves. And so I’m going to begin this post by …
Sep 19, 2023: Angus does love cleaning the faces of his family. Also any other faces.
Sep 19, 2023: Terry Halliday: “In 2008 or 2009, at an early stage of an extensive research program on criminal defense lawyers in China, I was asked a surprising …
Sep 19, 2023: The Urban Sketchers website is really cool. This drawing is by Ilaria Petrussa.
Sep 19, 2023: Here’s another one.
Sep 19, 2023: Eleanor Doughty’s urban plein air sketches are wonderful.
Sep 19, 2023: I had never heard of takkyu-bin but it sounds great. At least in Japan. Can’t imagine it working reliably in the U.S. or Europe.
Sep 18, 2023: I wrote 5600 words today so I decided to reward myself with the Queen of Cocktails.
Sep 18, 2023: a silent adventure Whenever people speak in L’Avventura I find their talk intrusive. I imagine a Phantom Edit of the movie that removes all the scenes in which people …
Sep 16, 2023: A small post on François Truffaut’s handwriting.
Sep 16, 2023: A letter from François Truffaut to Jean Renoir, telling the old master how much The Rules of the Game meant to him. Truffaut had lovely handwriting, I …
Sep 16, 2023: I wrote a post on being the best (kind of) teacher I can be.
Sep 16, 2023: gardening strategies I love this by John Holt, transcribed by my buddy Austin Kleon: You learn to teach by teaching. I never had any educational training, luckily. I say …
Sep 15, 2023: Mandy Brown: “Are you a writer or a talker? That is, when you need to think about something, do you generally reach for something to write with, …
Sep 15, 2023: Brunch!
Sep 15, 2023: Here’s a September update for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.
Sep 15, 2023: My career as a fabulist.
Sep 15, 2023: fabulism I was a fabulist as a child, and indeed, well into my adolescence. It was perhaps the signal trait of my character. I have a fairly elaborate …
Sep 14, 2023: Thirty years ago, one of the great achievements of Western culture appeared. And we have documentary evidence of its making. (Large version here.)
Sep 14, 2023: Ted Gioia: “Taylor Swift, you are the one person who can make this happen. I believe this is your destiny.”
Sep 14, 2023: This week I’m teaching Austen’s Mansfield Park and, honestly, I don’t know of any other novel I’d rather teach. A few are equally interesting in the …
Sep 14, 2023: This seems miraculous: I actually need to wear waterproof shoes today.
Sep 14, 2023: Here’s a shortish essay from me on the literature classroom as a place for “the deepening and sharpening of emotional powers.”
Sep 13, 2023: A brief post about Auden and Ischia.
Sep 13, 2023: A fascinating little fact in this article on declining interest in studying Mandarin: On Duolingo, Korean is more popular than Mandarin.
Sep 13, 2023: Auden on Ischia I’m in the final stages of editing my critical edition of Auden’s The Shield of Achilles, and I’m finding myself thinking often about Ischia, the …
Sep 12, 2023: I often think about this Brent Simmons post on “Mac-assed Mac apps” — especially when I’m using apps that fit that description. Case …
Sep 12, 2023: Sometimes I actually have to do scholarship.
Sep 11, 2023: The palatial Granada Theatre in Chicago, from a book about America’s lost architectural treasures. Full-size photo here.
Sep 11, 2023: I wrote up a kind of summation of my posts on the desperate-times-require-desperate-measures Christians.
Sep 11, 2023: repetition and summation When you blog for a long time, as I have done, you inevitably repeat yourself. Sometimes this is conscious and intentional, as you work to develop …
Sep 10, 2023: It’s a great blessing to me that my parish church does Choral Evensong on Sunday evenings, and tonight our women’s choir sang a glorious …
Sep 9, 2023: Bertrand Russell, in his Autobiography: “As an undergraduate I was persuaded that the dons were a wholly unnecessary part of the university. I …
Sep 9, 2023: Not everyone is interested in the Oxyrhynchus papyri — IYKYK — but for those who are, this article by Candida Moss is an excellent summary of recent …
Sep 9, 2023: When Paul Schrader was asked to do a Criterion Collection Top 10, he gave a great response: “As a longtime cinephile I’m familiar with …
Sep 8, 2023: I haven’t really used Twitter for several years, but now I’m deleting my account.
Sep 8, 2023: x nay I’ve deactivated my X account and won’t be coming back. I’ve despised Twitter for several years, but I have been willing to keep the account active in …
Sep 8, 2023: Joseph Horowitz: “So unnoticed are the American arts that a major American historian, Jill Lepore, can produce a wonderfully readable 900-page …
Sep 8, 2023: Here I wonder: When do competent writers turn to AI for help in writing?
Sep 7, 2023: We see so many tributes when great artists die, but we should do a better job of praising them while they’re still around. So let’s …
Sep 7, 2023: Ronald W. Dworkin: “AI without the ballast of intuition represents the tyranny of pure analysis.”
Sep 7, 2023: mechanical writing Cory Doctorow: A university professor friend of mine recently confessed that everyone in their department now outsources their letter-of-reference …
Sep 7, 2023: Oh boy am I excited about what Robin Sloan is up to.
Sep 6, 2023: Mary Harrington on Burning Man is, well, 🔥: “All this gift-economy joy is enabled by participation in the regular cut-throat capitalist one. And …
Sep 6, 2023: Dr. Drang: “[Judge Scott] McAfee is asking [DA Fani] Willis to make these estimates for a single trial, 19 separate trials, and every …
Sep 6, 2023: A lovely song and a beautiful video of the live performance: Peter Broderick & Ensemble 0 - Give It to the Sky
Sep 6, 2023: some thoughts on habitus For quite some time I haven’t been posting here about focal practices, but I’ve been thinking about them. I’m going to share some of those thoughts …
Sep 6, 2023: Victor Mair: “As the creatively piquant online nicknames [for Xi Jinping] of yesteryear—including such classics as Winnie the Pooh, Steamed Bun …
Sep 5, 2023: Heads up: I don’t believe my micro.blog weekly digest is working, and I don’t know whether it will work in the future. I don’t want …
Sep 5, 2023: I love seeing this tribute to the translator Edith Grossman, whose version of Don Quixote is by miles the best, but she gets too much credit here for …
Sep 5, 2023: The decline of fireflies is to me one of the most depressing events of our time. When I was a child in Alabama, I spent countless summer evenings …
Sep 4, 2023: I wrote a post about how much Max Ophuls loved dancing. (Also, as a side note, in The Earrings of Madame de … that’s Vittoria de Sica, …
Sep 4, 2023: Ophuls' dancers Above you’ll find a justly famous scene from one of the greatest of all films, The Earrings of Madame de… — and it’s also a perfect illustration of …
Sep 4, 2023: Viva Italia!
Sep 2, 2023: Tag of the Week on my big blog: Tolkien.
Sep 2, 2023: J R R Tolkien died fifty years ago today. A while back I wrote an imaginary conversation between him and W H Auden, who died later the same month.
Aug 31, 2023: Ted Gioia: It’s true, we are living in the 21st century — at least according to the calendar. But in terms of our creative culture, we’re still in …
Aug 31, 2023: Joseph Epstein: “With Meatless Tuesday in mind, I wonder if the country wouldn’t do well to declare Trumpless Thursday. This would entail an …
Aug 31, 2023: Some of you may think I post too many photos of Angus, but believe me, if I go a couple of days without posting one, I hear from people who miss him.
Aug 31, 2023: an exercise in branding I decided to take a flyer on this — and am kinda wishing I didn’t. It’s fun to get a newspaper in the mail, and I like the look; the parodies of the …
Aug 30, 2023: An old man’s simple prayer, from Bruce Cockburn.
Aug 30, 2023: This piece on blurbs reminds me of the greatest blurb ever written – almost surely the greatest blurb that ever will be written. Pablo Neruda …
Aug 30, 2023: Movies as old books, by Matt Stevens.
Aug 29, 2023: Kieran McCarthy: “Some of the biggest companies on earth — including Meta and Microsoft — take aggressive, litigious approaches to prohibiting …
Aug 29, 2023: The Economist’s interactive page on the effects of the London Blitz is a fabulous piece of information design and visual storytelling – …
Aug 29, 2023: Cameras are cool, and make better photos than phones, but Om Malik is right: their software is really bad, and that may well kill them off.
Aug 29, 2023: This morning I read yet another denunciation of today’s college students, complete with assertions about how much better students were in Ye …
Aug 29, 2023: bureaucratic sustainability Matt Crawford: The example of China’s explosive growth in the last thirty years showed that capitalism can “work” without the political liberalism …
Aug 28, 2023: A word to the wise from Matt Birchler: “Things on the internet can be forever, but you can’t assume someone else will keep them going, …
Aug 28, 2023: Berenice Abbott, New York City, 1935
Aug 28, 2023: I wrote about the sad story of The Band.
Aug 28, 2023: once brothers The fascinating and deeply sad documentary Once Were Brothers concerns the career of The Band — primarily as seen through the eyes of Robbie …
Aug 26, 2023: Cal Newport: “The Internet has become the ultimate narrowcasting vehicle: everyone from UFO buffs to New York Yankee fans has a Website (or dozen) to …
Aug 25, 2023: Adolphe Appian, from a wonderful exhibition of drawings at the Met.
Aug 25, 2023: One paragraph from me, at the Hog Blog: This is the way your mind ends.
Aug 25, 2023: I love this: Fred Sanders finds an often-cited obviously-bogus quotation by St. Augustine and shows that … um … it’s actually not …
Aug 25, 2023: The Scriptural BCP The Scriptural Book of Common Prayer is a wonderful resource that does its job a little too well. That job is to lead readers to the biblical sources …
Aug 25, 2023: I had been drafting a piece on the old prison work song “Ain’t No More Cane on the Brazos” — and then I discovered that someone …
Aug 25, 2023: Fleet Street, December 2019
Aug 24, 2023: I love the genre of “alternative movie posters,” and Michael Krasnopolski’s are great.
Aug 23, 2023: Ted Gioia: “The only areas where AI is flourishing are shamming, spamming & scamming.”
Aug 23, 2023: I wrote a denunciation of apps.
Aug 23, 2023: against apps, for wander lines In 1980, a curiously polymathic Jesuit priest named Michel de Certeau (1925–86) published a provocative book called, in English translation, The …
Aug 23, 2023: The Cat Concerto (1947). David Thomson: “The great American film about the highest artistic dreams leading you to madness.”
Aug 23, 2023: I wrote an essay (now unpaywalled!) on the kinds of resistance that create the possibility of great art — and also the kinds of resistance that impede …
Aug 22, 2023: Finally got Angus to sit (for an instant) for his portrait.
Aug 22, 2023: Tom Eastman: “I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text …
Aug 22, 2023: Robert McCabe’s photographs of Greece
Aug 22, 2023: This case for sabbaticals is quite good – and also a reminder to me that, while I’ve had a number of sabbaticals, I have never had a rest. …
Aug 22, 2023: Well, I’m back.
Aug 21, 2023: St. John Chrysostom: “Has [Eutropius] inflicted great wrongs and insults on you? I will not deny it. Yet this is the season not for judgment but …
Aug 21, 2023: Re: my Asteroid City post: I’m gonna write a long essay one day about how Terrence Malick and Anderson are matter and anti-matter: two Texas …
Aug 21, 2023: Abandoned reading: Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews by Jonathan Cott. Dylan, the greatest singer-songwriter ever, is a terrible interviewee because …
Aug 21, 2023: A Visit to Balzac’s House: “In addition to its garden, the Maison de Balzac boasts a large lawn of natural grass, unevenly tufted. No one seemed …
Aug 21, 2023: I wrote a pretty long post about Asteroid City — but it has so many spoilers that you probably shouldn’t read it unless (a) you’ve seen …
Aug 21, 2023: what the bird said Many spoilers follow. Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City begins with a framing story: We seem to be watching a television show from the 1950s, and in that …
Aug 20, 2023: Oh, is that what he embodies?
Aug 20, 2023: Cory Doctorow: “ In the Big Tech internet, it’s freedom for them, openness for us. ‘Openness’ – transparency, reusability and extensibility – is …
Aug 20, 2023: Last night I dreamed that Leo Messi lived near me and out of neighborliness did some work in my yard. I determined to pay him, but he said he didn’t …
Aug 19, 2023: Chris Arnade: “I’ve also become more convinced that while all suburban bleh might look the same, might seem boring and banal, there is a lot going on …
Aug 18, 2023: I wrote a post about the wonderful artist Tirzah Garwood.
Aug 18, 2023: Tirzah Garwood Regular readers of this will know of my fondness for the art of Eric Ravilious. Ravilious was married to another highly gifted artist, Tirzah Garwood, …
Aug 17, 2023: In my early years I was utterly devoted to Ace Doubles, which bound two short novels back-to-back — you’d read one, then flip it over and read …
Aug 17, 2023: I have an essay, “Looking Westward,” in the new issue of Raritan. (Paywalled; sorry about that.) It concerns water, Wallace Stegner, the …
Aug 17, 2023: Love the style of this sign-maker, but I’m not quite sure how Teri would take it if I posted this sign in the house.
Aug 17, 2023: I’m going to be reserving my Old Big Blog for longer essays and things that relate to some of my most common themes and topics over the years. …
Aug 16, 2023: A Very Happy Dog.
Aug 16, 2023: Finished reading: Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns. Reading about the music of the Sixties can be fascinating, but reading about all the $$$ …
Aug 16, 2023: James Hill: “Eve Arnold, the wonderful Magnum photographer, used to recount a story about walking with Henri Cartier-Bresson from the Magnum office in …
Aug 16, 2023: I’m having fun listening to The Science of Sound, from 1958. The liner notes are fun also.
Aug 16, 2023: I’m hitting the pause button on my weekly newsletter, but that just means that I’ll be using micro.blog as my newsletter, thanks to the cool subscribe …
Aug 15, 2023: From a fascinating interview about Georgia O’Keefe’s choice of materials, especially papers.
Aug 15, 2023: There Babylon is builded in the Waste, founded in Human desolation
Aug 14, 2023: Hilary Hahn plays the Sibelius Violin Concerto — an astonishing performance 🎵
Aug 14, 2023: Cabel Sasser: “Some designers are amazing at imagining things, but not as amazing at imagining them surrounded by the universe.”
Aug 14, 2023: More posters here.
Aug 14, 2023: Justine Bateman: “Don’t forget, AI isn’t doing this to us. People using AI to eliminate jobs, that’s who’s doing this in every sector. People …
Aug 14, 2023: I have a page for my students explaining why I won’t use ed-tech software like Canvas and Turnitin, and I just updated it to add this: Chatbots …
Aug 14, 2023: Dylan's conversion Conversion to folk music, that is. From the 1978 Playboy interview: PLAYBOY: Just to stay on the track, what first turned you on to folk singing? You …
Aug 13, 2023: “It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you, if you yourself don’t dig you.” — Bob Dylan, 1965
Aug 13, 2023: Here’s an essay (PDF) about my adolescent years that I published 25 years ago. Not how I would write it today, but I need to respect my past …
Aug 11, 2023: We got Angus a new e-collar and he finds it much more comfortable, though he sort of looks like he’s wearing an Easter bonnet.
Aug 11, 2023: outreach and generativity Over at the Daily Nous, Alex Guerrero, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers, argues that the traditional three branches of academic work — teaching, …
Aug 10, 2023: Nick Cave: ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It …
Aug 10, 2023: Oughta count.
Aug 10, 2023: Nick Carr: Well-turned sentences had a decent run, but after TikTok they’ve become depreciating assets. Traditional word-based culture — and, sure, …
Aug 9, 2023: R.I.P. Robbie I’ve written before about the waves of death that are coming for some of our cultural giants, but this is a big one. Robbie Robertson’s influence has …
Aug 9, 2023: Every morning I wake up with a song in my head — a different song each day, and it could be anything I’ve ever heard, including songs I haven’t …
Aug 9, 2023: For those who are concerned — and I thank you! — Angus has undergone an adjustment of his reproductive capacities.
Aug 9, 2023: “Just a couple of days ago I was so happy!”
Aug 9, 2023: Worst day EVAR
Aug 9, 2023: possible new tagline for this blog
Aug 9, 2023: nurturing Wendell Berry, from The Unsettling of America: Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, …
Aug 8, 2023: Justin Smith-Ruiu: The risk of attempting such a thing is that one will appear unserious and will accordingly begin to lose the professional and …
Aug 8, 2023: Reading more poetry? That’s a great thing. Reading a book of poetry a day? That’s a 100% guarantee that you will get almost nothing from your reading. …
Aug 7, 2023: Prologue to an Anti-Therapeutic, Anti-Affirmation Movement: As a leftist, my core political assumption is that we are all responsible for each …
Aug 7, 2023: Encyclopedia Babylonica 6: Ellul Ellul’s The Meaning of the City is a book in six chapters. Though he doesn’t say so explicitly, the subjects of the six chapters are, in effect: …
Aug 5, 2023: Thanks to kind assistance, I now have a books read page. “Currently reading” is featured on the About page. At some point I might combine …
Aug 5, 2023: Not a feature request, just a wish: I’d love to be able to show my reading lists (Currently Reading, Finished Reading) as pages on my blog, …
Aug 5, 2023: two quotations on corporations Charlie Stross (2010): Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the …
Aug 5, 2023: a blessed 89th birthday to the Mad Farmer I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts, and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing, and reaped, as I knew, by luck and …
Aug 5, 2023: Matt Crawford: Today’s Leviathan conceives its subjects as fragile beings afloat in a field of incipient traumas. Such a governing entity will look …
Aug 4, 2023: We have a new Spanish place here in town — Segovia Wine Bar — and it’s really good. This is the tortilla de patatas I had yesterday.
Aug 3, 2023: Storyboard for the dream sequence of Hitchcock’s Spellbound, in the Harry Ransom Center.
Aug 3, 2023: The Economist: Research on solar geoengineering has been side-lined, and its possible role in climate policy has gone largely undiscussed. All those …
Aug 2, 2023: Encyclopedia Babylonica 5: a brief hiatus I just realized that I need to pause this series for a while. Why? Because I’m reading Ellul’s The Meaning of the City and am finding it so …
Aug 2, 2023: And just as I’m posting these I see this from Craig Mod — serendipity!
Aug 2, 2023: One more.
Aug 2, 2023: And as I look through those photos, I find myself thinking: the Lake District — not unattractive!
Aug 2, 2023: My beloved! Taken on a trail overlooking Grasmere, 2011. Today we celebrate our 43rd wedding anniversary.
Aug 2, 2023: Yuval Levin: This is a fact we often miss about our Constitution. It works by setting competing interests and powers against each other, which …
Aug 2, 2023: Greenwich Observatory, by Eric Ravilious (1937)
Aug 1, 2023: ignore strenuously Robin Sloan: I want to under score it here: where the internet is concerned, we are in a crisis of discovery. Anyone with inter esting new work to …
Aug 1, 2023: Encyclopedia Babylonica 4: System The Bob Marley and the Wailers album Survival (1979) is one of Marley's most politically militant recordings. The imagery of the album cover, which …
Jul 31, 2023: A common experience for me: Someone tweets (or “X-es”?) about something I’ve written, maybe with a quotation, maybe with a summary; Someone else …
Jul 31, 2023: on technologies and trust Recently, Baylor’s excellent Provost, Nancy Brickhouse, wrote to faculty with a twofold message. The first part: How do we help our students work …
Jul 29, 2023: Here at Laity, I’m staying in a place called Lanier Apartment, which features interesting art by an interesting person.
Jul 29, 2023: Becca Rothfeld on “Sanctimony Literature”: Sanctimony literature errs, then, not because it ventures into moral territory, but because it displays no …
Jul 28, 2023: Ted Gioia: Boredom is built into the [Spotify] platform, because they lose money if you get too excited about music — you’re like the person at the …
Jul 28, 2023: I wrote to my BMAC supporters explaining (a) why I’m writing about Babylon and (b) why I’m doing it on my blog. For some kinds of thinking …
Jul 28, 2023: Encyclopedia Babylonica 3: Daniel As we have seen, D. W. Griffith gives us an image of an effete and dissolute Babylonian kingdom, destroyed by a combination of its own lassitude and …
Jul 27, 2023: Peter Gray: Other research has assessed relationships between the amount of time children have to direct their own activities and psychological …
Jul 27, 2023: abnegation A brilliant, angry, nearly-despairing essay by Justin Smith-Ruiu, one that grows out of a reading of William Gaddis's brilliant, angry, …
Jul 26, 2023: Encyclopedia Babylonica 2: Belshazzar Let’s talk about about the OG Babylon — not as it was, perhaps, but as we have envisioned it. For instance, let’s consider D. W. Griffith’s …
Jul 25, 2023: There’s the Streisand Effect and now, I say, there’s the Elon Effect.
Jul 25, 2023: excerpt from my Sent folder: favor A friend wrote in response to my addition, at the end of my most recent newsletter, a quote from Robert Farrar Capon. My friend asked about how I see …
Jul 24, 2023: Back in my happy place. (Unfiltered, unadjusted image — the sky really does look like a painted stage set right now.)
Jul 24, 2023: I have only listened to two or three audiobooks in my life, but some recent struggles with eyestrain convinced me to try again. I just listened to …
Jul 24, 2023: Encyclopedia Babylonica 1: welcome Welcome to Babylon! I know you’re not all happy about it, but here’s something I’ve learned from experience: You’ll get used to it. Indeed, some of …
Jul 22, 2023: There are people whose intelligence I admire, whose decency I respect, but with whom I feel ill at ease: I censor my remarks to avoid being …
Jul 22, 2023: I saw Oppenheimer. It was okay. The Close Encounters installation in the hallway of the Alamo Drafthouse was cool.
Jul 22, 2023: So the wonderful Dulwich Picture Gallery is beginning a renovation that will add a … big shoebox to their garden. Will architects ever get tired of …
Jul 21, 2023: I’ll be off to Austin this afternoon to see Oppenheimer, and while I know the Alamo Drafthouse will present it beautifully, I do dream a little about …
Jul 21, 2023: Unanswered Questions Over the past few months I’ve occasionally made oblique references to a book I’m working on. That book is tentatively titled Unanswered Questions: The …
Jul 19, 2023: This isn’t quite right: Auden would never have been named Poet Laureate even if his comic/pornographic poem about a blow job hadn’t existed. He was …
Jul 19, 2023: a little ride in the time machine Here’s something people often don't notice about Sunset Boulevard: Norma Desmond isn’t old. Several elements in the film are designed to make us think …
Jul 18, 2023: My old friend Noah Millman, who writes and directs: I love actors, and I want to see them continue to get jobs. More so, I love actors as actors, and …
Jul 18, 2023: David Thomson: “The most daring novelty in Citizen Kane was not its deep-focus photography, overlapping sound, or flashback structure (though those …
Jul 17, 2023: Mateus Asato plays “Blessed Assurance.”
Jul 17, 2023: New issue of the newsletter out today. I do enjoy making my newsletter.
Jul 17, 2023: How Google Reader died: At its peak, Reader had just north of 30 million users, many of them using it every day. That’s a big number — by almost any …
Jul 16, 2023: David Samuels: The reasons for the Nobel Committee’s snub [of Milan Kundera], which occurred at the height of the award’s geopolitical if not literary …
Jul 16, 2023: Taken a few days ago, when we still had clouds
Jul 15, 2023: same
Jul 15, 2023: Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em
Jul 14, 2023: my new title I ain’t going nowhere. I’m still here at Baylor’s Honors College, and I’ll continue, mostly, to do what I’ve been doing. But I have a new job title, …
Jul 13, 2023: personal organization Here’s my one piece of advice about personal organization: (calendars, tasks, planning, tracking): Think hard about your needs, pick a system, and …
Jul 12, 2023: Chisos Mountains, Big Bend National Park. I’ve been longing to get back there but right now it’s too dang hot.
Jul 12, 2023: starting from zero The young architects and artists who came to the Bauhaus to live and study and learn from the Silver Prince talked about “starting from zero.” One …
Jul 11, 2023: academic bullshit My estimable friend Dan Cohen: Maybe AI tools can help to combat their unethical counterparts? SciScore seeks to improve the reliability of scientific …
Jul 10, 2023: Megan McArdle, with a thought-provoking argument: “Once Musk readmitted the views and people they abhor, the left began abandoning the common …
Jul 10, 2023: This interview with A. G. Sulzberger on the Dispatch Podcast is fascinating. So informative about both the challenges and the opportunities for …
Jul 10, 2023: Forthcoming in Comment
Jul 10, 2023: Little, Big My friend Adam Roberts wrote recently about John Crowley’s Little, Big, which is (a) one of my very favorite novels and (b) a book I have never …
Jul 9, 2023: I tried AudioPen today. If you want to have your own words converted into the bland, characterless, impersonal, inhuman anti-style of bureaucracies …
Jul 9, 2023: “Now Angus, be still, your breeder wants a nice portrait of you.”
Jul 8, 2023: What I want: a universal de-notification button. “Click here if you do not wish to receive any notifications, from anyone, for the rest of your …
Jul 8, 2023: How to read weather forecasts in central Texas: If the chance of precipitation is 100% — there’s a 66% chance of rain 75% — there’s a 33% …
Jul 7, 2023: Oh, also here’s my handy guide for people who think they might want to read Pynchon but find the prospect intimidating.
Jul 7, 2023: My ginormous essay on Thomas Pynchon, theologian has escaped its paywall and is available for all to read on the open web. I hope it will generate …
Jul 7, 2023: Me: (excitedly explains something I read about Churchill and FDR) My son: You know, Dad, I think it’s a law of nature that every American man, at some …
Jul 7, 2023: more on SCOTUS and university admissions Just a few random thoughts about the Harvard opinion. (On this blog I tend to avoid opining on current events, but I am endlessly fascinated by the …
Jul 5, 2023: If she would only look at me the way she looks at Angus….
Jul 5, 2023: forums David Pierce: As far as how humans connect to one another, what’s next appears to be group chats and private messaging and forums, returning back to …
Jul 4, 2023: Baldur Bjarnason: The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con
Jul 4, 2023: This is the second time recently that I’ve found an old lo-res photo on my Mac that caught my interest. This from Shenandoah National Park in …
Jul 4, 2023: The degenerate monarchists at The Rest Is History podcast have done something extraordinary: they’ve brought out my hidden patriotism.
Jul 4, 2023: patriotic effusion for Independence Day I have always, I feel, been somewhat deficient in patriotism — I just don’t have the instinct for it, somehow — but listening to the recent Rest Is …
Jul 4, 2023: George Orwell, review of Mein Kampf (1940): Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly …
Jul 3, 2023: Would I like to ride on a 1938 London Underground train? Yes I would.
Jul 3, 2023: The actress Theodosia Goodman became a silent-movie femme fatale after she adopted the name Theda Bara — a name which, TIL, is an anagram for Death …
Jun 30, 2023: reading SCOTUS Some facts: Very few Americans even know what the Supreme Court does; fewer still care. Not all those who care know. Among those who care, 99% — …
Jun 30, 2023: Thomas Pynchon, America's Theologian Today is the pub day for the longest essay I’ve ever published: “The Far Invisible: Thomas Pynchon as America’s Theologian.” (It’s paywalled, but of …
Jun 29, 2023: My beloved reporting from her family’s place in Alabama.
Jun 29, 2023: The best thing you are likely to read about the Supreme Court affirmative action decision — or rather the response to it — is Freddie’s take. Two …
Jun 29, 2023: the system I’m going to begin by quoting a very long passage from Bleak House, one involving a suitor in the court of Chancery, generally known as “the man from …
Jun 28, 2023: Counterman implications Arguing with Supreme Court opinions, as one does — in this case Counterman v. Colorado. Now, let me be quick to say that the comment I am making above …
Jun 27, 2023: more on Korematsu The other day I mentioned some famous Supreme Court cases that were influenced by public opinion. I had forgotten that a few years ago I wrote a post, …
Jun 27, 2023: That’s the Canadian River in the Texas Panhandle. The lovely photo is by Sean Fitzgerald from this story. The theme of this issue of Texas Highways is …
Jun 27, 2023: Still Life with Sheltie
Jun 27, 2023: banal utopias JC Niala: cultivating on allotment sites has always been so much more than ‘growing your own’. As Crouch and Ward put it, ‘The allotment is a …
Jun 26, 2023: public opinion People keep talking about the Supreme Court being “out of step with public opinion.” You know when the Supreme Court was totally in step with public …
Jun 26, 2023: Currently reading: Essays by George Orwell 📚
Jun 26, 2023: Finished reading: Bleak House by Charles Dickens 📚
Jun 26, 2023: Anne Snyder, the editor of Comment, is doing some really important things: she’s not just publishing essays on social problems and possibilities, …
Jun 26, 2023: Last year I explained why I think Jacques Ellul’s book on Christian anarchism is really bad; and I hinted at a different way of thinking about …
Jun 26, 2023: In which I defend Esther Summerson, the much-maligned protagonist of Dickens’s Bleak House.
Jun 26, 2023: Newsletter!
Jun 26, 2023: in defense of Esther Summerson Esther Summerson, the protagonist of Dickens’s Bleak House – insofar as that outrageously ambitious and wide-ranging novel can be said to have a …
Jun 25, 2023: Every winter I think this oleander is dead and every summer it comes back.
Jun 25, 2023: Cities, appendix: Sin City On the thirty-first floor your gold plated door Won’t keep out the Lord’s burning rain
Jun 24, 2023: Jessica Winter: In retrospect, it seems clear that “Inside Out” was when Pixar’s Silicon Valley brain trust began to peel off from the universe and …
Jun 24, 2023: A new report for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters – in which I ask for suggestions of books to blog through.
Jun 24, 2023: Cities 10: last things Book XXI of the City of God is about Hell, and as a result isn’t very interesting. Now, you might reply that Dante certainly made Hell interesting — …
Jun 23, 2023: not for me My buddy Austin Kleon and I have often discussed the point he makes in this post: the value of responding to a book (or a movie, or TV show, or …
Jun 23, 2023: Currently reading: Bleak House by Charles Dickens 📚
Jun 23, 2023: Finished reading: Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin 📚
Jun 22, 2023: Currently reading: Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin 📚
Jun 22, 2023: Cities 9a: the City of God coming down One brief comment about Book XX: in XX.17 Augustine comments on Revelation 21:2-5: And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of …
Jun 21, 2023: Finished reading: Farewell the Trumpets by James/Jan Morris. An extraordinary narrative history — I got to the end of this third volume and was …
Jun 21, 2023: Augustinian blogging: Cities 9: ends and means
Jun 21, 2023: Cities 9: ends and means One of the most distinctive elements of Augustine’s method in the City of God looks like this: Now I wish to explore Z, but I cannot explore Z until I …
Jun 20, 2023: Currently reading: Farewell the Trumpets by James Morris 📚
Jun 20, 2023: Finished reading: Pax Britannica:The Climax of an Empire by James Morris 📚
Jun 19, 2023: Angus was timid and quiet when we brought him home six months ago; now he owns the place.
Jun 19, 2023: In many minds Juneteenth is associated with the great Ralph Ellison, which means that this is a good day for me once more to beat the drum for …
Jun 19, 2023: Augustinian blogging has resumed with Cities 8: parallels.
Jun 19, 2023: New issue of the newsletter featuring Mozart, Lucie Rie, and catfish & spaghetti.
Jun 19, 2023: Cities 8: parallels In Book XVIII of The City of God, Augustine writes a kind of parallel history of the two cities, drawing on the best sources available to him at the …
Jun 18, 2023: Mo' myrtles
Jun 18, 2023: Currently reading: Pax Britannica:The Climax of an Empire by James/Jan Morris 📚
Jun 18, 2023: Well, where I come from it’s definitely a word.
Jun 17, 2023: Finished reading: Heaven’s Command by James/Jan Morris 📚
Jun 17, 2023: Canna lilies grow like crazy in our garden, but I never quite get used to them.
Jun 17, 2023: TIL that John Le Carré said that he would refuse the Nobel Prize if it were offered to him, which makes me realize that I have shamefully neglected to …
Jun 17, 2023: Mark Helprin, many years ago: Tending a fire enforces a sense of patience and tranquility. In that way it is like sailing a boat. You’re engaged by …
Jun 16, 2023: A memory out of nowhere: In Rome for the first time, riding the Metro and seeing across from me a nodding-off municipal employee, with a shoulder …
Jun 16, 2023: The crêpe/crepe/crape myrtles around here are at their peak.
Jun 15, 2023: Robert Caro on working with Robert Gottlieb: In all the hours of working on The Power Broker, Bob never said one nice thing to me — never a single …
Jun 15, 2023: As a person who spends a lot of time in Austin, loves Austin, hates Austin traffic, and can’t afford to live in Austin, I was absolutely fascinated by …
Jun 15, 2023: “From tragedy it is seldom but a step to memorabilia.” — Larry McMurtry in Waco, 1993
Jun 15, 2023: I’m not a collector of anything, but this auction of Larry McMurtry memorabilia had some pretty interesting stuff.
Jun 14, 2023: Currently reading: Pax Britannica by James (Jan) Morris. This Folio Society edition is one of my treasures. 📚
Jun 14, 2023: David Brooks: “If autonomy-based liberals believe that society works best when it opens up individual options, gifts-based liberals believe that …
Jun 14, 2023: I have mixed feelings about the bokeh of iPhone “Portrait” shots. It’s often effective, I guess, but seems unnatural – it …
Jun 14, 2023: Douthat bringing some essential Dark Energy to the question of what matters most about Orange Man as a Presidential candidate
Jun 14, 2023: absolutizing (slight return) Jon Askonas has responded to my earlier post, and his response deserves a fuller counter-response than I can give it right now. These are matters …
Jun 13, 2023: I will begin to consider the possibilities of the iPad as a work device when I can set a default app for opening text files.
Jun 13, 2023: Making Asteroid City
Jun 13, 2023: “Not in word list.” Grrrrr.
Jun 13, 2023: Marc Andreessen wrote a terrible essay and I annotated it.
Jun 12, 2023: Finished reading: Mozart by Jan Swafford. An extraordinary life, an extraordinary book. 📚
Jun 12, 2023: The second Goat Rodeo record is fine, but the first one is absolutely sublime, and I’m re-listening. A while back I wrote a post about my favorite …
Jun 12, 2023: Charlie Warzel: “I reminded myself to chill out, stop being such a doomer, and move on. But about 18 hours later, I woke up to images of the East …
Jun 12, 2023: I wrote about people who make apocalyptic or absolutist claims that … I just don’t understand.
Jun 12, 2023: absolutizing and abstraction, conservation and piety Some years ago I wrote a post on what I called “the absolutizing of fright”: I have the same questions about the notorious “Flight 93 Election” …
Jun 11, 2023: Leah Libresco Sargeant: At Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, administrators were even caught turning to ChatGPT to write a condolence …
Jun 11, 2023: Charlie Stross on A.I. hype: “The real promise here is that corporations will be able to replace many of their flawed, expensive, slow, human …
Jun 10, 2023: Currently reading: Mozart by Jan Swafford 📚
Jun 10, 2023: He’s become a big boy.
Jun 10, 2023: Forthcoming: The Shield of Achilles I will be returning soon to my posts on Augustine's City of God, but maybe not for another week or so, because I need to devote my full attention to …
Jun 9, 2023: Pro tip: If anyone is more concerned about something than you are, just say that they’re “hand-wringing” and “clutching their …
Jun 9, 2023: ESPN is now a gambling-promotion network that finds sports useful.
Jun 9, 2023: Watching Reddit imitate Elon’s Twitter reinforces an important point: People who want a topic-based online discussion platform already had one …
Jun 9, 2023: Angus was waiting for me to get home from my journey, and don’t tell me or my family that he wasn’t.
Jun 9, 2023: Iowa
Jun 7, 2023: I like Nick Carr’s description of the Vision Pro as a “face tiara for elite beings of a hypothetical nature.”
Jun 6, 2023: Very excited about this forthcoming book from Deb Chachra. All the hidden places in the built environment!
Jun 6, 2023: Cities 7: a digression on reading I’ve heard from a number of people, via email, about this series, and almost all of the responses have been negative. This has surprised me. Most of …
Jun 5, 2023: This photo of Mykha (from the Chicago Sun-Times) really captures her spirit.
Jun 5, 2023: I’m back in my old stomping grounds of Wheaton, Illinois today, and I just learned that one of most memorable people I’ve ever met, Mykha Trinh, died …
Jun 5, 2023: To me, the Vision Pro doesn’t look like something to use, it looks like something to be sentenced to - by an especially cruel judge.
Jun 5, 2023: Cities 6: causes In a previous post I wrote, “The Pax Romana is not a telos, it’s merely an event among other events, subject to varying interpretations and to the …
Jun 4, 2023: Kansas. I was listening to the Eno/Eno/Lanois Apollo music as I drove through this landscape and it was strangely fitting.
Jun 4, 2023: Sunrise over Waco this morning
Jun 4, 2023: Ken Myers on music and silence.
Jun 3, 2023: Eric Adler: “It seems a stereotypically American, and perhaps more broadly imperialist, conceit to believe that we can create cosmopolitan monoglots. …
Jun 3, 2023: The poet Tennyson had many siblings. Once a visitor to the family home found a boy lying on a rug in front of the fireplace. The boy got up and …
Jun 3, 2023: Let me tell you something, friends: This is something special. You’ll have to wait a while to read it, but trust me, you’ll want to.
Jun 2, 2023: The American National Biography is not as consistently good, but there are some fine entries there too. 📚
Jun 2, 2023: Currently reading: Lots of biographies from the Dictionary of National Biography. I love these: Detailed enough to be informative, but readable in one …
Jun 2, 2023: Cities 5: a digression on longtermism Not closely related to my main argument, but just a brief note: Longtermism is the version of effective altruism that wants us to think about our …
Jun 1, 2023: In an interview Andy Summers once said “If you’re using alternate tunings, you just don’t know enough chords.” Yeah, but Andy can do things like this …
Jun 1, 2023: My friend Rick Gibson found this in an old issue of the Bell System Technical Journal.
Jun 1, 2023: Ezra Klein: “Jonathan Frankle, the chief scientist at MosaicML and a computer scientist at Harvard, described … the ‘boring apocalypse’ scenario for …
Jun 1, 2023: Cities 3b: City and Church My friend Brad East wrote with a partial dissent to something I say in this post: When you say the City of God precedes the church, it seems to me …
May 31, 2023: Bought this copy in the summer of 1980, for my first semester of grad school. I think it’s gonna hold together for the current reading….
May 31, 2023: Cities 3a: political theology I got an email from a friend regarding this post: “What do you mean ‘Augustine isn’t interested in political theology or ecclesiology’???” Hey, that’s …
May 31, 2023: Cities 4: Secondary Epic My previous post discussed the way Augustine sets up his City of God as antithetical to the Aeneid. Auden’s witty poem “Secondary Epic” may be seen as …
May 30, 2023: A terrific first-hand report/memoir by James Conaway on the rise and fall of Rajneeshpuram, Oregon. It’s such a bizarre story. Wikipedia gives more of …
May 30, 2023: Annotating Augustine’s City of God 📚 and listening to Dilla’s Donuts ♫. As one does.
May 30, 2023: Brian Phillips: “Talking about ‘prestige TV’ rather than good TV became a way to take the thorny question of aesthetic value out of …
May 30, 2023: Currently reading: City of God by Augustine of Hippo. Should’ve added this a week ago. 📚
May 29, 2023: Finished reading: Ursula K. Le Guin: The Complete Orsinia by Ursula K. Le Guin. Not Le Guin at her best; I think I’ll do an audio post soon. 📚
May 29, 2023: Crime scene snapshot
May 29, 2023: There’s a general sense among athletes that, as Sloane Stephens says here, racial abuse is getting worse. What I find especially strange about …
May 29, 2023: Cities 3: hypothesis Here’s the hypothesis I’m working with now: The problem with every theology of culture is that “culture” isn’t a biblical concept — isn’t clearly …
May 29, 2023: It’s newsletter day, and I’ve posted my second entry on the City of God.
May 29, 2023: This is good from Matt Yglesias: All political sides are vulnerable to misinformation.
May 29, 2023: Cities 2: archetype and antithesis The City of God, which, as we saw in a previous post, claims to be an account of the two cities, the City of God and the City of Man, is a work in …
May 28, 2023: Emily Wilson: “In Epictetus’ version of Stoicism, the self is always the focus, even for the most enlightened philosopher. The wise Stoic never gives …
May 27, 2023: Caught in mid-zoom.
May 27, 2023: That first half from Dortmund was shocking, not because they were bad but because they didn’t try. Didn’t even run back to defend. …
May 27, 2023: Ross Douthat: “But for all its influence, social media is still downstream of other institutions — universities, newspapers, television channels, …
May 26, 2023: Currently reading: The Complete Orsinia by Ursula K. Le Guin 📚
May 26, 2023: I’m starting to write about Augustine’s City of God, with help from (of all people) China Miéville.
May 26, 2023: The City and the City Should you happen to want to think about Augustine’s City of God (hereafter CD for Civitate Dei) in sociological terms – which is certainly not the …
May 25, 2023: Finished reading: The City & the City by China Miéville 📚
May 25, 2023: excerpt from my Sent folder: the day of reckoning About fifteen years ago I started moving away from the standard research essay assignment. In my Literary Theory classes I assigned dialogues; in …
May 25, 2023: Of all the tributes to Tim Keller I’ve seen, the one that resonates most strongly for me is this from Russell Moore.
May 25, 2023: I'm no Mr. Miyagi My friend Richard Gibson: Emerging adults need to see, as one of my colleagues put it, “the benefits of the struggle” in their own lives as well as …
May 25, 2023: Currently reading: The City & the City by China Miéville 📚
May 25, 2023: Finished reading: Mao II by Don DeLillo. Conceptually fascinating but not wholly successful as a novel. 📚
May 24, 2023: Currently reading: Mao II by Don DeLillo 📚
May 23, 2023: Phil Christman: “A certain man went down from Athens to Atlanta, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and …
May 22, 2023: Michael Luo in the New Yorker: In June, 2020, Keller announced that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. One of his final projects, …
May 22, 2023: Clive Thompson: “The problem is that while we moderns desperately need exposure to nature, it sure doesn’t need exposure to us.”
May 22, 2023: Oh cool: Journals having to suspend accepting submissions because they’re being overwhelmed by pieces written by LLM bots.
May 21, 2023: Abraham M. Nussbaum: “We have all become accustomed to the gun violence plaguing our congregate spaces. Comforting each other after another shooting …
May 21, 2023: Taken in 2004 with what was even then a cheap digital camera on a trail on Mount Seymour, above Vancouver. Might’ve been an interesting shot …
May 21, 2023: “Robot roll call!”
May 20, 2023: Finished reading: The Spirit of Early Christian Thought by Robert Louis Wilken. I should probably re-read this magnificent book every year. 📚
May 20, 2023: Rory Smith: “Manchester City has the air of a machine, both in the way the project has been constructed and the manner in which the team plays. It …
May 19, 2023: Here I creep a little closer to what a genuine theology of culture might look like.
May 19, 2023: Matteo Wong: But language-only models such as the original ChatGPT are now giving way to machines that can also process images, audio, and even …
May 19, 2023: Very pleased that my buddy Sara Hendren ( @ablerism ) has joined us here on micro.blog. Check out all the cool stuff she does.
May 19, 2023: I managed to write a few halting words about Tim Keller.
May 19, 2023: Tim Keller Well, this is a day for tears. I don’t know Tim intimately, but he is a friend, and his presence in my life has been a great gift. When I look back …
May 19, 2023: the culture question revisited I want to get back to the question of what theologians talk about when they talk about culture. Earlier entries: This essay by Brad East This …
May 19, 2023: Charlie Warzel: “When I look at a future dominated by generative-AI tools that are embedded in every nook and cranny of industry, I fear the …
May 18, 2023: Glad to see that my buddy Austin Kleon enjoyed my recitation!
May 18, 2023: Finished reading: The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand. A brilliant book — I should have read it years ago. 📚
May 17, 2023: Hit up some used-record stores in Austin today – all these from the 3-dollar bins!
May 17, 2023: Gary Saul Morson: “The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, published 50 years ago, was much more than a detailed account …
May 17, 2023: I read and annotated that new Tara Isabella Burton essay on postrationalism in Silicon Valley.
May 16, 2023: From William James’s speech at the dedication of a memorial in Boston to a soldier named Robert Gould Shaw (1887): The deadliest enemies of nations …
May 16, 2023: Currently reading: The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand 📚
May 16, 2023: Finished reading: Richard Hofstadter: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays 1956-1965 …
May 16, 2023: Tara Isabella Burton’s essay about post-rationalism in Silicon Valley is a vital read.
May 16, 2023: Elon Musk, self-proclaimed “free-speech absolutist,” is happily cooperating with the Turkish government’s silencing of its political …
May 15, 2023: I wrote about the Three Paths of micro.blog.
May 15, 2023: the three paths of micro.blog I’ve written here from time to time about the excellent service known as micro.blog — and I still want to commend it to those of you who have had …
May 15, 2023: Currently listening: Ry Cooder - Jazz. One of my all-time favorites. ♫
May 15, 2023: Jenny Odell: “I felt like I needed to protect my time more so that I could do things that I wanted, and it obscured the fact that what I wanted …
May 15, 2023: Augustine, De Trinitate I.iii.5: “Dear reader, whenever you are certain about something as I am go forward with me; whenever you hesitate, seek …
May 14, 2023: People say Arsenal couldn’t handle the intensity of a title challenge, and while there’s probably some truth to that, I think the far …
May 14, 2023: A Walk in the Rain A special lo-fi casual episode, never to be repeated. Transcript
May 13, 2023: From the remarkable collection of photographs at the Courtauld Institute.
May 13, 2023: Currently reading: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays 1956-1965 by Richard Hofstadter …
May 13, 2023: Finished reading: Libra by Don DeLillo. A truly brilliant, and disturbing, novel. 📚
May 12, 2023: Finished reading: Heidegger in Ruins by Richard Wolin. A devastating indictment. I wrote a review here. 📚
May 12, 2023: Book Review: Heidegger in Ruins Richard Wolin’s Heidegger in Ruins is a compelling synthesis of what scholars have learned about Heidegger over the past decade – and also an account …
May 12, 2023: My working environment
May 12, 2023: Currently reading: Heidegger in Ruins by Richard Wolin 📚
May 11, 2023: Study of a Kingfisher, with dominant Reference to Colour, by John Ruskin
May 11, 2023: Currently reading: Libra by Don DeLillo 📚
May 10, 2023: Some guy wrote a whole Substack post about why books aren’t worth reading. TL;DR, dude. Why do people write hundreds of words when their idea fits in …
May 10, 2023: Brian Eno: “This is why the idea of surrender is so interesting to me, because surrendering is what we are most frightened of doing. Everything is …
May 10, 2023: Albert Borgmann – perhaps the most important philosopher of technology in our time – has died. Perhaps this is a good opportunity for a …
May 10, 2023: Erik Hoel: “So if someone regularly talks about IQs significantly above 140 like these were actual measurable and reliable numbers that have a …
May 10, 2023: Scott Alexander: If you could really plug an AI’s intellectual knowledge into its motivational system, and get it to be motivated by doing things …
May 9, 2023: Spending some time with Ol’ Blue Eyes 🎵
May 9, 2023: WSJ: “In one study, Dr. Strayer and colleagues compared two groups of people strolling an arboretum. One group chatted on their phones. The …
May 8, 2023: Currently reading: Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson 📚
May 8, 2023: locating intellectuals In his great book The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, Robert Wilken writes: In an age in which thinkers of all kinds, even poets, are creatures of …
May 7, 2023: Irony The day I discovered an important concept. Transcript
May 6, 2023: without principle ‘The Godfather of AI’ Quits Google and Warns of Danger Ahead: Dr. Hinton said that when people used to ask him how he could work on technology that …
May 5, 2023: same
May 5, 2023: The list of musical cues in Malick’s Song to Song is hilarious and wonderful.
May 5, 2023: cosplaying Kingship In a much-celebrated essay on King Lear, Stephen Greenblatt writes about theatrical costumes: During the Reformation Catholic clerical garments – the …
May 5, 2023: Matt Crawford: We do a lot of clerical labor to register ourselves with entities that have figured out ways to intervene in matters that were once …
May 4, 2023: Christine Emba: This story idealized detachment, “liberation” from mutual care, ensuring that relationships never came before career goals. It looked …
May 4, 2023: Why millennial men are turning to the Book of Common Prayer. Very cool! And if they’d like to know more about the book’s history, I can …
May 4, 2023: Tim Keller: “If the Church aims at loving service to one’s neighbor while clearly speaking the truth, it will grow again and may have cultural …
May 3, 2023: Re: those two recent links: TV and movie writers fear that their employers want to outsource writing to AI; meanwhile, other writers seem to hate …
May 3, 2023: I eagerly co-sign this from Freddie: “So why write if you hate writing? … But you could do literally anything else, if you dislike the …
May 3, 2023: Tim Carmody: “A writer in 2023 is disproportionately likely to be working on a script for a giant company that treats their output as a …
May 3, 2023: Emerging
May 3, 2023: Baldur Bjarnason: “Believing the myth of Artificial General Intelligence makes you incapable of understanding what language models today are and …
May 2, 2023: Currently listening 🎵
May 2, 2023: Richard Gibson: “Current debates about writing machines are not as fresh as they seem. As the footnotes of scientific papers quietly admit, much …
May 2, 2023: Currently reading: The Spirit of Early Christian Thought by Robert Louis Wilken. Another re-read. Very excited to return to this one. 📚
May 2, 2023: I want to move to the desert just to escape the leaf blowers.
May 2, 2023: Finished reading: Clockwork, Or, All Wound Up by Philip Pullman. A perfect little fable, ideal for children of all ages. 📚
May 1, 2023: Mary Harrington: “We need to re-imagine marriage as the enabling condition for radical solidarity between the sexes, and as the smallest …
Apr 30, 2023: I (a) announced that I was shutting down my Buy Me A Coffee page, (b) heard from some readers telling me not to do that, (c) announced that I …
Apr 30, 2023: Klopp pulling a hammy while (a) celebrating the winning goal and (b) shouting at the fourth official is one of the great moments of this of any other …
Apr 30, 2023: Finished reading: Raymond Chandler: the Library of America Edition by Raymond Chandler. Most of these I hadn’t read in decades … I’m having a …
Apr 29, 2023: I did not write about Tolkien, but I wrote about the return of the King.
Apr 29, 2023: the Return of the King I just finished teaching Susanna Clarke’s marvelous Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and probably my favorite scene in that book comes in the third …
Apr 29, 2023: I wrote a while back about the ways that Silicon Valley is structurally sociopathic, but there’s another profession of which the same is true: …
Apr 28, 2023: My family tell me they love my veggie soup, but what they really get excited about? The accompanying parmesan toasts.
Apr 28, 2023: Freddie deBoer: “We have a prevalent concept of the ‘practical college major’ in our society, but that concept is vague, not …
Apr 28, 2023: Elle Griffin: In 2020, “only 11 books sold more than 500,000 copies — which is paltry when you consider that the 10 best-performing Netflix …
Apr 28, 2023: Greg Afinogenov: Kropotkin’s understanding and appreciation of societies then regarded as primitive, from Africa to the Arctic, forms a striking …
Apr 27, 2023: “There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder.” — Philip Marlowe, in Raymond …
Apr 27, 2023: Currently listening: Oren Ambarchi, Shebang ♫
Apr 27, 2023: I’m rewatching and re-evaluating Kurosawa.
Apr 27, 2023: a revaluation Here is the great Takashi Shimura as Kambei Shimada, the leader of The Seven Samurai (1954): A man to be reckoned with. A calm but unyielding and …
Apr 26, 2023: Really excited for this work-in-progress by Samuel Arbesman called The Magic of Code.
Apr 25, 2023: Currently reading: Raymond Chandler: the Library of America Edition by Raymond Chandler 📚
Apr 25, 2023: Finished reading: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. A masterpiece. 📚
Apr 25, 2023: New evidence of Rosalind Franklin’s role: “as an equal member of a quartet who solved the double helix, one half of the team that …
Apr 24, 2023: [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“830”] Early chapter outline of True Grit using Portis’s original character …
Apr 24, 2023: Oklahoma and Muswell Hill Here I’ve joined together two posts that I wrote a decade or so ago at The American Conservative (which has memory-holed most if not all I wrote …
Apr 24, 2023: Last night when proofreading my newsletter, I saw that I had misnamed the founder of the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra. (Instead of Benjamin, I wrote …
Apr 24, 2023: Is our society’s Overton window unresizeable?
Apr 24, 2023: This week I did a one-topic newsletter, on Scott Joplin. I rarely do these – they don’t feel like a great fit for the medium – but …
Apr 24, 2023: an unresizeable window Does any society ever grow more tolerant? That is: Does acceptance of a position or a group hitherto untolerated ever come without the rejection of …
Apr 24, 2023: Finished reading: Looking for the Good War by Elizabeth D. Samet. This one was disappointing: too predictable and pedestrian. 📚
Apr 23, 2023: Currently reading/listening: Glenn Gould - The Goldberg Variations - The Complete Unreleased Recording Sessions June 1955. An extraordinary …
Apr 23, 2023: Currently reading: Looking for the Good War by Elizabeth D. Samet 📚
Apr 23, 2023: Another Sherman Alexie comment: “Self-censorship among writers is a real and serious problem in this era. To believe otherwise either means you live …
Apr 23, 2023: Sherman Alexie’s comment that “the right wing are censorship vikings and the left wing are censorship ninjas” is accurate and …
Apr 22, 2023: Finished reading: Reinventing Bach by Paul Elie. What an extraordinary book — so glad I decided to revisit it a decade after I first read it. My head …
Apr 21, 2023: I get why you need to chew it, but why do I have to hold it?
Apr 21, 2023: Getting closer….
Apr 20, 2023: Ezra Klein: “Do we want a world filled with A. I. systems that are designed to seem human in their interactions with human beings? Because make no …
Apr 20, 2023: Dr. Bill Gardner: “MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying) is inexpensive, completely effective, and easily delivered. If we do not resist it, the …
Apr 20, 2023: “The internet does not recognize the state of Montana, Wheeler explained."
Apr 19, 2023: Spotify Gives 49 Different Names to the Same Song: “The biggest problem on the web today is that the dominant platforms have shifted from …
Apr 19, 2023: Here I argue that our Christianity-and-culture conversations are often fruitless because we don’t have a clear, shared understanding of what we mean …
Apr 19, 2023: Christianity and ... ? This essay by Brad East is very smart, and takes the Christianity-and-culture conversation usefully beyond H. Richard Niebuhr’s categories. But …
Apr 19, 2023: Rory Smith is correct: many of soccer’s problems have easy fixes. Limit the use of VAR, quit pretending you can discern when someone is 3mm …
Apr 19, 2023: Angus likes to show me his kills.
Apr 18, 2023: Didn’t really need another reason to avoid flying, but, sure, let’s have one more.
Apr 18, 2023: “Mr Bergman, I’m ready for my close-up!”
Apr 17, 2023: Apple weather: 100% chance of rain tonight. Carrot (using Accuweather): 0% chance of rain tonight.
Apr 17, 2023: Currently reading: Reinventing Bach by Paul Elie. Read it and loved it when it came out a decade ago, time to return to it. 📚
Apr 17, 2023: Finished reading: Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard. It seems wrong somehow to say that this was merely good, but … it moves quickly, and I think …
Apr 17, 2023: I rarely offer advice, but once I gave two items of writing advice, and another time I gave two items of productivity advice. I’ll now add one …
Apr 17, 2023: Currently reading: Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard 📚
Apr 17, 2023: Irina Dumitrescu on the body’s memories, and the comparative ghostliness of digital experience: “I find it hard to articulate what this …
Apr 16, 2023: Something about to happen here.
Apr 15, 2023: What @dave says about Mastodon has been my experience also. I look through Mastodon posts and think “Oh, right, these folks liked …
Apr 14, 2023: Finished reading: Reporting World War II: The 75th Anniversary Edition: A Library of America Boxed Set. I wrote about the experience here. 📚
Apr 14, 2023: Reporting World War II This is the two-volume Library of America anthology of World War II journalism — reports sent back from the field, or written on the home front, …
Apr 14, 2023: Ross Douthat: “Can a movement for social justice be credible and capable if it’s intertwined with plutocracy and seems to originate and thrive …
Apr 14, 2023: Currently listening: Clouds, by Adam Baldych, Vincent Courtois, & Rogier Telderman ♫
Apr 14, 2023: Just a reminder: if a site has an RSS feed and you have an RSS reader, then nobody’s algorithms affect what you see and when you see it. Nobody …
Apr 14, 2023: How to read weather forecasts (data from any source) in central Texas: If your app says 100% chance of rain, the actual chance is 65% 80% chance of …
Apr 13, 2023: “I see you’re trying to read!”
Apr 13, 2023: Re: this essay on scholars writing papers meant only to game the academic-metrics system: Sounds like a job for a chatbot! I sort of look forward to …
Apr 13, 2023: unstacked Over the last few days I have received several emails from Substack telling me that I have new subscribers. Wait … what? I don’t have a newsletter, …
Apr 13, 2023: Ted Gioia: “There’s an ominous recurring theme here: The very technologies we use to determine what’s trustworthy are the ones most under …
Apr 12, 2023: By Jon Haidt et al., a fascinating overview of studies indicating what young people think about the effects of social media.
Apr 12, 2023: I wrote this morning about Tertullian, the early church, and the “spoils of victory”; I think this converges with a piece by Jeff Reimer, …
Apr 12, 2023: Via my friend Sara Hendren, further evidence that while the big American universities despise the humanities, elsewhere they thrive.
Apr 12, 2023: the spoils of victory In his Apologeticus — written almost certainly in Carthage around 197 AD — Tertullian writes about the persecution suffered by Christians throughout …
Apr 11, 2023: Giving your money to Harvard is like giving your money to Warren Buffett.
Apr 11, 2023: me against technopoly
Apr 11, 2023: Currently reading: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Revisiting in preparation for class. Still can’t easily believe that I get …
Apr 10, 2023: Listening to Gustavo Dudamel, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra - Brahms: Symphony No. 4 ♫
Apr 10, 2023: Finished reading: Charles Ives by Jan Swafford. A superb biography of one of the most peculiar composers: an ordinary man in almost every respect who …
Apr 9, 2023: Gregory Nazianzus: “Yesterday I was crucified with Christ, today I am glorified with him; yesterday I died with him, today I am made alive with him; …
Apr 9, 2023: Currently watching/listening: Netherlands Bach Society, Easter Oratorio ♫
Apr 8, 2023: Our little boy is growing up.
Apr 7, 2023: Currently listening: Arvo Pärt, Passio. A worthy companion and counterpart to Bach. ♫
Apr 7, 2023: I follow several Twitter accounts via Feedbin, & often click through to twitter.com. Twitter cuts off Feedbin’s access to force people like …
Apr 7, 2023: Currently listening: Bach, St. Matthew Passion ♫
Apr 7, 2023: I wrote about Le Guin and Tolkien in what is also a Good Friday meditation.
Apr 7, 2023: beyond daylight ethics In a 1975 essay called “The Child and the Shadow,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote: In many fantasy tales of the 19th and 20th centuries the tension between …
Apr 6, 2023: Took me about two days of using a Mac with a Touch Bar to realize that I would go insane if I didn’t install Bar None.
Apr 6, 2023: Tim Larsen on Philip Jenkins’s new book on Psalm 91: “Sometimes called ‘the Protection Psalm’ because of its blanket …
Apr 6, 2023: Robin Sloan: “I have wanted to greeble something for a very, very long time. Maybe for my entire conscious life. I regret that it took me this …
Apr 5, 2023: Anne Trubek: “I no longer feel a need to prove anything through my choice of book to read. I often barely even remember them a day or two later, …
Apr 5, 2023: Listening to All Melody - Nils Frahm ♫
Apr 5, 2023: One common problem with the computational photography of smartphones: it gets overwhelmed by bright colors. (If you’re in point-and-shoot mode …
Apr 5, 2023: Heterodox Academy: “If scientific institutions continue to openly and preferentially support the progressive wing of the Democratic party’s …
Apr 5, 2023: My essay on Oliver Sacks and a “humanism of the abyss” is unpaywalled. I don’t know whether this one is any good, but it’s …
Apr 5, 2023: Me: the Oppenheimer Principle revisited.
Apr 5, 2023: the Oppenheimer Principle revisited Eight years ago, I wrote about a dominant and pernicious ideology that features two components: Component one: that we are living in a administrative …
Apr 4, 2023: Molly White: “I … don’t think that a company that creates harmful technology should be excused simply because they’re bad at it.”
Apr 4, 2023: Damon Krukowski: “Two years ago this month, I disconnected my recording studio from the internet entirely. This wasn’t an analog rebellion – I …
Apr 3, 2023: “Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a …
Apr 3, 2023: As my son says, Angus is like Michael Jordan: he never takes a play off. Relax for a moment and he will exploit your weakness. Leave a pocket on your …
Apr 3, 2023: Currently reading: Charles Ives: A Life with Music by Jan Swafford 📚
Apr 3, 2023: Finished reading: Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues by Albert Murray. I read this over a period of months, [ausing to listen to the …
Apr 2, 2023: adjustments As many of my readers will know, I am continually fiddling around with my online presence, to such a degree that I try my own patience. The one …
Apr 2, 2023: Listening to Thelonious Monk - Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 1 ♫
Apr 1, 2023: Listening to Complete Mozart Piano Trios ♫
Apr 1, 2023: Bernard of Clairvaux: “It is not necessary for you to cross the seas, nor to pierce the clouds, nor to climb mountains to meet your God. It is not a …
Apr 1, 2023: Teens on screens: Life online for children and young adults revealed - Ofcom: This year also saw the rise of ‘split-screening’. Split-screen social …
Mar 31, 2023: Finished reading: The Earthsea Quartet by Ursula K. Le Guin. What a joy to revisit these glorious books. 📚
Mar 31, 2023: Freddie deBoer: This is a very basic point, but I find that it’s consistently under-discussed: to close achievement gaps like the racial achievement …
Mar 31, 2023: Our new baby dogwood is looking good.
Mar 31, 2023: my proposed law “Any online platform and/or application that delivers content to users may deliver only content explicitly requested by said users.” That’s it. No …
Mar 30, 2023: libraries vs. publishers Dan Cohen: Libraries have dramatically increased their spending on e-books but still cannot come close to meeting demand, which unsurprisingly rose …
Mar 30, 2023: beseball revisited Five years ago I wrote about giving up on baseball — after a lifetime of fandom. Should the new pitch clock bring me back? I’m not sure it will. A …
Mar 29, 2023: Finished reading: Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly by Joshua Rivkin. Rivkin is very clear up front that this is not a straightforward …
Mar 29, 2023: learning from Hume Last week I gave you David Hume’s Guide to Social Media; today I give you David Hume’s Guide to Today’s Politics. He’s a very useful guy, Mr. Hume.
Mar 29, 2023: Technoteachers Lorna Finlayson · Diary: Everyone Hates Marking: Students want – or think they want – more and faster feedback. So tutors write more and more, faster …
Mar 29, 2023: The Decline of Liberal Arts and Humanities - WSJ: The liberal arts are dead. The number of students majoring in liberal arts has fallen precipitously …
Mar 28, 2023: Daring Fireball: “When you sign up, Wavelength asks for your phone number. That’s just your identifier. You’re not going to get any phone calls, …
Mar 28, 2023: Forthcoming from my friend and colleague Philip Jenkins. A kind of intro or overview here. I’m excited that this is coming.
Mar 28, 2023: Currently reading: Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly by Joshua Rivkin 📚
Mar 28, 2023: Fear of a Female Body - Jill Filipovic: I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young …
Mar 27, 2023: Zena Hitz: The traditional monastic rule against particular friendship is the great bogeyman of the cinematic representation of religious life. Who …
Mar 27, 2023: Retro Description of the first-year seminar I’ll be teaching in the fall. RETRO: How and Why the Past Comes Back In this course we will explore retro …
Mar 26, 2023: First light in the canyon
Mar 25, 2023: Miniature Morning Soundscape From Laity Lodge Transcript
Mar 25, 2023: A bluntly powerful essay by my friend and colleague Jonathan Tran: What began as a struggle of and for the dispossessed has devolved into a culture …
Mar 24, 2023: The Jellyfish Tribe - by Paul Kingsnorth: The growing loss of faith across the West in our institutions, leaders and representatives in recent years …
Mar 24, 2023: just purchased An excellent find, in excellent condition, and for eight bucks! Also a neat little window into classical music culture ca. 1972.
Mar 23, 2023: I get the security concerns that have prompted the move to passkeys, but the new strategy forces us to have our smartphones on us at all times. For …
Mar 23, 2023: I’m still reading Reporting World War II: The 75th Anniversary Edition: A Library of America Boxed Set – what an extraordinary anthology …
Mar 23, 2023: humanism renewed I often see quoted a line by Carl Schmitt: The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in …
Mar 23, 2023: Stanford Law School Dean Jenny S. Martinez: I want to set expectations clearly going forward: our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is …
Mar 22, 2023: Currently reading: The Earthsea Quartet by Ursula K. Le Guin 📚
Mar 22, 2023: Bison at Caprock Canyons State Park in the Texas panhandle, which I visited a couple of weeks ago. With that experience in mind I was glad to see this …
Mar 21, 2023: the arbiters The impossible job: inside the world of Premier League referees: An excellent in-depth study. None of the problems identified here are easily …
Mar 21, 2023: Treat time!
Mar 21, 2023: as it must to all men... When Charlie Watts died in August of 2021, I wrote: “This feels like a big one, and is certainly a harbinger of things to come.” I didn’t know at the …
Mar 20, 2023: It would be very difficult to determine the Platonic ideal of a Steven Wright joke, but I think it might be: “What’s another word for …
Mar 20, 2023: Heads up: the Bono & Edge Tiny Desk concert is just fantastic.
Mar 20, 2023: Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive: The dream of the Internet was to democratize access to knowledge, but if the big publishers have their way, …
Mar 20, 2023: Finished reading: The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Sixth Edition by David Thomson. This too I did not read every word of – it’s …
Mar 20, 2023: Finished reading: Paul and the Faithfulness of God by N.T. Wright. Didn’t read it all, but read most of it – all that I need. (Most of the …
Mar 20, 2023: Angus has figured out how to get up onto our bed. Returning from the toilet this morning this is what I found in my place.
Mar 20, 2023: slight return I’m back! — well, partially. Posting will be light for a while. But I certainly learned that for me micro.blog works best as a place to post images …
Mar 18, 2023: Oh, and you can’t trust Amazon with your newspapers and magazines either. If you want to own your reading and listening and viewing material, …
Mar 17, 2023: The new issue of The Hedgehog Review is just extraordinary. I am especially taken by Malloy Owen’s essay on the strange history of critical …
Mar 16, 2023: Lionel Shriver: “I don’t always want my novels to be focused on the culture wars, but I have used the culture wars and more broadly, I have found the …
Mar 16, 2023: One of these things is not like the others
Mar 16, 2023: James Bridle: “The lesson of the current wave of ‘artificial’ ‘intelligence’, I feel, is that intelligence is a poor thing when it is imagined by …
Mar 16, 2023: “A group of property developers have been ordered to rebuild a Grade II-listed pub that they demolished without permission. The historic Punch Bowl …
Mar 16, 2023: Mark Zuckerberg famously said that the Twitter founders drove a clown car into a gold mine. Now it looks like he’s driving a Lamborghini into a …
Mar 15, 2023: David Stromberg on Israel: “It is really an age-old question: When things turn dark in your country, do you resist from within or go into exile?”
Mar 15, 2023: Here I am on David Hume’s Guide to Social Media.
Mar 15, 2023: Here’s another one of my little experiments in sharing ideas: Paul Kingsworth recently published an essay and I annotated it.
Mar 14, 2023: Best photo yet of Flaco.
Mar 14, 2023: I think if I could use only one recording to demonstrate how good vinyl can be, it would be this one. Spacious, rich, perfectly balanced.
Mar 14, 2023: Currently reading: Reporting World War II: Library of America 📚
Mar 13, 2023: “A Humanism of the Abyss” — my essay on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings — is unpaywalled.
Mar 13, 2023: Robin Sloan wants me to ask “What do I want from the internet, anyway?” I’ve been thinking about that a lot and I’ve decided …
Mar 13, 2023: Garden Path by Eric Ravilious (1934)
Mar 13, 2023: Finished reading: The Lord of the Rings: 50th Anniversary, One Vol. Edition by J.R.R. Tolkien. I’m wondering how many times I’ve read this …
Mar 13, 2023: That ridiculous black tail
Mar 13, 2023: The Guardians A vision on the high plains.
Mar 12, 2023: Our friend David Hooker is an amazing artist, and we’re so excited about this fabulous new pot we got from him.
Mar 12, 2023: Huge if true
Mar 12, 2023: Over at my Buy Me a Coffee page, I explain the new ways I’ll be using micro.blog.
Mar 12, 2023: David Thomson on Ingmar Bergman
Mar 11, 2023: Currently reading: The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Sixth Edition by David Thomson. This is another one of those that I won’t be …
Mar 11, 2023: Cal Newport: “The open office boom is right up there with the spread of Slack as representing the peak of early 21st century distraction culture — a …
Mar 11, 2023: Finished reading: Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control by George Dyson. A fascinating, frustrating, and in the end I …
Mar 10, 2023: I keep taking pictures of live oaks because they have such distinctive interior architectures – what the poet Hopkins called inscape.
Mar 10, 2023: Every morning when I’m putting my shoes on. Every. Morning.
Mar 10, 2023: hiatus Heads up, friends: I’ll be taking a break from this blog in order to work on several projects — some essay-length, one (or maybe two) book-length — …
Mar 10, 2023: I wrote for Echoes, the H.E. Butt Foundation’s magazine, about repairing to the canyon to be repaired.
Mar 10, 2023: Currently reading: Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control by George Dyson 📚
Mar 10, 2023: Finished reading: Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary by David Hume. The moral and literary essays remain vibrant, but the political ones — …
Mar 10, 2023: of bad book reviewers and writerly cults A book can go wrong in a nearly infinite number of ways, but a book review has a narrower range of ways to fail. In what follows I’ll be writing about …
Mar 9, 2023: Dan Wang’s annual letter is always excellent, but this year’s edition may be the most fascinating yet.
Mar 9, 2023: “Better to talk to people than communicate via tweet.” — Deep thoughts from Elon Musk
Mar 9, 2023: Currently listening: Van Morrison, Veedon Fleece. What a masterpiece. ♫
Mar 9, 2023: A Nighttime Walk with Garnette Cadogan: GC: Night walks are incredibly important. The city becomes a different creature at night. There are levels of …
Mar 9, 2023: Currently reading: Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary by David Hume 📚
Mar 9, 2023: Finished reading: The Virginian by Owen Wister. Not a good book, but a fascinating one – and massively influential. 📚
Mar 9, 2023: The Art of Computational Narrative - by Samuel Arbesman: Perhaps there are specific features of computer programs that might be (a tiny bit) like …
Mar 9, 2023: The corruption of California - UnHerd: You, tender reader, might be scandalised by the ways of California’s DMV, but such a response is a hangover …
Mar 8, 2023: Currently reading: The Virginian by Owen Wister 📚
Mar 8, 2023: Finished reading: Resisting the Bonhoeffer Brand by Charles Marsh. A fascinating brief book (really a long essay). Will post on it soon. 📚
Mar 8, 2023: Angus is a “sable” Sheltie, which is to say he’s tan with white trim – but his tail is mostly black. There’s no black …
Mar 8, 2023: Melody Moezzi: This brings me to the most embarrassing reason I stayed on social media for so long: ego. I genuinely believed that my posts, tweets, …
Mar 8, 2023: excerpt from my Sent folder: progressive I do believe in what Cardinal Newman called the “development of doctrine” — though not precisely in the way that Newman did — but I am skeptical of …
Mar 8, 2023: same old song The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression: HB 999 [in Florida] would require faculty to censor their discussion and materials in general …
Mar 7, 2023: Currently reading: Resisting the Bonhoeffer Brand by Charles Marsh 📚
Mar 7, 2023: Pile of straw! Best toy EVAR!
Mar 7, 2023: Finished reading: Wild Thought: A New Translation of “La Pensée sauvage” by Claude Lévi-Strauss. what an enormously frustrating book. 📚
Mar 7, 2023: Currently listening: Julian Lage, View with a Room ♫
Mar 7, 2023: Mary Harrington: Increasingly, wave after wave of young people reaches adulthood armed with pop-Butlerism via university and Tumblr alike. No wonder …
Mar 6, 2023: unstacked This afternoon, after I got some dreary-but-necessary work done, I took some time to browse through a goodly number of Substack newsletters that …
Mar 6, 2023: One last photo from that foggy morning in northern New Mexico, chiefly because it has a bit of that Tarkovsky Polaroid look.
Mar 6, 2023: Yair Rosenberg: In 2013, Google shut down its celebrated RSS client, Google Reader, citing a decline in RSS usage. Today, millions of people still use …
Mar 6, 2023: Currently reading: Wild Thought by Claude Lévi-Strauss 📚
Mar 6, 2023: Finished reading: Wildwood by Roger Deakin 📚
Mar 6, 2023: the sovereignty of mercy In his sixth-and-lastly LOTR post, Adam Roberts graciously responds to my recent attempts to correct his errors, and this leads him into some …
Mar 6, 2023: Claude Monet, The Thames below Westminster
Mar 5, 2023: Be ye not puckfoisted!
Mar 5, 2023: “What it will be Questioned When the Sun rises over Amarillo do you not see a series of metal pylons connected to the electrical grid O no no I see an …
Mar 5, 2023: Above Taos.
Mar 5, 2023: North Lake, in the Sangre de Cristo mountains.
Mar 4, 2023: The four pictures I posted today were all taken this morning in a bizarrely thick fog in northeastern New Mexico. But the images I most wanted to …
Mar 4, 2023: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow Turns 50 - by Ted Gioia: Pynchon may still have many admirers, but few who are willing to follow in his footsteps. …
Mar 3, 2023: Trying another photo just as a test.
Mar 3, 2023: Another fun fact: Dalhart is closer to Cheyenne, Wyoming (and five other state capitals) than it is to Austin.
Mar 3, 2023: If you did what I did today, drive from Waco to Dalhart, you would swear that the whole drive was flat. But in fact Waco is 470’ above sea level and …
Mar 3, 2023: Afternoon sky over a gas station in Dalhart, Texas. Couldn’t do anything except grab a quick shot through the window. I guess it’s true that the best …
Mar 3, 2023: See also one of my favorites among my own essays, “Filth Therapy.”
Mar 3, 2023: I appreciate the respectful tone of this essay, but … I guess I am bemused by the widespread feeling that the American South needs to be explained. …
Mar 2, 2023: Lunch!
Mar 2, 2023: David Hockey, from A Rake’s Progress (1963)
Mar 2, 2023: Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?: Most professors, students said, grasp that the American campus has changed—big time. …
Mar 1, 2023: This Arsenal side is playing some absolutely gorgeous football. What a delight to watch. ⚽️
Mar 1, 2023: possibility Over at Plough, the tag is: Another life is possible. This ought to be a mantra for most of us. We can live in defiance of the mandates of technocracy …
Mar 1, 2023: Culture as Metastasis - by Mary Harrington: All the way back in 1994, Baudrillard could see that the emerging culture after the revolutionary “orgy” …
Mar 1, 2023: beyond creepiness One thought about that incredibly creepy Snapchat TV ad — so creepy that I’m not even going to link to it — the interesting thing to me about it is …
Feb 28, 2023: Currently reading: Wildwood by Roger Deakin 📚
Feb 28, 2023: Eduardo Galeano: In the morning, one of the prisoners who hadn’t yet lost track of the calendar recalled, “Today is Easter Sunday.”
Feb 28, 2023: Here’s a beautiful meditation by Eleanor Parker on the Cross and the medieval poem “The Dream of the Rood.” I recently read Parker’s book Winters in …
Feb 28, 2023: unsimulated Re: this essay by Alexa Hazel — of course people think we’re in a computer simulation. We always conceive of our minds as a dominant technology of our …
Feb 27, 2023: Finished reading: The Age of Eisenhower by William I Hitchcock 📚
Feb 27, 2023: in brief If I were a journalist and given the task that Nathan Heller had, here’s the primary (though not the only) thing I'd have done: First, I’d have …
Feb 27, 2023: Re: my buddy Austin’s recent post on indexing notebooks, for most of the last decade I have used Leuchtturm notebooks, which helpfully have index …
Feb 27, 2023: Currently reading: The Age of Eisenhower by William I Hitchcock 📚
Feb 27, 2023: a better way I’ve often written in praise of RSS — see the tag — as a Better Way to read stuff online than any social media platform could possibly be. There are a …
Feb 26, 2023: For Chat-Based AI, We Are All Once Again Tech Companies’ Guinea Pigs - WSJ: Celeste Kidd, a professor of psychology at University of California, …
Feb 26, 2023: Finished reading: Bad Land: An American Romance by Jonathan Raban. What a superb book – and how I wish I had written it. 📚
Feb 25, 2023: Currently reading: Bad Land: An American Romance by Jonathan Raban 📚
Feb 25, 2023: Charlie Stross: The thing I find most suspicious/fishy/smelly about the current hype surrounding Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, and other AI applications …
Feb 25, 2023: Finished reading: Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West by H. W. Brands. A brilliant book – a vibrant narrative about an immensely …
Feb 24, 2023: Currently reading: Dreams of El Dorado by H. W. Brands 📚
Feb 24, 2023: Great, now I’m singing “If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal” to the tune of “If I Were a Rich Man.” Yubba dibba dibba dibba …
Feb 24, 2023: The Economist: Wilmore, Kentucky, is the kind of quaint town (population 6,027) you might drive through and forget. Perhaps if you stop at the …
Feb 24, 2023: the evacuation of choice A. O. Scott’s reflection in the NYT on the video record of the horrific murder of Tyre Nichols begins with a question that in so many ways …
Feb 24, 2023: Was getting some work done when Angus discovered that he could climb up into my chair. This could end up as my personal equivalent of the moment when …
Feb 24, 2023: Kevin Williamson: Speaking about the prospect of “national divorce” on his radio program, Matt Walsh voiced what I fear is a typical view on the …
Feb 23, 2023: Cal Newport: Imagine if the Supreme Court threw caution to the wind and radically rolled back Section 230 protections; to the point where it became …
Feb 23, 2023: Finished reading: The Earliest English Poems by Michael J. Alexander 📚
Feb 23, 2023: Bishop George Sumner: The See of Canterbury combines, impossibly, leadership of the Church of England and of the Anglican Communion. It is hedged in …
Feb 23, 2023: Three Temptations, and Three Triumphs | Philip Jenkins: Psalm 91 was very famous and well-used, and quoting verse 12 naturally sent you into verse …
Feb 23, 2023: The Castelbarco Tomb, Verona, by John Wharlton Bunney
Feb 22, 2023: Currently reading: The Earliest English Poems edited by Michael J. Alexander 📚
Feb 22, 2023: books as toys C. S. Lewis, letter to Arthur Greaves, 1932: To enjoy a book like [Froissart’s Chronicles] thoroughly I find I have to treat it as a sort of hobby …
Feb 22, 2023: plain speaking Letter to Eric Fenn of the BBC: Magdalen College, Oxford. 7th May 1943. My dear Fenn, Sorry again. But a talk to the general public on Paradise Lost …
Feb 21, 2023: Re: this explicit deepening of Pope Francis’s hostility to trad Catholics, let me call attention to something I wrote two years ago.
Feb 21, 2023: Grayson Perry, detail from Print for a Politician (click to see larger image)
Feb 21, 2023: the classics are all right Re: the recent kerfuffle over the vandalism of Roald Dahl’s books, Walter Kirn tweeted “I ran into two used book stores today and grabbed classics …
Feb 21, 2023: his harshest critic I recently re-read Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in the third edition of 1880. Ruskin had originally published the book in 1849, when he …
Feb 20, 2023: Currently reading: The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien 📚 (I’ve heard good things, but we’ll see 😉 )
Feb 20, 2023: John Ruskin, Study of the Marble Inlaying on the Front of the Casa Loredan, Venice
Feb 20, 2023: Albert Murray and me From my new essay for Comment on Albert Murray’s “blues idiom”: For white North American Christians who perceive themselves as marginalized, …
Feb 19, 2023: Claude Monet, The Museum at Le Havre
Feb 19, 2023: Finished reading: The Seven Lamps of Architecture by John Ruskin. Back to it for the first time in some years — what a crazy and wonderful book. 📚
Feb 18, 2023: Twits It’s been widely reported that the U.K. children’s book publisher Puffin is producing a new edition of Roald Dahl’s books with all the wrongthink – or …
Feb 18, 2023: Currently reading: The Seven Lamps of Architecture by John Ruskin 📚
Feb 18, 2023: Inside the Bro-tastic Short-Term Rentals Upending an Austin Community: Almost anywhere you find tourists in Texas, from waterfront neighborhoods on …
Feb 17, 2023: Nick Catoggio: Dominion might win its suit notwithstanding the general truth of what Kevin [Williamson] said in his piece, that “nothing short of a …
Feb 17, 2023: I want this (forthcoming) book just for its cover. Or the cover as a poster.
Feb 17, 2023: Cory Doctorow: “In its nearly 25-year history, Google has made one and a half successful products: a once-great search engine and a pretty good …
Feb 17, 2023: question and answer Question: How bad would the whole AI/search/chat situation have to get — how much real-world harm have to be done — before any of the tech companies …
Feb 17, 2023: strings and bows Making the Sausage - Freddie deBoer: That said, I feel that the only value proposition I really offer is my writing, the writing itself. The fact of …
Feb 16, 2023: Finished reading: The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis. Delightful to come back to this and read it straight through, for the first time in … a …
Feb 16, 2023: Continuing the recent reflections on fantasy, it me: Like many other fantasy writers, [Hope] Mirrlees is interested in what happens if the power of …
Feb 16, 2023: tradeoffs David Sax, from The Future Is Analog: “The ideas that come to our mind are around curiosity, creativity, exploration, which come to you when you're …
Feb 15, 2023: Currently reading: The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis 📚
Feb 15, 2023: Costică Brădăţan: As she pondered and internalized the meanings of slavery, affliction, and humility, Weil stumbled upon a central Christian idea: …
Feb 15, 2023: When it gets something wrong, Bing Chat begins by getting touchily defensive and then escalates to angry counter-accusation. So it is human after all.
Feb 15, 2023: From the Wilton Diptych (National Gallery)
Feb 15, 2023: self-sacrifice and despair Adam Roberts: And in the middle (round about the two-thirds point, actually) there is the odd, striking scene of Denethor’s suicide. I wasn’t sure …
Feb 14, 2023: Terry Eagleton: For a slim volume, [Peter Brooks’s] Seduced by Story covers an impressive array of topics: oral narrative, the function of character, …
Feb 13, 2023: Finished reading: Once and Forever by Kenji Miyazawa — a marvelous book of marvelous tales. 📚
Feb 13, 2023: In which the fell beast contemplates the sunrise.
Feb 13, 2023: Finished reading: The Annotated Hobbit by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien 📚
Feb 13, 2023: Ed Ruscha, Sin
Feb 12, 2023: Currently reading: The Annotated Hobbit by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien 📚
Feb 12, 2023: Finished reading: William Blake vs the World by John Higgs 📚
Feb 12, 2023: 'Satan viewing the Ascent to Heaven' from The Paradise Lost of John Milton with illustrations by John Martin, London, 1846, pl. facing p.83. Mezzotint …
Feb 12, 2023: Paul Ford: "The real reason Twitter lies in ruins is because it was an abomination before God. It was a Tower of Babel.” This would be a lot more …
Feb 11, 2023: Who among us hasn’t met ChadGPT?
Feb 11, 2023: Culling my RSS feeds this afternoon, I was both saddened and annoyed to see how many museums that once had wonderful Tumblrs have abandoned them — …
Feb 11, 2023: Blake domesticated John Higgs’s William Blake vs the World is a real disappointment. Higgs writes vividly and is a fine storyteller, but like most people who write about …
Feb 11, 2023: Currently reading: William Blake vs the World by John Higgs 📚
Feb 11, 2023: Paul Kingsnorth: Everybody is talking these days about the decline of the West, and with good reason. Some people think that Christianity should have …
Feb 10, 2023: Finished reading: Winters in the World by Eleanor Parker. What an absolutely marvelous, wondrous book. I will be returning to it again and again. 📚
Feb 10, 2023: Finished reading: Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction by Brian Dillon 📚
Feb 10, 2023: Currently reading: Winters in the World by Eleanor Parker 📚
Feb 10, 2023: Finished reading: The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – for the first time in forty years! 📚
Feb 10, 2023: Finished reading: Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees 📚
Feb 10, 2023: Finished reading: The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany 📚
Feb 10, 2023: Finished reading: Phantastes by George MacDonald 📚
Feb 10, 2023: Finished reading: The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode (good to return to this masterpiece of criticism). 📚
Feb 10, 2023: Finished reading: For Keeps by Pauline Kael 📚
Feb 10, 2023: To date I have been recording what I’m reading but not when I finish a book. But doing the latter might be useful, so I am about to register …
Feb 10, 2023: Just posted a State of My Mind Address to my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.
Feb 10, 2023: frictionless ignorance Andy Baio: Google used to take pride in minimizing time we spent there, guiding us to relevant pages as quickly as possible. Over time, they tried to …
Feb 9, 2023: Ted Gioia’s State of the Culture 2023 “speech” is a feast of provocations.
Feb 9, 2023: the verdict is in
Feb 9, 2023: Robert Joustra: I think the importance of [Katelyn Beaty’s Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church] is the …
Feb 9, 2023: Operation Diogenes I don’t usually think much about things I have already published, but I have continued to meditate on the subject I wrote about here — and there’s …
Feb 9, 2023: Franciska Coleman: In this paper, I undertake a qualitative exploration of how social regulation of speech works in practice on university campuses, …
Feb 8, 2023: Currently reading: Paul and the Faithfulness of God by N.T. Wright 📚
Feb 8, 2023: My friends Jeremy Botts and Richard Gibson teach a course called Technotexts, and have an exhibition featuring some of the stuff they do – and …
Feb 8, 2023: Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor: The philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined bullshit as speech that is intended to persuade without regard for the …
Feb 7, 2023: Kevin Williamson: The point of keeping Trump administration veterans out of positions of public trust is not to punish them — it is to keep them out …
Feb 7, 2023: be your own algorithm Damon Krukowski: “I know it can be difficult, with so much choice, to figure out what to focus on. But on top of everything, you can preview most …
Feb 7, 2023: Currently reading: The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe 📚
Feb 7, 2023: FWIW I’m not watching The Last of Us because (a) I don’t have and don’t want HBO, (b) I think all the changes on zombie stories have already been rung, but …
Feb 7, 2023: Wesley Hill: It could be that what we have in Esther isn’t just a theology of divine providence and protection but also something like a doctrine of …
Feb 6, 2023: From my dear friend John Wilson: Ever since I “discovered” book reviews, when I was in high school, I have been in love with this simple but …
Feb 6, 2023: Talia Barnes: I traded my smartphone for a dumbphone to simplify my life. Then I revived my iPod. Then I bought a GPS. Then I bought a …
Feb 6, 2023: New edition of the newletter, with a movie title sequence, Italian advertising, and Bob Dylan, among other things.
Feb 6, 2023: From James Agee’s obituary for H. G. Wells in Time (Aug. 26, 1946): It was H. G. Wells's tragedy that he lived long enough to have a second thought. …
Feb 5, 2023: “I’ve had Holy Communion and four doughnuts, so this has been a great day” – my exact words, just now.
Feb 4, 2023: doin thangs I haven’t written much over the years about what people call “productivity,” partly because I don’t have a lot to say. A few years ago I thought I …
Feb 4, 2023: When I’m nervous and stressed, few things are as calming to me as fiddling around with the design of my website. I rarely end up changing much, …
Feb 3, 2023: GIGO Freddie deBoer: Elite American colleges are already more racially diverse than the country writ large, but the perpetual cry is for more people of …
Feb 3, 2023: Currently reading: Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade 📚
Feb 3, 2023: “The Teleprinter,” Eric Ravilious (1941)
Feb 2, 2023: Currently reading: Once and Forever by Kenji Miyazawa 📚
Feb 2, 2023: I mean, it’s what happened to Eustace Scrubb, so it ought to be a word.
Feb 1, 2023: Lebenswelt Adam Roberts (yes, again): My problem is not that [Miles Cameron’s Against All Gods] gets this or that specific historical detail or mood wrong; it’s …
Feb 1, 2023: Jahan Ganesh: The controversies of the day expose a problem with the right and it isn’t corruption. It isn’t “sleaze”. It is the impossibility of …
Feb 1, 2023: inertia Peter Gray: In the late 19th and early 20th century, many people became concerned about the ill effects of child labor on children’s development and …
Jan 30, 2023: weapons and separations Adam Roberts: But the thing that struck me is the way Gandalf comes back invulnerable. The last we see of Gandalf the Grey he is complaining that he …
Jan 30, 2023: more, please Ah, here it is: the musical equivalent of ChatGPT. Cool. I want to see more of this. I’ve written before — see the links here — about the ways that …
Jan 30, 2023: The Media Very Rarely Lies - by Scott Alexander: Suppose Infowars claimed that police shootings in the US cannot be racially motivated, because …
Jan 30, 2023: schooled In his brilliant book J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Tom Shippey spends a good deal of time trying to account for the depth and intensity of …
Jan 29, 2023: He’s been like this for 30 minutes. I don’t think I’ve ever been that comfortable.
Jan 29, 2023: Tony Cearns explains how he made this photograph.
Jan 29, 2023: I’m not crazy about David French’s going to the NYT, because I think we need more excellent writers — and David is an excellent writer — outside the …
Jan 28, 2023: Currently reading: Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees 📚
Jan 28, 2023: Hooded intruder thwarted by fierce household defender.
Jan 27, 2023: Another pro tip: While you’re waiting a week for the limoncello to brew, add the juice from the Meyer lemons to bourbon and honey syrup to make …
Jan 27, 2023: Pro tip: when life hands you Meyer lemons, make limoncello.
Jan 27, 2023: the end of the timeline era Glenn Fleishman: With Mastodon, you’re not dealing with a giant, faceless company — or a constantly in-your-face CEO — making arbitrary decisions …
Jan 27, 2023: note to self Repair begins with redirection. Commencing the repair of our cultural ecosphere by shifting attention to neglected things. Focal practices ➡ hypomene …
Jan 27, 2023: Dunsany's games In the class I’m currently teaching on fantasy, we are moving from George MacDonald’s Phantastes to Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter. …
Jan 26, 2023: Fun and games.
Jan 26, 2023: focal practices for pilgrim people: intervals In one sense the question I posed in an earlier post — What are the proper focal practices for a pilgrim people? — has an obvious answer. In a sermon …
Jan 25, 2023: Currently reading: Standing by Words by Wendell Berry 📚
Jan 25, 2023: My buddy Rob Miner bought this for me in Amsterdam – and it sounds great. But I’m concerned that I’ll soon be haunting record stores …
Jan 25, 2023: burn after reading Dear colleagues, I must congratulate you all on what is, so far, a perfect execution of our Plan. You will recall that when we first met, more than a …
Jan 24, 2023: Re: yesterday’s cover art, How to Think has now been translated into: Arabic Chinese (PRC) Chinese (Taiwan) Dutch Korean Portuguese Spanish Turkish …
Jan 24, 2023: reflections Phantastes is all about doubling: reflections in mirrors, a cave of making juxtaposed to a grotto of destruction, a loving womanly beech-tree versus a …
Jan 23, 2023: R. I. P. Lin Brehmer I’m a Texas guy now and proud of it, but Chicago is deep in my heart and always will be — and an essential part of my Chicagoland experience for three …
Jan 23, 2023: There’s a lot of this. Also, Angus is committed to (a) peeing outside and (b) pooping inside.
Jan 23, 2023: Cover for the forthcoming Arabic translation of How to Think.
Jan 23, 2023: Currently reading: The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany 📚
Jan 23, 2023: enshittification The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok | Cory Doctorow: Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make …
Jan 23, 2023: the buffered self in Fairy Land A number of years ago I wrote an essay called “Fantasy and the Buffered Self” in which I applied Charles Taylor’s distinction between “porous” and …
Jan 22, 2023: Currently reading: Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction by Brian Dillon 📚
Jan 21, 2023: A proper Texas breakfast.
Jan 21, 2023: moderation in consistency: fantasy edition Adam Roberts: I have, I think, a rough model of the broader discursive-etymology of Middle Earth/Narnia — their strange hybrid of …
Jan 20, 2023: Drives me slightly nuts when I am one letter away from an enormous word.
Jan 20, 2023: I said to Angus this morning, “Certain elements of your behavior are irreconcilable with rational principles.” He responded by biting me …
Jan 20, 2023: the post-literate academy and this blog The Post-Literate Academy - by Mary Harrington: When it’s so difficult to imagine the academy as we know it surviving the demise of ‘deep literacy’, …
Jan 19, 2023: two views of Iain McGilchrist Andrew Louth: Although McGilchrist is clearly arguing a case (a case that he feels needs to be accepted, if there is to be any future), his mind is …
Jan 18, 2023: Currently reading (in one of my most treasured volumes): Mont Saint Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams 📚
Jan 18, 2023: Kierkegaard, from his Journals: Christianly the emphasis does not fall so much upon to what extent or how far a person succeeds in meeting or …
Jan 18, 2023: Glamour shot.
Jan 18, 2023: Matthew Loftus: The option to kill always punishes the most vulnerable. Those who are wealthy and currently fly to a jurisdiction where the killing …
Jan 17, 2023: It’s good to be back on campus.
Jan 17, 2023: Currently reading: Phantastes by George MacDonald 📚
Jan 17, 2023: Pro tip: When you’re trying to get a portrait shot, it’s important that the subject remain still.
Jan 17, 2023: trouble I’ve got a few posts queued up, but I am expecting serious disruption in service next week — like, a Southwest-Airlines-over-the-holidays level of …
Jan 17, 2023: comping Brad Mehldau: I began to learn that instrumentalists and singers often didn’t want or need … validation from the accompanist. Actually, most of the …
Jan 16, 2023: … but he’s getting quite comfortable already.
Jan 16, 2023: Angus was a little nervous for the first few minutes here…
Jan 16, 2023: the ed-tech business model NYT: The misuse of A.I. tools will most likely not end, so some professors and universities said they planned to use detectors to root out that …
Jan 16, 2023: Joel Coen: As writers … long-form was never something we could get our heads around. It’s a different paradigm. Not to be shitty about it, but you …
Jan 16, 2023: Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose: Study, in effect, is per se interminable. Those who are acquainted with long hours spent roaming among books, when …
Jan 14, 2023: peeved This should not annoy me as much as it does, but … here’s a sentence that I see sometimes in books or articles: “I tried unsuccessfully to reach him …
Jan 13, 2023: Currently reading 📚
Jan 13, 2023: SO cool to see this from my friend (and former colleague) Shawn Okpebholo!
Jan 13, 2023: Richard Hanania: I don’t like inconveniencing others, and for many parents the possibility that one day they could be a burden on their children …
Jan 13, 2023: Just posted an update for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.
Jan 13, 2023: Ross Douthat: Liberalism cannot easily renew itself, because despite what certain of its detractors and some of its champions insist, it isn’t really …
Jan 13, 2023: the Christian and the hearth In traditional Roman culture, the focus, the hearth, is all about holding the family together: the family is the essential, immutable, and …
Jan 13, 2023: Richard Gunderman: Thanks to [Lillian] Gilbreth, workers would be treated not as cogs in a machine, but as people. So great was her compassion for …
Jan 13, 2023: John Warner: Many are wailing that this technology spells “the end of high school English,” meaning those classes where you read some books and then …
Jan 12, 2023: Jesus 5: Parabolic On insiders and outsiders.
Jan 12, 2023: Currently reading: The Secret Gospel of Mark by Geoffrey S. Smith and Brent C. Landau 📚
Jan 12, 2023: allegory of ... something
Jan 11, 2023: Currently listening: Emerson Quartet, Bach: The Art of Fugue ♫
Jan 11, 2023: one more word on Kael That’s my copy of Pauline Kael's For Keeps, the enormous collection of the essays on and reviews of movies that she most wanted to preserve. It’s …
Jan 10, 2023: I’m 100% with MKBHD on this – or rather, even more critical than he is. I’m taking fewer iPhone pictures because I dislike its …
Jan 10, 2023: truth “Oh, it's so hard to be good under the capitalistic system.” — Genevieve Larkin (Glenda Farrell) in Gold Diggers of 1937
Jan 10, 2023: For years I’ve been determined to decline invitations in this way, but I always chicken out.
Jan 10, 2023: greatness in film The 2022 Sight and Sound critics’ poll of the greatest films of all time featured a surprising Number One: Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, …
Jan 9, 2023: one of the classic blunders A while back I quoted Amna Khalid’s thoughtful response to the Hamline University kerfuffle; now we have a strong statement from the Muslim Public …
Jan 9, 2023: Currently reading: The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode 📚
Jan 9, 2023: Maybe one day I’ll get tired of taking pictures of trees, but not this day.
Jan 9, 2023: Escaping the Malthusian Trap: What an amazing graph-in-motion by Kieran Healy. Malthus believed that as population in a given locale rises, a point is …
Jan 9, 2023: Forthcoming in Comment.
Jan 9, 2023: projects and methods Perhaps because I write different sorts of books, one of the most important writerly skills I have developed is the ability to adapt my working …
Jan 8, 2023: Finished reading: Why We Drive by Matthew B. Crawford. Fascinating book — I’ll probably blog about it soon. 📚
Jan 7, 2023: Currently reading: Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life by Albert Borgmann 📚
Jan 7, 2023: Hmmm, maybe, given current trends, I should put this little baby up for sale on eBay.
Jan 7, 2023: Italo Calvino: I belong to that portion of humanity—a minority on the planetary scale but a majority I think among my public — that spends a large …
Jan 7, 2023: Here’s a wonderful post by Ian Paul on the Epiphany story — what Matthew and Luke have in common and how they differ; the unconfronted assumptions of …
Jan 6, 2023: Honestly, I’m glad about this. The team’s behavior was disgraceful — and it starts with the manager. Arteta needs to understand that, because he has …
Jan 6, 2023: Currently reading: For Keeps by Pauline Kael 📚
Jan 6, 2023: why Kael matters Of all the great movie critics, present and past, I suppose the one whose judgments about particular films I am least likely to endorse is Pauline …
Jan 6, 2023: Damon Krukowski: We are in a far worse situation than we were in 1991. Thurston’s part-jokey, part-deadly serious condemnation of the industry then — …
Jan 5, 2023: pre-empted About a month ago I started drafting an essay about how Richard Rorty both predicted the rise of Trump and in a certain sense prepared the way for it. …
Jan 4, 2023: [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“2400”] Owens Salvage, Wellington, Texas[/caption]
Jan 4, 2023: Cassiodorus College For a few years, starting around a decade ago, I blogged at The American Conservative. Sometime in the not-too-distant past, they memory-holed all my …
Jan 3, 2023: Some of the trees around here started turning in November, others in December, and a few are turning right now. Climate change has got to be confusing …
Jan 3, 2023: Jesus 4: Eyewitnesses Stepping back for a bit of semi-scholarly context. It won’t happen again, I promise.
Jan 3, 2023: Senator Ben Sasse says that the real divide in America is between Pluralists and Zealots; I made the same case two years ago but called the parties …
Jan 3, 2023: Interesting crop of works and makers entering the public domain this year.
Jan 3, 2023: the home's sacred fire In this book, Ralph Cudworth makes the following fascinating argument: Now the Tabernacle or Temple being thus a House for God to dwell in visibly, …
Jan 2, 2023: Dominic Sandbrook: There’s no way our podcast, presented by two white Oxbridge-educated middle-aged men, would be commissioned by the BBC these days. …
Jan 2, 2023: When did this practice of writing accusatory and dictatorial headlines begin? It’s universal now. It must get clicks, but why would people want to …
Jan 2, 2023: The Year of Focal Practices I declared 2021 the Year of Hypomone and 2022 the Year of Repair. I have not ceased to need hypomone — the New Testament word for “patient endurance” …
Jan 1, 2023: Currently reading: Why We Drive by Matthew Crawford 📚
Dec 31, 2022: My kind of year-end list: the 10 best films of … 1932.
Dec 31, 2022: Just give me one import from Latin
Dec 31, 2022: George Giusti
Dec 30, 2022: Nearly eight hundred people attended the Christmas Eve services at my church, St. Alban’s Waco — the most people ever for one day at this …
Dec 30, 2022: There’s no current soccer player I dislike as much as Cristiano Ronaldo, but if he had gone to Sporting KC I would’ve loved him. CR7, …
Dec 30, 2022: “Standards-based interoperability makes a comeback, sort of” – The best brief overview I’ve seen of the possibilities, limitations, and dangers of the …
Dec 30, 2022: removals: a few year-endish thoughts One: I don’t do year-end lists, and I typically don’t read those of others. (Those of you who write them: Please forgive me!) I make note of books …
Dec 30, 2022: at the movies The “movies” tag at the bottom of this post will point you to what I’ve written about that artform on this blog, but I’ve published a few things …
Dec 29, 2022: Amna Khalid: But most of all, I am offended as a Muslim. In choosing to label this image of Muhammad as Islamophobic, in endorsing the view that …
Dec 29, 2022: casting about I recently re-read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and experienced an epiphany: the perfect Aunt Emily — and Aunt Emily is the most important character …
Dec 29, 2022: illusions and their removal In The Point of View of My Work as an Author Kierkegaard explains why he writes sometimes under his own name and sometimes under pseudonyms. One of …
Dec 28, 2022: Ted Gioia: “This is James Daunt’s super power: He loves books.”
Dec 28, 2022: This NYT essay on Rudy Van Gelder’s famous recording studio is fine, but the photos are great.
Dec 28, 2022: reading Pynchon Some years ago I tried to write a book that I called Anthropocene Theology … well, actually, I did write that book, but once I had written it I wasn’t …
Dec 27, 2022: Nick Cave: Grief can be seen as a kind of exalted state where the person who is grieving is the closest they will ever be to the fundamental essence …
Dec 27, 2022: Currently reading: A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books by Charles Dickens [specifically The Chimes] 📚
Dec 27, 2022: movie cards When preparing to shoot a scene, the film director Alejandro Iñárritu prepares note cards to help him organize his thoughts. ”During the production of …
Dec 27, 2022: markets and economies David L. Bahnsen: [Rusty] Reno’s ongoing mistakes are derived from his first mistake — the straw-man claim that market orthodoxy seeks to value …
Dec 25, 2022: Long coveted on vinyl!
Dec 25, 2022: Context
Dec 24, 2022: Where loues are Christmast, with all pleasures sorts
Dec 24, 2022: How Would You Prove That God Performed a Miracle?: J. Ayodeji Adewuya is a professor of New Testament at the Pentecostal Theological Seminary in …
Dec 24, 2022: Christmas Eve lunch with my dear ones. ❤️
Dec 24, 2022: the friendliness of objects Roger Scruton: Repair [at an earlier stage of our culture] was not so much a habit as an honoured custom. People respected the past of damaged …
Dec 24, 2022: Jesus 3: A Poem For Christmas Eve “A Christmas Hymn,” by Richard Wilbur
Dec 23, 2022: Ross Douthat’s Advent-themed newsletter quotes Auden and, um, me – so you know it’s something special!
Dec 23, 2022: I’d like a version of Spelling Bee in which the only acceptable words are proper names from Tolkien’s legendarium.
Dec 22, 2022: Currently reading 📚
Dec 22, 2022: Katherine Rundell: The difficulty of Donne's work had in it a stark moral imperative: pay attention. It was what Donne most demanded of his audience: …
Dec 21, 2022: Tim Carmody: What happens when engineers stop thinking of their interests as fundamentally aligned with the companies' owners and management, and …
Dec 21, 2022: Matt Crawford: There appears to be a circle of mutual support between political correctness, technocratic administration, and the bloated educational …
Dec 20, 2022: Angus and his mama, Gypsy.
Dec 20, 2022: Currently reading: Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov 📚
Dec 20, 2022: Jesus 2: An Advent Poem “The Coming,” by R. S. Thomas
Dec 20, 2022: what a loss We just watched To Be or Not To Be for the first time in a while. What an extraordinary movie; I don’t know of a film more tonally complex. Jack Benny …
Dec 19, 2022: Latewood | A Working Library: In the spring, when the weather is (hopefully) warm and wet, a tree will grow rapidly, forming large, porous cells …
Dec 19, 2022: beyond persuasion art, not argument | sara hendren: I have thus far assembled a body of work that lists between the two poles of poetry and philosophy, and between …
Dec 19, 2022: two kinds of work Almost forty years ago now, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote to a New York Times reporter to respond to critiques of his work and himself, most revolving …
Dec 18, 2022: I’ve got some advice for people who might consider moving from Twitter to micro.blog — with links to other posts. (Did that a while back, but I’ve …
Dec 17, 2022: Currently reading: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell 📚
Dec 17, 2022: the age of taipa I don’t want to ask whether pop music is worse than it used to me, because that’s an unanswerable question — for several reasons. But some things we …
Dec 17, 2022: It’s a good time to remember Hilaire Belloc’s Christmas card.
Dec 16, 2022: No Other Options — The New Atlantis: One of the greatest reasons for concern is the sheer scale of Canada’s euthanasia regime. California provides a …
Dec 16, 2022: This is Angus. He’ll be joining our family in a couple of weeks. We’re chuffed.
Dec 16, 2022: I think the puzzlemakers exclude some words simply because they’re too big.
Dec 16, 2022: I just posted an update for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.
Dec 16, 2022: I’m a little nervous about starting this microcast series on Jesus, because I’m not good at it yet – but I hope to improve as I go …
Dec 16, 2022: Jesus 1: I Think I’m a Principal The first in a series of brief audio meditations on Jesus.
Dec 16, 2022: I’ll believe in AI when I can say, “Hey Siri, please hide from me all references to AI. Also every conversation in which journalists snark at other …
Dec 16, 2022: defining immortality down Digital Eternity Is Just Around the Corner: As these technologies develop and become more accessible, they will increasingly be used in combination, …
Dec 15, 2022: Current listening: Yo La Tengo, Fakebook ♫ (a grossly underrated record)
Dec 15, 2022: If your Christmas season doesn’t include a viewing of The Shop Around the Corner, it really really should. 🎞
Dec 15, 2022: ‘Luddite’ Teens Don’t Want Your Likes - The New York Times: For the first time, she experienced life in the city as a teenager without an iPhone. She …
Dec 15, 2022: This has some useful reflections on the (often unfortunate) powers of literary executors — a subject about which I have written — but it doesn’t make …
Dec 15, 2022: Elizabeth D. Samet, in an interview: World War II gave us a way to look at the world as an unambiguous contest between good and evil. We have used a …
Dec 15, 2022: Space debris expert: Orbits will be lost—and people will die—later this decade | Ars Technica: Ars: Given what has happened over the last few years …
Dec 14, 2022: Pelé Brian Phillips’s new podcast episode on Pelé reminds me that, back in the day, when I was contributing to his site The Run of Play, we had a kind of …
Dec 13, 2022: Currently reading: The Moviegoer by Walker Percy 📚
Dec 13, 2022: attention and reading In response to my post on my readerly annotations, my friend Adam Roberts writes: I buy a lot of second-hand books, and previous owners' annotations …
Dec 13, 2022: defilement redux What the Hell Happened to PayPal?: Increasingly, it is becoming a police officer. It is deciding what is right and wrong, who gets to be heard, who …
Dec 13, 2022: my skillz So I just re-read Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World — a book I read not long after it came out, but uncarefully. Now I have read it with great …
Dec 12, 2022: Currently reading: Death Be Not Proud by David Marno 📚
Dec 12, 2022: why liberals should read smart conservatives Liberals should read smart conservatives not because they need to be convinced by conservative arguments — though let’s face it, sometimes they do — …
Dec 12, 2022: Currently reading: Henry James: Collected Stories Volume 2 (Everyman’s Library) by Henry James 📚
Dec 12, 2022: leopards Fifty or sixty years ago, one of the most common genres of nonfiction book in this country concerned advertising. Vance Packard’s The Hidden …
Dec 11, 2022: Ezra Klein: “A town square controlled by one man isn’t a town square. It’s a storefront, an art project or possibly a game preserve.” Yep.
Dec 11, 2022: Lovely choral Evensong this evening at St. Alban’s. “Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from …
Dec 11, 2022: Street furniture
Dec 10, 2022: May I never be called a rantipole.
Dec 10, 2022: Catastrophic tactical error by Southgate: After an Arsenal legend scored for France, he brought off his Arsenal man. Everyone knows that only Arsenal …
Dec 10, 2022: NYT: “As weird as the story [Pinocchio] is, it’s been made all the stranger by the decision to turn it into a metaphor about fascism, a conceit that …
Dec 10, 2022: Leo Strauss and the Closed Society by Matthew Rose | Articles | First Things: Strauss was not the only thinker who turned to questions of education …
Dec 10, 2022: The Struggle To Be Human - by Ian Leslie - The Ruffian: Whether it’s music, movies or politics, we seem to be creating a world more amenable to AI by …
Dec 9, 2022: Can’t stop singing this.
Dec 9, 2022: The link in the previous post goes to a current Penguin edition, but I’m reading the copy I bought and read 40 years ago (but have since mostly …
Dec 9, 2022: Currently reading: In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin 📚
Dec 9, 2022: In my experience — and I do have some experience with this phenomenon — when a journalistic outlet responds to criticism by saying “We stand by our …
Dec 9, 2022: Whaddya mean that’s not a word? It’s my gamer handle!
Dec 9, 2022: DHH argues that European nations should pursue digital sovereignty. I think this is right. So far the idea of a global internet has meant primarily an …
Dec 9, 2022: I like having a corkboard.
Dec 9, 2022: common ground and its enemies From the More in Common report on the History Wars: [M]ore than twice as many Democrats agree that all students should learn about how the …
Dec 8, 2022: Currently listening ♫
Dec 8, 2022: Olivia Snow: I’ve already been lectured about the dangers of how using [Lensa] implicates us in teaching the AI, stealing from artists, and engaging …
Dec 8, 2022: imagined railways Matt Yglesias thinks that Amtrak should focus all of its efforts on bringing high-speed rail to the Northeast Corridor, because of course he does. But …
Dec 8, 2022: the blog as a seasoned technology For several years now I’ve been writing about the distinctive virtues of blogging, which has become, I keep saying, a seasoned technology that …
Dec 7, 2022: An appropriate day to remember one of Waco’s greatest heroes.
Dec 7, 2022: Trying out the new global shortcut for microposting in MarsEdit 5 – looks like it works perfectly. Long live MarsEdit and long live blogging!
Dec 7, 2022: oh, okay, one more post On these matters. This from Roald Dahl’s story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” (1952): “That’s exactly it, Mr Bohlen! That’s where the machine …
Dec 7, 2022: An anti-slavery medallion by Josiah Wedgwood But: Wedgwood seems to have thrown himself behind the cause of abolition out of genuine conviction. The …
Dec 7, 2022: a year of new avenues A year of new avenues: a fantastic post by Robin Sloan, just fizzing with ideas. Here are the ones dancing in my head like a vision of sugarplums: …
Dec 6, 2022: Currently listening: Van Morrison, Veedon Fleece (one of my favorite records for more than forty years now). 🎵
Dec 6, 2022: In Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, he acknowledges that he was wrong to say, as he was perhaps the first to do, that to the social media platforms you …
Dec 6, 2022: When I read crypto-bro stories like this one I always think of Yeats: “The rhetorician would deceive his neighbor, / The sentimentalist himself.”
Dec 6, 2022: Currently listening: Charles Mingus, Blues and Roots ♫
Dec 6, 2022: Leon Shamroy, writing in American Cinematographer in 1947: Not too far off is the "electronic camera." A compact, lightweight box no larger than a …
Dec 5, 2022: Currently listening: Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Song Book ♫
Dec 5, 2022: Currently reading: Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde 📚
Dec 5, 2022: This post by Victor Mair on the staggering variation in translations of the Daodejing points to something that has been worrying me. I want to go …
Dec 5, 2022: and then? Illustration by my buddy Austin Kleon As I mentioned in earlier posts, Noah Smith wants to outsource much of the process of writing, and Derek …
Dec 5, 2022: Megan McArdle, arguing that trying to use social media’s moderators to crack down on misinformation isn’t a good idea: For one thing, moderators …
Dec 3, 2022: A game of unforced and amateurish errors by 🇺🇸 ⚽️ — oh well.
Dec 3, 2022: Where’s Brian McBride when you need him? 🇺🇸 ⚽️
Dec 3, 2022: A wonderful idea from Zeynep Tufekci: donate to Partners In Health in memory of the great Paul Farmer. I’ve just done it.
Dec 2, 2022: Much talk in the past 24 hours about Luis Suarez’s deliberate handball against Ghana in the 2010 World Cup. At Brian Phillips’ much-missed Run of …
Dec 2, 2022: Foggy morning in the canyon.
Dec 2, 2022: A wonderful list of books for Christmas presents by my friend John Wilson, the most imaginatively omnivorous reader I know.
Dec 2, 2022: two quotations on slow reading The Guardian: But there is power in reading slowly, something the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li tells her creative writing students at Princeton …
Dec 2, 2022: I like my job Derek Thompson: “These language models enable the automation of certain tasks that we’ve historically considered part of the creative process,” Olson …
Dec 1, 2022: no comment
Dec 1, 2022: two quotations on reading books “My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer, and I have my mind…and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to …
Dec 1, 2022: Laity looking especially lovely on this cloudy autumnal day.
Dec 1, 2022: Gruber: “Mastodon is — deservedly! — getting a lot of attention as people re-evaluate their use of Twitter. But what I’m digging more in our current …
Dec 1, 2022: words: bashed Noah Smith and “roon”: It’s important to realize exactly why the innovations of the past didn’t result in the kind of mass obsolescence that people …
Dec 1, 2022: ripeness For some reason I haven’t thought about this passage in years, though it is one of the most glorious things I know: God made Sun and Moon to …
Nov 30, 2022: Finished reading: Stealing for the Sky, by Adam Roberts. A terrific brief SF thriller — fast-paced, to be sure, but as always with Adam, there’s much …
Nov 30, 2022: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie comes out fighting for freedom of speech: We are all familiar with stories of people who have said or written something and …
Nov 29, 2022: Tyler Adams’s response yesterday to a confrontational Iranian journalist was remarkably impressive. You can see why even at age 23 he’s the proper …
Nov 29, 2022: political football Brian Phillips: It seems safe to say that beneath this admiration, there is still, for many Americans, a lurking sense of Iran as a geopolitical …
Nov 29, 2022: I am thrilled to have been so wrong about this USMNT side. What I didn’t expect: their defensive consistency and reslilence. Tim Ream is their man of …
Nov 29, 2022: comparative study of real and fictional corbies Carol Rumens: There’s a human narrator, but s/he bows out after three lines. Of the two crows, one has a single, though essential, line: “Where sall …
Nov 29, 2022: It's very hard not to laugh at this: Twitter-addicted journalists decamping for Mastodon only to resume, immediately, their familiar habits of …
Nov 29, 2022: Real Presence in Sex and Sacrament Jessica Martin: I am not sure that we meant to place the holy eucharist inside the temple to the marketplace gods; but we did. We put it there for …
Nov 28, 2022: Currently reading: Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues by Albert Murray 📚
Nov 28, 2022: Same
Nov 28, 2022: medical discourse A follow-up on one element of this post: It would be uncharitable and just plain wrong to conclude that doctors and other health-care professionals …
Nov 28, 2022: lies, yours and mine Staying for the Truth | The Hedgehog Review: Bacon … thinks it is good, very good indeed, to be “well fortified by doctrines of the wise” and thereby …
Nov 27, 2022: Currently reading: Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie as told to Albert Murray 📚
Nov 27, 2022: hiding your hand I don't know who Noah Kulwin is — someone, I don’t remember whom, linked to this post, which among other things talks about the assassination of JFK. …
Nov 27, 2022: Barney Ronay: Qatar is not, when you look more widely, some kind of rogue state peopled by a different kind of human being. In fact, the best way to …
Nov 27, 2022: Sam Harris on Whether Religion Really Does Make Everything Worse: Sam Harris: The God of Abraham is explicit in the Bible and in the Quran that the …
Nov 26, 2022: I fervently hope that when I’m gone people will say “He was a right rumptydooler, he was.”
Nov 26, 2022: Sun’s out after a few days of (very welcome) rain.
Nov 26, 2022: What We Owe Our Fellow Animals | Martha C. Nussbaum | The New York Review of Books: Behind these biases lies a more general failing, which the Dutch …
Nov 25, 2022: Listening to: Bill Frisell, Four ♫
Nov 25, 2022: Final analysis: same as halftime. A solid performance by the USMNT: they were composed and competent throughout, but had no cutting edge. ⚽️
Nov 25, 2022: Halftime analysis: USMNT dominating in midfield, but has no finishing. ⚽️
Nov 25, 2022: I’m sticking with my prediction, but it would be the most USMNT thing ever to beat England and get knocked out by losing to Iran. ⚽️
Nov 25, 2022: Even if you hate soccer, listen to the first few minutes of this podcast to discover how my friend Brian, in his Ponca City, Oklahoma elementary …
Nov 25, 2022: My prediction for USA-Wales was 0-0; it finished 1-1. My prediction for today’s match: England 3-1 USA. ⚽️
Nov 25, 2022: I hand-write a lot, but I don’t boost it much these days because I’ve come to realize how strongly many people hate their own handwriting. …
Nov 25, 2022: ark head Venkatesh Rao: One mental model for this condition is what I call ark head, as in Noah’s Ark. We’ve given up on the prospect of actually solving or …
Nov 24, 2022: Finished reading: Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray: What a brilliant and delightful correspondence (which …
Nov 24, 2022: Another book to read: Gal Beckerman, too, is interested in political talk. His new book, The Quiet Before, is essentially a history of conversation, …
Nov 24, 2022: Rules: A short study of what we live by by Lorraine Daston | Book review: All history is, it would seem, the history of regulative struggles. After …
Nov 24, 2022: Ready to go.
Nov 24, 2022: A German map of the Valley of the Kings, from the Bodleian Map Room Blog.
Nov 23, 2022: the media ecology of college writing Richard Gibson: Practically speaking, GPT-3 and the like demand that educators reconsider the writing process in fundamental ways. Symons entertains …
Nov 23, 2022: China wants to change, or break, a world order set by others | The Economist: Nor does Mr Xi accept that the second world war created a mandate to …
Nov 23, 2022: Michelle Nijhuis: Speakers of Luganda, the most common indigenous language in Uganda, don’t have a word for “depression.” They use the terms …
Nov 22, 2022: I have several pairs of headphones, of varying quality, but FWIW, these are the ones I always reach for. They’re super-comfortable and they …
Nov 22, 2022: a change of attention After the killing of George Floyd, my first response — after sympathy for poor Floyd, I hope — was to think that the protesters were overreacting to …
Nov 22, 2022: Currently listening: Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar: More Songs by Sam Gendel & Sam Wilkes ♫
Nov 22, 2022: I just love this post by Imani Perry about how excited her sons were when she won the National Book Award.
Nov 22, 2022: Tanzmasken
Nov 22, 2022: Definitions: An accurate definition of “influencer” is: a virtuoso of a particular internet platform; someone who has learned to use its …
Nov 22, 2022: A good overview of the value of deep reading.
Nov 22, 2022: From a lovely profile of Will Arbery by Chloé Cooper Jones: One of the first stories Arbery ever told me was how, even as a child, he longed to …
Nov 21, 2022: Currently reading: Albert Murray: Collected Essays & Memoirs by Albert Murray 📚
Nov 21, 2022: low anthropology In my new essay on anarchism, I describe myself as “a person with an exceptionally low anthropology” — and if you want to know what I mean by that, …
Nov 21, 2022: Nothing like listening to the Welsh sing their anthem. 🏴
Nov 21, 2022: I’ve been predicting U.S. 0-0 Wales, but the power of Weston McKennie’s hair is (against my will) raising my hopes.
Nov 21, 2022: After seeing that shambolic defending by Iran, I might have to reconsider my prediction that the U.S. will finish behind them…. ⚽️
Nov 21, 2022: Matthew Loftus: The Church universal also has a set of overlapping responsibilities, but how these responsibilities are translated into the work of …
Nov 21, 2022: Barney Ronay: It feels like a theme park. There’s always been this ridiculous corporate circus, but generally it intersects with a real sense of joy, …
Nov 21, 2022: subsidiarity Dale Ahlquist: While the Distributist movement gained a much larger following than most historians have acknowledged, and is even experiencing …
Nov 20, 2022: Currently reading: Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray 📚
Nov 20, 2022: Charles Spurgeon: “I do not know that the prodigal saw his father, but his father saw him. The eyes of mercy are quicker than the eyes of …
Nov 20, 2022: Interview with Yiyun Li: Just as you were starting Tolstoy Together, you wrote in The New York Review’s pandemic journal: “Twice during the most …
Nov 20, 2022: Ayana Mathis: When I first conceived of this essay, I imagined it would be purely literary. Then, the presidential election arrived with all of its …
Nov 20, 2022: As an endlessly corrupt World Cup begins, the American college-sports-industrial complex says, “Hold my beer.”
Nov 19, 2022: Ralph Ellison in his Harlem apartment, 1986
Nov 19, 2022: Mastodonic thoughts After a brief period on Mastodon: It’s exactly like Twitter. People have taken all their Twitter habits — lecturing, hectoring, making demands, …
Nov 19, 2022: Corner Club Cathedral Cocoon, by Sasha Frere-Jones: I developed a new way of thinking about how we listen to music, together or alone. My …
Nov 18, 2022: “Not in word list.” Sigh. It’s not that esoteric a word!
Nov 18, 2022: Twitter right now is mainly about Twitter but also a little about Mastodon. And Mastodon is mainly about Mastodon but also a lot about Twitter. Both …
Nov 18, 2022: peaceableness It is noteworthy, and not in a good way, that an essay by Wendell Berry called “Peaceableness Toward Enemies” — written in response to the 1911 Gulf …
Nov 17, 2022: Currently reading: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison 📚 (Decided to save Solzhenitsyn for later)
Nov 17, 2022: a right bollocking Well, this is surely Adam's best post title ever, but the post is really fascinating also. A key passage: But let’s go back to this magic clod. …
Nov 17, 2022: capitaltruism Effective altruism is an admirable movement, and I hope it spreads. But one of my chief concerns about the movement is how obsessively focused it is …
Nov 16, 2022: My prediction for Group B in the World Cup ⚽️: 🏴 🏴 🇮🇷 🇺🇸 I mean this. I think the USMNT is a shambles, largely because of inept …
Nov 16, 2022: I would watch any NBA game called by Doris Burke (play-by play) and 89-year-old Hubie Brown (analyst). Yeah, Doris doesn’t usually do play-by-play but …
Nov 16, 2022: A student just wrote to ask me about an independent study, and my reply to him called it an “indecent study.” I need to slow down when …
Nov 15, 2022: Just had the loudest, longest episode of SpaceX thunder ever. Every window in the house rattling for several minutes. My guess: final testing of the …
Nov 15, 2022: Welp, I’m going in. If you don’t hear from me in a month, call the FBI, or a priest. 📚
Nov 15, 2022: sprawling along the way: a polemic and an exhortation In for a penny, in for a pounding, I always say. I really don’t want to talk about the whole “three worlds” thing again, but I’m going to, because it …
Nov 15, 2022: showing You'll probably not be shocked to learn that I agree with Adam about this. My agreement is on three grounds: First: If you want simply to tell — if …
Nov 15, 2022: Corvo I picked up The Quest for Corvo by A. J. A. Symons secure in the knowledge that I had read it before, many years ago. Turns out I did not remember one …
Nov 14, 2022: Wendell Berry: There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.
Nov 14, 2022: Finished reading: The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne. Somewhat disappointing; the author died before the book was altogether …
Nov 14, 2022: two essays My Harper’s essay on (not?) becoming an anarchist is now online – though paywalled. But why not subscribe? My (much briefer) Hedgehog Review essay …
Nov 14, 2022: Currently reading: The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne 📚
Nov 14, 2022: Newsletter!
Nov 14, 2022: Ronald Blythe, age 100 Rowan Williams on Ronald Blythe at 100: “He’s somebody who is very committed to the Christian tradition and he uses it to think with, he uses it as a …
Nov 14, 2022: a proposal Jonathan Spence, in The Gate of Heavenly Peace, relates that the great Chinese reformer Kang Youwei, troubled by the way China in the late 19th …
Nov 13, 2022: Currently reading: Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray by Ralph Ellison 📚
Nov 13, 2022: rethinking work Cal Newport: The battle for telecommuting is a proxy for a deeper unrest. If employees lose remote work, the last highly visible, virus-prompted …
Nov 13, 2022: Ian Bogost: If Twitter does fail, either because its revenue collapses or because the massive debt that Musk’s deal imposes crushes it, the result …
Nov 13, 2022: master to master That’s the very early electric guitar associated with the great Charlie Christian, who died, tragically, at age 25. One of Christian’s Gibsons has …
Nov 12, 2022: John Banville: The English language is beautiful. It’s immensely rich and untidy with so many influences from other cultures, and I glory in it. …
Nov 12, 2022: Don’t know why that book info has the author’s name in Russian, but it looks cool so I decided to keep it.
Nov 12, 2022: Currently reading: The Complete Short Novels by Антон Павлович Чехов 📚
Nov 12, 2022: Thomas Harrison: Musil was not the only writer of his time to think of the essay as the method and intellectual mode most appropriate to ethical …
Nov 11, 2022: You Can Forget About Crypto Now: “Imagine your debit card suddenly stopped working because the executives at your bank were out making high-risk …
Nov 11, 2022: This Adam Neely video on the ways that intellectual property law is simply unsuited to music is just superb.
Nov 11, 2022: Currently reading: The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography by A.J.A. Symons 📚
Nov 11, 2022: Prediction: By this time in 2024, Elon will have sold Twitter to people who will pledge to return it to the Good Old Days of 2018. And all the …
Nov 10, 2022: The most amazing part of this story is the teacher who says that he used to keep his smartphone on his desk so he could “check in with the outside …
Nov 10, 2022: negative worlds all the way down Here's something people have been asking me to weigh in on for quite a while, but I’ve been putting it off, because ... well, what’s the point? But …
Nov 10, 2022: On ne peut jamais quitter les Romains.
Nov 10, 2022: And now, perhaps, time to reward myself with a little light reading?
Nov 10, 2022: Just sent off my critical edition of Auden’s The Shield of Achilles to my editors at Princeton University Press. WOW that was a lot of work, and …
Nov 10, 2022: stats Just a quick reminder that the use of statistics to mislead is a never-ending thing: The Guardian, in an attempt to cast a skeptical eye on Ron …
Nov 10, 2022: It’s what nihilists do.
Nov 10, 2022: Pevearsion Recently I had cause to remember Gary Saul Morson’s devastating critique of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translations of Russian literature. (When you’re …
Nov 9, 2022: Finished reading: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Just as I had remembered it: brilliant and bombastic, magnificent and maddening. 📚
Nov 9, 2022: Home invasion: For those of us who have been using Mastodon for a while (I started my own Mastodon server 4 years ago), this week has been …
Nov 9, 2022: End-Times Tales Venkatesh Rao — End-Times Tales: We are drowning in a sea of reboots, reruns, and recycled stories on television and movie screens for the same …
Nov 9, 2022: From a really helpful essay by my colleague David Corey: Some people I know worry that genuine friendship is less possible in a pluralist age than in …
Nov 8, 2022: excerpts from my Sent folder: angels This is from an email conversation with my friend Adam Roberts about a recent post of his. N.B.: We’re in medias res here. It doesn’t take long to …
Nov 8, 2022: Currently reading: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 📚
Nov 8, 2022: Very alien-invasion vibe to the pre-dawn walk in the fog.
Nov 8, 2022: a parable Almost all of Tolstoy’s early stories were published by a journal called The Contemporary. Some of them focused on the miseries — and also the human …
Nov 8, 2022: being Russian A. N. Wilson, from his biography of Tolstoy (1988): Being Russian, unless you are preternaturally stupid or wicked, produces violent inner tensions …
Nov 7, 2022: scale again Monday November 7 2022 - by Sasha Frere-Jones: Scale serves wealth. “Scale” is a polite way of saying “love of numbers” and the numbers are there …
Nov 7, 2022: audiences The Struggle With The Audience: By 2020, [Sam] Carter was a battle-hardened veteran of the music scene. He’d been making records with this group for …
Nov 7, 2022: Currently reading: Tolstoy: A Russian Life by Rosamund Bartlett 📚
Nov 7, 2022: the foundering of the therapeutic A therapeutic church is an atheist church — Brad East: The more … a congregation becomes therapeutic, in its language, its liturgy, its morals, its …
Nov 6, 2022: Life at the 30th Street Studio of Columbia Records, 1955: Glenn Gould in the morning, Rosemary Clooney in the evening. (And at another studio, an …
Nov 6, 2022: Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variatoons was so popular that he took the Goldbergs on tour, and in 1958 he played them in Lexington, …
Nov 6, 2022: Yet another reason to love Texas.
Nov 6, 2022: eyeballs Since so many journalists spend most of their time on Twitter, it’s unsurprising to hear the more addicted among them now saying that other people …
Nov 5, 2022: I keep trying to do the Todd Hido thing but it’s a lot harder than it looks.
Nov 5, 2022: maybe this is the least important election of my lifetime Jonah Goldberg: “You want to know what I think will happen if Republicans have a really good night on Tuesday? Not much.” Jonah is correct. Even if …
Nov 5, 2022: Struggles to deal with being in the shadow of his more famous brother Bub.
Nov 4, 2022: So our magnificent local Balcones Distillery has been purchased by a behemoth corporation. When a great local business gets taken over by people who …
Nov 4, 2022: Lev Tolstoy, born in 1828, had a daughter who lived until 1979.
Nov 4, 2022: Currently reading: Interaction of Color: 50th Anniversary Edition by Josef Albers 📚
Nov 4, 2022: the tongues of men and angels Milton, Angels, Mortals: a Story Idea | by Adam Roberts: This will be a very busy day, so I don’t have time to engage with this as fully as I …
Nov 4, 2022: So much fantastic stuff in Sara Hendren’s new newsletter!
Nov 4, 2022: It’s morning in America!
Nov 4, 2022: summing up 1943 The following is the text of a talk I was supposed to give three years ago and didn’t because my back went out the day I was supposed to fly to the …
Nov 3, 2022: Current comparative listening: Pet Sounds and Revolver. I’m surprised at how strongly I feel that the Beach Boys have the better of this, though …
Nov 3, 2022: Hey folks: I want to auto-link my WordPress posts to micro.blog – not cross-post, but just have everything I post there automatically linked …
Nov 3, 2022: things poets do
Nov 3, 2022: I’m sure you’re having a rough day, but consider this: You’re not spending it trying to read Auden’s handwriting.
Nov 3, 2022: Ross Douthat: One of the master keys to understanding our era is seeing all the ways in which conservatives and progressives have traded attitudes …
Nov 2, 2022: Sermon for All Souls by Jessica Martin Sermon for All Souls, 2 November 2022 Ely Cathedral, 7.30 pm Canon Jessica Martin NT: 1 Peter 1.3–9 Gospel: John 5.19–25 Although you have not seen …
Nov 2, 2022: Last night at our local pizzeria, Moroso. So, so delicious.
Nov 2, 2022: refugees from human nature Matthew Loftus: Our communities and households must be active in reaching out to those whose lack of virtue, tradition, or culture is harming …
Oct 31, 2022: Why Ted Gioia thinks that victory, for artists, is assured.
Oct 31, 2022: Currently reading 📚
Oct 31, 2022: I’m doing a bit of blogging again, and about weird scholarly stuff – perhaps a sign that my spirit is beginning to recover some of its …
Oct 31, 2022: Vulcanology Here’s a little offshoot of my work on Auden’s The Shield of Achilles. This painting by Piero di Cosimo — see a larger version here — is called The …
Oct 31, 2022: so let's chill Noah Smith: So, Elon Musk bought Twitter. Personally, I’m pretty sanguine about this development. It’s no secret that I think that Twitter is a …
Oct 30, 2022: Re: my recent post on antisemitism, this from @lmullen and crew is exciting.
Oct 30, 2022: Currently listening: The Campfire Headphase - Boards of Canada 🎵
Oct 30, 2022: Re: Kyrie Irving, Ye, and others, this remains permanently relevant. Antisemitism is a pathological bigotry that can’t be eradicated because it’s …
Oct 30, 2022: If I were at the Emirates I’d teach people a song for Tomiyasu: It would be “Tomi Gunner,” to the tune of the Clash’s “Tommy Gun.”
Oct 30, 2022: Derek Thompson’s take on baseball is similar to mine from a few years back, but he adds a compelling theory about “Cultural …
Oct 30, 2022: OH COME ON
Oct 29, 2022: Dave Winer: “Why would I leave Twitter? It’s like living in NY and not taking the subway. Sure it’s dirty and smells bad, but …
Oct 29, 2022: Trying a little experiment here, which I will explain in a future audio post. Source.
Oct 29, 2022: Currently reading: The History of the Computer: People, Inventions, and Technology that Changed Our World by Rachel Ignotofsky 📚 (It’s …
Oct 28, 2022: Currently listening: Tinariwen, Aman Iman ♫
Oct 28, 2022: Trying to do my part to show people A Better Way.
Oct 28, 2022: Cognitive errors and moral failings A first experiment in microcasting.
Oct 28, 2022: this blog's mission statement Auden, from “The Garrison”: Whoever rules, our duty to the City is loyal opposition, never greening for the big money, never neighing after a public …
Oct 27, 2022: I’m feeling thoroughly moskered.
Oct 27, 2022: So close to greatness.
Oct 27, 2022: Looking forward to this new podcast from my friends at Comment Magazine, featuring Shadi Hamid and Matthew Kaemingk.
Oct 27, 2022: SO hard to decide whether to denounce the people who deserve denouncing or denounce the people who are denouncing the people who do not deserve …
Oct 27, 2022: Manton Reece - Dear Elon Musk: I agree that we shouldn’t be stuck in our own bubbles of misinformation. But the part Elon gets wrong is the premise …
Oct 27, 2022: I posted an update on my Buy Me a Coffee page.
Oct 27, 2022: Adam Atheist The other day I emailed my friend Adam Roberts and told him that I would have something to say about his despicable atheism. Adam: “SCANDALOUS …
Oct 27, 2022: My friend and colleague Philip Jenkins on The Great Vampire War of the Enlightenment.
Oct 26, 2022: Currently listening: ¡Ay! by Lucrecia Dalt ♫
Oct 26, 2022: Richard D. Kahlenberg: “Harvard picks classes that look like today’s racially diverse America; indeed, most undergraduates are students of color. But …
Oct 26, 2022: Ross Douthat putting the necessary question: As I argued in my inaugural newsletter last week, in general you need liberalism plus some overarching …
Oct 26, 2022: Every time Matt Yglesias bangs the one billion Americans drum, I have the same question: Where will the necessary water come from?
Oct 26, 2022: I am neither Greek nor Chinese nor a philosopher, but I do often try to go back to the beginning.
Oct 25, 2022: My buddy Austin Kleon tried to ask a question about “merch” but for once autocorrect imposed the right question: “What do people use …
Oct 25, 2022: Finished reading: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. Impressive in many ways and often delightful, but essentially it’s The Further Adventures of the …
Oct 25, 2022: Riccardo Mori: “I actually quite like most of what Apple is doing with the Mac, hardware-wise. The problem is I just can’t stand the software …
Oct 24, 2022: Re: this essay on accelerated and decelerated landscapes, I wonder if we can think similarly about media landscapes. Maybe what we need is not the …
Oct 24, 2022: Brad East’s rules for reviewing and being reviewed, are excellent, but the very first rule for reviewing should be: Don’t review a book …
Oct 24, 2022: Currently reading: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt 📚
Oct 24, 2022: Maybe this is just an oddity of my brain, but I find the Systems Settings app in Ventura incomprehensible. Whenever I have to use it I go straight to …
Oct 19, 2022: On my first morning at Laity, I always walk to Blue Hole. But it’s 39° this morning so I don’t think I’ll take a swim.
Oct 18, 2022: In these circumstances, a reminder: You don’t have to go there. You don’t have to do any of that crap. Life is better outside.
Oct 18, 2022: IMO, what this story points to is the difference between people who want to listen to sound systems and people who just want to listen to music. …
Oct 17, 2022: “Well, we’re the Satanic Temple, not the Church of Satan, because they’re awful.” From a terrific essay by Matt Milliner, mainly about Vladimir Putin.
Oct 16, 2022: Les Murray: Nothing a mob does is clean, not at first, not when slowed to a media, not when police.
Oct 16, 2022: WSJ on the Metaverse: “Among the persistent complaints from early adopters and testers, according to the documents, are that users have trouble …
Oct 16, 2022: ♫ Currently listening: Hermanos Gutiérrez, El Bueno Y El Malo
Oct 16, 2022: ♫ Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud was my faithful companion on my recent road trip. What an outstanding record. And two of the bonus tracks, …
Oct 16, 2022: Darwin Nuñez on for Liverpool. Bringing Darwin on is a … natural selection. #thankyouvurrymuch
Oct 12, 2022: Did I write this solely in order to use that title? You may well think so, but I couldn’t possibly comment.
Oct 12, 2022: Me to myself: Do not enter. DO. NOT. ENTER.
Oct 12, 2022: Finished reading: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler 📚. I wanted to love this book but I didn’t. It’s just too didactic. Like Richard Powers’s The …
Oct 12, 2022: Popular term for a beheaded person — disparaging, though, which I guess is why they won’t let me use it.
Oct 10, 2022: Currently reading: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler 📚
Oct 10, 2022: I wrote about Jean-Luc Godard, whose ideas I think simplistic and silly but whose boldness I admire, even when it leads to bad movies. But the piece …
Oct 10, 2022: C. S. Lewis, from “Lilies that Fester” (1955): The [student] will not get good marks (which means, in the long run, that he will not get …
Oct 9, 2022: I know from long experience that it’s the hope that kills you, but I’m gonna go way out on a limb here and say it: I don’t believe Arsenal will be …
Oct 9, 2022: It’s Sunday morning in northeastern Alabama and there sure are a lot of guys around here wearing camo. (I’m having some pretty overwhelming Proustian …
Oct 8, 2022: Sara Hendren: “But in rejecting the distorted and gendered version of small-s sacrifice, I threw out also the big-s Sacrifice that is one …
Oct 8, 2022: Will be doing my thought-experimental Reading the New Testament class again next term.
Oct 7, 2022: Now that I’m taking a break from my big blog and posting many small things here at micro.blog, I am just so impressed by how well thought-out …
Oct 7, 2022: An extremely raucous murder of crows in the neighborhood this morning is reminding me of lines from a poem by E. B. White: “In their assemblies …
Oct 7, 2022: What an image. Among the silent trees a Russian rocket finds its resting place. (Taken near a Ukranian village by Francisco Seco / AP.)
Oct 7, 2022: Currently reading: Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson 📚
Oct 6, 2022: Temple Grandin: “Some visual thinkers, like me, are ‘object visualizers’—we see the world in photorealistic images. Many of us are graphic designers, …
Oct 5, 2022: Currently reading: Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance by Ada Palmer 📚
Oct 5, 2022: Noah Smith: “The authoritarians of the world are already making a pretty good case for liberal democracy simply by being incredibly incompetent.”
Oct 5, 2022: The Cineaste’s Guide to Watching Movies While Stoned. This was basically my life back in the day. Not gonna be more specific.
Oct 5, 2022: Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt: “One day, a government source informed the synagogue that we would be expected to support the war — or else. It was …
Oct 5, 2022: Alternate spelling. Pangram!
Oct 4, 2022: “If these problems are intrinsically linked to consolidated tech giants like Meta, Google, and Amazon, why not embrace technologies that …
Oct 4, 2022: Announcing a blogging hiatus – though I’ll probably be here at micro.blog more than in the past.
Oct 4, 2022: announcement I won’t be blogging here for the foreseeable future, for reasons I explain here. I will continue, God willing, to produce my weekly newsletter, and I …
Oct 4, 2022: seed funding for the arts The Nostalgic Turn in Music Writing - by Ted Gioia: There are a hundred non-profit foundations in the arts that could solve this problem with a …
Oct 3, 2022: It me.
Oct 3, 2022: Translation: “I’m not paying you to teach me organic chemistry, I’m paying you to tell medical schools that I know organic chemistry — and you’re not …
Oct 3, 2022: Bresson and the power of habit Robert Bresson’s films A Man Escaped (1956) and Pickpocket (1959) are book-matched movies, mirror images of each other. In the first an honest and …
Oct 2, 2022: Esau McCaulley: How do we order society in such a way that increases human flourishing and limits suffering? What is the good, the true and the …
Oct 2, 2022: ♫ Currently listening: Time Waits: The Amazing Bud Powell
Oct 2, 2022: Stop Donating to Your Elite University - The Atlantic: “Everything we do in academia is based on the assumption that merit can be assessed,” Son Hing …
Oct 2, 2022: de-streaming ‘There’s endless choice, but you’re not listening’: fans quitting Spotify to save their love of music: Meg Lethem was working at her bakery job one …
Oct 1, 2022: forming the public self When I read about what children should be taught at school about gender, I find myself thinking back to the scene early in Hunger of Memory in which …
Sep 30, 2022: ♫ Currently listening: Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers with Thelonious Monk. Fabulous record; the fact that Monk always seems to be playing on a …
Sep 30, 2022: Collections on micro.blog On the most recent episode of Core Intuition, @manton and @danielpunkass discuss whether micro.blog should implement an equivalent of Bookshelves for …
Sep 30, 2022: unpreparation I’ve kept the links in this important passage from a sobering piece by Ed Yong: In 2018, I wrote an article in The Atlantic warning that the …
Sep 30, 2022: homelessness Paul Kingsnorth: When you can no longer grow your own wood or cut your own turf to heat your own parlour, you are made that little bit more dependent …
Sep 29, 2022: ♫ Sweet haul from Waterloo Records today. Grooving to Delvon Lamarr right now.
Sep 29, 2022: it's all content Josh Owens, former employee of Alex Jones: I don’t think there’s a silver bullet when it comes to stopping Jones. As for the trial, I think it …
Sep 28, 2022: As Qatar 2022 looms the US look like who they are: Concacaf’s third best team. Too true to be good.
Sep 28, 2022: David French: When the Church leads with its moral code — and elevates that moral code over even the most basic understandings of Jesus Christ …
Sep 28, 2022: comparisons are odorous Don't Fear the Artwork of the Future - The Atlantic: What is so tiresome about the fear of AI art is that all of this has been said before—about …
Sep 28, 2022: fighting the good fight Some initial axioms: The U.S. has some genuine conservatives and genuine liberals, but not enough — or maybe it’s just that they’re not vocal enough; …
Sep 27, 2022: The workshop.
Sep 27, 2022: the arts our country requires In a famous letter, John Adams wrote from Paris to his beloved Abigail: To take a Walk in the Gardens of the Palace of the Tuilleries, and describe …
Sep 26, 2022: “The Godfather is shit. But there is a part of me that loves shit.” — Jean-Luc Godard
Sep 26, 2022: defeaters Ukraine Can Win This War - by Liam Collins and John Spencer: Two or three times a day I see an article like this one: a confident prediction that …
Sep 26, 2022: monarchy Having written recently about the death of Queen Elizabeth, I’d like to call attention to some of the things I’ve written in the past about what I …
Sep 25, 2022: Made pesto today in this food processor, which is forty years old. I know old people like to say “They don’t make ‘em like that any …
Sep 25, 2022: “There are no dull subjects, only dull minds.” — Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”
Sep 25, 2022: Sigal Samuel at Vox: The world has no real plan to stop the genocide underway in China. Some Uyghurs are at the point where they wish the world would …
Sep 25, 2022: name change I decided to change the name of this blog, for reasons that should be clear from recent and future posts. But ICYMI, the namesake post of the blog is …
Sep 24, 2022: two versions of covid skepticism From a long, intricate, subtle, and necessary essay by Ari Schulman: The skeptical type I have targeted here is not the one who believes merely that …
Sep 23, 2022: secret ambivalence In an earlier post I talked about how good Pauline Kael’s early film criticism — her pre-New Yorker writing — is, and another fine example comes from …
Sep 22, 2022: Donald Trump says that as President he could declassify documents just by “thinking about it.” NOT TRUE. He also needed to do this: …
Sep 22, 2022: Russell Moore: Today’s American evangelical Christianity seems to be more focused on hunting heretics internally than perhaps in any other …
Sep 22, 2022: Mark Zuckerberg Welcomes YOU to the Metaverse
Sep 21, 2022: an allegory of American political life, especially online Dante, Inferno, Canto XXX (Hollander translation): And I to him: ‘Who are these two wretches who steam as wet hands do in winter and lie so very near …
Sep 21, 2022: forking paths Deepfake audio has a tell and researchers can spot it — yes, there’s a tell now, but will there always be? Deepfake audio, deepfake video, DALL-E …
Sep 20, 2022: Any word in The Lord of the Rings is a word as far as I’m concerned.
Sep 20, 2022: Games, Mysteries, and the Lure of QAnon | WIRED: There’s a parallel between the seemingly unmoderated theorists of r/findbostonbombers and the …
Sep 19, 2022: the dust that you are After the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, C. S. Lewis wrote to an American friend, You know, over here people did not get that fairy-tale …
Sep 19, 2022: rebellion against stability I’m not a huge fan of the music of Kelly Lee Owens, but I am a huge fan of this interview: “I grew up in a working class village in Wales and …
Sep 18, 2022: Look for my forthcoming novel The Queue Towers
Sep 18, 2022: file-selves Sheila Fitzpatrick: ‘Man lives in the real world; but there’s also a parallel world: a paper one, a bureaucratic one. So the passport is the person’s …
Sep 17, 2022: sequence, 2 Read transcendentally stupid take online Grab laptop, start banging out devastating takedown Realize that ten thousand other people are doing the …
Sep 17, 2022: my little soccer Recently I was watching an MLS match and a familiar scene played out before me: A player comes flying down the left wing with the ball at his feet, …
Sep 16, 2022: Very much looking forward to Jamie's latest, which seems the natural — indeed the wonderfully inevitable — next step in his thoughtful and provocative …
Sep 16, 2022: Hmm, a couple of Premier League games at 2 — I wonder how VAR will ruin them?
Sep 16, 2022: Ken Burns’s ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’ - Dara Horn: Burns has a soft spot for Franklin and Eleanor, the subjects of one of his prior films, and here …
Sep 16, 2022: Auden, nature, history (A draft preface for my forthcoming edition of Auden's book The Shield of Achilles, with some images and links that won’t be in the book.) In 1952, …
Sep 15, 2022: redirect I love this from Tom McWright: A script that redirects anyone who comes to his site from Hacker News to Google. He’s had enough experience with jerks …
Sep 15, 2022: Currently lstening to: Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue ♫ (It’s good to be reminded what an extraordinary and unprecedented work it is)
Sep 15, 2022: sequence A: I don’t know, I think we need to get our own house in order before we launch into critiques of our enemies. B: There’s no time for that! The …
Sep 15, 2022: shorts I have read a great deal about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I have many thoughts — and a few strong opinions — but I am keeping them all to …
Sep 15, 2022: Le faux samouraï Criterion describes the film thus: “In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts. After …
Sep 14, 2022: the King There’s a great moment in the Beatles’ Get Back documentary — the 9 January 1969 session — when Mal Evans points out that the previous day had been …
Sep 13, 2022: how history doesn't work This is great from Freddie: The bigger thing for me, beyond the death of art and criticism I mean, is just how easy it is to inspire identitarians, …
Sep 13, 2022: Currently reading: Their Finest Hour (The Second World War) by Winston S. Churchill 📚
Sep 13, 2022: I continue to be interested in how the iPhone software handles low light, especially when using the longest lens. Here’s another example taken …
Sep 13, 2022: Blimp The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) is an odd movie, because it’s essentially an argument for something it never directly mentions: the bombing …
Sep 12, 2022: My friend Tim Larsen with an interesting thought: In all of human history Queen Elizabeth II is the single person who has been most prayed for. From …
Sep 12, 2022: Joe Mangina: For a healthy balance between the apophatic and kataphatic we should look to the liturgy. The liturgy is a complex performance, a …
Sep 12, 2022: introducing Six Books With Introductions Worth Pausing Over: Well, okay. Since I have tried to be a conduit for old books, I have no business criticizing this — …
Sep 10, 2022: Currently reading: The Gathering Storm (The Second World War) by Winston S. Churchill 📚
Sep 10, 2022: Robert Hutton: Had the Queen died earlier in the year, it’s not difficult to imagine Johnson harnessing the event to his great survival project. So …
Sep 9, 2022: The rain did a lot for this fella.
Sep 9, 2022: What the iPhone software does with very low light (don’t be deceived by the sky in the background, this was taken in a pitch-black night) …
Sep 9, 2022: Maya Jasanoff's idea that “The new king now has an opportunity to make a real historical impact by scaling back royal pomp and updating Britain’s …
Sep 9, 2022: I told them a while back that this is a word, but they obviously didn’t listen. Anti-liturgical bias at the NYT!
Sep 8, 2022: Currently reading: The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn 📚
Sep 8, 2022: September update for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.
Sep 8, 2022: Elizabeth II: a constant queen whose failings were rare: “She possessed, apparently, the unique skill of being able to position a tiara on her head …
Sep 8, 2022: God Save the Queen It is a truth universally acknowledged that if we do not suffer from our ancestors’ sins, then we have no need of their virtues. This truth has about …
Sep 8, 2022: I know this kind of thing is totally normal now — one of the most characteristic ways for journalists to use Twitter — but let’s be clear what it’s …
Sep 8, 2022: The Woman Who Became a Company: Since corporations can claim trade secrets, [Jennifer Lyn] Morone decided to resist pervasive data capture by …
Sep 8, 2022: creating the Vernacular Republic Ivan Illich, from In the Mirror of the Past: Rather than life in a shadow economy, I propose, on top of the z-axis, the idea of vernacular work: …
Sep 7, 2022: the history of literacy Mary Harrington: We can also kiss goodbye to the “marketplace of ideas”. This might have seemed plausible when everyone aspired to long-form, …
Sep 6, 2022: Currently reading: Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War by Mark Harris 📚
Sep 6, 2022: the final frame James Agee, the best writer ever to review movies for a living, was never better than in his review for The Nation of William Wyler’s The Best Years …
Sep 5, 2022: An Open Letter Responding to the NatCon "Statement of Principles" – The European Conservative: In the end the National Conservative statement is …
Sep 5, 2022: Ben Domenech: Too much of a good thing is a real problem — and in its final years, Prestige TV ran into that hard. The final season of Game of …
Sep 4, 2022: time out I’m going to be taking a little time away from watching the Premier League, because VAR is simply ruining the experience for me. Even if it were …
Sep 3, 2022: Currently reading: Awakenings by Oliver Sacks 📚
Sep 3, 2022: the end of <em>The This</em> Start with Adam’s post about this podcast. In the podcast, Bill, Joel, and their guest Phil do a great deal to illuminate Adam’s novel The This — if …
Sep 2, 2022: Michael Gerson: When we are caked with the mud of political struggle, and tired of Pyrrhic victories that seed new hatreds, and frightened by our own …
Sep 2, 2022: Listening to: Mingus Ah Um by Charles Mingus ♫
Sep 2, 2022: There’ll always be an …
Sep 2, 2022: The-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties In 1963 Pauline Kael — a freelance essayist, five years before her gig at the New Yorker — published an essay in the Massachusetts Review about some …
Sep 1, 2022: Watching Eurobasket this morning (which is awesome) and I just saw a European sports website identifying Luka Doncic as a player for “Maverick …
Sep 1, 2022: Currently reading: Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris 📚
Sep 1, 2022: wait, what? I started telling people what a terrific writer Brian Phillips is back in 2008, when he wasn’t yet even a gleam in Bill Simmons’s eye, and since then …
Sep 1, 2022: Letter from Martin Luther King Jr. to Clarence Jordan and the people of Koinonia Farm in Georgia; from a fine reflection on Jordan by Starlette …
Aug 31, 2022: Colin Burrow: The original Yale Book of Quotations (2006), on which this new edition is closely based, was always a spunkier affair than the Oxford …
Aug 31, 2022: Stanley Fish, How Milton Works: To those in whose breast it lodges, the holy is everywhere evident as the first principle of both seeing and doing. …
Aug 30, 2022: Currently listening: summerteeth by Wilco 🎵
Aug 30, 2022: I have always loved rain, but not until I moved to Texas did I really LOVE rain.
Aug 30, 2022: Currently reading: Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris 📚
Aug 30, 2022: 40-year report When I first started teaching college students, at the University of Virginia forty years ago, I discovered that A few students were right on my …
Aug 29, 2022: open letter Politics is exceptionally difficult. I mean, think about it: what could be more complex and challenging and fraught with landmines than the attempt to …
Aug 26, 2022: Barry Moser, St. Jerome and the Lion
Aug 26, 2022: Currently reading: A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors by David Thomson 📚
Aug 25, 2022: quote unquote I have no idea what is actually going to happen before I die except that I am not going to like it. — W. H. Auden, 1966
Aug 25, 2022: How Moral Panic Has Debased Art Criticism - Alice Gribbin: Artwords are not to be experienced but to be understood: From all directions, across the …
Aug 24, 2022: two quotations on memory holes, present and future Peering down the Memory Hole: Censorship, Digitization, and the Fragility of Our Knowledge Base | The American Historical Review: Abstract …
Aug 24, 2022: Currently reading: Making Movies by Sidney Lumet 📚
Aug 24, 2022: ELEMENT ANTYSOCJALISTYCZNY While I’m in Covid-induced memory mode… This is my beloved, circa 1981, with what I think is her first selfie. She had been listening to a public …
Aug 23, 2022: heads up Might be kinda quiet around here for a few days — I (finally) have Covid, and feel like a dim bulb. A stuffy, achy, coughy dim bulb. Though if it gets …
Aug 23, 2022: Remembering Fred Buechner My wife Teri and I first met Fred Buechner in 1984, when he came to Wheaton College for a ceremony acknowledging the donation of his papers to the …
Aug 23, 2022: speed revisited Consider this a kind of follow-up to my post from some weeks ago on moving at the speed of God. I’ve been reading Lawrence Wechsler’s And How Are You, …
Aug 23, 2022: Currently reading: And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?: A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks by Lawrence Weschler 📚
Aug 23, 2022: W. H. Auden, writing in The Griffin (February 1959): For several centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, Greek culture was unknown to the West …
Aug 22, 2022: An annoyance: Online security systems these days assume that everyone is surgically attached to their phone.
Aug 22, 2022: the publishing monoculture Why We Need Independent Publishers: The process of creating art and then asking others to assign it a somewhat made-up market value is admittedly one …
Aug 20, 2022: “Repeated, long-term exposure to standing also has been implicated in the development of serious health problems.” Exposure to standing? Like, being …
Aug 20, 2022: The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed: Americans could learn simply to do politics through ordinary statute rather than staging …
Aug 20, 2022: taste and judgment Re: Freddie’s post on the various ways you can like or dislike something, I wonder of this from Auden’s “commonplace book” A Certain World might help: …
Aug 19, 2022: National Parks Lifetime Pass? ✔️
Aug 19, 2022: I’m borderline-obsessed with these differently-angled straight lines.
Aug 19, 2022: revisiting Saul After further reflection: I’m the mark. The easy mark. It pains me to say so, but I fell for it. Jimmy didn’t change — didn’t change at all; but he …
Aug 19, 2022: Lambeth Whither the Lambeth Conference 2022? I’ve been turning that question over and over in my mind, and I’ve finally realized what I think. Imagine a …
Aug 19, 2022: Kubrick the idealist Diane Johnson, novelist and co-author with Stanley Kubrick of the screenplay of The Shining, writing just after the director's death: Kubrick had a …
Aug 18, 2022: Incoming.
Aug 18, 2022: forgetting and propaganda Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up …
Aug 17, 2022: “Not in word list.” These people are barbarians.
Aug 17, 2022: liberalism vs. centrism, adjacency and action I’ve written often about philosophical liberalism on this blog, because I have a complicated relationship to it. On the one hand, like John Milton, I …
Aug 17, 2022: Bit of a scramble to get down to this part of the river, but it was worth it.
Aug 16, 2022: Evening coming on in the canyon
Aug 16, 2022: change In this last season of Better Call Saul, we see Jimmy becoming more reckless in ways that seem both self-endangering and dangerous to others. By …
Aug 16, 2022: me to Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan
Aug 16, 2022: Laurence Sterne, from A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy: Lord! said I, … — What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this …
Aug 15, 2022: Glad to see this thread – the badness of what is now called “System Settings” in Ventura is scarcely to be believed. It looks like …
Aug 15, 2022: Masa tres leches cake, from Barley Swine last night. Would like to have more for breakfast.
Aug 15, 2022: Currently reading: Some Versions of Pastoral by William Empson 📚
Aug 15, 2022: tolerance In Defense of National Conservatism – Scott Yenor: National conservatives would have public and private institutions honor Christianity above other …
Aug 14, 2022: He drew a deep breath. ‘Well, I’m back,’ he said.
Aug 13, 2022: lost causes and places of hope Better late than never, Ezra — props to you for finally coming around. But not many of your generation will. Indeed, for policy if not for personal …
Aug 13, 2022: liberals believe Stanley Fish, from How Milton Works: Liberals believe that knowledge of an object (be it a piece of data, a person, a concept) is one thing and …
Aug 12, 2022: heads up I’ve got a number of brief quote-posts queued up for the next week, and a couple of slightly longer ones, but I won’t be around. I’m off Monday for a …
Aug 12, 2022: There’s a self-regarding preciousness to much of Donald Judd’s work — and to the whole town of Marfa — that I don’t care for, but he also did some …
Aug 12, 2022: Taylor Dotson, “Unsustainable Alarmism”: Consider alarmism in the climate debate. Presenting climate change in catastrophic terms has allowed …
Aug 12, 2022: The Contingency of Listening - by Damon Krukowski: Albums are mixed in order to be reproduced. When that process truly was 100% analog – the last of …
Aug 11, 2022: another friendly reminder Here’s the good news: Most Americans are not hateful conspiracy-theorists who want to destroy their wrongthinking neighbors. Here’s the bad news: The …
Aug 11, 2022: trolleys Every day, American politicians re-enact the Trolley Problem, and every day, they find a third option: to run themselves over with the trolley.
Aug 11, 2022: exhaustion, its causes and treatments I thought of calling this post, “You’re Exhausted Because You Don’t Have Enough to Do” – which, yeah, I know: a trolling, clickbaity headline if there …
Aug 11, 2022: a friendly reminder A year ago I wrote: “Wondering how to decide what to read? Here’s a simple but effective heuristic to cut down the choices significantly. Ask yourself …
Aug 10, 2022: Big the-Virgin-and-the-Dynamo vibe going on at the local Methodist church. From this angle anyway.
Aug 10, 2022: Rain everywhere … except in the little circle where I live. It’s like we have a force field keeping ALL rain away – and it’s …
Aug 10, 2022: I always quit Spelling Bee when I get to “Amazing,” because I think it would go to my head if I were called “Genius.”
Aug 10, 2022: Currently reading: Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston 📚
Aug 10, 2022: This is extremely uncomfortable for me, but over at my Buy Me a Coffee page I decided to ask people what might enourage them to offer more support. I …
Aug 9, 2022: thoughts, nearing the end The shot above is — in context — one of the most amazing things this amazing show has done. If Rhea Seehorn doesn’t win an Emmy, there should be riots …
Aug 9, 2022: Well, I’ve had more than enough of the heat, but this guy seems to like it.
Aug 9, 2022: exousia The Greek word exousia (ἐξουσία) is one that develops in curious ways. In Plato its connotations are often (though not invariably) pejorative: for …
Aug 9, 2022: Albert Murray in his apartment in Harlem, 1970s
Aug 9, 2022: Le Guin and forgiveness Ursula K. Le Guin wrote very few bad stories, but among those few is, surely, The Word for World is Forest. And though she never called it a bad …
Aug 8, 2022: It’s the cup of tea that just makes this one.
Aug 8, 2022: Photograph by Stanley Kubrick (1947) — taken, I think, with a Rolleiflex, because he used one often in those days. I do love me a square format …
Aug 8, 2022: Currently reading: Science and Government by C. P. Snow 📚
Aug 8, 2022: two quotations on church James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time: The church was very exciting. It took a long time for me to disengage myself from this excitement, and on the …
Aug 7, 2022: enough is enough It’s been said many times by many people, but the state of officiating in the Premier League is disgraceful — and does not appear to be improving. In …
Aug 6, 2022: "One Manner of Law," by Marilynne Robinson: Hugh Peters, most disparaged of Puritans, wanted to exclude poor artists from taxation. He proposed that …
Aug 6, 2022: Currently reading: Albert Murray: Collected Essays & Memoirs by Albert Murray – Murray was born in Woodrow Wilson’s first term and …
Aug 5, 2022: my new spiritual discipline ... … is: watching Arsenal play soccer. For the past few years I have rarely watched Arsenal matches live. Too much stress for me, too much swearing for …
Aug 5, 2022: The Southern Courier was published weekly from 1965 to 1968.
Aug 5, 2022: What is the meaning of ‘transfiguration’? | Psephizo: We are so used to speaking of ‘transfiguration’ in Christian terms that we have not realised …
Aug 4, 2022: The New York Times: Born in Birmingham, Ala., Dr. [Freeman] Hrabowski came of age in the thick of the Jim Crow era. The notion that Black children …
Aug 4, 2022: Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them …
Aug 4, 2022: Currently reading: Collected Essays by James Baldwin 📚
Aug 4, 2022: violence and boredom Adam Roberts, from an essay that (caveat lector) is full of explicit violence: Be honest: when I confessed, early on in this post, how squeamish I am …
Aug 4, 2022: representation A while back I mused on a question: What do we owe the more-than-human world? It seems to me that that question has a certain set of implications for …
Aug 3, 2022: From a Polish performance of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Paradise Lost
Aug 3, 2022: decline and fall TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants: A very interesting post by Cal Newport. His thesis is, essentially, as follows: TikTok’s popularity …
Aug 2, 2022: Noah Millman: The popular series Stranger Things is meticulous about getting details right, but it’s a Frankenstein world, built of spare parts from …
Aug 2, 2022: Some lovely photos of the recent Laity Lodge retreat with Sara Hendren and Claire Holley.
Aug 2, 2022: Continuing a theme….
Aug 2, 2022: I love how my buddy Austin Kleon uses his newsletter to riff on and extend some stuff I wrote.
Aug 2, 2022: That really was a wonderful meal at Milo last night. Corey’s cooking gets more and more interesting. (See these blue-crab hushpuppies – to …
Aug 2, 2022: workspace
Aug 2, 2022: A woman loving her dessert. A lovely woman who has been married for forty-two years – to me!
Aug 2, 2022: incentives Consider this an addendum to my recent post on an influential study of Alzheimer’s that looks to have featured manipulated data. Retraction Watch has …
Aug 2, 2022: All forms of privilege — including the ones I benefit from — are morally dangerous, but I think the form of privilege that does the greatest social …
Aug 1, 2022: feeling kinda like
Aug 1, 2022: Currently reading: Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls by Edmund Wilson 📚
Aug 1, 2022: Wendell Berry: I have had with my friend Wes Jackson a number of useful conversations about the necessity of getting out of movements — even …
Aug 1, 2022: Pablo Auladell’s graphic-novel adaptation of Paradise Lost is quite remarkable.
Jul 31, 2022: R.I.P. Bill Russell, one of the greatest Americans of our era — the best team athlete in American history, and an icon of Black Americans’ quest for …
Jul 31, 2022: smooth things and rough ground There are many links in what follows. I would encourage you to read this through without noticing the links, and then go back to them later if you’re …
Jul 30, 2022: Sir Hardy Amies was for decades Dressmaker to Queen Elizabeth, and also, in his spare time, designed costumes for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space …
Jul 30, 2022: building what looks right Eboo Patel: When I was in college in the mid-1990s—an era that feels quite similar to today—a lot of my activism was around diversity issues. It …
Jul 30, 2022: In those first three tries, I guessed one letter correctly and twelve incorrectly. ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ 🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜ ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Jul 29, 2022: Not really where I thought Christopher Fry would take that libretto, but I guess that’s why he’s a famous playwright and I’m not.
Jul 29, 2022: "Charge of the Phone Brigade," by Adam Roberts: Is there a text from Nan? What’s up on instagram? Has aught retweeted them? Anxiously scrolling. …
Jul 29, 2022: My colleagues Byron Johnson and Jeff Levin: According to the 2018 General Social Survey, 6.4% of self-described atheists and 27.2% of agnostics …
Jul 29, 2022: fish I’m trying to decide how much I agree with this, from the film scholar David Thomson, in the Mizoguchi entry in his New Biographical Dictionary of …
Jul 28, 2022: the file system The Verge: “I grew up when you had to have a file; you had to save it; you had to know where it was saved. There was no search function,” says Saavik …
Jul 28, 2022: Critical research on the causes of Alzheimer’s may have been falsified — and as a result, researchers may have concentrated too much on a hypothesis …
Jul 28, 2022: Currently listening: Bach: The Cello Suites — Recomposed by Peter Gregson ♫
Jul 28, 2022: Yes, Social Media Really Is Undermining Democracy - The Atlantic: Social media may not be the primary cause of polarization, but it is an important …
Jul 27, 2022: Mary Midgley, in a late interview: “The kind of thing that Paul Davies has dwelt on, about the improbability of all this order, seems to me to be …
Jul 27, 2022: Finished reading: Space Odyssey by Michael Benson – one of the best books of its kind I’ve ever read 📚
Jul 27, 2022: Finished reading: The Railway Children by E Nesbit 📚 (first time in many years!)
Jul 27, 2022: What does my home town sound like? It sounds like Waxahatchee’s “Arkadelphia”. It sounds exactly like that.
Jul 27, 2022: Ross Douthat: “More Americans should live in the West, and more Americans assuredly will.” Yeah, they probably will, but they shouldn’t, because …
Jul 27, 2022: Mary Leng: Indeed, armed with a new toolbox of Latin names for fallacies, eager students all too often delight in spotting fallacies in the wild, …
Jul 27, 2022: no nonsense For the past few weeks I’ve been watching the 2022 UEFA European Women’s Football Championship, AKA the women’s Euros, and it’s been enjoyable …
Jul 27, 2022: Yasmin Tayag: At this point, I worry about how much longer it’s going to last. People like [my fiancé] — I think of them as “COVID virgins” — are …
Jul 26, 2022: We only have one weather now.
Jul 26, 2022: two varieties of human frailty Breaking Bad is a story about ressentiment; about a man who feels himself marginalized and neglected, powerless and ineffectual, who, therefore, …
Jul 26, 2022: Subpar Parks
Jul 26, 2022: normie wisdom 7: politics Towards a Normie Politics - Freddie deBoer: The association with the mainstream and centrism in American political life depends on a very selective …
Jul 25, 2022: To people who say that they need to repair and renew and restore themselves before they turn their attention to anything else -- which is what one …
Jul 25, 2022: Currently reading: The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries on Genesis, 1527-1633 by Arnold Williams 📚
Jul 25, 2022: How to Search for Life on Mars — The New Atlantis: Despite what it says, NASA has actually made the decision not to look for present life on Mars, …
Jul 25, 2022: capability and collaboration In her book Creating Capabilities Martha Nussbaum writes, What are capabilities? They are the answers to the question, “What is this person able to do …
Jul 24, 2022: Just playing around here … embedding a video in a post didn’t seem to work on all browsers, but maybe if I just link to the video? (Yep, …
Jul 24, 2022: Currently reading: Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson 📚
Jul 24, 2022: P. Frankenstein & Sons made a lot of things, including the space suits worn by the astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Jul 24, 2022: Via my son.
Jul 23, 2022: the invitation to critique A while back, I wrote this: To make promises, to stand by one's words, to be answerable for them, is to open oneself to blame. That’s legitimately …
Jul 23, 2022: the missing middle Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly - by Adam Mastroianni: In every corner of pop culture — movies, TV, music, books, and video games — a smaller and …
Jul 22, 2022: One thing about this wild wild country It takes a strong strong It breaks a strong strong mind ♫
Jul 22, 2022: I’m so happy about last weekend at Laity Lodge that I’m posting about it on both my blogs.
Jul 22, 2022: critique and repair in the canyon A number of years ago, when I was teaching at Wheaton College in Illinois, a couple of students asked me if I would consider becoming the faculty …
Jul 22, 2022: convo Me: Good grief, it’s just one thing after another. T: No kidding. Today the plumber spills toxic chemicals all over our kitchen floor, yesterday it …
Jul 22, 2022: A Love Letter to the Mountains: In The High Sierra, [Kim Stanley] Robinson is constantly shifting scale too—shifting scale, subject, angle of …
Jul 21, 2022: L'aube de l'homme Ever since I learned from Michael Benson‘s excellent book on the making of 2001 that Stanley Kubrick‘s list of actors to play Moonwatcher — the early …
Jul 21, 2022: the ultimate in entitlement I posted this yesterday and then, because I wrote it in a moment of anger, decided to take it down. Denunciation is not the ideal mode for me; and …
Jul 21, 2022: Andrew Hickey: [Brian] Wilson’s post-Pet Sounds career, like his pre-Pet Sounds career, is an extraordinary mix of the bizarre, the shockingly bad, …
Jul 21, 2022: three versions of artificial intelligence Artificial Creativity? – O’Reilly: AI has been used to complete Beethoven’s 10th symphony, for which Beethoven left a number of sketches and notes at …
Jul 20, 2022: Andy Crouch: What I say to students is, you are not unhealthy people in a normal world, despite these statistics that show how anxious, lonely, and …
Jul 20, 2022: Ben Shahn, The Alphabet of Creation (1954)
Jul 20, 2022: Tom McTague: Being in London this week has been like having your home teleported somewhere else: You look around and everything is the same, but …
Jul 20, 2022: what's done Things without all remedy Should be without regard: what's done, is done. As regular visitors to this blog know, I recently read the four extant …
Jul 19, 2022: LOST, NOT STOLEN: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election [PDF] — very well done, patiently detailed and …
Jul 19, 2022: Is there a more user-hostile website on the internet than Patheos? I saw that my colleague Philip Jenkins had a new post and — momentarily forgetting …
Jul 19, 2022: Currently reading: Collected Poems by C. P. Cavafy 📚
Jul 19, 2022: Posted an update to my Buy Me a Dragon page.
Jul 19, 2022: Om Malik: Instagram’s transformation into QVC is now complete and absolute. Instagram is dead — or at least the Instagram I knew and loved is dead. …
Jul 19, 2022: Sympathy for my northern European friends. (I could say “At least it won’t last long,” but they might reply, “At least you …
Jul 19, 2022: improving Education Doesn’t Work 2.0 - Freddie deBoer: Entirely separate from the debate about genetic influences on academic performance, we cannot …
Jul 18, 2022: indestructible This long post by Jesse Singal makes one key point perfectly clear: People on Twitter may know that 10,000 alarmist posts about their political …
Jul 18, 2022: My friend Chad Holley — lawyer, teacher, writer — describing a bold pedagogical decision: If it was sage to leave well enough alone, I slipped up …
Jul 18, 2022: Didn’t think this guy was going to bloom this summer, but we returned from a few days away to find him going gangbusters.
Jul 18, 2022: Andrew Scull: Vast resources have been devoted over time to efforts to intervene in, ameliorate, and perhaps cure the mysterious conditions that …
Jul 17, 2022: Well hello
Jul 13, 2022: Small detail from Wildflowers (2017) by María Berrío
Jul 13, 2022: At The Modern in Forth Worth today, I was totally captivated by the mixed-media paintings of María Berrío.
Jul 12, 2022: Currently reading: Beyond Nature and Culture by Philippe Descola 📚
Jul 11, 2022: Ellul and anarchism This will be my last post this week — I’m off soon to Laity Lodge! I’ve said before that I think Anarchy and Christianity is Jacques Ellul’s worst …
Jul 11, 2022: the two enemies I have come to believe that almost all of our social pathologies stem from two deeply-ingrained tendencies: People care more about belonging to the …
Jul 10, 2022: Tony Cearns
Jul 10, 2022: self-limitation Here in McLennan County we’re experiencing a heat wave and a drought. Not altogether uncommon in Texas; and it will become increasingly common. We’re …
Jul 10, 2022: dehumanizing fun A provocative and disturbing essay by Josh Askonas in The New Atlantis: Many of the systems we now use online have their structural origins in the …
Jul 9, 2022: Jemez River, New Mexico
Jul 9, 2022: Currently reading: You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup by Peter Doggett 📚
Jul 9, 2022: Paul Kingsnorth: Why would transnational capital be parroting slogans drawn from a leftist framework which claims to be anti-capitalist? Why would …
Jul 9, 2022: How to prevent the coming inhuman future - by Erik Hoel: There are a handful of obvious goals we should have for humanity’s longterm future, but the …
Jul 8, 2022: Currently listening: Fleet Foxes, A Very Lonely Solstice ♫
Jul 8, 2022: Speaking of taste…. I don’t listen to many podcasts, but one I never miss is John Spong’s Texas Monthly podcast One By Willie, each episode of which …
Jul 8, 2022: normie wisdom 6: fear I draw breath; this is of course to wish No matter what, to be wise, To be different, to die and the cost, No matter how, is Paradise Lost of course …
Jul 7, 2022: Chris Stirewalt: There are species of bacteria that actually thrive in the toxic emissions from hydrothermal vents deep below the ocean. What would …
Jul 7, 2022: Bravo. Well done indeed, Economist.
Jul 7, 2022: Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume III: “Whenever I was late, no matter what the reason, Johnson called me a …
Jul 7, 2022: Matt Yglesias: And I’ve been saying for a long time now that we need to get out of this rut. You can shut things down for 15 days to slow the spread. …
Jul 6, 2022: 📚 Currently reading, in a copy I acquired in (I think) 1972:
Jul 6, 2022: A heartbreaking and powerful essay from Leah Libresco Sargeant: A previous surgeon had told me to stop crying during a miscarriage, so this time my …
Jul 6, 2022: Vicente Manansala, Community
Jul 6, 2022: Caro's LBJ After all these years, I am finally getting around to reading Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, and you know what? It is just as great as …
Jul 5, 2022: Currently reading: The High Sierra: A Love Story by Kim Stanley Robinson 📚
Jul 5, 2022: Paris Marx: The Amazon store experience, while presented as frictionless, contains a lot of friction—so much so that many people are excluded from …
Jul 5, 2022: David Brooks: The great thing about humility tweets is that you’re not trying to show that you are better than anybody else. You are showing that you …
Jul 5, 2022: Elvia Wilk: While plants do not demonstrate ESP or identify murderers, the fact that they are to some extent sentient, communicative, and social has …
Jul 4, 2022: If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line - starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding …
Jul 4, 2022: Andrey Mir: Digital natives are fit for their new environment but not for the old one. Coaches complain that teenagers are unable to hold a hockey …
Jul 3, 2022: Currently reading: The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. 4) by Robert A. Caro 📚
Jul 2, 2022: the sheepdog's view I’ve been thinking about the weirdly intense hatred many conservatives feel for people like David French and Liz Cheney — for anyone they think isn’t …
Jul 2, 2022: Leah Libresco Sargeant: To give an honest accounting of ourselves, we must begin with our weakness and fragility. We cannot structure our politics or …
Jul 1, 2022: annoyance I like Independent Publisher, the WordPress theme you’re looking at, but I’m not crazy about it. I prefer Davis, the theme I was using …
Jul 1, 2022: Today’s harvest
Jul 1, 2022: My iCloud issue: files I create on my iPhone take roughly 36 hours to show up on my Mac. This has been especially frustrating with photos, which I …
Jul 1, 2022: it’s the friends you make along the way
Jul 1, 2022: Iain Sinclair · Diary: The Plutocrat Tour · LRB 7 July 2022: Heading west towards Woolwich and the remains of the Royal Arsenal, with its buried …
Jun 30, 2022: New ways of war: Adam Liptak on Adam Roberts’s 2010 novel New Model Army — which, as it happens, I wrote about here, a decade ago. It’s an endlessly …
Jun 30, 2022: Currently reading: Master Of The Senate (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 3) by Robert A. Caro 📚
Jun 30, 2022: Finished reading: Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 2) by Robert A. Caro 📚
Jun 30, 2022: Finished reading: The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 1) by Robert A. Caro 📚
Jun 30, 2022: habits of the American mind The American Civil War was not that long ago. The last surviving Civil War veteran died two years before my birth. A conflict of that size and scope …
Jun 29, 2022: The Best and the Brightest I’ve been reading David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest for the first time in 40 years or more, and returning to it after all this time my …
Jun 28, 2022: Blake’s savagely funny annotations to Robert Thornton’s The Lord’s Prayer, Newly Translated (1827). He does his own translation, of …
Jun 28, 2022: Brain Sciences | Is Reduced Visual Processing the Price of Language?: Abstract We suggest a later timeline for full language capabilities in Homo …
Jun 28, 2022: two quotations on culture wars Ian Leslie: I have long thought it’s a bit odd quite how much people on the left love to bemoan culture war discourse. They talk about it all the …
Jun 27, 2022: Surely there’s never been a greater album cover.
Jun 27, 2022: Thus a more inclusive definition of Nixonland: it is the America where two separate and irreconcilable sets of apocalyptic fears coexist in the minds …
Jun 25, 2022: weighing in, God help me Weighing in, yes, but doing my usual trick of trying to separate matters that get entangled in The Discourse. Regarding yesterday’s SCOTUS decision, …
Jun 24, 2022: a friendly reminder In times of intense emotional upheaval in our public life, nothing — and I mean absolutely nothing — good can come from being on social media, and …
Jun 24, 2022: [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1466”] Alpinia zerumbet as syn. Renealmia nutans in Temple of Flora by …
Jun 24, 2022: Currently reading: The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam 📚
Jun 24, 2022: transcription I like this from my buddy Austin Kleon: A solution to writer’s block: Transcribe yourself — I do something similar, though not for writer’s …
Jun 23, 2022: getting what you ask for More familiar instances of toxic masculinity concern the wanton infliction of violence, especially the sexual kind, especially upon women and girls. …
Jun 23, 2022: Re: my recent essay on the dangers intrinsic to any attempt to create a monoculture, I think of this passage from Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle …
Jun 22, 2022: I'll be totally fine if Arsenal don't get Raphinha — I don't think he's worth the amount he’ll likely command. I’m a little more positive about …
Jun 22, 2022: Freddie deBoer: It’s very strange to think that someone who murders a convenience store employee in a botched robbery deserves another shot at life …
Jun 22, 2022: Don’t know why this guy stands more than a foot higher than his friends, but he’s impressive. Maybe eight feet tall?
Jun 22, 2022: To say, as the Archbishop of Canterbury has, that the bishops at the forthcoming Lambeth Conference won’t be passing resolutions but rather “issuing …
Jun 22, 2022: Machenesque and Menckenesque From H. L. Mencken's obituary for J. Gresham Machen, the proto-evangelical: There was a time, two or three centuries ago, when the overwhelming …
Jun 22, 2022: Currently reading: Lucky Per by Henrik Pontoppidan 📚
Jun 22, 2022: From Agnes Giberne’s Sun, Moon, and Stars: A Book for Beginners (1879)
Jun 21, 2022: Currently listening: Danish String Quartet, Last Leaf ♫
Jun 21, 2022: Currently reading: Milton and the English Revolution by Christopher Hill 📚
Jun 21, 2022: self-understanding and resistance In The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn says that whenever people in the Soviet Union were arrested they all said the same thing: “Me? What for?” When …
Jun 21, 2022: Sonnet 61 (2016). Linocut by Rosie Fairfax-Cholmeley
Jun 20, 2022: Currently listening: Willie Nelson, Spirit ♫
Jun 20, 2022: Lambeth 2022 and African Anglicanism – Covenant: Whatever readers of this blog make of GAFCON, it constitutes a key segment of the Communion, too …
Jun 20, 2022: It’s a newslettery morning
Jun 20, 2022: bodies and stones In Breaking Bread with the Dead, I write about Donna Haraway: There's a fascinating early chapter in her book on human interaction with pigeons. Of …
Jun 19, 2022: From my essay ”You Are Not a Server”, on Dickensian characters: To begin to cite examples is a dangerous thing. Once embarked on that journey, how …
Jun 18, 2022: Currently listening: Aaron Copland, Appalachian Spring ♫
Jun 18, 2022: I’ve just revised and edited the page where I list the major themes of my big blog and link to the relevant tags. I don’t know whether …
Jun 18, 2022: Mosaics of San Marco, Venice
Jun 18, 2022: Remembering a visit to Sanibel with dear friends….
Jun 18, 2022: Currently listening: Wood Works by Danish String Quartet ♫
Jun 18, 2022: less Tono, more Bungay After writing my reflection on Tono-Bungay, I read Adam Roberts’s thoughts in his excellent literary biography of Wells — you can read almost the same …
Jun 17, 2022: I wrote about mechanization, illiberalism, and the attempt to create a monoculture. Part of my ongoing work on plurality and pluralism.
Jun 17, 2022: Mechanization and Monoculture, by me: Indeed, it seems to me that the one indisputable thing we can say about our current illiberalisms, of the left …
Jun 17, 2022: excerpt from my Sent folder: nodes I try to make the best of the blogging environment, but I have always been fascinated by Jorn Barger's early-web idea of what he called “single-layer …
Jun 16, 2022: And this Yaupon tea pannacotta with fresh peaches and granola … I don’t even have words.
Jun 16, 2022: Odd Duck Austin is one of my favorite eating/drinking places.
Jun 16, 2022: Currently reading: What They Heard by Luke Meddings 📚
Jun 16, 2022: Learning a lot from this FIFA map. For instance, Denver is now where Bozeman used to be; Dallas where Kansas City used to be; Kansas City where Des …
Jun 16, 2022: P.S. I ended up finally reading Tono-Bungay because, at a bookstore in Austin, I found a beautiful old Heritage Press edition of the novel for eight …
Jun 16, 2022: Tono-Bungay My friend Adam Roberts has written extensively about this book, but because I knew I wanted to read it, I have avoided reading Adam’s account. I’ll …
Jun 16, 2022: Silver Jubilee - by Damon Krukowski - Dada Drummer Almanach: [Maurizio Lazzarato:] “Small and sometimes very small ‘productive units’ (often …
Jun 15, 2022: Currently reading: Tono-Bungay by H. G. Wells 📚
Jun 15, 2022: Stories by Thomas Mann, published by Equinox Cooperative Press (1934).
Jun 15, 2022: You always try to console yourself. Yesterday I said, “Hey, the temp didn’t hit three digits today!” Today I’m saying, “Hey, at least I don’t live in …
Jun 14, 2022: My friend and colleague David Corey: I share Fukuyama’s hope that liberalism can be maintained. I hold this hope in part because (like Fukuyama) I …
Jun 14, 2022: A really fine poem by Adam Roberts. Adam is a man who writes all things well.
Jun 14, 2022: artisans on video Just as there are an infinite number of reasons to seek God in prayer, so there are an infinite number of reasons to check out YouTube. But for me …
Jun 13, 2022: sauce, goose, gander A typically and blessedly thoughtful reflection from Noah Millman: On both sides of the aisle, there is increasing acceptance of the idea that our …
Jun 13, 2022: normie wisdom 5: idiocy A great deal of survey research in recent years points to an important truth: That most Americans are not online much; most people aren’t political …
Jun 13, 2022: book review ethics When my biography of C. S. Lewis came out in 2005, I was inexperienced enough as a writer of trade books that I actually read most of the reviews. I …
Jun 12, 2022: Sam Adler-Bell: Of course, many good ideas, theories of change, and histories of oppression and struggle have been generated on campuses. The wider …
Jun 12, 2022: From the Eric Gill Collection at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas
Jun 11, 2022: three axioms I don’t think enough attention is given to the three key axioms — typically unstated — of advocates for gender fluidity and gender choice: A person …
Jun 11, 2022: Heading on a letter from Maria Smith Giberne to Gerard Manley Hopkins
Jun 10, 2022: In Times of Tribulation, Prophecy Books Multiply: “We are looking for books that not only try to decipher what the Bible is describing, but also how …
Jun 10, 2022: Rep. Liz Cheney: Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, …
Jun 10, 2022: Squirrel wars escalating. I am injured but I persist.
Jun 10, 2022: a proper goal Joel Lehman and Kenneth O. Stanley (2011): Most ambitious objectives do not illuminate a path to themselves. That is, the gradient of improvement …
Jun 9, 2022: My “productivity system” is … a calendar. That’s it, that’s all I got.
Jun 9, 2022: Currently reading: The Women Who Saved the English Countryside by Matthew Kelly 📚
Jun 9, 2022: my essential productivity app … is a calendar. In some seasons of my life it’s a physical calendar, in others a digital one (I’m a huge fan of Fantastical, because it unifies my …
Jun 9, 2022: When Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (later to be known as Lewis Carroll) was a child, his father was the rector of the Church of St. Peter, Croft-on-Tees, …
Jun 8, 2022: Currently reading: Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton by Nicholas McDowell 📚
Jun 8, 2022: Art Chantry
Jun 8, 2022: "She's Funny That Way" “She’s Funny That Way” is a 1928 song composed by Charles N. Daniels, using the pseudonym Neil Moret, with lyrics by Richard A. Whiting — normally a …
Jun 7, 2022: Here’s a little thing I often think about: On “The Weight” Garth Hudson is on piano, and as each chorus approaches he plays a little …
Jun 7, 2022: How to give university lectures | Mary Beard: The second [lecturing tip I picked up from colleagues] was from Keith Hopkins, who asked students at …
Jun 7, 2022: Just ordinary morning light, that’s all. But I like it a lot.
Jun 7, 2022: Pretty typical message to my wife, who’s in Alabama with family
Jun 7, 2022: Currently reading: London: A Social History by Roy Porter 📚
Jun 7, 2022: normie wisdom 4: quirky vs. basic Scott Alexander: Right now, our society demands you be a Special Snowflake. Women who aren’t quirky enough are “basic bitches”, men who aren’t quirky …
Jun 7, 2022: What the West Got Wrong About China – Habi Zhang: The reason why China would brazenly “disregard the international law” that many other nations …
Jun 6, 2022: I wish there were a larger version of this response by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to an autobiographical questionnaire. The eye is drawn to his joking …
Jun 6, 2022: Newsletter time!
Jun 6, 2022: The other day I put on Richard Linklater’s Heads I Win / Tails You Lose (1991) — four hours of film leaders, those splotchy, static-y, often …
Jun 6, 2022: normie wisdom 3: two quotations on common responses G. K. Chesterton: The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage …
Jun 4, 2022: Currently reading: John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought by Gordon Campbell 📚
Jun 4, 2022: too good not to be true? Now that the semester is over, I am plugging away on my volume on Paradise Lost for Princeton’s Lives of Great Religious Books series. Right now I’m …
Jun 4, 2022: Seriously, these guys are just exploding. They’ve all been in this one patch, but now we’ve divided them and distributed them through the …
Jun 4, 2022: One of many glorious wood engravings by David Gentleman from a limited edition of Swiss Family Robinson.
Jun 3, 2022: excerpt from my Sent folder: "September 1, 1939" In the end, I think, everything has worked out nicely; Auden performed the rite of renunciation that he needed, for internal reasons, to perform, and …
Jun 3, 2022: Currently reading: Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World by Leo Damrosch 📚
Jun 2, 2022: Friday 4 July 1662 (The Diary of Samuel Pepys): Up by five o’clock, and after my journall put in order, to my office about my business, which I am …
Jun 2, 2022: contractual and unconditional love We know that when Dickens wrote David Copperfield he had not read Kierkegaard’s Either/Or – published less than a decade earlier, available only in …
Jun 2, 2022: From David Copperfield, Chapter XV: Mr. Dick and I soon became the best of friends, and very often, when his day’s work was done, went out together …
Jun 1, 2022: Kyōsai
Jun 1, 2022: not for me In a recent post that links back to an earlier post, my friend Adam Roberts talks about his lasting affection for Robert Graves’s book The White …
Jun 1, 2022: There are men who always confound the praise of goodness with the practice, and who believe themselves mild and moderate, charitable and faithful, …
Jun 1, 2022: The Woes of Being Addicted to Streaming Services | Pitchfork: I feel unsettled when I stream music on Spotify. Maybe you feel that way, too. Even …
May 31, 2022: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” — Samuel Johnson
May 31, 2022: I love it when former students of mine do cool things, and with this book Nate Anderson has done a cool thing. I’ve just started the book but I am …
May 31, 2022: Currently reading: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins 📚
May 31, 2022: ”The Sermon of the Wolf,” by Eleanor Parker: For Wulfstan [preaching in the year 1014] diagnosing his society’s ills as breaches of law was not a …
May 31, 2022: normie wisdom 2: philistines A continuation of this post Hugh Trevor-Roper doesn’t use the term normie, of course – his key term of disparagement is “philistine.” Paul Fussell: …
May 30, 2022: UW-M Special Collections
May 30, 2022: two quotations on what has been lost Could the greatest works of literature be undiscovered?: For two millennia, we’ve been haunted by the idea that what has been passed down to us might …
May 30, 2022: 14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture: This is very good by Ted Gioia, as always, but I would contend that the …
May 30, 2022: The Architectural Drawings at All Souls College, Oxford: Wren and Hawksmoor
May 27, 2022: Currently reading: Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh by Thomas S. Kidd 📚
May 27, 2022: Good to see these guys back.
May 27, 2022: keeping things on my chest Perhaps the key theme in C. S. Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man is his emphasis on the importance, in much classical and almost all medieval thought, …
May 26, 2022: I spend a lot of time just watching these guys come and go.
May 24, 2022: brief hiatus This seems like a good time to go silent for a few days — to pray in silence. I’ll be back, probably next week.
May 24, 2022: When I grow up, I wanna be like Pop. And you should too.
May 24, 2022: Pete Wehner: For abuse to happen under any circumstances is gut-wrenching; when it happens in a church setting, and is perpetrated by people who are …
May 24, 2022: Reformation in the Church of Science — The New Atlantis: Fake news is not a perversion of the information society but a logical outgrowth of it, a …
May 24, 2022: normie wisdom: 1 First post in a series When Hugh Trevor-Roper was a young historian he became friends with with the art connoisseur Bernard Berenson. Berenson was …
May 23, 2022: A festive harvest in the mail today. Listening to Wood Works right now and it’s utterly enchanting.
May 23, 2022: Currently reading: The Code of The Woosters by P G Wodehouse 📚 – I almost know this one by heart. In this difficult season of my life, …
May 23, 2022: Rowan Williams: I have said that I think there is a strong case for the exclusion of the Moscow Patriarchate from the [World Council of Churches], …
May 23, 2022: Another dashed-off newsletter, though with some prime Wodehouse content.
May 23, 2022: The heat wave on the Indian subcontinent is making the terrifying opening chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future feel a good …
May 23, 2022: when problems aren't trolley problems A brief follow-up to my earlier post on effective altruism (EA): I have a feeling that what makes EA less effective than it aspires to be is its …
May 23, 2022: my business That said, I’m not sure that this is an issue we need to spend too much time on. The genuinely Christian view is, it seems to me, both longer and …
May 22, 2022: a story In my first years at Wheaton College I had a colleague named Julius Scott. (He retired in 2000 and died in 2020. R.I.P.) Julius was a New Testament …
May 22, 2022: Going around saying hello to the plants I wasn’t sure had made it through our cold snaps in the winter. (I mean, this is central Texas, so …
May 21, 2022: Robin Sloan: Obviously, no one does this, I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of …
May 20, 2022: Currently reading: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens 📚 – taking my own advice.
May 20, 2022: time I want to connect a post of mine from five years ago — There are always questions. Which ones arise — that’s not for us to decide. All we have to …
May 20, 2022: points that don't need to be belabored We know — we all know — That people impose standards on their Outgroup that they never impose on their Ingroup. That politicians do 180º turns on any …
May 19, 2022: Ross Douthat is a brilliant writer and an old friend, but I wish he wouldn’t participate — as he does inthis essay — in the fiction that …
May 19, 2022: Finished reading: The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers 📚 Lovely to renew an old friendship.
May 19, 2022: Puppets by Paul Klee named the Philistine, Matchbox Spirit, and the Crowned Poet — Source: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (CC BY-SA 4.0).
May 19, 2022: The coming food catastrophe | The Economist: By invading ukraine, Vladimir Putin will destroy the lives of people far from the battlefield — and on a …
May 19, 2022: Quanta Magazine interview with Leslie Lamport: One last thing, about another side project of yours with a sizable impact: LaTeX. I’d like to finally …
May 19, 2022: Kent Russell: By accident of birth I am a modern, which means I will never know a charmed world. A world of consecrated hosts and faerie-haunted …
May 18, 2022: I very much enjoyed the recent Rest Is History podcast episode on Agatha Christie — and if you did too, you might be interested in this essay of mine. …
May 18, 2022: The Incapable States of America? – Helen Dale: State capacity is a term drawn from economic history and development economics. It refers to a …
May 18, 2022: pandemic and biopower "Permanent Pandemic," by Justin E. H. Smith: When I say the regime, I do not mean the French government or the U.S. government or any particular …
May 18, 2022: These beauties arrived: So now the set is complete: Had to do my review from PDFs, so this seems my just reward.
May 17, 2022: Finished reading: Anarchy and Christianity by Jacques Ellul 📚
May 17, 2022: Cory Doctorow: Writing for a notional audience — particularly an audience of strangers — demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m …
May 17, 2022: notes Interesting convo at micro.blog about what people use to take notes. Me? Handwriting in notebooks (usually Leuchtturm) Marginal commentary and …
May 17, 2022: For what it may be worth: As the years go by my opinion of OK Computer ascends and my opinion of Kid A descends.
May 17, 2022: welp More than twenty years ago Malcolm Gladwell published a fascinating essay about two different modes of failure in sports: panicking and choking. …
May 17, 2022: this is your brain on shuffle Every morning — and I mean every single morning — when I awaken from slumbers, my brain serves up a song. A different song each day, as a rule. Never …
May 16, 2022: Currently reading: The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie 📚
May 16, 2022: Miguel Covarrubias, The Tree of Modern Art (1940)
May 16, 2022: Currently reading: The Recognitions by William Gaddis 📚
May 16, 2022: reification and metaphysical capitalism I’ve written occasionally here about what I call “metaphysical capitalism” — see the relevant tag at the bottom of this post — but one thing I have …
May 14, 2022: I was very interested in this Jonathan Malesic essay on how college students are or are not coping with the stresses of Covidtide. For what it’s worth …
May 14, 2022: Currently reading: The Recognitions by William Gaddis 📚
May 14, 2022: Self-portrait as I begin eight months of research leave
May 13, 2022: Your periodic reminder from Leszek Kołakowski: It’s possible to be a conservative-liberal-socialist.
May 13, 2022: on resembling the Angel of History Okay, so, first we have Andy Crouch’s book The Life We’re Looking For. Then we have Brad East’s essay-review on Andy’s book in The New Atlantis. Then …
May 13, 2022: Yann Kebbi’s drawings for the movie C’mon C'mon
May 12, 2022: nerves Well, the North London Derby will be kicking off in a few minutes, and my nerves are tingling. I won’t be watching the match — I’m gonna practice …
May 12, 2022: mapping the books I love this idea from my buddy Austin Kleon: not listing but rather mapping the books you’ve recently read. I have never thought of this but am …
May 12, 2022: bloggy A friend of mine wrote the other day to commend some of my recent posts for being “bloggy.” There can be no higher praise. I love blogging bloggily, …
May 12, 2022: Just posted an update to my Buy Me a Coffee page.
May 11, 2022: ascending In many of my courses I ask my students to explicate certain key passages from the texts we read — to dig in to the details, to see how the passages …
May 11, 2022: From a 1999 interview with the members of The Police: Sting: People thrashing out three chords didn't really interest us musically. Reggae was …
May 10, 2022: some thoughts on Tim Keller If you read Tim Keller’s books or listen to his sermons, some things will (or should) become quite clear to you: He thinks of himself first and …
May 10, 2022: zine! Julia Evans makes really cool zines for people who want to know more about computer programming, or, more generally, about being a power user of …
May 10, 2022: In David Thomson’s The Big Screen, largely a history of movies, there’s a chapter on television that contains a sentence, a simple and straightforward …
May 10, 2022: the speed of God Many of the key ideas in Andy Crouch’s new book The Life We Are Looking For emerge from his definition of the human person, which he derives from the …
May 9, 2022: mid-century modernity Over the past few months, I have been thinking a lot about the remarkable cultural transition that took place, especially in the West but really all …
May 9, 2022: Nick Russo: To wrap up his rowhomes project, Hytha’s planning to sell a collage of all 100 images that comprise it, and he expects the collage to …
May 9, 2022: envelope please Tom Stafford: A slow day at the museum, and the receptionist is sitting at their desk as a stranger approaches, perhaps a tourist. ‘Hi’, the stranger …
May 8, 2022: Re: those eggs, once I tried Alton Brown’s way of boiling eggs – which is not to boil them but rather to steam them – I knew …
May 8, 2022: Happy 92nd birthday to Gary Snyder pic.twitter.com/At40v7B4l7 — Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) May 8, 2022
May 8, 2022: Jacques Pépin calls this dish Eggs Jeannette, after his mother, because she would always make them for her kids when they were sick. The most …
May 8, 2022: Edward Heathcote, with a piece that provides an interesting counterpoint to my recent post on a 1950s skyscraper: Sennett refers to the difference …
May 7, 2022: “Another Green World," by Jessica Camille Aguirre: NASA has also dabbled in space agriculture. In the late Nineties, it conducted …
May 6, 2022: “The problem with my life is that I’ve said too much shit in the past and no one forgets it.” — Jürgen Klopp, also me
May 6, 2022: Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly - by Adam Mastroianni: We haven’t fully reckoned with what the cultural oligopoly might be doing to us. How much …
May 5, 2022: Last day in my Reading the New Testament class – a semester-long thought experiment in trying to place ourselves in the minds of the very first …
May 5, 2022: Happy 83rd birthday to the McDonald Observatory!
May 5, 2022: the old women of Nishapur Talal Asad: My point is simply that when a capability is acquired there is no longer a temporal interval between judging according to a universal …
May 4, 2022: Barbara Graziosi: Strong readings of the Iliad tend to focus on the final encounter between Achilles and Priam, and Achilles' return of the body of …
May 4, 2022: making a difference This is one of those I-want-to-think-further-about-this posts. A couple of years ago, Shoshana Zuboff wrote an essay for the NYT in which she …
May 4, 2022: Currently reading: The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies by David Thomson 📚
May 4, 2022: Andrey Mir (note Mir's definition: "Postjournalism is journalism that is economically forced to take a political side and produce polarization and …
May 3, 2022: Currently reading: Death and the King’s Horseman: A Play by Wole Soyinka 📚 (I’ve been adding books I’m teaching to these …
May 3, 2022: My newsletter is intermittent these days, but here’s a new issue.
May 3, 2022: the glazing of eyes The older I get, the more common this experience becomes: finding that I am simply unable to read essays and articles on certain topics. I may, out of …
May 3, 2022: Andy Crouch on invitation and repair From Andy Crouch’s new book: To rebuild households would begin to undermine Mammon itself. If we lived this way together, we would begin to …
May 2, 2022: Currently reading: The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 📚
May 2, 2022: The Economist: Migration into the state has remained steady for a decade (it is the number leaving that has changed). California continues to attract …
May 2, 2022: a memory At UVA, they’re stripping Alderman Library pretty much down to the frame, which may mean that this room won’t be long for the world. (I don’t know the …
May 2, 2022: DNA B. D. McClay: It’s natural to find the thought that what we build in our life will die with us disturbing. (Though forms of its lasting can also be …
May 1, 2022: This is gonna be fun
Apr 30, 2022: I estimate that 73% of my RSS feed is stories about Twitter. Enough is enough, folks!
Apr 30, 2022: uniqueness Ernst Cassirer’s An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture is essentially (more so than I realized when I began it) a …
Apr 30, 2022: Academics think a public intellectual is an academic who comments on current events. Journalists think a public intellectual is a journalist who …
Apr 29, 2022: Happy birthday to Willie Nelson, 89 years young today. Smoke ’em if you got ’em. The Texas Monthly podcast One By Willie — in which musicians talk …
Apr 29, 2022: Skyscraper Skyscraper (1959) is a 20-minute documentary film — mainly in black-and-white, though color enters in an interesting way near the end — about the …
Apr 28, 2022: Currently reading: A History of Christian Missions by Stephen Neill 📚
Apr 28, 2022: Thanks for the kind words on my post, folks!
Apr 28, 2022: I generally dislike unsolicited advice, but over at my macro blog I wrote a post offering some advice to people who are coming to micro.blog from …
Apr 28, 2022: a bit of advice Elon Musk’s imminent purchase of Twitter has a good many people scurrying for the exits, and some of them are coming to micro.blog — which is awesome! …
Apr 28, 2022: “You can't see it so I help you” There’s a lot going on in Edward Yang’s masterful Yi Yi (2000), but I just want to focus on one theme here: how an eight-year-old boy named Yang-Yang …
Apr 27, 2022: Currently reading: Picture by Lillian Ross 📚
Apr 27, 2022: I was so annoyed by the size and heft of my iPhone 13 Pro that I traded it to my son for an SE – which is dramatically more comfortable to carry …
Apr 27, 2022: department of corrections My friend Joe Mangina — who, unlike me, is a real theologian — has written to correct something I wrote in my sketch of a demonology. I would only …
Apr 26, 2022: [caption id=“attachment_42113” align=“aligncenter” width=“946”] “Hi, I’d like to add you to my …
Apr 26, 2022: DBH: [T]he religion historically called “Christianity” is not a “truth” that exists among and in competition with "false" non-Christian religions. …
Apr 26, 2022: Watching Scott Alexander try unsuccessfully to grapple with Lacanian thought reminds me of the summer, many many years ago, when I made the same …
Apr 26, 2022: Alexander Stern on "The Technocrat’s Dilemma": The technocratic response to misinformation and conspiracy theory only exacerbates the problem and …
Apr 25, 2022: Elon Musk could become the world’s greatest hero by buying Twitter and then immediately shutting it down. Seriously, it would be a revelatory moment. …
Apr 25, 2022: Craig Mod: I wish you all — all of you reading this — could teleport here right now, right in this very moment, and I could take you on a long walk …
Apr 25, 2022: Xiaoxiao Xu
Apr 25, 2022: this and that I am working on some things that will (I hope) be significant additions to my Invitation & Repair project, but those are taking a while to …
Apr 23, 2022: Hummingbird clearwing moth visiting my patio – couldn’t get a sharp photo though.
Apr 23, 2022: a tiny rant Recently I listened to a highly-regarded political podcast in which some of the participants referred to Senator Fine-Stine while others spoke of …
Apr 23, 2022: Michael Chabon (2006): I don’t know what happened to the Future. It’s as if we lost our ability, or our will, to envision anything beyond the next …
Apr 22, 2022: injured My Hedgehog Review essay “Injured Parties” — on free speech, iniuria, charity, social and legal remedies, and strategic inattention — is unpaywalled, …
Apr 22, 2022: institutions Story here. See also my essay on the need to recover the virtue of piety in order to restore institutions. But we have a really bad feedback loop …
Apr 22, 2022: entanglements Science gets entangled with politics; it always has and it always will. And every time it happens the reputation of science get damaged. I am of …
Apr 21, 2022: hero Wingy Manone was a trumpet player and songwriter from New Orleans who lost part of his right arm in a streetcar accident when he was ten years old. …
Apr 21, 2022: The Lindheimer’s beeblossom is back! – which means that soon the bees will be too. (I saw just a couple today, but I hope and trust there …
Apr 21, 2022: Maybe my favorite thing about our house: It sits on a slight elevation, so when we look across our back yard, we don’t see our neighbor’s …
Apr 21, 2022: The courtyard of Kéré Architecture’s Léo Doctors’ Housing, 2019, at the Surgical Clinic and Health Center, Léo, Burkina Faso; described here. Kéré’s …
Apr 21, 2022: Ross Douthat, suggesting two ways to reverse the decline of the power and influence of movies: First, an emphasis on making it easier for theaters to …
Apr 21, 2022: Nora S. Unwin (1907-1982), engravings from Joseph; the King James Version of a Well-loved Tale, arranged with an introduction by her friend and …
Apr 20, 2022: Currently reading: Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star: The War Years, 1940-1946 by Gary Giddins 📚
Apr 20, 2022: reading lists Three brief thoughts on this: People are calling it “banning books,” which it ain’t: a book isn’t banned by being left off a reading list; One …
Apr 20, 2022: I had to suspend my regular newsletter – interrupted by Life – but I’m still sending out occasional brief missives. I dropped one …
Apr 20, 2022: [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1200”] I am as I am. 1999 © Dayanita Singh[/caption]
Apr 20, 2022: The Love Feast “The Love Feast“ -- me in the new issue of Harper’s (paywalled, I think?) on the immediately forthcoming two volumes of Auden’s complete poems: In …
Apr 19, 2022: The 9 Biggest Myths About Nonfiction Trade Publishing, Debunked. These are all spot-on. I would only add that even when you get a larger advance, …
Apr 19, 2022: Austin Kleon
Apr 19, 2022: Welles and the newspapers From the Preface to the first volume of Simon Callow’s biography of Orson Welles: He publicly constructed himself, from the earliest age — my first …
Apr 19, 2022: compelling needs In 1957 Vance Packard published The Hidden Persuaders, his famous book about advertising techniques, in which he claimed that the products advertised, …
Apr 18, 2022: Michael L. Budde: This book is not an attempt to convince people that Jesus would prefer his followers not to use lethal force, even for a good …
Apr 18, 2022: two quotations on life beyond self-actualization Freddie deBoer: The simplest argument against a cultural fixation on the individual getting whatever they want is that it’s entirely unachievable. But …
Apr 18, 2022: Metafoundry 75: Resilience, Abundance, Decentralization: We mostly only close materials loops when it’s ‘economically viable’ to do so. By and large, …
Apr 17, 2022: Currently reading: Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams — the Early Years, 1903-1940 by Gary Giddins 📚
Apr 17, 2022: cross and resurrection Lesslie Newbigin: If the cross were the last word in God's self-revelation, then this first commentary would be the only possible one. If all …
Apr 15, 2022: Currently reading: The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood by David Thomson 📚
Apr 15, 2022: the great and awful doctrine The great and awful doctrine of the Cross of Christ, which we now commemorate, may fitly be called, in the language of figure, the heart of religion. …
Apr 13, 2022: Ross's prediction and mine Ross Douthat: I will make a prediction: Within not too short a span of time, not only conservatives but most liberals will recognize that we have been …
Apr 13, 2022: waiting for persuasion Leon Wieseltier’s long essay on postliberal Catholic integralists, or whatever we should call them, is a mixture of the insightful and the dismissive. …
Apr 13, 2022: discounting the past People on the left will typically be amazed and gratified by any good that has been achieved recently, and will treat any goods achieved by our …
Apr 12, 2022: self-Haysing As Nikil Saval pointed out some years ago, “The arc of scientific management is long, but it bends towards self-Taylorizing.” (See further development …
Apr 11, 2022: I’ve been watching this regularly for the past couple weeks, and I’ve never been so mesmerized.
Apr 11, 2022: Currently reading: Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss 📚
Apr 11, 2022: We have four mature live oaks on our property, but this is the one I look at the most often. It has a curiously sinuous interior architecture.
Apr 11, 2022: The Cosmati Pavement in Westminster Abbey: “In the year of Christ one thousand two hundred and twelve plus sixty minus four, the third King Henry, the …
Apr 11, 2022: Demons I got a lot of problems with you people, and you know what the top one is? Many of you are possessed by demons. Or at least oppressed by them. And it …
Apr 10, 2022: I do like a frittata.
Apr 10, 2022: [source]
Apr 9, 2022: I saw this lovely old thing at a friend’s house the other day.
Apr 8, 2022: Currently reading: The Pat Hobby Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald 📚
Apr 8, 2022: scatterings A few brief notes: You’re seeing more posts about movies these days because I have a couple of long-term projects in mind that concern cinematic art, …
Apr 8, 2022: Callow on Welles It was nearly 30 years ago, I suppose, that Simon Callow began working on his biography of Orson Welles. It was originally conceived as a two-volume …
Apr 6, 2022: I’m beyond excited that this July Sara Hendren, Claire Holley, and I will be leading a workshop at Laity Lodge on The Work (and Joy) of Repair. I’m …
Apr 6, 2022: Moving to Texas eight years ago forced me to think often about water — and the future of American places that simply don’t have enough of it to …
Apr 6, 2022: From an interview with Todd Hido at Lens Culture: LC: Your series Homes at Night is one of my favorites. We never see human silhouettes or the homes’ …
Apr 6, 2022: neighbors and altruism In my recent post on neighborliness, I quoted from a sermon by Helmut Thielicke, and I want to return to one passage from that sermon: Anybody who …
Apr 5, 2022: My friend Ken Myers — of Mars Hill Audio fame — has made a page with links to his several fascinating posts on the music of Passiontide.
Apr 5, 2022: rules, consent, virtues Leah Libresco Sargeant: The search for the perfect rule or set of safety settings does remind me of Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex. As she told me …
Apr 4, 2022: universal neighborliness Re: my earlier post on an Ezra Klein column, I want to add that the universality of Christianity takes a very peculiar form, because it is a …
Apr 4, 2022: At the request of … several, I have enabled a subscription plan for my blog. Please spread this exciting (?) important (??) news.
Apr 4, 2022: Ezra Klein: Can the constant confrontation with our failures and deficiencies produce a culture that is generous and forgiving? Can it be concerned …
Apr 4, 2022: This is my link to my post about my essay on piety.
Apr 4, 2022: Denethor the impious Long-time readers of this blog will know that I am a proponent of what I call the Gandalf Option. Such readers will also know how often I look to The …
Apr 3, 2022: Currently reading: Orson Welles, Volume 2: Hello Americans by Simon Callow 📚
Apr 2, 2022: Bunker Hill Imogen Sara Smith: Bunker Hill was film noir’s favorite neighborhood. In the 1940s and ’50s, the once-exclusive area of downtown LA, with its …
Apr 2, 2022: Still the best.
Apr 2, 2022: I almost always post my photos in square format, but not because of Instagram. This was my first camera, many years ago; I loved it with a passion, …
Apr 2, 2022: Diners.
Apr 2, 2022: New York City Libraries End Late Fees, and the Treasures Roll In: When New York’s public library system announced last October that it would be …
Apr 1, 2022: My friend Adam Roberts has written a witty and fascinating theological parable. Adam is of course a heretic, and I will feel bad when the Inquisition …
Mar 31, 2022: Currently reading: Orson Welles, Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu by Simon Callow 📚
Mar 31, 2022: a threefold labor This post by the film scholar David Bordwell has me thinking about how I might apply lessons from the project of caring for old movies to the more …
Mar 30, 2022: John Gallagher: The judges asked Thiess why he had become a werewolf – what benefits did it bring to a poor man like him? He explained that many …
Mar 30, 2022: I plan to write about the extraordinary 24 Frames soon.
Mar 29, 2022: I decided not to read the article about the takes about the memes about the exhaustion about the memes about the takes about the Thing That Happened.
Mar 29, 2022: This WSJ article about people returning to landlines and ethernet cables — that’s my tribe, man. Now, I don’t have a landline (yet?) and I use …
Mar 29, 2022: Symmetry in nature. Wes Anderson’s gonna love this.
Mar 29, 2022: Todd Hido
Mar 28, 2022: By pointing me to this interview with Brian Cox, my buddy Austin Kleon has provided me with the ideal tagline for this blog: “I’m too old, too tired …
Mar 28, 2022: Invasion of the Fact-Checkers - Tablet Magazine: The pandemic would shine an especially harsh light on the role of fact-checkers as information cops …
Mar 27, 2022: Watching the UNMNT and on this Sunday the goals (so far) have been scored by Jesus, Paul, and Christian. Just saying.
Mar 25, 2022: Matt Milliner: The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces was sprinkled with holy water by Patriarch Kirill in 2020, but that does not mean it is …
Mar 25, 2022: Andrew Hudgins, “The Cestello Annunciation”
Mar 25, 2022: critique and repair Here’s my friend Sara Hendren, a couple of years ago, on critique and repair: We’re seeing critique in the public sphere: criticism of leadership, of …
Mar 25, 2022: Sergei and Aimee Another story from Salka Viertel's The Kindness of Strangers: Eisenstein and his friends wanted to explore the religious and the sinful Los Angeles, …
Mar 24, 2022: two quotations on age Orson Welles: It’s only in your twenties and in your seventies and eighties that you do the greatest work. The enemy of society is the middle class, …
Mar 24, 2022: A true word from Laura Kipnis: “Rest assured, today’s moral grandstanders will be tomorrow’s thought criminals.”
Mar 24, 2022: the power of priors Leah Price: Remembered today as an escape artist who was one of the first Hollywood stuntmen, Houdini was equally well known during his lifetime for …
Mar 24, 2022: scissors in the head Ariel Dorfman: And yet the interaction between censors and those they suppress can be complex, as illustrated by an encounter I had with one of these …
Mar 23, 2022: Currently reading: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison 📚
Mar 23, 2022: This smoked-pastrami reuben at Milo – amazing.
Mar 23, 2022: Taken as the tornado sirens sang.
Mar 23, 2022: cancel it Ken White’s post on the problems with defining “cancel culture” — or maybe it’s better to say, the problems with declining to define it — put me in …
Mar 23, 2022: The Crimson Pirate If you want to have a good time, watch The Crimson Pirate (1952). It’s absolutely delightful. Years ago a critic — can’t remember who — described that …
Mar 22, 2022: [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1324”] James R. Roberts, Ivan Illich Leading Seminar at the Centro …
Mar 22, 2022: I am huge fan of the wines made by Steve and Jill Matthiasson, and one of their most remarkable products is their sweet vermouth, which is not like …
Mar 22, 2022: complete control Allow me to tell you about a memorable scene from Salka Viertel’s compelling memoir The Kindness of Strangers. In their native Austria and later in …
Mar 21, 2022: Currently reading: The Kindness of Strangers by Salka Viertel 📚
Mar 21, 2022: Ambersons Last night, for the first time in decades, I watched The Magnificent Ambersons, and three points struck me with great force. First: If Welles’s vision …
Mar 21, 2022: lagniappe Like Lincoln Michel, I have a soft spot in my heart for little literary magazines, and worry about their future. (For what it’s worth, I think the …
Mar 20, 2022: Currently reading: Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California by Matthew Specktor 📚
Mar 20, 2022: Finished reading: Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks 📚
Mar 18, 2022: well ok then
Mar 18, 2022: Those trees Texans call “mountain cedars”? They’re junipers. See?
Mar 18, 2022: Gary Saul Morson: “You have Putin’s Russia and Pushkin’s Russia,” Krielaars observed. To blame a whole culture, past and present, for a current …
Mar 18, 2022: [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“634”]Richard Cattermole, from Cathedral antiquities of England, vol. …
Mar 17, 2022: beyond grumpiness I suspect you have noticed that many old people are grumpy. I think the explanation for such widespread grumpiness is fairly simple. Perhaps you’ve …
Mar 16, 2022: Leah Libresco Sargeant, in a post called “Defining Human to Leave Out Almost Everyone”: Wrinkles are what a person looks like if they’re …
Mar 16, 2022: Mars Hill Audio One of my favorite experiences is to be interviewed by Ken Myers for Mars Hill Audio. Ken is both a great interviewer and a great editor of audio, so …
Mar 16, 2022: Doubt may be considered one of the consequences of original sin, but it also protects us against its more deleterious effects. It is important for us …
Mar 15, 2022: “Money clarifies; so does war.” — me, over at the Hog Blog, on Realities Soon To Be Revealed
Mar 15, 2022: Professional musical instrument storage and display
Mar 15, 2022: unresonant Every serious acoustic guitarist will have thoughts about how a guitar’s body — its shape, its bracing, the woods from which it is made, etc. — …
Mar 14, 2022: Pommes de Terre Persillade. IMO, the best way to eat potatoes.
Mar 14, 2022: Persillade in process.
Mar 14, 2022: The Monday morning ritual: reviewing whatever inchoate ideas emerged during the past week and putting the useful ones in a text file. Sometimes I …
Mar 14, 2022: [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1280”]Lwów, Poland, 1938[/caption]
Mar 14, 2022: aspiring to realism Adam Tooze: Adopting a realistic approach towards the world does not consist in always reaching for a well-worn toolkit of timeless verities, nor does …
Mar 13, 2022: [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“720”]Neil Young (1967) by Jini Dellaccio. See a lovely brief film about …
Mar 13, 2022: [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“700”]Imiri Sakabashira[/caption]
Mar 13, 2022: civil heart, disinterested charity Well, it was very odd what Mr. Sammler found himself doing as he lay in his room, in an old building. Settling, the building had cracked its plaster, …
Mar 13, 2022: I am experiencing the worst thing that an Arsenal supporter can experience: Hope.
Mar 12, 2022: "We know the next planet outside of our solar system is at least 5,000 years away," [Werner Herzog] tells Ars. "It's very hard to do that, and …
Mar 12, 2022: sounds [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“820”]“The worst cover in the history of the record business” …
Mar 11, 2022: Harmonized Region (1938), Paul Klee; Art Institute of Chicago
Mar 11, 2022: Source: UW-Milwaukee Special Collections
Mar 11, 2022: What a lovely tribute to Willie Nelson’s sister Bobbie, the heartbeat of his band for so many years. R.I.P.
Mar 11, 2022: The Embankment Railway never happened -- thank God.
Mar 11, 2022: consecration to culture Culture is the child of each individual’s self-knowledge and dissatisfaction with himself. Anyone who believes in culture is thereby saying: ‘I see …
Mar 11, 2022: Sometimes I think the OED is just pulling my leg.
Mar 10, 2022: a useful distinction C Thi Nguyen: An ‘epistemic bubble’ is an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission. That omission might be …
Mar 10, 2022: How to Discover the Life-Affirming Comforts of ‘Death Cleaning’: Professional home organizers are reporting a spike in calls from older customers …
Mar 10, 2022: Graeme Wood: Various journalists complained that I described MBS as personally “charming” and “intelligent.” To this my reply is twofold. First, MBS …
Mar 9, 2022: ”It’s Not Your Fault You’re a Jerk on Twitter,” writes Katherine Cross for WIRED. That said, you are a jerk on Twitter.* As Jaron Lanier …
Mar 9, 2022: original thinking and academic codes Kant clung to his university, submitted himself to its regulations, retained the appearance of religious belief, endured to live among colleagues and …
Mar 9, 2022: no power on earth From Edwin Muir’s Autobiography: During these years I began to grow aware of the people round me as individuals. At the Bu [the farm on the tiny isle …
Mar 8, 2022: Currently reading: An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture by Ernst Cassirer 📚
Mar 8, 2022: Currently reading: The Wood that Built London by C. J. Schüler 📚
Mar 8, 2022: Currently reading: Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer 📚
Mar 8, 2022: Currently reading: Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot 📚
Mar 8, 2022: Currently reading: Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee 📚
Mar 8, 2022: Currently reading: The This by Adam Roberts 📚
Mar 8, 2022: I keep vacillating about whether or not to record the books I read here; it’s interesting in a way but also feels performative. (Plus, …
Mar 7, 2022: revisiting architectural blogging I think a lot about blogging, about why I like it, what I think I can accomplish through blogging that I can’t accomplish, or not easily anyway, …
Mar 7, 2022: We have newsletter!
Mar 7, 2022: current status
Mar 7, 2022: Most people want to hear two things from politicians: First, that the problem they’re most concerned about has a clear, clean solution with no …
Mar 7, 2022: education, more or less Andrew Delbanco: There is a third — and perhaps the deepest — problem with the futuristic vision of education advanced by “technologically enabled …
Mar 7, 2022: self-knowledge, self-help Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (1944): That self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophical …
Mar 5, 2022: nothing's perfect The only Bluetooth device that has ever worked reliably for me is the first-generation Apple AirPods. In every other circumstance Bluetooth has been …
Mar 4, 2022: news-resilient The most recent issue of Oliver Burkeman’s excellent newsletter The Imperfectionist focuses on “becoming news-resilient” – finding ways to stay …
Mar 3, 2022: There’s a remarkable amount of useful information about the attack on Ukraine in this one map from the Economist. They really are masters of data …
Mar 3, 2022: Took me this long to get it in two. Will I ever get it in one? Doubtful.
Mar 3, 2022: dystopia now From my publisher:
Mar 3, 2022: Ian Bogost: The risks of netwar and cyberwar are consequences of convenience. Communications networks became widespread, delivering previously …
Mar 2, 2022: from the TLS: On my first visit to Moscow, I met one of Lenin’s embalmers. “When I began, the body was in a poor state”, said Styopa, whose expertise …
Mar 2, 2022: doing your own research Leo Kim: In 2016, director Dean Fleischer-Camp — known for his work on the viral hit, Marcel The Shell With Shoes On — released Fraud, a …
Mar 1, 2022: Injured Parties I have an essay in the new Hedgehog Review — behind a paywall, but shouldn't you subscribe? Yes indeed you should. The essay is called "Injured …
Mar 1, 2022: Tom Stoppard in 2013: Half the point I want to make is that I have had a charmed life. I was whisked out of the way of the Nazis, bundled out of the …
Feb 28, 2022: Big Bend National Park, taken a while back.
Feb 28, 2022: The mothership … um, I mean the newsletter has landed.
Feb 28, 2022: Antonio Stradivari, the ‘Davidoff’ cello (1712)
Feb 28, 2022: songs you're entitled to sing Edwin Muir was born and raised in the Orkneys at the end of the 19th century, and in his Autobiography (1954) recalls the songs he and his family sang …
Feb 26, 2022: Adam Roberts, “Ozymandias Replies”: So, friend, you think my face and legs in stone Are signs that I have failed? Friend, think again. When I ascended …
Feb 26, 2022: Photo by Gregory Gresko
Feb 25, 2022: Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, from Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away: Socrates was probably the first to identify aretē with what …
Feb 24, 2022: When the skylight in your bathroom enables photo-as-abstract-art …
Feb 22, 2022: hard things with friends There is a line from Tom Stoppard that I like to quote, one that I suspect is important to Stoppard as well, because he has used it in his plays, with …
Feb 21, 2022: R.I.P. Paul Farmer I am absolutely gutted to learn of the death of Paul Farmer, the only contemporary, I believe, that I have called simply My hero. He fought the long …
Feb 21, 2022: An amazing story by a public defender named Yassine Meskhout. A big wide disturbing window into the American legal system.
Feb 21, 2022: Behold the newsletter!
Feb 21, 2022: unified Czeslaw Milosz, from Unattainable Earth (1987): I don't like the Western way of thinking. I could say: the way Western intellectuals think, but then I …
Feb 20, 2022: Currently reading: Constellations by Govert Schilling 📚
Feb 19, 2022: Currently reading: Unattainable Earth by Czeslaw Milosz 📚
Feb 19, 2022: William Davies: Before March 2020, I was unfamiliar with the phenomenon of ‘guided reading’. My daughter (aged eight during the school closures that …
Feb 19, 2022: Martha C. Nussbaum: Behind these biases lies a more general failing, which the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal calls “anthropodenial”: the denial …
Feb 18, 2022: Richard Gibson: Work, [Adam] Smith points out, is a reciprocal process: Workers form goods, and are, in turn, formed by their labors. Smith worries …
Feb 18, 2022: cunning “Cunning” is a very interesting word. What follows comes largely from rummaging around in the OED. Long ago it could mean little more than “quite …
Feb 17, 2022: Chris Townsend: Let’s face it: we largely privilege Shakespeare more than other writers today because it’s always been that way. Or perhaps because …
Feb 17, 2022: Daring Fireball: Spotify isn’t just trying to become the biggest name in podcasting (which has heretofore been, but may no longer be, Apple). They’re …
Feb 16, 2022: this vs. The This C. S. Lewis, from The Discarded Image: If the reader will suspend his disbelief and exercise his imagination upon it even for a few minutes, I think …
Feb 16, 2022: Currently reading: The This by Adam Roberts 📚
Feb 16, 2022: the low bar An excellent post by John Siracusa (a) outlining the most elementary features that the UI of any video-streaming service should have and (b) showing …
Feb 16, 2022: Marcus Ratliff
Feb 15, 2022: Matt Yglesias: A normal person can tell you lots of factual information about his life, his work, his neighborhood, and his hobbies but very little …
Feb 15, 2022: useful thinkers in three kinds Useful thinkers come in three varieties. The Explainer knows stuff I don’t know and can present it clearly and vividly. This does not require great …
Feb 14, 2022: Behold the newsletter!
Feb 14, 2022: Old loyalties.
Feb 14, 2022: soma Adam Roberts, back in 2014: There is, I think, a genuine human fascination with outer space. Apollo could have capitalised upon that fascination and …
Feb 13, 2022: Currently reading: The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas 📚
Feb 13, 2022: Senator Josh Hawley: To start, large social media companies should be required to become interoperable with one another: Just as you can email …
Feb 12, 2022: seeds and means of renewal In a recent column, David Brooks writes extensively and thoughtfully about the prospects for the renewal of the moribund evangelical movement. He …
Feb 12, 2022: Blake Smith: His apocalypticism may be disturbing, or indeed mad, but it is not compatible with conservatism — or even with politics as such. Girard …
Feb 11, 2022: I stay away from almost all current kerfuffles, so maybe that’s what I was struck by a couple of things from this report by Kaitlyn Tiffany: (a) that …
Feb 11, 2022: A fantastic point by my friend Noah Millman in response to the question of whether Pulp Fiction could be made today: The answer is of course not. You …
Feb 10, 2022: A wise and useful reflection by Gabrielle Bauer on the "precautionary principle": Two years into this pandemic, it is high time we learn from our …
Feb 10, 2022: Alan Shapiro: For good or ill, I have spent more time reading and writing poetry than doing anything else in my roughly three score and ten years of …
Feb 10, 2022: Pope Benedict XVI: Quite soon, I shall find myself before the final judge of my life. Even though, as I look back on my long life, I can have great …
Feb 10, 2022: public and private Jürgen Moltmann: It is from community life that we draw the strength for discipleship and courage to face the inevitable opposition. In discipleship …
Feb 9, 2022: In a reasonable world, most people would be able to distinguish misinformation minority opinions the views of my political enemies
Feb 9, 2022: attentional norms Me at the Hog Blog on “attentional norms” and Zoom: It has been interesting to watch over the last two pandemic years as the norms associated with …
Feb 8, 2022: Gorgeous day on campus today.
Feb 8, 2022: Currently reading: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf 📚
Feb 8, 2022: the view from Poppy Hill When I talk about invitation and repair, I think the concept of invitation is a pretty simple and straightforward one. I want to invite people to …
Feb 7, 2022: Preview of coming attractions
Feb 7, 2022: It’s clobberin’… um, I mean, newsletter time!
Feb 7, 2022: Monday morning, at the desk, preparing to clear my head.
Feb 7, 2022: the graveyard of ideas What Was the TED Talk? - The Drift: The story goes like this: there are problems in the world that make the future a scary prospect. Fortunately, …
Feb 7, 2022: Here
Feb 5, 2022: Martin Niemöller, writing to his wife from Moabit Prison in Berlin, 18 August 1937: “You don't have to worry about me; I live my day and it's never …
Feb 5, 2022: tenants Megan McArdle: Zuckerberg had shifted his company away from the open platform of the browser and onto a closed system where Apple set the terms. For …
Feb 4, 2022: Christianity in sum I’ve mentioned in my newsletter how deeply I have been touched and healed in recent months by the Church of England’s Daily Prayer. This morning as I …
Feb 4, 2022: makers and making Let’s think about three ways in which technological making can go wrong, using some Ludlumesque naming conventions. First, there’s the Zuckerberg …
Feb 3, 2022: Currently reading: The Metamorphosis: And Other Stories by Franz Kafka 📚
Feb 3, 2022: Nicholas Carr: It’s revealing that, before the arrival of the net, people didn’t talk about “authenticity” as we do today. They didn’t have to. They …
Feb 3, 2022: I like this photo of the renovations being done at my church because it reminds me how the nave of a church gets its name (from navis, ship). …
Feb 3, 2022: two quotations: ears to hear James Wood: This objection to the free will argument seems decisive. It raises the most uncomfortable questions about why God bothered to create the …
Feb 2, 2022: Let’s be clear about the meaning of this silly practice of hosting international matches in cold-weather cities: U.S. Soccer is afraid that our lads …
Feb 2, 2022: Ilana Horwitz: When it comes to performance, religiously restrained students who live their life for God fare better because they are conscientious …
Feb 2, 2022: inside/outside More here
Feb 2, 2022: myths and counter-myths A while back I wrote a brief essay on the relevance of Emile Durkheim’s sociology to an understanding of our present social tensions. For the last …
Feb 1, 2022: orienting principles Many thoughts led to my beginning this Invitation and Repair project, but two of the major ones I have articulated on this blog: One: “One of the …
Jan 31, 2022: I do not criticize Josh Wardle, who deserves to get paid for his work — and I can’t even imagine what his hosting costs are — but I’m sorry to see …
Jan 31, 2022: Currently reading: Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age by Dennis Duncan 📚
Jan 31, 2022: Newsletter: Harmonies and Dissonances.
Jan 31, 2022: excerpt from my Sent folder: dominant Anyway, don't you realize that yesterday was a fantastic result for the USMNT? I read our coach's comments. He said we were "dominant." He said that …
Jan 30, 2022: Currently reading: The Time Machine by H. G. Wells 📚
Jan 30, 2022: eating people is wrong I’m sure what I’m about to say has been said by many before me, but I’m counting on Adam Roberts to let me know about that. Early in H. G. Wells’s The …
Jan 29, 2022: Tolkien’s own drawing of Sauron’s fortress Barad-dûr, with Mount Doom in the distance.
Jan 29, 2022: If Christians are ever again taken seriously in this country, it won’t be because they own the libs and rout the woke; it won’t be because they …
Jan 29, 2022: Musa al-Gharbi: In the wake of the 2016 election, Trump claimed to have had higher turnout at his inauguration than Barack Obama did. Subsequent …
Jan 29, 2022: Well, this was different. ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩🟨🟨🟨🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Jan 29, 2022: Currently reading: The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells 📚
Jan 28, 2022: I sort of hate my office, but I just yesterday (after eight years!) realized that the windowsill makes a decent standing desk.
Jan 28, 2022: Currently reading: The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology by Tom Shippey 📚
Jan 28, 2022: scouring In one of his Prefaces to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien notes that many early readers of the book thought that the chapter called “The Scouring of …
Jan 27, 2022: trying About to watch the USMNT v. El Salvador, and having a thought: When you watch a well-managed team, you can easily see what the team is trying to do, …
Jan 27, 2022: Rowan Williams: We are used to plaintive cries that not enough students opt for scientific subjects, and related worries about the supposed drift of …
Jan 26, 2022: Currently reading: Early Christianity and Greek Paideia by Werner Jaeger 📚
Jan 26, 2022: your questions answered Was Dorothy Day Too Left-Wing to Be a Catholic Saint? No. Was the Life of Dorothy Day Too Catholic for the New York Times to Grasp? Yes.
Jan 26, 2022: free and forever I want to write here about something I don’t understand. My friend Robin Sloan alerted me to this post by a passionate advocate of crypto/blockchain’s …
Jan 25, 2022: on Wells Stefan Collini’s review of Claire Tomalin’s book on H. G. Wells is very strange indeed. For one thing, he only mentions the book under review in the …
Jan 25, 2022: I was a teenager working in a bookstore when this book, with this cover, came out. One day a lady came up to me and asked, “Do you have Billy Graham’s …
Jan 24, 2022: Currently reading: The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien 📚
Jan 24, 2022: Newsletter: Sir Shi and the Wanderer
Jan 24, 2022: Can’t stop, won’t stop.
Jan 24, 2022: Currently reading: Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud 📚 (trying to remember to put books I’m reading/re-reading for class on this …
Jan 24, 2022: undefended, unprotected This post on being defenseless has nagged at my mind, reminding me of something, and I finally made a couple of connections. My brilliant friend Sara …
Jan 24, 2022: the power of ideology Gary Saul Morson: How did Dostoevsky anticipate what would happen? For one thing, he took the beliefs of intellectuals seriously. It is one thing to …
Jan 24, 2022: excerpt from my Sent folder: Morgenbesser I have many, many thoughts about Morgenbesser. I have often thought of writing little vignettes about him doing mundane things in New York City: …
Jan 22, 2022: intractable I keep thinking about this by Rivka Galchen in the LRB: Berman is keen to dispel the notion that those who refuse vaccines suffer from an information …
Jan 21, 2022: Currently reading: Vermeer: The Complete Works by Karl Schütz 📚
Jan 21, 2022: From Alan Lee’s illustrations for the Mabinogion
Jan 21, 2022: John Ruskin, The North-West Angle of the Facade of St Mark’s, Venice
Jan 20, 2022: Guess I won’t be visiting the McDonald Observatory – one of my favorite places – today. (Even if it weren’t a 7-hour drive.)
Jan 20, 2022: Prep
Jan 20, 2022: Jamie Zawinski, formerly of Mozilla: “Anyone involved in cryptocurrencies in any way is either a grifter or a mark. It is 100% a con. There is no …
Jan 20, 2022: CD Rob Sheffield: I’ve always loved CDs, and I never junked my collection, even when the format fell off a cliff in the 2000s. I cherish all …
Jan 19, 2022: runs In footy (aka soccer) it is possible for players to make the following kinds of run: Mazy Marauding Lung-bursting Darting Slaloming The Laws of …
Jan 19, 2022: albeit WIRED: Why do you call the metaverse dystopian? John Hanke: It takes us away from what fundamentally makes us happy as human beings. We’re …
Jan 19, 2022: covid in four states STATE Cases/100k Deaths/100k California 18,260 198 Texas 19,466 268 Florida 23,995 295 New York 23,423 318 Data from the NYT. I chose the …
Jan 18, 2022: Remember how I said that there are some trees around here that think it’s still autumn? (Photo taken half an hour ago.)
Jan 18, 2022: defenseless Juliette Kayyem, who among other things is a security consultant: But what if the essence of a place is that it is defenseless? What if its ability …
Jan 18, 2022: drawing a narcissus Ruskin’s instructions to his students: Suppose you have to paint the Narcissus of the Alps. First, you must outline its six petals, its central cup, …
Jan 17, 2022: Newsletter: on fakery and Hittites.
Jan 17, 2022: The Beaupré Antiphonary
Jan 16, 2022: Currently reading: Andrey Tarkovsky: Life and Work: Film by Film, Stills, Polaroids & Writings 📚
Jan 16, 2022: the whys and wherefores of humanistic study Louis Menand: Reading Weinstein and Montás, you might conclude that English professors, having spent their entire lives reading and discussing works …
Jan 15, 2022: Okay, time to get this second career started.
Jan 15, 2022: The Homebound Symphony Much of Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven — set largely in Michigan some twenty years after a global pandemic kills 99% of humanity — …
Jan 14, 2022: Can't stop? Won't stop. It's not just Wordle, the App Store is a total mess | Macworld: It’s would be a trivially small amount of money for Apple to create an internal group …
Jan 14, 2022: Currently reading: The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, Volume II: 1940–1973 by W. H. Auden 📚
Jan 14, 2022: Currently reading: The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, Volume I: 1927–1939 by W. H. Auden 📚
Jan 14, 2022: summing up and moving forward What are the key elements of this ongoing project I’m calling Invitation and Repair? And of what I have called The Year of Repair? I’ll proceed by …
Jan 13, 2022: This article by Cal Newport says it’s about “slow productivity,” but as far as I can tell it’s really about “workplaces assigning less work.” Which …
Jan 13, 2022: all I want to know is ... … How many would be too many? Just give me a number. How many times does this have to happen before Arteta thinks, You know, maybe this guy isn’t …
Jan 13, 2022: revisiting Richter A couple of weeks ago I compared Sviatoslav Richter’s playing of Bach unfavorably to Glenn Gould’s. I need to revisit that comparison. I was basing my …
Jan 12, 2022: moral infections That it is at least as difficult to stay a moral infection as a physical one; that such a disease will spread with the malignity and rapidity of the …
Jan 12, 2022: When the Pandemic’s End Means the Return of Anxiety - WSJ: Taking an absolutist approach means assigning zero weight to all risks other than the …
Jan 12, 2022: The Year of Repair One year and one day ago, I wrote: “I declare 2021 The Year of Hypomone.” As you’ll see if you read that post, hypomone is a New Testament word …
Jan 12, 2022: circumlocution A memorable moment from Dickens’s Little Dorrit: ‘May I inquire how I can obtain official information as to the real state of the case?’ ‘It is …
Jan 11, 2022: A number of trees here are convinced that it’s still autumn.
Jan 11, 2022: practices In an earlier post I mentioned Lauren Winner’s book The Dangers of Christian Practice. Let me try to summarize that book’s argument: For a very long …
Jan 11, 2022: The Virtual Sir John Soane’s Museum is great. I love the Model Room.
Jan 11, 2022: two quotations on web3 Ameera Kawash: Web3 aims to seize on the communicative motives of social media and fuse them more directly with transactional ones, as every …
Jan 10, 2022: Currently reading: Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens 📚
Jan 10, 2022: Newsletter!
Jan 10, 2022: “The Wood of Error,” from Robert Rauschenberg’s drawings of Dante’s Inferno
Jan 10, 2022: formation and martyrdom Continuing here to lay the groundwork for future reflection, opening questions rather than answering them…. Lately I have been musing over something …
Jan 9, 2022: Sidney was right Sir Philip Sidney: I conclude, therefore, that [the poet] excels history, not only in furnishing the mind with knowledge, but in setting it forward …
Jan 9, 2022: Currently reading: History of England (Volume I) by David Hume 📚
Jan 8, 2022: Against Champagne Socialists: The reality is that for many people, publicly expressing ideology is not about trying to say what's right and wrong; …
Jan 8, 2022: We found our old friend Nelson! – missing for many years. (Long ago a friend from South Africa gave him to us.)
Jan 7, 2022: Currently reading: The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins 📚
Jan 7, 2022: Chilly and lovely morning in the neighborhood today.
Jan 7, 2022: William Deresiewicz: No, secularism cannot reassure us that the universe is governed by a benevolent deity, or that the wicked will be punished and …
Jan 7, 2022: Rowan Williams: Our ancestors, right up to the modern age, knew they were fragile. A brief period of dazzling technological achievement combined with …
Jan 7, 2022: I don’t often read the New York Times, but when I do, I prefer to use lynx.
Jan 7, 2022: Karth Barth, in a 1934 talk: For what we have experienced in Germany during these latter days — this remarkable apostasy of the Church to …
Jan 6, 2022: Currently reading: The First Kingdom: Britain in the Age of Arthur by Max Adams 📚
Jan 6, 2022: 361 years ago today Later they “affirmed to the last that if they had been deceived, the Lord himself was their deceiver.” Let the reader understand.
Jan 6, 2022: equipment In his great essay “Literature as Equipment for Living,” Kenneth Burke argues that proverbs may be described as a kind of purposeful realism (my …
Jan 5, 2022: Phatic Pharting In Ozu’s late film Good Morning, the primary engine of conflict, which is also to say the primary engine of story, is the desire of two boys for a …
Jan 4, 2022: Currently reading: The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner by Wallace Stegner 📚
Jan 4, 2022: Really glad to get this fine book in the mail. Isaac has pulled off a very difficult task here: his book is straightforward and practical, charitable …
Jan 4, 2022: why? Let me just say a bit more about why I’m doing this Buy Me a Dragon thing. My thinking can be condensed into three simple points. First: I’ve never …
Jan 3, 2022: the cross-pressured self In a key passage of A Secular Age, Charles Taylor writes: Although we respond to it very differently, everyone understands the complaint that our …
Jan 3, 2022: First newsletter of the new year!
Jan 3, 2022: an artifact of scale David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters: We tried this strategy [telling people about the incorrect interpretation before they catch it in the wild] …
Jan 2, 2022: First 🔥 in many months
Jan 2, 2022: Special Relationships If I had another lifetime at my disposal, here’s a book I’d like to write. Special Relationships: British Sages in America A history of American …
Jan 1, 2022: FYI: I am doing Big Blogging again, and if you want to support that you can buy me a dragon.
Jan 1, 2022: It was 80º here an hour ago – tomorrow morning it’ll be 22º.
Jan 1, 2022: Buy Me a Dragon If you look to the top of this page, you’ll see something new: a Buy Me a Dragon link. Now, before we go any further, let me just say that I do not …
Jan 1, 2022: Glenn Gould had a famously complex and dynamic personality; Sviatoslav Richter was, by contrast, notoriously silent and private, giving no interviews …
Dec 31, 2021: Cheers, London. Wish I were visiting you right about now.
Dec 31, 2021: readers reading, disagreeing I have decided that I want 2022 to be a Year of Re-Reading — it would be rash for me to say that I won’t read any new books, but I really want to …
Dec 31, 2021: Weil and justice Jacqueline Rose: As Zaretsky points out, there is no one thread running through [Simone Weil’s] writings, a difficulty he responds to by picking out …
Dec 31, 2021: Currently reading: Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens 📚
Dec 31, 2021: The Jesuit church, Mount Street Gardens, London (a few years ago). Looking through some of my London pictures this morning, wondering when I’ll …
Dec 30, 2021: Currently reading: Freud: The Making of an Illusion by Frederick Crews 📚
Dec 30, 2021: the mirror The good folks at Plough have produced an e-book featuring two early Christian texts, and Rowan Williams has written an introduction to it that I …
Dec 30, 2021: two kinds of writer the design of time - by Sara Hendren: The learner, whether student or reader, can come with you from their current zone, what they already know, to …
Dec 29, 2021: Currently reading: The Control of Nature by John McPhee 📚
Dec 29, 2021: Super-Fancies from Caught by the River
Dec 28, 2021: intimacy Edward Mendelson: Many academics are far too sophisticated to take seriously the thought that literature is a special form of intimacy. Academic …
Dec 28, 2021: here I am again Well, my abandonment of this blog lasted less than a month. Here’s why, in a word: tags. When I decided to move quotes and links, as well as photos, …
Dec 28, 2021: reviews and essays, hidden I have reposted here on this site a number of my essays and reviews, originally published elsewhere, that I’d like to preserve: “Reverting to Type” …
Dec 27, 2021: Here’s a terrific conversation at The New Atlantis about whether it’s possible to write good fiction about climate change.
Dec 25, 2021: Currently reading: The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West by Wallace Stegner 📚
Dec 25, 2021: A Christmas edition of the newsletter.
Dec 24, 2021: Renovations to our parish church continue apace, including a lovely new rose window.
Dec 24, 2021: Joan Didion, “Holy Water” (1977): Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The …
Dec 24, 2021: Matt Mullenweg: “As more and more of our lives start to be run and dictated by the technology we use, it's a human right to be able to see how that …
Dec 23, 2021: Currently reading: Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West by Wallace Stegner 📚
Dec 23, 2021: Scott Alexander: Science communicators are using the same term — “no evidence” — to mean: This thing is super plausible, and honestly very likely …
Dec 23, 2021: I got an email from the University of Austin saying: “Since we launched last month, our promise to breathe new life into American higher education has …
Dec 22, 2021: Matt Stoller: “The amount of utopian bullshit and fake promises on a technology that doesn’t really work as anything but a speculative bubble and …
Dec 21, 2021: James Rebanks, English Pastoral: One morning as I was waiting by the church with the other boys and girls for the school bus, milling about, throwing …
Dec 21, 2021: Currently reading: English Pastoral: An Inheritance by James Rebanks 📚
Dec 21, 2021: Cecilia D’Anastasio: “The idea of the metaverse has reemerged under a new sky. The current frenzy? It’s simply a succinct way for Big Tech to …
Dec 21, 2021: From Alex Ross’s terrific interview with Jonny Greenwood: There are scenes in “Spencer” that require your music to be already in place, like …
Dec 20, 2021: “In God We Trust” should be retired as our national motto and replaced with Homer Simpson’s line: “Stupidity got us into this mess, and stupidity will …
Dec 20, 2021: Maybe it’s just because I live in Texas, but when I read techno-optimistic pieces like this one I always have the same thought: What are we gonna do …
Dec 20, 2021: This essay in the Economist gives a pretty good idea of what level of social control would be required to eliminate Covid in any given country.
Dec 20, 2021: N. S. Lyons: At this point, you might be wondering why Communist Party media apparatchiks now sound a bit like mid-2000s American Evangelicals. But …
Dec 20, 2021: Newsletter!
Dec 15, 2021: Katharine Park: “Every time I read something in The New York Times that Leonardo da Vinci had to hide the fact that he was doing dissection, and every …
Dec 13, 2021: New issue of my newsletter – featuring fakery, a cathedral builder, and an Advent poem – may be found here. (With some formatting issues I …
Dec 12, 2021: Friedrich Kittler (1992): “I am adamantly in favor of the clean separation of the inorganic from the organic. My whole fascination has been dedicated …
Dec 12, 2021: Treat ev’ry man according to his deserts, and who should ‘scape a scathing takedown?
Dec 11, 2021: My local coffee shop (Dichotomy) takes Christmas very seriously.
Dec 11, 2021: Brilliant essay by Mark Lilla on Julien Benda: “Our century will properly be called the century of the intellectual organization of political hatred. …
Dec 11, 2021: Kevin Kelly: “Security on a network is equivalent to pollution coming from a small source. If you pollute the river, you effect everyone’s …
Dec 9, 2021: Samuel Johnson, from his “Life of Milton”: It is told that in the art of education [Milton] performed wonders, and a formidable list is …
Dec 8, 2021: Finished reading: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow 📚
Dec 8, 2021: Currently reading: Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins 📚
Dec 8, 2021: 12 Get Back Moments You Need to Know to Act Like You Watched the Whole Thing — I mean, yeah, if you’re into the whole TL;DW thing. But the chief point …
Dec 8, 2021: My colleague Perry Glanzer is 100% correct: The reality is, when it comes to faculty formation, the Christian mission is not a high priority at …
Dec 8, 2021: David Brooks with a shrewd inquiry: Donald Trump is the near-opposite of the Burkean conservatism I’ve described here. How did a movement built on …
Dec 8, 2021: James Hankins: “One clear change [in historical scholarship] was the coverage of what my colleagues call the ‘deep past,’ meaning …
Dec 7, 2021: Here in Waco we get “SpaceX thunder”: reverberations from the rocket testing site fifteen miles away in McGregor. Last night we had the …
Dec 7, 2021: Lovely New Yorker -ish image on the cover of the LRB.
Dec 7, 2021: Adam Roberts again: I argue that how we configure the birth of the genre [of science fiction] has consequences for how we read the mode today. If we …
Dec 6, 2021: New issue of my newsletter today – and as always, the version on the Comment website looks especially nice.
Dec 5, 2021: Adam Roberts: Let’s say Hogarth sees religion less in terms of mystic or transcendent aesthetic intensities, and more in terms of real-world life and …
Dec 4, 2021: The Tufte theme by @pimoore is just amazing. With its shortcodes you could use micro.blog as a full-scale essay-writing environment – and a …
Dec 4, 2021: As someone whose guitar playing is severely compromised by damage to my fingers – thanks to decades of playing basketball – I have a lot …
Dec 4, 2021: heads up I’ve been re-thinking my approach to blogging, and here’s my decision: Blogging has been rather parasitic on my essay-writing, so for the rest of …
Dec 2, 2021: Hogarth Ferdinand Mount on the new Hogarth exhibition at the Tate Britain: Here we need, I think, to notice two large absences from Hogarth and Europe. These …
Nov 30, 2021: language, language Ian Leslie: Capitalism, fascism, neo-liberalism, structural racism, transphobia, wokeness: these giant, airborne nouns, which float around the …
Nov 26, 2021: tribulation Hannah Anderson in Christianity Today: Just as we do not choose our biological families of origin, there’s a sense in which we do not choose our …
Nov 24, 2021: A brother once came to one of the desert fathers saying, "My mind is intent on God." The old man replied: "It is no great matter that thy mind should …
Nov 24, 2021: imagination Adrian Vermeule: The radicals, the extremists, the idealists, the critics, the dissenters, the activists of social change, have in my lifetime been …
Nov 23, 2021: From this lovely profile of Miyazaki. Also, I definitely need a Totoro and a Catbus for Christmas.
Nov 23, 2021: Raymond Tallis, making a profound point: “Irrationality is a luxury that can be enjoyed only because it sits securely in the landscape of sedimented …
Nov 22, 2021: The Coddling of American Children Is a Boon to Beijing - WSJ: My son is not a genius, but he started studying math at an early age. When he was 5, I …
Nov 22, 2021: How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation | MIT Technology Review: Over the last few weeks, the revelations from the Facebook Papers, a …
Nov 19, 2021: two quotations on disagreement Michael Oakeshott: The view dies hard that Babel was the occasion of a curse being laid upon mankind from which it is the business of philosophers to …
Nov 18, 2021: I don’t think that Freddie needs to, or for that matter should, reply further to any screeching about him on Twitter, but in relation to this I …
Nov 18, 2021: symbolic manipulation Matt Yglesias: A lot of today’s politics is taken up with issues that are not just cultural, but symbolic — what do we teach in middle school U.S. …
Nov 17, 2021: incremental Ross Douthat: Both decadence and chronic ailments cut against the human tendency to imagine a crisis as something that either leads to some kind of …
Nov 17, 2021: O God, who endowed your servant Hugh with a wise and cheerful boldness and taught him to commend to earthly rulers the discipline of a holy life: give …
Nov 17, 2021: against the state Justin E. H. Smith: Who among these groups is “Indigenous”? We might in this case feel this is the wrong question to ask, but this feeling may in …
Nov 16, 2021: Daily Heller
Nov 16, 2021: FiveThirtyEight: I asked each of the interviewees what they would do if I waved a magic wand and gave them total control over Facebook. “I would turn …
Nov 15, 2021: corruption From a brilliant essay by Matt Crawford: One of the most striking features of the present, for anyone alert to politics, is that we are increasingly …
Nov 15, 2021: representation Adam Roberts: Representation in the sense of ‘how texts figure and inscribe the world and its concerns’ overlaps with another sense of the word: …
Nov 12, 2021: Czech avant-garde
Nov 12, 2021: design
Nov 12, 2021: a way forward An outstanding contribution to my Invitation and Repair project (see the tag at the bottom of this post) from Samuel Arbseman: “The Way-Forward …
Nov 12, 2021: unbribed The Magnificent Bribe — Real Life: Nearly 50 years ago, long before smartphones and social media, the social critic Lewis Mumford put a name to the …
Nov 12, 2021: alliances George Scialabba: [Wendell] Berry is a serious Christian, and also a serious reader of poetry. His prose is studded with quotations from the Bible …
Nov 11, 2021: Freddie deBoer: Those institutions that actually hurt the oppressed you can only oppose with the slow, unsexy, decidedly uncool work of mundane …
Nov 10, 2021: Katharine Hayhoe: We think of climate change as a separate issue on our priority list, but the only reason you care about climate change is because of …
Nov 9, 2021: Wendell Berry (1991): I. Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have "thought globally" (and among them the most successful …
Nov 9, 2021: Gladden Pappin: Many conservatives tend to assume that economic outcomes in capitalist economies are “natural.” Yet there is nothing less natural …
Nov 8, 2021: UATX Pano Kanelos: We expect to face significant resistance to this project. There are networks of donors, foundations, and activists that uphold and …
Nov 8, 2021: John Tooby: To earn membership in a group you must send signals that clearly indicate that you differentially support it, compared to rival groups. …
Nov 8, 2021: This by Kevin Kelly is useful: “Class 1 problems are caused by technology that is not perfect, and are solved by the marketplace. Class 2 problems are …
Nov 7, 2021: The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an …
Nov 7, 2021: No one is sure what Blake meant by mentioning ‘dark, Satanic mills’ as part of what Jesus would have seen and moved among, but the candidates include …
Nov 5, 2021: Charlie Eaton: Between 1980 and 2016, the wealthiest 1 percent of university endowments had already grown tenfold — from an average of $2 billion to …
Nov 4, 2021: Michael Lind: The contemporary American university is an enormous Kafkaesque bureaucracy teetering on top of a small Dickensian sweatshop. If we …
Nov 1, 2021: two quotations on the metaverse Nick Carr: Facebook, it’s now widely accepted, has been a calamity for the world. The obvious solution, most people would agree, is to get rid of …
Oct 29, 2021: Almost-November rose.
Oct 22, 2021: hiatus This will be my last post on this blog in 2021: I’m shutting down for the rest of the year. I’ll revisit things in January to see if I want to resume. …
Oct 21, 2021: topics This is related, in a way, to my previous post: After reading yet another invitation-disinvitation story, I think every university should – in the …
Oct 21, 2021: motives For more than 20 years now, I’ve been writing occasionally on the theme of motives, always making the same points: Because, as Rebecca West famously …
Oct 19, 2021: 'Cause this life is a farce I can't breathe through this mask Like a fool
Oct 19, 2021: engagement Marianna Spring, BBC News: All the main social media companies say they don't promote hate on their platforms and take action to stop it. They each …
Oct 17, 2021: mediocrity and acceptance This reflection by Tim Stillman articulates a lot of what I, as an often unwilling but helpless Arsenal supporter, have been feeling lately. The …
Oct 16, 2021: Hello old friend
Oct 16, 2021: bad dispensations The idea that we must choose between two intolerant illiberalisms, one on the Right and one on the Left, is, it seems to me, increasingly common …
Oct 15, 2021: It is not that the documentary hypothesis is necessarily wrong in substance; Genesis is clearly made up of a number of traditions which have been …
Oct 15, 2021: “This time the old mother has forgotten the old creature’s birthday, which if I am not mistaken falls on October 15.” — Nietzsche in a letter to his …
Oct 15, 2021: the beginning of politics Leah Libresco Sargeant on an “illiberalism of the weak”: To give an honest accounting of ourselves, we must begin with our weakness and fragility. We …
Oct 13, 2021: Arnold Kling: If you use your economics, then no matter how complex the supply-chain problems might appear, they can be solved using the price …
Oct 13, 2021: There’s a lot of talk around here about Baylor’s being “an unambiguously Christian university.” I wonder how this fits in.
Oct 13, 2021: a brief note on narrative Recently I've come across a number of pieces dismissing or critiquing the idea of “narrative” – the idea being that when you call something a …
Oct 12, 2021: Am I a different person when I travel? Yes. A stressed and unhappy person.
Oct 11, 2021: My friend Matt Milliner: Christians have long credited the pagan poet Virgil, in his fourth eclogue, with prophesying Christ. In Chesterton’s day …
Oct 11, 2021: a Black cop's son It turns out that one of the most essential cultural commentators in America today is a 74-year-old retired basketball player. I highly recommend …
Oct 11, 2021: Nobody today could write Cassirer’s Essay on Man, just as nobody could write Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man. But when the old …
Oct 10, 2021: the Noriko Triptych (In what follows I’m not saying anything that’s not well-known to film buffs, but, as always on this blog, I’m writing to get my thoughts clear for my …
Oct 9, 2021: Justin E. H. Smith: To say that On the Situations and Names of Winds is a “pseudo-Aristotelian” text is to say among other things that it is the sort …
Oct 9, 2021: Paper Electronic Literature It’s cool when a friend publishes a new book: And even cooler when that book contains a chapter on another friend’s work:
Oct 8, 2021: From a New York Times correction: The article also misstated the number of Covid hospitalizations in U.S. children. It is more than 63,000 from …
Oct 8, 2021: Vertigo Recently I re-watched both Citizen Kane and Vertigo, with the purpose of trying to understand how it is that Vertigo could have replaced Kane as Best …
Oct 8, 2021: I am of course WEIRD, but it just occurred to me that as a Cis-Het Able-bodied White Man I am also a CHAWM. I am a WEIRD CHAWM.
Oct 7, 2021: Kareem weighs in Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, on his Substack: Clearly, [Andrew Wiggins is] afraid that the vaccine will have some long-term consequences, even though there …
Oct 6, 2021: the perils of translation I had been very much looking forward to Sarah Ruden’s translation of the Gospels, but now that I know that it features such sentences as “Then he …
Oct 6, 2021: trainings My friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey and her co-author Jeffrey Polet have written an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education called …
Oct 5, 2021: David French: We cannot be empathetic only to our allies. We cannot allow fear of law enforcement excess to deprive fellow citizens of the protection …
Oct 5, 2021: The Greenwald has a point about the current anti-Facebook energy: The social media giant hurts America and the world, this narrative maintains, by …
Oct 5, 2021: governance by image In Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), the factory in which the Tramp works in the opening scenes is controlled by a boss whose image appears in …
Oct 4, 2021: poem and antipoem David Lowery's The Green Knight is a wonderful movie, but it shouldn't be thought of as an adaptation of the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In …
Oct 4, 2021: Hire this man for the School for Scale!
Oct 4, 2021: Trying and failing to capture a beautiful crescent moon this pre-dawn I accidentally made an impressionist masterpiece. (No filter, no edits.)
Oct 4, 2021: Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence. — Stella (Thelma Ritter) in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) Ideas are stale …
Oct 3, 2021: speaking truth to power Daring Fireball: From a usability perspective, every single thing about Safari 15’s tabs is a regression. Everything. It’s a tab design that can only …
Oct 2, 2021: Criterion The other day Teri and I were streaming an old movie and had to give up after half-an-hour or so. The print was indifferent and the sound both …
Oct 2, 2021: Christians and the biopolitical Matthew Loftus: Christians must develop and encourage practices of suffering that accompany those in pain, like Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross …
Oct 2, 2021: deracination Paul Kingsnorth: This process accelerates under its own steam, as Weil explained, because “whoever is uprooted himself uproots others”. The more we …
Oct 1, 2021: End titles for A Hard Day’s Night
Oct 1, 2021: Here
Oct 1, 2021: medicine as religion Giorgio Agamben: It has been evident for quite a while that science has become our time’s religion, the thing which people believe that they believe …
Oct 1, 2021: compliance Jeannie Suk Gersen: If, in the face of scientific findings, one lets go of the view that trigger warnings foster mental health or facilitate …
Oct 1, 2021: taverns and churches Nicholas Orme: Looking at the rows and rows of seats in an English church, some of them dating back to the 15th century, invites questions. Why so …
Oct 1, 2021: news as religion Matt Taibbi: Surveys found a third of Republicans think the asymptomatic don’t transmit Covid-19, or that the disease kills fewer people than the flu …
Sep 30, 2021: indices Lots of enjoyable coverage of Dennis Duncan’s new and wonderfully titled Index, A History of the. (You may find a brief excerpt from it as a …
Sep 29, 2021: What a great cover.
Sep 28, 2021: excerpt from my Sent folder: strawberries Adam, I have a story to tell you. It concerns strawberries. When I was a boy in Birmingham, Alabama, one of my great-aunts lived in the countryside …
Sep 28, 2021: The Washington Post: “The metaverse, to Sweeney, would be an expansive, digitized communal space where users can mingle freely with brands and …
Sep 25, 2021: random Foundational thoughts There was absolutely no reason to believe, at any point in the development of this series, that it would be related in a significant way to Asimov’s …
Sep 24, 2021: A fun little acquisition. Text by Arthur C. Clarke.
Sep 24, 2021: waiting I made an interesting discovery yesterday. (I’m sure others have already noticed it, but the insight is new to me.) Many readers will know this famous …
Sep 23, 2021: neighbors Samuel Goldman: While it's not much like European nation-states, the U.S. has plenty of similarities to other post-colonial, pluralistic societies in …
Sep 23, 2021: thirty years ago today
Sep 23, 2021: So let me get this straight: From plants you’ve developed sentient chickens, and you expect me to eat them?
Sep 23, 2021: the Mondragon moment In 1990, for a then-new magazine called First Things, the historian Christopher Lasch wrote about the incompatibility of conservatism and free-market …
Sep 21, 2021: James O’Donnell: Detachment and objectivity are not to be found in the Confessions. Analysis of divine affairs is not only not kept apart from …
Sep 20, 2021: underwriting democracy From an interview with James Davison Hunter: In this tangle between very powerful institutions and very powerful cultural logics, there are serious …
Sep 20, 2021: How does Le Carré get higher billing than I do?? UPDATE: My essay is now online.
Sep 19, 2021: John Shelby Spong John Shelby Spong is dead. If he had been an intelligent man, he would have developed more coherent and logical arguments against the Christian faith; …
Sep 19, 2021: scholars A scholar can never become a philosopher; for even Kant was unable to do so but, the inborn pressure of his genius notwithstanding, remained to the …
Sep 18, 2021: On the one hand, your noble and essential work is being mocked. On the other hand, it’s being mocked by illiterate Nazis.
Sep 17, 2021: a church in crisis Russell Moore: First-century Athens, Greece, was just as intellectually averse to Christianity as twenty-first-century Athens, Georgia – and far more …
Sep 16, 2021: When you’re teaching Thomas Aquinas and are trying to fill in the theological background, you need a big board. (I misspelled homoousios, but oh …
Sep 16, 2021: Envoy repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain repeat great words repeat them …
Sep 16, 2021: numbers Paul Kingsnorth: The impacts of a society predicated on boundless economic growth via boundless sensory stimulation are at least in some ways …
Sep 15, 2021: Very nice to see from Crossway these lovely new editions of some of Jim Packer’s books.
Sep 15, 2021: The Honky-Tonk Nun of Ethiopia Via Ted Gioia. “There is no genre for funky Ethiopian nuns.”
Sep 15, 2021: Mid-century modern lives on.
Sep 14, 2021: ebooks bad This Ian Bogost essay on e-books is an oddity, in the sense that about a decade ago we had thousands of essays on this same theme, but have had very …
Sep 14, 2021: R.I.P. Norm You know, I think about my deathbed a lot. What do you think about it? I think I should never have purchased a deathbed in the first place.
Sep 14, 2021: “Hemorrhoids are not to be feared, as human nature is much more fearsome than hemorrhoids.”
Sep 14, 2021: This by Jonathan Liew is beautiful: Certainly this final felt like a turning point of sorts: a pause in hostilities, perhaps even a burying of the …
Sep 13, 2021: where have you gone, Hamburger University? I just spent a few days in Chicagoland, visiting dear old friends and my very dear son. I got a deal from Expedia and stayed at the Hyatt Lodge in Oak …
Sep 9, 2021: Katherine J. Wu: Eventually, all discussions about sterilizing immunity become nerdy quibbles over semantics. Clearly, not every infection is …
Sep 9, 2021: One thing I don’t understand (and I’ve read a good deal of legal commentary on this issue) about United States v. Texas: The suit says that the …
Sep 8, 2021: beyond the strongman In a previous post I wrote: This tension between the ancient vessels of culture and what they contain is not indefinitely sustainable: in the long …
Sep 7, 2021: we all know but won't say Freddie deBoer: I just don’t believe people, on this issue. When they say that they think all people have the same innate ability to perform well in …
Sep 7, 2021: the coolest people from my home town
Sep 6, 2021: the breaking of the inherited vessels But the Enlightenment has for us a strange form of continuing life: everything about it seems alien, and yet everything about it seems familiar; it is …
Sep 3, 2021: Well now, this is a more innovative adaptation than I thought it would be. As I said, research is fun!
Sep 3, 2021: Research is fun.
Sep 1, 2021: afterwards This lovely post by my friend Wesley Hill on carrying and using a Bible reminds me of a question I ask myself on a regular basis: What is Christianity …
Sep 1, 2021: Elon's plan Charlie Stross: Musk owns Tesla Energy. And I think he's going to turn a profit on Starship by using it to launch Space based solar power satellites. …
Aug 31, 2021: just for the record Matt Taibbi has posted a newsletter edition in which he complains about what he calls a “just-released On the Media episode” about free speech — but I …
Aug 31, 2021: on me Wyatt Mason on Jon Fosse's Septology: The practice of prayer, the practice of painting, the products of prose: all buoy us as we live and as those we …
Aug 29, 2021: Across the Borderline “Across the Borderline” was a big hit for Willie Nelson, and when Willie covers a song it’s usually the definitive version, but not in this case. The …
Aug 28, 2021: and so it begins This feels like a big one, and is certainly a harbinger of things to come. We’ve had major rock stars die young, from accidents (Buddy Holly, Stevie …
Aug 28, 2021: If we do not now have evidence that Mikel Arteta is incapable of managing this side, then what would constitute evidence? One shudders to imagine.
Aug 27, 2021: Me to my wife: Hey babe, I have good news and bad news. Teri: Give me the good news first. Me: The senior vice president of communications for the …
Aug 27, 2021: Day, Prez, Hawk, Jeru
Aug 27, 2021: Lady Day and Coleman Hawkins
Aug 26, 2021: As I write, all of the ICU beds in McLennan County, where I live, are occupied. The vast majority have covid. Of those who have covid, 93% are …
Aug 26, 2021: hubris David French: A conservative doctor recently told me that after January 6th he “unplugged.” He stopped watching cable news. He stopped listening to …
Aug 25, 2021: Or 0.07% of those vaccinated. This is so depressing, bc it reflects that we can’t cover any sort of public health numbers responsibly. It’s not just …
Aug 25, 2021: The issue of Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter The Imperfectionist reminded me of something he wrote several years ago that it’s always useful …
Aug 25, 2021: too lazy for long marches The phrase “long march through the institutions” is often attributed to Antonio Gramsci, but in fact it was coined in the 1960s, by a German Communist …
Aug 24, 2021: Coming September 7
Aug 24, 2021: Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes …
Aug 23, 2021: Adam Roberts: I’m wondering if we could theorise Twitter itself as a huge, sprawling and continually refashioning sequence of aphorisms. And, as a …
Aug 23, 2021: George MacDonald, “The Voice of Job”: In the confusion of Job’s thoughts — how could they be other than confused, in the presence of the awful …
Aug 23, 2021: Our social science may make us very wise or clever as regards the means for any objectives we might choose. It admits being unable to help us in …
Aug 23, 2021: bookmarking Since 2009, I’ve been keeping my bookmarks online in service called Pinboard. It’s a service that displays your bookmarks — with tags and …
Aug 22, 2021: Letter Makers [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“560”]lithograph from “High Street” (1938)[/caption]
Aug 21, 2021: Dangerous Work at Low Tide [caption id=“attachment_40577” align=“aligncenter” width=“600”]Dangerous Work at Low Tide (1940) © The Estate of …
Aug 21, 2021: Duty Boat [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1418”]Duty Boat (1940); © The Estate of Eric Ravilious. Artists Rights …
Aug 21, 2021: a new theory of propaganda (An idea for a book I’ll never write) One of the most famous scenes of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four begins this way: “It was nearly eleven …
Aug 20, 2021: thoughts on Glass And by Glass I mean this. Holy cow is it beautiful. I’ve seen people saying “This is what Instagram used to be” — no. Instagram never looked this …
Aug 19, 2021: the Stupids Garret Keizer: More than the parade of people walking into lampposts while gawking at their phones; more than the insatiable appetite for any kind of …
Aug 19, 2021: We thought the nightmarish winter storm we had in February had killed our oleander, but we cut it all the way back and waited to see … and now …
Aug 19, 2021: Maybe it’s time to bring these out of mothballs?
Aug 19, 2021: two quotations on innovation and influence Joseph Bernstein: Facebook is full of ugly memes and boring groups, ignorant arguments, sensational clickbait, products no one wants, and vestigial …
Aug 18, 2021: Permanent Crisis Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon’s Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age will be on sale tomorrow, and it’s an absolutely essential book …
Aug 18, 2021: thinking and rationality Reading this Joshua Rothman piece about rationality, I finally realized how my account in How to Think differs most significantly from the models of …
Aug 17, 2021: A random note: early in Shakespeare’s Henry V, the Archbishop of Canterbury constructs an elaborate simile comparing human society to a colony of …
Aug 17, 2021: departments of knowledge Every department of Knowledge we see excellent and calculated towards a great whole. I am so convinced of this, that I am glad at not having given …
Aug 17, 2021: Wes at his first Cubs game, 30 June 1999. He’s singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” along with Harry Caray, and it looks like …
Aug 16, 2021: Tolkien and Auden J. R. R. Tolkien and his wife Edith with their grandson Simon, at their home on Sandfield Road, Oxford, 1966. Photo from the Oxford Mail. Tolkien was …
Aug 13, 2021: When it gets hot and dry the Lindheimer’s beeblossom seems to become very happy.
Aug 13, 2021: Orbanistas [I had here an Andrew Sullivan quote about the recent right-wing fascination with Viktor Orban and Hungary, but while I agree wholly with Andrew’s …
Aug 13, 2021: assessment Brentford 2-0 Arsenal: A fair result, accurately reflecting the quality of the two sides and their management.
Aug 13, 2021: caricatures We enjoy caricatures of our friends because we do not want to think of their changing, above all, of their dying; we enjoy caricatures of our enemies …
Aug 12, 2021: more on geoengineering As a follow-up to my recent post on climate change and the various means of addressing it, see this from the Economist: Some form of geoengineering …
Aug 11, 2021: The Deep Places I’ve just read Ross Douthat’s forthcoming memoir The Deep Places and it is truly exceptional: a vividly narrated account of his disorienting spiral …
Aug 11, 2021: Bible reading II This is a follow-up to my recent post on not reading the Bible. There I quoted Heidegger on the “hermeneutic circle,” and while I think what is has to …
Aug 11, 2021: Roberts on Taylor My friend Adam Roberts is doing a read-through of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, and I started to comment on his most recent post and then realized …
Aug 9, 2021: pure speculation Kim Stanley Robinson’s most recent novel, The Ministry for the Future, begins with a long and horrific set-piece about a massive heatwave in India, in …
Aug 7, 2021: by the numbers Here in Waco, as in many parts of the country, COVID–19 cases and hospitalizations are spiking. I live a few blocks from Baylor Scott & White …
Aug 4, 2021: gratitude From an essay of mine about Terrence Malick: In 1978, the year I turned twenty, I was a film buff — a cinephile, a cinéaste. Though this was long …
Aug 3, 2021: When I read this story, I had one immediate thought: Facebook will close the loophole that allows Oculus purchasers to get customer service. They …
Aug 3, 2021: Millennium Park, Chicago
Aug 3, 2021: Frank Gehry’s dining room
Aug 3, 2021: Milo again I’ve written before in praise of our wonderful local restaurant Milo, but we haven’t been able to visit during the pandemic (just ordered to-go a few …
Aug 2, 2021: Forty-one years ago today this wonderful woman married me. I still can’t believe it.
Aug 2, 2021: As a follow-up to my recent posts on vaccination — one and two — I just want to say that it’s especially nice to see people in high-risk groups …
Aug 2, 2021: unknown unknowns In the first printing of my biography of the Book of Common Prayer, I say that Thomas Cranmer was a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. This is …
Aug 1, 2021: An Italian born in Texas named Jacobs has just won an Olympic gold medal … this Italophile Texan named Jacobs is verklempt.
Jul 31, 2021: open letter from a distinguished surgeon I confess to experiencing not merely disquiet but also exhaustion, in the face of endless demands that I, a trained and experienced surgeon, wash my …
Jul 31, 2021: good Sarah Perry is trying to be good: she trained as a vaccinator, sought to help. But being good is hard, and there is a lot of anger about. This is not …
Jul 29, 2021: On Not Reading the Bible The title of this post is the title of a book I have, for about twenty years now, thought of writing. My thesis would simply be this: We can do almost …
Jul 29, 2021: the fault This is prompted largely by Robin Sloan’s comments on comments. A decade ago I was active on Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinboard, and wrote a couple of …
Jul 28, 2021: beats me Over the past ten days I’ve been thinking a good deal about my friend Michael Brendan Dougherty’s essay on responding to vaccine skeptics. One key …
Jul 28, 2021: separate ... but equal? Arnold Kling: I don’t want to see politicians get involved in what should and should not be taught. I would like to see parents speak to teachers and …
Jul 28, 2021: two questions After reading Elizabeth Bruenig’s remarkable article on a recent contretemps at Yale Law School — and after resisting the temptation to immediately …
Jul 27, 2021: So grateful for the time at Laity Lodge with these dear people.
Jul 27, 2021: citizens I’ve just returned from Laity Lodge, where I had a glorious time with my dear friend Wesley Hill: talking about “praying with Jesus”; joyously …
Jul 26, 2021: Every time I’m at Laity Lodge I take pictures of this Japanese maple, because the light is always bouncing off it in different ways.
Jul 20, 2021: He likes parsley, I have too much parsley. So we’re cool.
Jul 18, 2021: The Lamps The Seven Lamps
Jul 18, 2021: the Campanile of Giotto John Ruskin, Tracery from the Campanile of Giotto in Florence; in The Seven Lamps of Architecture
Jul 18, 2021: tablets When the iPad came out, more than a decade ago, I tweeted that I didn’t especially want an iPad but would really love an e-ink tablet, one on which I …
Jul 18, 2021: Shadow Kingdom An amazing show, but too short. The best versions I’ve ever heard of “Queen Jane Approximately” and “Forever Young” — the latter a tearjerker.
Jul 17, 2021: Sant'Andrea al Quirinale From the Met. Bernini’s Sant’Andrea al Quirinale in Rome is to me the most beautiful of churches. I am reading and thinking about Paradise Lost right …
Jul 16, 2021: asymmetrical charity I mean my title to describe a peculiarity of the current Pope, who speaks often of the need for charity but seems to have little for people he thinks …
Jul 15, 2021: passing Freddie deBoer writing about his sense that what Wesley Yang calls the “successor ideology” might be losing momentum: This could lead to a Great …
Jul 14, 2021: Earlier this year we planted this burgundy-leaved crepe (or crape) myrtle and (a) it’s absolutely thriving and (b) it’s utterly gorgeous. …
Jul 14, 2021: literary journalism In the preface to Continuities, a collection of his reviews and essays written for magazines, the late great Frank Kermode makes a strong assertion: …
Jul 13, 2021: linkages As Eve Tushnet has reminded us, “Mercy to the guilty is the only kind of mercy there is,” which is something to remember as you read about Shirley …
Jul 13, 2021: evasions and approaches Above is a painting on the wall of the Commandery, a building said to have been built as a hospital by Wulfstan, then Bishop of Worcester, later St. …
Jul 13, 2021: dialogue In an age when the word “dialogue” has acquired so potent a charge of verbal magic, it is worth reminding ourselves that in Plato, who seems to have …
Jul 12, 2021: two quotations: great words and grand themes Connie went slowly home to Wragby. 'Home!'...it was a warm word to use for that great, weary warren. But then it was a word that had had its day. It …
Jul 11, 2021: a reminder When social media companies say they can’t do anything about filthy, racist abuse on their platforms, what they mean is: We can’t do anything about …
Jul 11, 2021: thoughts after 90 minutes Southgate set up to play for penalties, and he just might get his wish. Chiellini spent the entire second half playing way up the pitch, like a left …
Jul 11, 2021: Ross Douthat: By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. Whichever fate awaits us, Catholics and …
Jul 10, 2021: One thing about this wild, wild country It takes a strong, strong It breaks a strong, strong mind — Bill Callahan, "Drover"
Jul 10, 2021: orbital obliquity SciTech Daily: Planets which are tilted on their axis, like Earth, are more capable of evolving complex life. This finding will help scientists …
Jul 9, 2021: revisiting People keep asking, but I don’t have anything to add to the current brain-dead kerfuffle over “Critical Race Theory” that I haven’t already said. The …
Jul 6, 2021: le mot juste Will Oremus: Asked for comment on Facebook Bulletin, Substack spokeswoman Lulu Cheng Meservey said, “The nice shiny rings from Sauron were also …
Jul 5, 2021: more on sexual difference My friend Adam Roberts’s response to my Tiptree-and-difference post pushes me to clarify a few points. Or rather, to realize that I can’t yet clarify …
Jul 4, 2021: difference Lately I’ve been re-reading the stories that Alice B. Sheldon wrote under the name James Tiptree, Jr. and it occurs to me that almost all of them are …
Jul 3, 2021: credit Thomas Tuchel is known as a skilled practitioner of modern atacking football, but when he got to Chelsea in the middle of last season the first thing …
Jul 2, 2021: tales of technocracy The chief theme of my book The Year of Our Lord 1943 is that, in the midst of World War II, a series of Christian writers and thinkers discerned that …
Jul 1, 2021: excerpt from my Sent folder: the Hitchens unit You know, we could really get into the spirit of modern administration and come up with a way to measure the influence of public intellectuals. …
Jun 30, 2021: don't Austin Kleon
Jun 30, 2021: DEI Alex Small: That brings us to a final problem with [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] statements in hiring processes. Selecting for “correct” social …
Jun 30, 2021: the rotting internet Jonathan Zittrain: Some colleagues and I joined those investigating the extent of link rot in 2014 and again this past spring. The first study, with …
Jun 30, 2021: writing a Life Over at the Hog Blog, I've written about Herman Hesse -- more specifically, about a passage from The Glass Bead Game, his novel about an archipelago …
Jun 28, 2021: the real Adorno Alexander Stern: Because of his influential analysis of fascism, his complex critique of capitalist social structure and culture, and his advocacy …
Jun 28, 2021: economies When, in August 1860, John Ruskin published an essay in Cornhill Magazine – an essay that would later become the first chapter of his book Unto This …
Jun 27, 2021: on re-reading Acts I’ve been re-reading the book of Acts, and my chief response this time is: It’s wonderfully encouraging to see how bluntly and unapologetically Luke …
Jun 26, 2021: editing tools The kind of work I’m doing right now — my critical edition of Auden’s book The Shield of Achilles — is somewhat unusual, but some readers might be …
Jun 25, 2021: civil disagreement John Rose, on classes he teaches at Duke University: To get students to stop self-censoring, a few agreed-on classroom principles are necessary. On …
Jun 24, 2021: two quotations: work Erin Griffith (2019): Welcome to hustle culture. It is obsessed with striving, relentlessly positive, devoid of humor and, once you notice it, …
Jun 24, 2021: Are you still there? Nick Carr: Late Tuesday night, just as the Red Sox were beginning a top-of-the-eleventh rally against the Rays, my smart TV decided to ask me a …
Jun 24, 2021: Bible reading in style I’ve written on several earlier occasions — e.g. here — about the delightful creativity of the good people at Crossway Books, who in my view don’t get …
Jun 23, 2021: Little Platoons Matt Feeney's Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age is a fascinating and provocative book that, in my judgment anyway, cries out …
Jun 22, 2021: Barney Ronay: Chekhov came up with the idea of the shotgun above the mantelpiece. If there’s a gun on the wall in Act 1 of your drama, someone had …
Jun 22, 2021: two poems in support of my recent posts If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, …
Jun 21, 2021: A tiny pendant to the previous post: One of the ways I try to maintain the very possibility of thinking of this blog in gift-economy terms is by …
Jun 21, 2021: managers and givers I have written frequently on this blog about what I call metaphysical capitalism, and that orientation to the world takes several forms: …
Jun 21, 2021: two constitutions Michael Lind: Today Americans live under two constitutions: the political constitution and the corporate constitution. The political constitution is …
Jun 20, 2021: giving breath back to the dead Justin E. H. Smith: History in general is easily manipulable, and can always be applied for the pursuit of present goals, whatever these may be. It …
Jun 20, 2021: Attention! (a summary) I obviously write about a good many things, but over the last decade my work has been largely devoted to a single overarching theme: what we attend to …
Jun 19, 2021: Thoughts on the Euros: 1 1. The Christian Eriksen story, of course, continues to loom large. It was a beautiful moment when his Inter teammate, Belgium striker Romelo Lukaku, …
Jun 19, 2021: chirography Dear reader, I’m sure you have a tough job, but reflect on this: You don’t have to try to decipher Auden’s handwriting.
Jun 18, 2021: This was quite the find at the used book store. Wild Flowers of the United States was a 15-book series, two of which are devoted to Texas. These are …
Jun 17, 2021: Texas FM 187 (one of the prettiest drives in the Hill Country) above Vanderpool
Jun 15, 2021: Betjeman & Burnham You probably don’t expect to see an essay that links John Betjeman and Bo Burnham. I certainly didn’t expect to write one, but I did. When I first …
Jun 13, 2021: Gorey as designer Rosemary Hill on Edward Gorey: Gorey’s first book, The Unstrung Harp, was published in 1953, the year he moved to New York. He was working for Anchor …
Jun 13, 2021: MbM People get paid to do minute-by-minute reports on matches, but they’re never as good as the ones my son and I do. The “Yorkshire …
Jun 13, 2021: Sourdough Auden used to say that he had a kind of guardian angel who was always there to tell him what to read next. I sometimes I think I have one too, though …
Jun 12, 2021: Thanks be to God that Christian Eriksen is alive, and I pray that he will make a full recovery. But I have to say, the sight of his teammates standing …
Jun 10, 2021: Wondering how to decide what to read? Here’s a simple but effective heuristic to cut down the choices significantly. Ask yourself one question: Does …
Jun 10, 2021: a kind of parable In yesterday’s post I mentioned the upsurge in the British public’s interest in art during the Second World War. Exhibitions like the one advertised …
Jun 9, 2021: Out of Chaos Jill Craigie (1911-1999) was an extraordinary and (in my country anyway) insufficiently well-known figure. Born in London to a Scottish father and …
Jun 9, 2021: Bird Basket Henry Moore, Bird Basket (1939)
Jun 9, 2021: All Saints Chapel John Piper, All Saints Chapel, Bath (1942); Tate Britain: "Piper already had a reputation as a painter of historic architecture, in particular of …
Jun 9, 2021: Covehithe Church John Piper, Covehithe Church (1983); Tate Britain
Jun 8, 2021: not giving up One way to describe the Invitation and Repair project is to say that it’s for people who haven’t given up. One should always be hesitant to make broad …
Jun 8, 2021: Conservatives tell me that we’re right on the verge of a hard-left takeover of the entire country, which will inevitably put an end to democracy and …
Jun 6, 2021: le mot juste Maurice Bowra was an Oxford don legendary for his social activities, his malicious wit, and his bullhorn voice. Once, in the 1930s, he met an elegant …
Jun 5, 2021: Light Perpetual And speaking of novels by friends, Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual is now available in the U.S. I cannot recommend it to you too highly. This novel …
Jun 5, 2021: the meaning of Purgatory I read Adam Roberts’s Purgatory Mount in draft, and struggled to know what to make of it. I have now read its final version, and find it an …
Jun 4, 2021: Berlins One of the best stories in Michael Ignatieff’s biography of Isaiah Berlin involves a luncheon hosted at 10 Downing Street in 1944. Berlin had been for …
Jun 3, 2021: Collett's England One of Auden’s favorite books was Anthony Collett’s The Changing Face of England (1926), and it’s easy to see why — it’s absolutely delightful. Here’s …
Jun 3, 2021: In the Hebrew school, sitting on plank benches with timber-cutters' children, Isaiah received his first formal religious instruction. It was also his …
Jun 2, 2021: re: Foucault A brief and belated thought on Ross Douthat’s column on Foucault and conservatism: It’s worth noting that Jürgen Habermas called Foucault a “young …
May 31, 2021: habituation We all know — though we don’t think of it often enough — that through highlighting and repeating certain events, the media make them seem more common …
May 31, 2021: excerpt from my Sent folder: mythos About that Current Affairs essay ... I think it’s pretty much wholly wrong. It’s true that fundamentalist Christianity is insistently literal about …
May 31, 2021: Kevin Williamson: On Memorial Day, we remember those who took up arms because they thought their civilization represented something good and worth …
May 29, 2021: It has rained so much in the past month that our live oaks are getting moss on them as though we were in Louisiana.
May 28, 2021: partners Whenever I hear someone refer to their husband, wife, spouse — even their Significant Other, a phrase from a now-distant past — as their “partner,” I …
May 27, 2021: the death of journalism From Charlie Warzel’s newsletter: Julia Marcus: I’m fairly new to Twitter but it’s felt to me that the people who are amplified in news media as …
May 27, 2021: Last year, over at the Hog Blog, I wrote a post on my sudden love-affair with garden shears. Now I am exploring the possibilities of muscle-powered …
May 27, 2021: abandoned From Katie Wignall’s new book Abandoned London
May 26, 2021: Hockney's Rake David Hockney’s set designs for the 1975 performance of The Rake’s Progress at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera.
May 26, 2021: I have long had an intense hatred of the telephone — even in the face of eloquent testimonials like this one from Suzanne Fischer — but finally I am …
May 26, 2021: When, in the 1930s, Auden was teaching at The Downs School, he decided that the students should perform a musical, so he wrote the lyrics, composed …
May 26, 2021: Yet the noble despair of the poets Is nothing of the sort; it is silly To refuse the tasks of time And, overlooking our lives, Cry — “Miserable …
May 25, 2021: ”The intellectual arrogance of clever people, intolerable though it often is, is nothing to the intellectual arrogance of ignorant people.” -- Anthony …
May 24, 2021: linkage “Now there’s this fame business. I know it’s going to go away. It has to. This so-called mass fame comes from people who get caught up in a thing for …
May 24, 2021: goods and harms Jonathan Zimmerman: A few years ago, I invited Mary Beth Tinker to meet with my undergraduate class on the history of American education. Tinker …
May 21, 2021: China's intellectual future Epistemic confidence level: very low. I don’t really know what I’m talking about here, though I’m trying to know more. In an essay published a few …
May 19, 2021: plus ça change Most poets in the West believe that some sort of democracy is preferable to any sort of totalitarian state and accept certain political obligations, …
May 19, 2021: Summer companions.
May 19, 2021: pluralities One of the most fundamental ideas that Auden held in the 1950s — the period of his career that I’m working on right now — was that “pluralities” of …
May 17, 2021: next steps Work on the Invitation & Repair project has basically come to a halt, and there are three major reasons for that. First of all, I really need to …
May 17, 2021: thick and thin I taught for many years at Wheaton College, which has a detailed Statement of Faith that everyone on campus signs. From this detailed statement …
May 16, 2021: David French: In white Evangelicalism the true challenge of “wokeness” isn’t that congregations will embrace critical race theory, it’s that fear of …
May 15, 2021: step by step Jonah Goldberg: For five years now, we’ve watched as one political and psychological levee after another has been broken. If in 2016, I’d have …
May 14, 2021: changing priors, changing life I taught a a class last term called Philosophy and Literature, and for our last book we read Plato at the Googleplex, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein …
May 13, 2021: Ted Gioia: I’m not a Hollywood scriptwriter, but if I were, I know what screenplay I’d write. Imagine a violent murder at the epicenter of early …
May 13, 2021: Underworld I tried to read Don DeLillo’s Underworld more than 20 years ago, and got about 500 pages in before I got firmly stuck in the mud. I just now returned …
May 12, 2021: From an extraordinary essay by Paul Kingsnorth: It kept happening, for months. Christ to the left of me, Christ to the right. It was unnerving. I …
May 12, 2021: excerpt from my Sent folder: orbit These are things I think about a lot. I can only answer briefly now, because having returned home I am in serious catch-up mode, so just a couple of …
May 12, 2021: bits and pieces I am just back from a visit to my son in Chicago and the rest of my family in Alabama, and am still frazzled — I’m definitely out of traveling shape. …
May 10, 2021: My sister lives out in the country, in the ridge-and-valley terrain of northeastern Alabama, so this is where Bella gets to play. She’s a lucky …
May 10, 2021: This is my sister’s dog Bella. Bella is a rescue and a very good girl.
May 9, 2021: Cardinal Newman distinguished between notional and real assent to a given proposition. Since I wrote this post three months ago, I have achieved real …
May 6, 2021: This is either the cover of the Turkish edition of Breaking Bread with the Dead or else the album art for my new ambient jazz record.
Apr 27, 2021: Re: the Substackfication-of-journalism stuff I’ve been writing about lately, this interview with Ted Gioia is fascinating. And I now see that the …
Apr 26, 2021: expectations A few times over the past several years I have written to organizations of various sorts to ask them not to politicize their public presence, or at …
Apr 26, 2021: three characters in search of forgiveness In his online notebook, my friend Adam Roberts is reflecting on a certain kind of fictional character, the Murderbot kind, the Winter Soldier kind, …
Apr 25, 2021: When you’re out for a walk but really don’t want to have to deal with people. Very relatable.
Apr 25, 2021: exhaustion Freddie might be indulging in a bit of exaggeration for rhetorical effect here, responding to the “discourse of exhaustion”: Listen. Listen to me and …
Apr 24, 2021: how to read stuff posted online Very few sites on the internet are meant to facilitate reading — most are, in fact, designed to inhibit reading. Imagine watching a movie and having …
Apr 23, 2021: first signs Recently I wrote a post for the Hedgehog Review on the Substackification of journalism and whether it marks a permanent atomization of journalistic …
Apr 23, 2021: acoustic renown Kleos means both “glory” or “fame” and also “the song that ensures that glory or fame.” The noun is cognate with the Homeric verb kluō, meaning “I …
Apr 23, 2021: follow the links This is the sort of thing the world needs more of. Matthew Sweet saw a tweet claiming that a peer-reviewed study from a Stanford University scholar …
Apr 22, 2021: a bit of friendly advice Here’s my suggestion: Assume that everything everyone says on social media in the first 72 hours after a news event is the product of temporary …
Apr 21, 2021: Rome fell in a day A couple of thoughts about the collapse of the so-called European Super League. First, it’s impossible to overstress how badly thought-out the …
Apr 20, 2021: updates on this and that In the wake of the jury’s determination that Derek Chauvin is guilty of the murder of George Floyd, I’ll just say that I stand firmly by what I wrote …
Apr 20, 2021: Welcome back, friend.
Apr 18, 2021: Seventy-three years I can’t help being moved by the juxtaposition of these photographs.
Apr 18, 2021: transnational capitalism in boots Jonathan Liew: Perhaps once all this has shaken out, once the imminent threat of a breakaway European super league has been resolved one way or the …
Apr 14, 2021: The achievement of coherence is itself ambiguous. Coherence is not necessarily good, and one must question its cost. Better sometimes to remain …
Apr 14, 2021: We planted this Lindheimer’s beeblossom last year, and we’re delighted that it survived our polar vortex just fine and is looking great …
Apr 14, 2021: "the church itself does not believe" This by Russell Moore is incisive — devastatingly so: Where a “de-churched” (to use an anachronistic term) “ex-vangelical” (to use another) in the …
Apr 14, 2021: a bit of pedagogy College students are busy, so they practice triage: they decide (a) what must be done now, (b) what can wait until later, and (c) what need not be …
Apr 13, 2021: hoti's business “Kakos really ought to suffer for doing hoti!” “Kakos did hoti?” “Of course! Haven’t you heard? It’s all over Twitter.” “But is there any evidence he …
Apr 13, 2021: the sprawling toolbox In one of his notebooks Wittgenstein wrote, “I don’t believe I have ever invented a line of thinking. I have always taken one over from someone else…. …
Apr 13, 2021: Don’t give me any ideas.
Apr 12, 2021: I found this to be a moving, frustrating, painful, and yet somehow also heartwarming story about a young man who deserves a whole lot more than his …
Apr 12, 2021: touch not the unclean thing I pay for four Substack newsletters, but am on the free tier for several others, and the writers I follow who are huffily declaring their departure …
Apr 11, 2021: mercy Paul Kingsnorth in his new newsletter “The Abbey of Misrule”: I will attempt to write here without becoming evil, fighting for what I love and not …
Apr 10, 2021: imagine Ian Leslie: Imagine if this virus had emerged two decades ago - perfectly plausible, and nothing in historical terms. Scientists would have not have …
Apr 8, 2021: it's Palmer Eldritch's world, we're just living in it I’m teaching Philip K Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch right now, and in my introductory comments I mentioned that one of the …
Apr 5, 2021: the method It was in that class that I first began to learn that every problem, whether serious or trifling, may be solved by the application of an always …
Apr 4, 2021: to sum up "I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!" — Lesslie Newbigin Is Christianity declining where you are? Is it, …
Apr 3, 2021: the spoils When, therefore, we see in Him some things so human that they appear in no way to differ from the common frailty of mortals, and some things so divine …
Apr 2, 2021: what we need Jessica Martin's Maundy Thursday homily at Ely Cathedral. From Ely today, The Preaching and Proclamation of the Cross. Via Ken Myers, an absolutely …
Apr 1, 2021: The Rock Church, Cranfills Gap, Texas
Apr 1, 2021: strategy and vocation It’s rare for me to disagree with Ross Douthat as thoroughly as I disagree with this reflection on Christian intellectuals. I disagree not because I …
Apr 1, 2021: It’s only the ambidextrous who are truly pure! As an ambidextrous person, I endorse this verdict. Though — if I must be truthful — I’m not in …
Mar 31, 2021: three lessons I’ve known Erin Kissane virtually for around a decade now — our IRL paths almost crossed a few years ago when she was still living in New York City …
Mar 31, 2021: Can’t tell y’all how excited I am about this.
Mar 31, 2021: Left Purity Culture Like many other people, I’m not happy with the terms “woke” and “wokeness,” but I haven’t been sure what a good alternative is. Then, just the other …
Mar 31, 2021: stocking up Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has a problem. Their business depends almost wholly on showing movies from the pre-woke world — movies that cannot …
Mar 31, 2021: rewilding Re: this plan for rewilding large chunks of Great Britain, I like the focus on a handful of very large landowners who, theoretically at least, don’t …
Mar 30, 2021: culture and value This book is written for those who are in sympathy with the spirit in which it is written. This is not, I believe, the spirit of the main current of …
Mar 28, 2021: Used books.
Mar 28, 2021: judging capitalism This post by my friend Adam Roberts is precisely right about the total disappearance of anything that might plausibly be called conservatism from the …
Mar 27, 2021: Dessert first, please
Mar 27, 2021: more on invitation So far in these posts I’ve said a good bit about repair but very little about invitation. Let me return to the passage from Michael Oakeshott’s essay …
Mar 26, 2021: R.I.P. Larry McMurtry Whatever you think of McMurtry as a writer, it’s worth reflecting on this plain fact: No other writer has ever had a career remotely like his, and no …
Mar 26, 2021: indiscriminate acceptance I said grace cannot prevail until law is dead, until moralizing is out of the game. The precise phrase should be, until our fatal love affair with the …
Mar 25, 2021: powers and demons The chief enemies of a culture based on invitation and repair are, in general terms, Powers and Demons. The Powers are, as St. Paul teaches in his …
Mar 24, 2021: Welcome, small stranger. Live long and prosper.
Mar 23, 2021: a new old Prayer Book Samuel L. Bray and Drew N. Keane have produced a volume that, I may say with confidence, I will be relying on for the rest of my life. It is The 1662 …
Mar 23, 2021: Keep your eye clear of their For and Against! There is much right there, and much wrong: whoever looks on becomes angry. — Nietzsche, Thus Spoke …
Mar 22, 2021: A four-magazine mail day is my equivalent of finding a four-leaf clover.
Mar 22, 2021: two quotations on the miraculous Alan Lightman: Given some ostensibly miraculous event, almost all scientists will insist on a logical, rational, “natural” explanation. (Scientists …
Mar 22, 2021: Isolatos In his brief 1949 book The Enchaféd Flood, Auden writes of what happens when communities — gatherings of persons bound together (Auden does not quote …
Mar 22, 2021: blogging and the blogosphere Robin Sloan’s reply to my last post, which was a riff on something Robin wrote … ah, you’ll figure it out. Follow the links. Robin has been very …
Mar 20, 2021: vendoring culture Software often has dependencies, and the bigger the codebase the more dependencies the software is likely to have. A dependency is another chunk of …
Mar 19, 2021: One down, one to go.
Mar 19, 2021: biographies and brands This is a fascinating essay by my friend Charles Marsh. For me, there are two major elements of fascination, and I want to take them one at a time. …
Mar 19, 2021: beyond repair In his review of Ross Douthat’s book on decadence, Patrick Deneen writes: Classical authors accepted decay as a natural condition of the world, and …
Mar 18, 2021: So excited about the arrival of this one.
Mar 18, 2021: more on invitation and repair Rita Felski's book The Limits of Critique primarily concerns literary criticism, but its argument has a more general application, as does Bruno …
Mar 17, 2021: Invitation and Repair This is the first installment of a diffuse and ill-defined project I am calling Invitation and Repair: A Theology of Culture. I will be posting on it …
Mar 17, 2021: This story reminds me of an experience I had in Manhattan a few years ago. I was walking crosstown, and there was a young woman in front of me texting …
Mar 15, 2021: I was 100% sure that this little tree had died in the recent big freeze, but here we are!
Mar 15, 2021: the new heretics Last July I wrote that we were just a few weeks away from a #BoycottSubstack hashtag, and while things have moved a little more slowly than I thought …
Mar 11, 2021: the wait This piece by Don McNeil (which in a sane world would have appeared in the New York Times, but that’s another story) is a sobering reflection on just …
Mar 10, 2021: Not everything was killed in our Big Freeze (but I fear a lot was).
Mar 10, 2021: premises There’s a great story about the famous wit Sydney Smith. He was walking with a friend through one of the narrow “closes” of Edinburgh, and looked up …
Mar 10, 2021: indoctrination I don’t blame people for getting alarmed by stories like this one from Bari Weiss. But there’s one question that I think everyone reading such stories …
Mar 8, 2021: syllables I read once that Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda, an Argentinian and a Chilean, a conservative and a Communist, formed a bond over the one thing …
Mar 8, 2021: Malcolm My friend Holly Fish made the above image for me. Call me indulgent, but I wrote today’s newsletter about my dog Malcolm.
Mar 7, 2021: franchise service I loved WandaVision right up to the last episode, which except for a few wonderfully moving moments – the ones in which Wanda says goodbye to the …
Mar 7, 2021: for another view, please see... At an especially important moment in Tim Keller’s lovely and honest essay about confronting death, The Atlantic neatly inserts this link to Ezekiel …
Mar 4, 2021: We said goodbye to our best friend this morning after fourteen years of endlessly delightful companionship. Thanks for being you, Malcolm. We …
Mar 3, 2021: you want it darker Damon Linker: We have stopped believing in reason's power to persuade. The right thinks the critical social theories espoused by many on the left are …
Mar 2, 2021: This by Oliver Burkeman is exactly right: The confused public conversation about [Jordan] Peterson arises, if you ask me, from the fact that there …
Mar 1, 2021: Malcolm has become increasingly contemplative in his old age.
Mar 1, 2021: My newsletter seems not to have gone out this morning, so while I’m trying to find out what went wrong you can see the issue here.
Mar 1, 2021: Currently reading: At Home by Bill Bryson 📚
Mar 1, 2021: Currently reading: Either/Or: A Fragment of Life by Soren Kierkegaard 📚
Mar 1, 2021: Currently reading: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf 📚
Mar 1, 2021: Currently reading: The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth 📚
Feb 28, 2021: two quotations on technological impermanence (plus commentary) Jason Snell: Every time an app I rely on exposes its mortality, I realize that all the software I rely on is made by people. And some of it is made …
Feb 28, 2021: not through me If you are using Clubhouse, and you agreed to their not-quite-but-almost demand to share all your contacts with them, and I am one of your contacts, …
Feb 25, 2021: This story, interesting in itself, is a reminder that the only thing that anyone knows about The Bell Curve is that it is very, very wicked. No one …
Feb 25, 2021: up the Amazon I find that life is full of lines, lines I may not even know the existence of until I cross them. There’s an annoyance, say, an annoyance I can live …
Feb 24, 2021: free speech under technocracy In a recent post I commented that Amazon’s deleting of Ryan Anderson’s recent book is not a free-speech issue. What I meant by that is that free …
Feb 24, 2021: I have a theory: Google has changed how college students interact with their teachers. I estimate that 90% of the questions that students email to ask …
Feb 23, 2021: Damnatio memoriae Let’s be clear: Ryan T. Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally has not been banned, and there are no “free speech" issues involved here. (Not in …
Feb 21, 2021: two quotations on conspiracy belief Ian Leslie: The US-based online conspiracy cult QAnon played a central role in last month’s violent insurrection at the Capitol. QAnon is a complex, …
Feb 21, 2021: the warming center When power was out all over Waco and the temperatures were dropping into the single digits, the city set up “warming centers” for residents in danger. …
Feb 20, 2021: Conservatism Inc. Ross Douthat, in an exceptionally insightful column: As Conservatism Inc. became more of a world unto itself, it sealed out bad news for conservative …
Feb 19, 2021: trade-offs It seems to me that human beings in general, and Americans in particular, stubbornly resist the idea that life often presents us with trade-offs — …
Feb 19, 2021: Why do Democrats want to forgive student debt but not, say, the debt that someone incurs by buying a truck that enables him to have his own …
Feb 19, 2021: Bandcamp should be Substack for musicians I’m sure someone else has written this, but it’s on my mind, so… I'm waiting and hoping for some major musical artist to say, “Screw this. I'm taking …
Feb 18, 2021: the next wave We’re spending much of the day harvesting snow so we’ll be able to flush our toilets when the inevitable comes: a period without water. When the thaw …
Feb 17, 2021: two quotations on journalism Michael Brendan Dougherty: [James] Poulos holds that the old mass-media mandarins are trying to “encode” their ethical dreams into the new …
Feb 17, 2021: cold Texas Some years ago, when I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s outstanding Science in the Capital trilogy — later condensed into a single volume called Green …
Feb 13, 2021: mendacity on Eighth Avenue The other day I posted what I thought was a rather witty little aside in which I said that the New York Times might have more interesting material …
Feb 13, 2021: Kafkaesque Is it just because I was teaching Kafka last week that I keep having these Kafkaesque experiences? Or is it the state of our civilization? Example A: …
Feb 11, 2021: weighed in the balance I have never watched Fox News, but I used to read the New York Times. I therefore view both from a distance. But based on what I’ve seen, it seems …
Feb 10, 2021: two weather forecasts Accessed right now. I know which one I hope is correct.
Feb 10, 2021: excerpt from my Sent folder: forgiveness (Reply to an email from a friend who engaged with my recent posts on this subject) Thanks so much for this excellent and gracious pushback! It helps …
Feb 9, 2021: Paul, our contemporary [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“615”](The inside front flap of my old and much-used copy of Barth’s …
Feb 9, 2021: Much-used books are beautiful books.
Feb 8, 2021: grace not abounding I want to knot some strands of rope here. Some folks have responded to my recent posts on Christian obedience — one and two — by noting that I …
Feb 8, 2021: negation and affirmation [Re: the writers of Job, the Psalms, Isaiah:] Their theme — and it is the proper theme of history — is not concerned with denying or affirming what …
Feb 7, 2021: presentism and the Present One of the major themes of my book Breaking Bread with the Dead is the danger of presentism. But what do I mean by that? Presentism is an unspoken and …
Feb 6, 2021: clarity I think peace often arises from clarity. So let’s be clear about a few things: Arsenal are a mid-table side. For the foreseeable future, they won’t …
Feb 5, 2021: qi On the one hand, it’s good to stretch yourself intellectually; on the other hand, when you do so you might pull a muscle. In my recent essay on …
Feb 4, 2021: your periodic friendly reminder of a very inconvenient truth This is a word for myself as well as for my fellow Christians. I’ve said things like this before, but I can’t remind myself too often. Do people twist …
Feb 3, 2021: Daoism and Cosmotechnics My recent New Atlantis essay on the way beyond what I call The Standard Critique of Technology is now unpaywalled. This is an important essay for me …
Jan 31, 2021: katharsis culture A great many people have criticized the use of the term “cancel culture,” but have done so for different reasons. One group of people simply wants to …
Jan 30, 2021: offside, handball, and VAR Nobody, and I mean nobody, in the world of soccer knows what the offside rule is. Nobody, and I mean nobody, in the world of soccer knows what the …
Jan 30, 2021: Reading this story about an obsessively malicious online troll I’m reminded that when the big tech companies say “We simply can’t monitor all the …
Jan 30, 2021: In A Writer’s Notebook (1949), Somerset Maugham wrote: “I am like a passenger waiting for his ship at a wartime port. I do not know on which day it …
Jan 30, 2021: For Malcolm, affection is like being groomed: something to tolerate if there’s a biscuit at the end of it.
Jan 29, 2021: These are the books I’m teaching this term.
Jan 29, 2021: Yesterday I posted, and then almost immediately took down, a reflection on the most recent public kerfuffle at Baylor. I decided that it deserves more …
Jan 26, 2021: calculations I wrote a post about love and death. UPDATE: A helpful comment from my friend Tim Larsen about people who think as Ezekiel Emanuel does: “They also …
Jan 25, 2021: three quotations on journalism Matt Taibbi: People like [Margaret] Sullivan would have you believe that “balance” is a mandate to give voice to clearly illegitimate points of view, …
Jan 25, 2021: the three paths The active life: The contemplative life: The social-media life:
Jan 23, 2021: couldn't have said it better myself Megan McArdle: “Will is a friend, so naturally I’m dismayed by what happened. I’m also dismayed that it should have happened at Niskanen, a …
Jan 22, 2021: Auden on education in America Reflecting on T.S. Eliot’s book Notes towards the Definition of Culture, W. H. Auden identifies what he believes to be the distinctively “American …
Jan 22, 2021: la crisis del humanismo cristiano There seems to be a pretty lively conversation going on in Chile about the new Spanish translation of my book The Year of Our Lord 1943. I can with …
Jan 22, 2021: Light Perpetual I had the privilege of reading this extraordinary novel in manuscript, and I recommend it to you more warmly than I can easily say. Alexandra Harris’s …
Jan 20, 2021: ashes I have been clinging for months now, and expect to be clinging for years, to this word from Beth Moore: We have burned down our evangelical witness. …
Jan 20, 2021: unity Here’s a terrific essay by my friend Rick Gibson on George Washington’s farewell address, national unity, and the possibilities and challenges of this …
Jan 20, 2021: two quotations on prophecy Washington Post: When one QAnon channel on the chat app Telegram posted a new theory that suggested Biden himself was “part of the plan,” a number of …
Jan 20, 2021: why not with love? A reader of my book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction — in which I have some harsh things to say about the eat-your-broccoli approach …
Jan 20, 2021: two quotations on form We will be back in some form. — Donald Trump It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased …
Jan 19, 2021: peacemaking Can I get an amen for this powerful reflection by Justin Giboney? It gets a hearty amen from me. Neither the warmonger nor the pious bystander is a …
Jan 18, 2021: Now taking pre-orders for my new book, Republicans Are From Mordor, Democrats Are From Isengard.
Jan 17, 2021: a little moral clarity My homie Daniel with a dose of moral clarity: At the Texas Capitol, pro-Trump protesters gathered as officers from the Texas Department of Public …
Jan 15, 2021: do I feel fine? My friend Adam Roberts has recently released a delightful and provocative little book called It’s the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid …
Jan 15, 2021: I’m sure others have said this, but the best favor anyone ever did for Donald Trump was Twitter’s suspension of his account. If he had …
Jan 15, 2021: two quotations on recent events The Economist: Stand back, for a moment, and consider the enormity of his actions. As president, he tried to cling to power by overturning an election …
Jan 13, 2021: back to class prep
Jan 13, 2021: Texting with my son.
Jan 12, 2021: Manorial Technocracy This morning I have a post up at the Hedgehog Review on “Our Manorial Elite.” The core idea, as you’ll see if you click through, comes from Cory …
Jan 11, 2021: a time of reckoning This essay by my dear friend James Davison Hunter is absolutely essential for our moment: It is important to remember that times of crisis are always …
Jan 11, 2021: The Year of Hypomone A twofold something I already knew but that I re-learned this past week: During a crisis one turns instinctively and desperately to the internet for …
Jan 10, 2021: for the record First time I’ve seen anything like this in my eight years in central Texas, and I strongly suspect that if I live here the rest of my life I …
Jan 10, 2021: essential reading for skeptics (and others) Some of my readers will have friends and family members who believe that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump and that the …
Jan 8, 2021: looking backward I’m blogging too much, focused too much on the things of the moment, but I think the circumstances just may warrant it. It’s certainly hard for me to …
Jan 8, 2021: scale, cont'd. The other day I published, at the Hedgehog Review site, a little dialogue on scale, and the common human inability to understand the scale at which …
Jan 7, 2021: opportunity Michael Gerson: The collapse of one disastrous form of Christian social engagement should be an opportunity for the emergence of a more faithful one. …
Jan 7, 2021: the new strain of covid My friends at The New Atlantis have posted an informative and slightly worrying Q&A about the new covid strain. A necessary read, even if we in …
Jan 6, 2021: frivolity Dostoevsky’s Demons is often read as a denunciation of a spineless liberalism that makes way for a nihilistic radicalism. But the fundamental problem …
Jan 6, 2021: Well, it’s nice to see how much more peaceful and orderly things are now that we’ve flipped the calendar to 2021.
Jan 6, 2021: clarity The events occurring in the United States Capitol building as I write offer a certain clarity about the issues I raised in a recent post. You can have …
Jan 6, 2021: I wrote about a new kind of school: The School for Scale.
Jan 6, 2021: more education, more motivated reasoning Musa al-Gharbi: In fact, the more intelligent, educated, or rhetorically skilled one is, the less likely it becomes that someone will change their …
Jan 6, 2021: Planet Earth I have a policy that I recommend to you. When I hear a politician who wants my vote, or a pundit who claims to explain what’s happening in politics …
Jan 4, 2021: against Trumpistan Yuval Levin: The post-election political spectacle has put the question of reality and fantasy front and center. A meaningful number of Republican …
Jan 4, 2021: My newsletter features Dr. Diet, Dr. Quiet, and Dr. Merryman.
Jan 2, 2021: UMaster In a recent edition of my newsletter, I mentioned that I am something of a fanatic about sound recording, from the instruments used to the recording …
Jan 2, 2021: Malcolm wishes you a Happy New Year.
Dec 31, 2020: a reflection Þere parfit treuthe and pouere herte is and pacience of tonge, Þere is charitee. — Piers Plowman “Patience” is the title of the essay about Terrence …
Dec 28, 2020: samizdat My take on this is simple: It is better for a good book not to be taught at all than be taught by the people quoted in that article. Yes! — do, …
Dec 28, 2020: guilt Freddie deBoer: “That you should never feel guilty is a commonplace in this world; guilt is never an appropriate response to something wrong that …
Dec 28, 2020: gruel Francis Fukuyama: Liberalism deliberately lowered the horizon of politics: A liberal state will not tell you how to live your life, or what a good …
Dec 24, 2020: CRT Three hundred years ago Daniel Defoe wrote, “I believe there are a hundred thousand plain country fellows in England, who would spend their blood …
Dec 22, 2020: unlived This essay by Joshua Rothman has a lot to say about “unlived lives,” lives we think we might have, or could have, lived. We have unlived lives for all …
Dec 20, 2020: One of Eric Ravilious's illustrations for Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne
Dec 20, 2020: Eric Ravilious
Dec 17, 2020: muting Goodness, this post from Noah Millman is challenging. It’s about those complicated situations when we mute, unfollow, or otherwise disengage from our …
Dec 16, 2020: My local coffee shop/cocktail bar, Dichotomy, does Christmas better than anybody. Even an Advent fundamentalist like me can get behind this. …
Dec 15, 2020: The Return of the King In Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell Susanna Clarke imagines an alternate history of England, one in which the north of England was ruled for 300 years …
Dec 14, 2020: Two years ago, autumn in central Texas was spectacular; last year, wan; this year, pretty darn nice!
Dec 13, 2020: sifting the words I have decided that reading the news in America is like listening to Gollum. Gandalf: “What I have told you is what Gollum was willing to tell – …
Dec 13, 2020: testing the spirits There is no infallible means for discerning when a religious believer has been spoken to, directly and personally, by God. However, there is a …
Dec 11, 2020: the two parties The United States of America has long had a two-party political system, but it now has a two-party social system also. The social system is not …
Dec 11, 2020: Cosmotechnics My essay in the just-out edition of The New Atlantis — if you want to read it now, please subscribe to this excellent journal, and even if you don’t …
Dec 10, 2020: clarification I normally don’t respond to reviews, either positive or negative, but because I’m getting a good deal of email about this: I reviewed Alan Jacobs (no …
Dec 8, 2020: Palaiphobia I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of the present moment as a Power, a power in the Pauline sense of a massively distributed, massively …
Dec 7, 2020: under pressure Technology Review has a good article on ex-Google employee Timnit Gebru, an AI researcher who recently co-authored a paper questioning the social and …
Dec 6, 2020: an intractable problem For anyone who thinks about the relations between the past and the present, intellectual maturity consists in understanding that (a) the world is …
Dec 2, 2020: re-reading Categories: Books I have read and know well and want to re-read precisely because I know them well. Books I have read but feel I haven't fully …
Nov 30, 2020: incomprehension For decades now, James Wood has been writing about his Christian upbringing, but he has gotten progressively worse at it. For instance, compare his …
Nov 27, 2020: the Qoheleth of Austin Texas Monthly has a terrific podcast called “One by Willie," each episode of which features a musician talking with the host, John Spong, about …
Nov 26, 2020: It begins.
Nov 24, 2020: Coming attractions.
Nov 24, 2020: In which I announce Gospel of the Trees 2.0.
Nov 23, 2020: I was, am, and will be here for Richard Polt’s Analog College.
Nov 23, 2020: Yeah, I’ve been doing this a while. What I like about this is that it shows that I’ve been working primarily in plain text files for 25 …
Nov 22, 2020: Theo Epstein: Baseball “is the greatest game in the world, … but there are some threats to it because of the way the game is evolving, and I take some …
Nov 22, 2020: Things many people who haven’t published don’t understand: We writers rarely have any control over (1) titles of essays and articles, (2) …
Nov 22, 2020: Just discovered that a fairly generous except of my biography of C. S. Lewis is available online — as a PDF — complete with the absolutely hideous …
Nov 22, 2020: I think this post by Ilya Somin, especially if you follow up its many useful links, raises the central question of American politics in our era: How …
Nov 21, 2020: Santa Subito!!
Nov 20, 2020: It’s just wonderful to me that friends of mine (Erin, Amanda, Alexis, Rob), have been doing this amazing work to track Covid cases in America — and …
Nov 19, 2020: In recent weeks I’ve expressed my gratitude to my students, who have been so faithfully disciplined in doing what they needed to do to keep us on …
Nov 18, 2020: Currently reading: A Promised Land by Barack Obama 📚
Nov 18, 2020: Currently reading: The Children of Men by P. D. James 📚
Nov 17, 2020: Well, I knew this was coming. And let’s be clear: Krebs was fired for telling the truth. (The unforgivable sin in certain circles.)
Nov 17, 2020: That’s right, I’m playing Monument Valley 2 on my Mac.
Nov 16, 2020: 48º, AKA perfect napping weather for a Sheltie.
Nov 16, 2020: And speaking of newsletters not on Substack, I have posted an issue this morning.
Nov 16, 2020: Overall, I think the move by some of our most provocatively interesting journalists to newsletters is a salutary one. But it’s not good for all of …
Nov 16, 2020: two quotations on American politics Barack Obama: The point I’ve always made to Ta-Nehisi, the point I sometimes make to Michelle, the point I sometimes make to my own kids — the …
Nov 16, 2020: Barack Obama: “ If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. …
Nov 15, 2020: Cheating-detection companies made millions during the pandemic. Now students are fighting back: “Students argue that the testing systems have made …
Nov 15, 2020: Cheakamus Lake, Garibaldi Provincial Park, British Columbia, 2006
Nov 14, 2020: Someone’s not ready for autumn.
Nov 13, 2020: New Mexico, June 2017
Nov 12, 2020: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has an excellent page debunking rumors of voting fraud — it will probably stay up until President …
Nov 12, 2020: I just gave our student assistant Ifeoma a boring sorting-and-filing job to do, and said, apologetically, “It’s not an intellectual …
Nov 12, 2020: mistrust An update on this post: I occasionally read NYT news stories now, for a very particular reason: the newspaper’s two chief religion reporters, …
Nov 11, 2020: All my photographs are of trees and my dog, but, you know, I yam what I yam.
Nov 11, 2020: odds Chance that even one of the election lawsuits will be decided in Trump’s favor: 3% Chance that Trump will accept the validity of any legal ruling …
Nov 9, 2020: Excerpt from my Sent folder: quarantine and quizzes Hello friends, A handful of you have told me that you’ll need to be quarantined for a while — I’m sorry to hear it. Here’s hoping for clean tests and …
Nov 6, 2020: back to the urbs Many years ago I wrote a post about living in a suburb — Wheaton, Illinois — but having a life that in many ways felt more like what city life is …
Nov 5, 2020: weakness and isolation Two random, one relatively significant and one relatively trivial, thoughts on this op-ed by Ian Marcus Corbin. The more significant one first. Corbin …
Nov 1, 2020: Leaves just beginning to turn, but the autumn light angles are here.
Nov 1, 2020: I think we’re all bozos on this bus For the last few weeks I’ve been tinkering with a draft of a post on American incompetence — on the basic inability of almost everyone in this country …
Oct 29, 2020: From Baylor’s covid tracking page. My students have been amazing: their consistency in doing the right thing, their cheerfulness — I am so proud of …
Oct 28, 2020: it’s time I read stories like this almost every day: banned from Twitter for no good reason; banned from Facebook for no good reason; banned from Facebook …
Oct 24, 2020: Very excited to get this little treasure from my dear friend Tim Larsen!
Oct 20, 2020: rediscovery Via Patrick Rhone, I discovered this newsletter by Mo Perry, in which she discusses the Triumph of the Scold: Now my social media feed is full of …
Oct 20, 2020: the college experience Ian Bogost, speaking truth to both power and powerlessness: Without the college experience, a college education alone seems insufficient. Quietly, …
Oct 19, 2020: If Then There are many books that I admire and love that I never for a moment dream I could have written. Right now I’m reading an old favorite, Susanna …
Oct 15, 2020: Currently reading: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky 📚
Oct 14, 2020: Making lunch, gazing out back, thankful for these gifts but waiting and hoping for better days for this country and our world. #adayinthelife in Waco, …
Oct 13, 2020: When I’m on on campus I always like to spend some time chilling under the live oaks.
Oct 13, 2020: I wrote a post on some features of micro.blog that more people should know about. (Maybe many of you already know about them, but people not yet using …
Oct 13, 2020: hidden features of micro.blog Micro.blog has some cool features that many users are not aware of. (They’re not really hidden, but that made for a better title than “not especially …
Oct 13, 2020: Cool enough for a hoodie on the morning walk 😯
Oct 13, 2020: Currently reading: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life by Emile Durkheim 📚
Oct 13, 2020: Currently reading: If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore 📚
Oct 12, 2020: simple XKCD is rarely wrong, but this: — this is wrong. During that nine nine hours and fourteen minutes you will not do anything to “slightly improve your …
Oct 12, 2020: the Great Crumping revisited A surprising number of readers of my previous post have written out of concern for my state of mind, which is kind of them, but I think they have read …
Oct 10, 2020: excerpt from my Sent folder: crumped I think regularly about Orwell’s “Why I Write,” and especially about the fourth of his four reasons for writing: “Political purpose … Desire to push …
Oct 10, 2020: civility revisited My friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey has written a lovely defense of civility as a political virtue. Her case is essentially prudential, grounded …
Oct 6, 2020: Let’s never see this sight again. Let’s win them all for the big green guy. ⚽️ #JusticeForGunnersaurus
Oct 6, 2020: Mesut Özil, Arsenal legend and hero of humanity. ⚽️ Also, #JusticeForGunnersaurus is the single greatest hashtag in the history of social media.
Oct 6, 2020: individualism For the past hundred years or so, we have had a vast multifarious culture industry devoted to the critique of individualism. Individualism, we have …
Oct 5, 2020: That’s it, Arsenal. If you don’t want Gunnersaurus you don’t want me as a supporter.
Oct 2, 2020: Currently reading: Murray Bookchin Reader 📚
Oct 2, 2020: Currently reading: Fear And Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard 📚
Oct 2, 2020: Currently reading: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen 📚
Oct 2, 2020: “not living merely for himself” In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Tom Bertram — the feckless, selfish, wayward elder son of Sir Thomas Bertram — becomes very ill. It starts with a …
Sep 30, 2020: I know there were people last night watching the debate and then live-tweeting their responses — like people in the Ninth Circle of Hell who don’t …
Sep 29, 2020: Not sure why, but our September roses are blooming with much more vivid colors than they had earlier in the year. (Maybe enjoying the …
Sep 27, 2020: Proudhon to Marx Lyon, 17 May 1846: Let us seek together, if you wish, the laws of society, the manner in which these laws are realized, the process by which we shall …
Sep 26, 2020: readings Gary Dorrien: Here is where Temple still matters as a theorist of guild socialism. In the early 1940s, both before and after he became Archbishop of …
Sep 25, 2020: two thoughts David French: “In the contest between the rights of a woman to sleep peacefully in her own home and for her boyfriend to defend it against violent …
Sep 25, 2020: David Jones, “The Terrace” (1929)
Sep 25, 2020: bundles I wonder how long before Substack starts offering discounts for subscriptions to bundles of thematically-related newsletters? They could be called, …
Sep 25, 2020: shy Geoffrey Skelley: If “shy” Trump voters were a thing, for example, you might expect a difference in how respondents reply to surveys conducted via …
Sep 24, 2020: Well of course it’s expensive, it’s a 350-year-old book.
Sep 22, 2020: Gaslighting One of the more pernicious quirks of English usage to arise in the past few years is the employment — by a remarkably large number of people, it seems …
Sep 21, 2020: limiting power As I noted in my previous post, there is no political system, no ordered social life, in which one can wholly escape being subject to power. As Burke …
Sep 21, 2020: an alternative A couple of years ago Corey Robin wrote, Under capitalism, we’re forced to enter the market just to live. The libertarian sees the market as …
Sep 18, 2020: advice for journalists Andrew Sullivan writes, Online is increasingly where people live. My average screen time this past week was close to ten hours a day. Yes, a lot of …
Sep 18, 2020: My son and I are sorting through the Big Issues
Sep 16, 2020: disparities If Ibram X. Kendi did not exist, it would be necessary for a certain kind of conservative to invent him. But because he does exist, whenever someone …
Sep 16, 2020: I’m a huge fan of Leuchtturm notebooks, but I’m a little concerned about their pricing.
Sep 13, 2020: lessons for activists from Edmund Burke We do not draw the moral lessons we might from history. On the contrary, without care it may be used to vitiate our minds and to destroy our …
Sep 12, 2020: the failings of biographers In this interview, C. S. Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham reveals facts about his upbringing, and especially about his brother David, that he has kept …
Sep 8, 2020: This is so cool from my buddy Austin Kleon.
Sep 7, 2020: Tomorrow!
Sep 4, 2020: Coming Tuesday!
Sep 3, 2020: sexual politics Nick Cohen: When I canvassed working-class northern neighbourhoods for Labour in the 1980s men told me they voted Labour because their ancestors had …
Aug 31, 2020: brand partnerships Anne Helen Peterson: The testimonies I collected last week made one thing clear: institutions attempting in-person instruction know they’re going to …
Aug 31, 2020: fascist architecture Continuing my recent habit of seeing The Lord of the Rings as the, um, One Analogy to Rule Them All…. I’ve been invoking the Gandalf Option, and I …
Aug 29, 2020: how he got away with it In a lovely remembrance of Kołakowski, Roger Scruton muses on the question of how the Polish thinker “got away with” his incessant assaults on the …
Aug 28, 2020: My beloved on the Rhine last fall (photo by her friend Fran).
Aug 28, 2020: critique and myth In a famous footnote to the Preface of his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant wrote, Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything …
Aug 27, 2020: Now I can intimidate my students by looking like Immortan Joe
Aug 26, 2020: why racism is wrong My friend and colleague Frank Beckwith is singing my song in a recent blog post. Responding to an essay by Princeton’s Keith Whittington, Frank …
Aug 25, 2020: Had to give myself a reward after my first class.
Aug 24, 2020: This morning’s newsletter is about silence, and a legendary young woman of the Lakota Sioux.
Aug 21, 2020: on being Bombadil I am not privy to anything that happens in the upper reaches of Baylor University’s administration, but as far as this close observer can tell, Baylor …
Aug 20, 2020: Looked all over the place for my beloved this morning. Finally found her in a tree.
Aug 16, 2020: summary, with tags I’ve spent some time recently sorting through my online writings, and it’s not easy, given my susceptibility to logorrhea. But I’m thinking it would …
Aug 15, 2020: iPad update Herewith an update to this post. Since I still don’t have a Mac I can easily use without broiling my fingers, I have continued to work on being a …
Aug 15, 2020: so sue me I have developed a theory about academic life in America today, one that started as a kind of joke but has developed into a genuinely held view. …
Aug 14, 2020: wokeness as Counter-Reformation My old friend Jody Bottum thinks that the various Woke movements amount to a kind of post-Protestantism. I think this is wholly wrong. Wokeness is …
Aug 13, 2020: a message to my students I have been starting school each August for the past fifty-six years. A great many things have changed in my life over the decades, but not that. And …
Aug 13, 2020: This spindly rose bloomed a bit in the spring, after which it offered no blooms at all for three months. Recently it decided to announce itself again.
Aug 12, 2020: Campus was looking lovely this morning except for the ongoing construction of tent cities.
Aug 8, 2020: Texas City As several people have pointed out, the recent explosion in Beirut bears many eerie similarities to the Texas City disaster of 1947. Also, the same …
Aug 7, 2020: hoisting the flag I mentioned on my micro.blog that I’ve been reading Stephen Harrigan’s magnificent Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas. (The title comes from the …
Aug 6, 2020: current status
Aug 5, 2020: shaken I have to admit that I am a bit shaken by Rod Dreher’s post yesterday — and more by the vehemence with which, today, he is doubling and tripling down …
Aug 4, 2020: putting this on the record I thinkthis post by my friend Rod Dreher is horrifying. I think Rod ought to be ashamed of himself for writing it, and should apologize. Rod says that …
Aug 3, 2020: Taken on the plane back to Alabama. She was with me then, and with me through the difficult years to come; and she’s still with me now, forty years …
Aug 3, 2020: Honeymoon over; in the airport and about to return to Alabama. If I look a little worried, I probably was. As soon as we got back we had to start …
Aug 2, 2020: Reader, she married me. Forty years ago today. I still can’t quite believe it. (Photo taken with a cheap camera on our honeymoon.)
Aug 1, 2020: I’m happy for all Gunners today, but happiest for this guy. What a class act and first-rate keeper. 🥅 ⚽️
Aug 1, 2020: South Fork, Guadalupe River (2017)
Aug 1, 2020: This monstrous thing is ten feet tall now.
Jul 31, 2020: when you feel you can't win In response to my recent post I have heard from a few (white) people who say something like this: Nothing we can do is right. If we speak, we’re wrong …
Jul 28, 2020: Race at Baylor Rod Dreher has a post today about a letter from Linda Livingstone, Baylor’s President. Rod’s post turned up a day after I got an email from a woman …
Jul 25, 2020: kneeling It’s remarkable how quickly we’ve moved from a situation in which people wanted to punish athletes for kneeling before a game to one in which other …
Jul 25, 2020: HEY I was pretty excited when I learned about HEY, because it’s been a long time since anyone did any real innovation in email, even though email remains …
Jul 23, 2020: more on the Dish Since I wrote about Andrew Sullivan’s renewed Dish, Andrew has reported that subscriptions are near 60,000 — probably over that mark by now — and …
Jul 23, 2020: proportional representation Jill Lepore wrote, “One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms …
Jul 21, 2020: plurality and unity In this essay from a couple of years ago and today’s post at the Hog Blog — the first for a Christian audience, the second for a general one — I’m …
Jul 17, 2020: Remembering Jim Packer I am grieved to hear today of the death of J. I. Packer, a great evangelical Christian and a great saint. He had been failing for some time but I did …
Jul 17, 2020: return of the Dish I’m really glad to learn that The Dish is returning — especially in a form that will allow Andrew to write fewer but longer pieces than he did in the …
Jul 17, 2020: tolerating corruption, or not Everyone knows that professional sports around the world are utterly and unfixably corrupt. Was there ever a chance that Manchester City’s ban from …
Jul 16, 2020: The Shield of Achilles I’ve prepared two critical editions of long poems by Auden: The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (originally published in 1947) and For the Time …
Jul 15, 2020: the emotional intelligence of long experience Reading this for reasons unrelated to our current kerfuffles, I came across an interesting passage: As it turns out, scientific research bears out …
Jul 14, 2020: Mindslaughter and the united front Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” (delivered as a lecture in 1958) begins with a meditation on political ends and means. “Where …
Jul 14, 2020: high time It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your …
Jul 13, 2020: dog whistles A friend kindly explained to me that this post was quite badly written, so I have fixed it. Sort of. Perhaps the most tiresome — not the worst, …
Jul 9, 2020: out-wrathing In 2017, I was interviewed by Emma Green of the Atlantic about my book How To Think. Here’s an excerpt: Green: Ideologically speaking, people are …
Jul 7, 2020: Freddie is right Freddie deBoer: So how can someone object to an endorsement of free speech and open debate without being opposed to those things in and of …
Jul 7, 2020: as essential as bread People often talk about the death of the humanities, or hard times for the humanities, but when they do what they really mean is the death of or hard …
Jul 6, 2020: Mammon Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Mammon is a remarkable book, beautifully written and narrated with great verve. However, I do not find its …
Jul 5, 2020: betwixt and between My employer, Baylor University, graciously provides me with a computer, a MacBook Pro; but it also loads that computer with a whole bunch of …
Jul 1, 2020: the circle game A year-and-a-half ago or thereabouts I deactivated my Twitter account and was very happy to escape the place. But I have a new book coming out, and …
Jun 30, 2020: I wrote about sharing a typewriter (model) with Carl Reiner.
Jun 30, 2020: Carl Reiner and me In a career spanning seventy years, Carl Reiner shaped the nation’s sense of humor through his writing, directing, and performances on stage and …
Jun 30, 2020: learning from Rod Dreher My buddy Rod Dreher has a book coming out soon called Live Not By Lies, and it’s about what American Christians can learn about living under an …
Jun 29, 2020: Went down to the river today to make sure it’s still there. ✔️
Jun 29, 2020: no, this isn’t about deconstruction Everyone’s got their wishlist, and mine, like yours, starts with an effective vaccine for COVID–19 and peace and justice in the world. But after than …
Jun 27, 2020: punishing the innocent Re: Yascha Mounk’s article on leftist mobs punishing the innocent: For the ones doing the mobbing, ruining the lives of innocent people is not a bug …
Jun 27, 2020: “Slowly”?
Jun 26, 2020: Couldn’t possibly be more delighted with the blurbs for my forthcoming book.
Jun 25, 2020: Jacob Epstein’s great sculpture of St. Michael’s victory over Satan at Coventry Cathedral — a memorable image of the ultimate binding of all the …
Jun 24, 2020: A more peaceful image from the same room
Jun 24, 2020: Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2016)
Jun 23, 2020: Hard to imagine a more damning chart. But what we will never be able to decide is who, primarily, deserves the blame: Federal government, state …
Jun 23, 2020: the web as it ought to be I use Safari as my default browser on the Mac, and the feature I am most thankful for is Reader View. We all have the experience, probably every …
Jun 22, 2020: First tomatoes from the garden, full-size + cherry.
Jun 22, 2020: Not just reading David French’s newsletter, I’m annotating it.
Jun 19, 2020: unsolicited advice Here in America, it’s a news week like any other. The President retweets, for political effect, a doctored video. Tucker Carlson says that Section …
Jun 19, 2020: Vieux Carré
Jun 19, 2020: Dear Apple Dear Apple, I bought my first Apple products — the original (512k!) Macintosh and an ImageWriter printer — in the spring of 1985, and in the decades …
Jun 19, 2020: Ascending Wansfell Pike, 2011
Jun 18, 2020: Malcolm wishes to register his approval of Dr. Kelly and her place.
Jun 18, 2020: Took Malcolm to his vet, Dr. Kelly, today. She works mainly on horses and so her place is out in the country a bit. Man, is it pretty out there.
Jun 18, 2020: Jemez River, New Mexico, 2017
Jun 17, 2020: last word on critical theory In these posts on “critical theory,” I’m doing what I pretty much always do: I am separating and sorting questions that tend to be conflated. That’s …
Jun 17, 2020: Christians and critical theory Here’s the question I mentioned in my last post: What should be the Christian’s response to critical theory? Note that this is not a question that is …
Jun 17, 2020: more on “critical theory” This is not the promised follow-up to my recent post on fear, but it certainly concerns related matters. This is a follow-up to my earlier post on …
Jun 16, 2020: fear In the most recent issue of his newsletter, David French writes, The fear of the Christian “best” is harming this nation…. [Some], in spite of …
Jun 15, 2020: Malcolm has just had an exciting game of garden hose to celebrate his birthday. He’s 13 today! He’s mostly deaf now, and has some arthritis, and …
Jun 14, 2020: Eric Ravilious
Jun 12, 2020: getting back to the open web via micro.blog I was a Kickstarter backer of micro.blog and an early enthusiast, but I eventually drifted away from it because I was having trouble getting it to do …
Jun 11, 2020: more on the mania for unanimity Theodore Dalrymple writes, Lewis Hamilton, the six-time world champion British Formula One driver, recently criticised his colleagues in the sport for …
Jun 8, 2020: stochastic resonance in reading Stochastic resonance (SR) is a phenomenon where a signal that is normally too weak to be detected by a sensor, can be boosted by adding white noise to …
Jun 7, 2020: not so much On January 25, Joe Biden tweeted that “Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time.” The. I texted a friend, “Because we’ve fixed all …
Jun 6, 2020: a green thought in a green shade
Jun 6, 2020: I’m just taking picture after picture of my garden because (a) I like growing flowers and (b) I ain’t going anywhere else except my own …
Jun 5, 2020: tiptoe stance I’ve read several articles and posts recently featuring the same conceit: that COVID–19 and police violence are the “twin plagues” or “parallel …
Jun 4, 2020: I may be some time
Jun 4, 2020: two quotes by Jesse Singal One: I am not arguing for a return to some sort of view-from-nowhere style of journalism. I have no problem identifying as both a journalist but also …
Jun 3, 2020: technocracy is impossible I’m re-reading Kim Stanley Robinson‘s magnificent Mars trilogy right now, which might be something to blog about in the coming days and weeks, so why …
Jun 2, 2020: A Canticle Yesterday I got a sweet email from my friend Francis Spufford, expressing his prayerful concern for the condition of my country right now, and I …
Jun 1, 2020: public health and economic balance Public health depends on economic balance. Basil and Ambrose both condemned as toxic the economic profiteering of high-interest loans, describing the …
May 31, 2020: in the day of trouble Almighty God, who hast given us this good land for our heritage; We humbly beseech thee that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of thy …
May 30, 2020: lessons from the past Once I saw how things were going I got away from Twitter and stopped checking my RSS reader. I didn’t want to hear any news, mainly because I knew …
May 28, 2020: my expert opinion Americans have never more desperately needed reliable knowledge than we do now; also, Americans have never been less inclined to trust experts, who …
May 27, 2020: St. Mark’s I love these pencil sketches by Ruskin that he later filled in with watercolor or colored pencil
May 27, 2020: Leaves John Ruskin
May 27, 2020: Loggia of the Doge’s Palace John Ruskin
May 26, 2020: This thing is going crazy
May 26, 2020: “Titanic insanity” And among such false means largeness of scale in the dwelling-house was of course one of the easiest and most direct. All persons, however senseless …
May 25, 2020: “I hated it with, like, a powerful hate” David Lynch
May 25, 2020: on misunderstanding critical theory Recently there’s been a lot of talk among conservatives about “critical theory,” and it’s been puzzling me. So finally I looked into the matter and …
May 25, 2020: fifteen years ago Teri took this picture of Wes and me on our visit here This is where we were headed (photo by me)
May 24, 2020: serious questions for churches The question I would ask churches that are re-opening without masks or distancing, but with lots of congregational singing, is: How do you think …
May 21, 2020: thread Nothing is stupider than using Twitter to write anything longer than, you know, a tweet. This we know. It’s a terrible experience first for the writer …
May 20, 2020: Wittgenzen In a new and extra-special edition of his newsletter, Robin Sloan writes about why he likes texts that have “a modular structure, an accelerated pace …
May 16, 2020: deep literacy? The problem here is the lack of evidence that “deep literacy” really is in decline. Decline from what height? Starting when? Also: The rise of deep …
May 15, 2020: mail time When I was writing my previous post I dug through my ancient folder of correspondence — which documents the pre-Cambrian era during which people wrote …
May 15, 2020: what to say about First Things? People keep writing to me about the Reno Incident, usually wanting to know what I think it says about First Things as a magazine, and aside from …
May 14, 2020: QAnon: costs and benefits Adrienne LaFrance on QAnon: In Toledo, I asked [a woman named Lorrie] Shock if she had any theories about Q’s identity. She answered immediately: “I …
May 13, 2020: how hard I know that one of the most frustrating things you can say to a software developer is “It can’t be that hard.” Because unless you actually are a …
May 13, 2020: free as in more coffee I use the Freedom app to keep me off Twitter for 22 hours a day. I get an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening to check what’s happening. …
May 12, 2020: another case for the humanities Samuel Johnson was impressed by the intelligent and ambitious structure of learning that Milton laid out in “Of Education,” but, as he explains in his …
May 12, 2020: Ravi Zacharias When I was a college student and a brand-new Christian, I attended a talk by Ravi Zacharias at a church in my home town of Birmingham, Alabama. At the …
May 6, 2020: sticky The best thing about paper sticky notes is that they’re sticky — that is, you can easily attach them to another sheet of paper, to a computer, to a …
May 1, 2020: against “the common good” Wendell Berry once wrote, “Community is a concept, like humanity or peace, that virtually no one has taken the trouble to quarrel with; even its worst …
Apr 30, 2020: enlightenment for ninepence I know you didn’t ask — and you’re not going to read this anyway — but all the same, I have some advice for those of you who are going around …
Apr 29, 2020: after the storm We had a massive thunderstorm around 3 this morning: crashing thunder, torrential rain, and lightning that was nearly constant for an hour, almost …
Apr 29, 2020: Shira Ovide: “This will sound weird coming from a professional tech writer: Technology will not end a pandemic. People will.” I’ve written about this …
Apr 28, 2020: the seductions of prediction Derek Thompson is an outstanding journalist, but this piece strikes me as way premature. I mean, good heavens, we’re not even two months into our …
Apr 27, 2020: more things happening
Apr 27, 2020: breaking habits Reading this post by Jonathan V. Last, I find myself meditating on the role that habit plays in our choices of activity, in small things and large. …
Apr 25, 2020: things happening in my yard
Apr 24, 2020: le mot unjuste I’ve written before about the dual and mutually reinforcing social problems of (a) stupid resistance to expertise and (b) dubious claims of expertise. …
Apr 23, 2020: why Blake is terrifying Last December, when I was in London, I spent a good deal of time at the Tate Britain’s big exhibition of Blake’s work, and found it frustrating. I …
Apr 21, 2020: Saul: Season 5, final comment In an earlier comment on this season I noted that Jimmy’s character arc is basically complete by the end of Season 4, when he registers to practice …
Apr 21, 2020: thoughts
Apr 18, 2020: thinking during Covidtide Content warning: the second half of this post is mainly for my fellow Christians For me, this Covidtide has been an unwelcome opportunity to revisit …
Apr 15, 2020: scenes
Apr 14, 2020: Saul: Season 5, Comment 3 Earlier in this season, Mike Ehrmantraut is so disturbed at the way his life is going — at the decisions he has made, and the people he’s connected to …
Apr 12, 2020: My newsletter this Easter week is devoted to Arcabas.
Apr 10, 2020: Tom Holland: That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman …
Apr 6, 2020: Arcabas, <em>Le retour du fils</em>
Apr 2, 2020: I have some questions My questions concern Adrian Vermeule's already-much-talked-about argument for “Common-Good Constitutionalism” — especially this paragraph: As for the …
Apr 1, 2020: ecclesial bricolage I see a whole bunch of Christian pastors and intellectuals going online to articulate a Theory of Worship for Coronavirustide. But of course those …
Mar 29, 2020: why death is bad: a primer for Christians It has come to my attention that some among you don’t believe death is a very bad thing; or at least that there are many things more precious than …
Mar 27, 2020: the post-truth thought leaders at work Giorgio Agamben: The other thing, no less disquieting than the first, that the epidemic has caused to appear with clarity is that the state of …
Mar 26, 2020: a remarkable convergence I am teaching three classes right now, distance-learning style. My students and I are isolated from one another, confined to our homes, denied the …
Mar 26, 2020: Saul: season 5, comment 2 Super-spoilery. I think my earlier prediction that Season 5 would not primarily be about Jimmy/Saul — because the transformation from the former into …
Mar 25, 2020: motte and bailey and coronavirus Nicholas Shackel: A Motte and Bailey castle is a medieval system of defence in which a stone tower on a mound (the Motte) is surrounded by an area of …
Mar 25, 2020: choices Rusty Reno: That older generation that endured the Spanish flu, now long gone, was not ill-informed. People in that era were attended by medical …
Mar 24, 2020: comfort food: a recipe When it comes to comfort food, our number 1 go-to in the Jacobs household is a thoroughly Americanized version of the Italian classic spaghetti …
Mar 21, 2020: welcome to my classroom
Mar 21, 2020: livestreaming church I disagree with pretty much everything in this post by Ephraim Radner. I don’t think consolation of lonely people is distinctively “motherly”; I don’t …
Mar 20, 2020: the definitive guide What if I made for my students a guide to Auden’s “Horae Canonicae” that looks like this?
Mar 20, 2020: Attaboy Sometimes I get obsessed about something and can only manage the obsession by writing about it. So, from nine years ago: I'm not sure exactly what to …
Mar 18, 2020: extended families I have written before about the experience I had growing up in the same house as my paternal grandparents. When I was very young, I had an inchoate …
Mar 18, 2020: Morning Prayer Each weekday at 7:30am, my parish church, St. Alban’s, is livestreaming Morning Prayer. It is a simple service but I have found it moving and …
Mar 17, 2020: rocketing the mind In his glorious poem “Advice to a Prophet,” Richard Wilbur begins: When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city, Mad-eyed from stating …
Mar 16, 2020: folly Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil. One can protest against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force. Evil …
Mar 15, 2020: incuriosity and indifference Incuriosity and indifference — intellectual laziness and the absence of compassion — are vices that feed each other. If you don’t care about what …
Mar 15, 2020: Stonehenge 1947 Bill Brandt. Warren Ellis posted this somewhere.
Mar 14, 2020: reading in a time of anxiety One of the first things to go in a time of stress like ours is concentration. We know so little about the coronavirus: whether we will get it and how …
Mar 12, 2020: who you gonna believe? Rush Limbaugh says, “Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute …
Mar 12, 2020: "a sad bit of fair play" Shai Held: Earlier today, a friend posted on Facebook about an experience he’d just had on the Upper West Side of Manhattan: “I heard a guy who …
Mar 8, 2020: choose Near the end of The Code of the Woosters, Bertie sagely comments of Roderick Spode that one can be either a fascist dictator or a designer of women’s …
Mar 4, 2020: Saul: season 5, comment 1 Spoilers ahead. Watching the first episode of Season 5 of Better Call Saul, something occurred to me: This story isn’t about Jimmy any more. It’s …
Mar 3, 2020: A Long Defeat, A Final Victory Here’s something I wrote several years ago at The American Conservative, something I still believe, something I need occasionally to remind …
Mar 2, 2020: We planted this Monterey oak in our front yard three years ago, and it has flourished, but it has this really odd behavior: Each early spring it …
Mar 2, 2020: still Tony Tanner, in his great essay on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, comments extensively on the peculiarity of a heroine, Fanny Price, who so rarely does …
Mar 1, 2020: the unpundit In what has become a famous passage, G. K. Chesterton wrote, "At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement …
Feb 29, 2020: ayjaytopia Needless to say, I don’t want anyone to get sick, much less die, but if we could remove that precipitating cause, I have to say: A world in which (a) …
Feb 29, 2020: hurt Politics is hard, and one of the most intractable rules that governs the implementation of any policy is: When trying to help people you want to help, …
Feb 27, 2020: the default assumption [I’m taking this post down not because I think it was wrong — I think I made a good and important point — but because I violated my First Law of …
Feb 26, 2020: Mantel's Cromwell Freya Johnston on Hilary Mantel's new novel: The Mirror and the Light, like Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, conceals through a mass of beautifully …
Feb 23, 2020: productivity My friend Richard Gibson today called my attention to this 2013 column in the Economist: The most obvious beneficiaries of leaning back would be …
Feb 22, 2020: what to do on Saturday night when you have a cold Why, you read Prince Kropotkin’s article on Anarchism from the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, of course. What else would you do?
Feb 22, 2020: what's in my bag The Cool Tools site does a regular series in which people describe what they carry around and what they carry it around in. I thought I might do my …
Feb 20, 2020: one more post about Twitter I deactivated my Twitter account more than a year ago, and set a recurrent reminder to log in every 28 days to reactivate and then deactivate again. I …
Feb 17, 2020: a perfect ratio There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock, of water to sand, insuring that wide, …
Feb 16, 2020: loss and grief To go from Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines to the Dark Mountain Manifesto is to take a 180° turn — a turn downward. If Kurzweil reached …
Feb 12, 2020: oscillations Here’s a brief summary by Charles Taylor of a contrast that’s vital to his thinking: porous vs. buffered selves. The porous self is open to a wide …
Feb 11, 2020: reading Paul: 2 Nota bene: This is not a scholarly exercise but rather a readerly one. My students and I are not reading theologians or scholars of the New Testament. …
Feb 10, 2020: reading Paul This blog has been on hiatus, mainly, but now I’m thinking that I should return from time to time. My classes this term are really enjoyable and I’m …
Feb 7, 2020: nature and freedom The notion that we "have a nature," far from threatening the concept of freedom, is absolutely essential to it. If we were genuinely plastic and …
Feb 6, 2020: Oh, how this northern Illinois boy misses the snow he used to play in. So this morning he sits in the dusting that is all central Texas can muster, …
Feb 2, 2020: understanding Christians (and others) on social media The Devil chooses to deceive some people in the following way. He will marvelously inflame their brains with the desire to uphold God’s law and …
Jan 27, 2020: a few items added One little project that I’ve been working on as time allows — and time very rarely allows — is to move some things I’ve written from somewhere else …
Jan 26, 2020: It begins.
Jan 21, 2020: The chief texts for this semester — good companions for the journey.
Dec 31, 2019: summing up I said in my previous post that I would be taking a break from this blog, but it occurred to me that a good way to mark that break would be to take a …
Dec 27, 2019: unforthcoming attractions This is why algorithmic time is so disorienting and why it bends your mind. Everything good, bad, and complicated flows through our phones, and for …
Dec 26, 2019: a partial fix Still lots of weird things going on in my WordPress installation; a complete fix would take, yeeeesh, weeks probably. ButI’ve sorted out a few things. …
Dec 24, 2019: something strange Some very strange stuff is happening to my blog right now. Many posts, at least recent ones, have disappeared from the homepage, though they’re still …
Dec 24, 2019: one man's view of Christmas Christmas to me is the remnant of an evaporating culture to which I once belonged. I am not a Christian, yet I am attached to its culture, personally, …
Dec 24, 2019: attention and sympathy The Richard Brody review of Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is a reminder of something that’s quite pervasive in criticism, though rarely talked …
Dec 21, 2019: FWIW I want him out. I was happy to see him impeached and I would dance for joy if he were to be removed from office. But I think the task of Christianity …
Dec 20, 2019: a sacrifice Albert Camus once wrote that the attitude of the French intelligentsia towards the pieds noirs — the ethnic French in Algeria — was “You go ahead and …
Dec 20, 2019: on not owning my turf When I bought this domain name I joked that the “.org” in this case stands for “organism,” because of course I’m not an organization. But that may not …
Dec 19, 2019: trigger warning
Dec 19, 2019: … is the name of my new band
Dec 18, 2019: Putting my toe back in the water here … it’s the best imaginable version of social media, but I doubt whether I’m suited for social media even …
Dec 16, 2019: wealth distribution Watching all these big sports clubs scrambling to appease the Chinese regime, and punish the coaches and players who don’t bow and scrape — Arsenal …
Dec 14, 2019: hidden A. O. Scott on Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life: Franz is not an activist; he isn’t connected to any organized resistance to Hitler, and he expresses …
Dec 12, 2019: oh for the normally bad There’s one rhetorical tic to which Trump supporters are addicted that I desperately wish I could banish from the earth. It’s when they say that Trump …
Dec 12, 2019: Messrs Bumpus From now on, this is how I will think of my dear friend John Wilson: as “John Wilson of Messrs Bumpus.”
Dec 10, 2019: Lucy Ellmann and old books We’re at the copy-editing stage of my next book, so it’s too late to add anything, but goodness, I wish I could squeeze in this from Lucy …
Dec 9, 2019: futurity: an Advent thought It seems to me that most of those who don’t think Christianity is true believe that it will soon disappear from the world, or all but disappear; that …
Dec 6, 2019: excerpt from my Sent folder: to my editors Oh, don’t worry, y’all, I’ll be a pro. (Remember, this is my 15th book, or thereabouts. Not my first or even my dozenth rodeo.) …
Dec 5, 2019: Martin Luther and the Second Advent But you say I would indeed await his coming with joy, if I were holy and without sin. I should answer, what relief do you find in fear and flight? It …
Dec 5, 2019: letter from a reader In response to this post, Christopher Evatt wrote thoughtfully and incisively (I post with his permission): Beyond what you mention, I think equating …
Dec 3, 2019: a better internet Annalee Newitz: What would “internet realists” want from their media streams? The opposite of what we have now. Today, platforms like Facebook and …
Dec 3, 2019: My preferred pronouns? None. You should use nouns only when referring to or addressing me.
Dec 3, 2019: it me
Dec 3, 2019: motivated reasoning, part gazillion If I had to name only one thing I have learned in my many years of making arguments, it would be this: You cannot convince people of anything that …
Dec 2, 2019: genealogists wanted Much of my written work has focused on stepping back from whatever it is people in my field — or people more generally — happen to be discussing or …
Nov 29, 2019: an exercise in interpretation The meaning is so obvious: “The black clothes represent Hong Kong, the mask represents Hong Kong, the Molotov cocktail represents Hong Kong, what else …
Nov 29, 2019: resuming normal activities A Guardian reader speaks for me: Unai Emery Already a distant memory The master of underachieving Thank you and good evening It wasn’t fun while it …
Nov 26, 2019: Automata, Animal-Machines, and Us What follows is a review of The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick, by Jessica Riskin …
Nov 26, 2019: I'm okay with this Something rather dramatic has happened to my Local Mainstay, Dichotomy Coffee and Spirits: But though I am among the most devoted Advent snobs you are …
Nov 26, 2019: Raising Kael Over at LitHub, I have an essay called “Raising Kael,” in which I pay homage to Pauline Kael’s centenary and argue that “in a very important sense, …
Nov 25, 2019: how people change The Mister Rogers No One Saw: At the luncheon, Fred stood at the lectern between Bush and Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. He leaned in to the …
Nov 25, 2019: obliviousness Radiolab just re-posted a 2017 episode on technologies for creating fake audio and video, and I noticed something this time that I missed when I first …
Nov 23, 2019: so much goodness Another amazing meal at Milo last night — this is grilled pork loin on a bed of sweet potato purée, topped with collard greens that had had something …
Nov 20, 2019: If you had told me in January that the best article about Christianity I’d read all year would be in the New York Review of Books…. And if you …
Nov 19, 2019: Here's further evidence that this three-year-old post was correct.
Nov 18, 2019: Triode The Iconfactory has just released an app called Triode, and I’m loving it. In essence, Triode provides a simple, clean, and lovely interface for …
Nov 12, 2019: the command to be reconciled One of the chief themes of my book How to Think is the vital importance of characterizing the arguments of those you disagree fairly — ideally, in …
Nov 12, 2019: on lost causes There’s a scene early in Neal Stephenson’s new novel Fall: or, Dodge in Hell, in which a tech billionaire, sick of the way that …
Nov 11, 2019: My colleague Philip Jenkins asks: “What are the most influential Christian books of the past decade?” I think the answer to that question is: …
Nov 11, 2019: revelation It was said of one of the elders that he persevered in a fast of seventy weeks, eating only once a week. The elder asked God to reveal to him the …
Nov 10, 2019: Volume Control David Owen’s new book Volume Control is pretty good, but it made me think way too much about my own hearing. (“Do I have tinnitus? I don’t think I …
Nov 9, 2019: excerpt from my Sent folder: poor It’s time. International break coming up. And if it doesn’t work out, bring Rafa Benitez back from China. He’d be excellent for this poor …
Nov 9, 2019: Fish on freedom Stanley Fish’s new book The First consists largely of repackagings of ideas Fish has already developed: he’s covered free speech in There’s No Such …
Nov 8, 2019: Tim Cook's master plan One of the fascinating subplots of Kim Stanley Robinson’s great Mars trilogy — though it’s not so much a subplot as an evolving context — relates to …
Nov 8, 2019: Just remember, I’m busting my hump reading and writing books so y’all can Netflix & chill. I’m not saying that anyone needs to thank me but I’m …
Nov 7, 2019: need-love
Nov 7, 2019: two points about A Hidden Life Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is a great, great masterpiece, and you must see it. It is his most linear film since The New World — also a …
Nov 7, 2019: the call “I call bullshit.” I used to see that a lot on social media, back when I was on social media. But what does it mean? It means, “I disagree.” That’s …
Nov 5, 2019: scared
Nov 5, 2019: this is the future Arsenal supporters want
Nov 5, 2019: it's official ... … MacOS is now more stable than iOS/iPadOS. Which I wouldn’t have believed even a couple of months ago. Marco Arment has gone on an appropriate rant …
Oct 31, 2019: My beloved is in Prague right now and the evidence suggests that it is hard to take a bad photo there.
Oct 31, 2019: on blogging Brent Simmons is right: It’s weird to see people bemoan the decline of blogging and do it on Twitter. You can blog! You can blog for free if you want! …
Oct 28, 2019: Xhaka is not the problem Granit Xhaka is nothing like the player Arsenal supporters thought he was, or could become, when the club signed him in 2016. The idea then was that …
Oct 28, 2019: options Sometimes I think: What if I had to write my next book based on just one of my piles of books?
Oct 25, 2019: Manzhouli
Oct 25, 2019: toss them out of the window I don’t think I’m becoming a grumpy old man, but I am, I know, increasingly inclined to heed that voice inside me — let’s call it the Voice of Binky — …
Oct 25, 2019: credit, blame, and the unrewindable tape Most political discourse is epideictic, which is to say, it’s about credit and blame. For instance, whenever we get an economic downturn in this …
Oct 23, 2019: teachers at the margins Lisa Marchiano, a psychoanalyst, describing her encounter with a student who had a “panic attack” during an exam and didn’t want to take any more …
Oct 23, 2019: I just love this by the Rev. Sarah Condon.
Oct 23, 2019: what really matters in this vale of tears
Oct 22, 2019: iPadOS iPadOS has rendered my iPad unusable, with a very strange combination of errors. For instance: The screen freezes in many different apps, usually …
Oct 22, 2019: against lectures At the very heart of the academy we find a series of genres — discursive genres, which are also genres of social interaction — the mastery of which …
Oct 21, 2019: all fears unwarranted Social Media Has Not Destroyed a Generation: Anxiety and panic over the effects of new technology date back to Socrates, who bemoaned the then new …
Oct 18, 2019: This is encouraging by Adam Silver. Maybe that NBA League Pass is not out of the question after all?
Oct 16, 2019: A couple of months ago I told my son that this year, for the first time, I would definitely be buying NBA League Pass. Now? No. I’m not standing …
Oct 16, 2019: where the USMNT is headed Tom Dart: Since Berhalter’s appointment was announced last December there have been no results that exceeded expectations against good teams; there …
Oct 15, 2019: the most important public issue My buddy Rod Dreher: “If religious liberty is the most important public issue to you — and, as a religious believer, should it not be? — then the Barr …
Oct 15, 2019: I wasn’t a huge fan of Kevin Williamson before the whole Atlantic fiasco, but since he has returned to National Review he’s been writing one superb …
Oct 15, 2019: A mystery partly resolved A while back I wrote about a scholarly mystery: what appears to have been the sale of certain ancient papyri by someone who had no right to sell them. …
Oct 12, 2019: ethical evaluation I’ve been trying to think about Apple’s deep embedding in a corrupt and tyrannical Chinese regime, and what that means for me, for my long-term …
Oct 10, 2019: (Of course, the problem for me in all this is that I am as implicated in Apple’s ecosystem as Apple is implicated in the Chinese economy. If Apple’s …
Oct 10, 2019: I can see clearly now I thought this day was coming, but I didn’t expect it to come so soon. I don’t believe Beijing expected it to come so soon either: the Chinese …
Oct 8, 2019: China syndrome follow-up Adam Silver is standing by NBA employees’ free speech rights, though he doesn’t sound happy about it. “Daryl Morey, as general manager of the Houston …
Oct 7, 2019: the new China syndrome John Lanchester: First, the Weibo accounts of prominent critics were ‘harmonised’ – in other words, deleted overnight. Then a conference was called …
Oct 7, 2019: Church Repair: 1 Of all the peculiar traits of the church, perhaps the most peculiar is its double character as end-in-itself and instrument. In one sense it is …
Oct 2, 2019: This is and always will be one of my favorite album covers
Sep 28, 2019: excerpt from my Sent folder: criticism Well, first of all, it’s important to remember that a lot of criticism of your work really doesn’t have anything to do with your work or you. Your …
Sep 27, 2019: alternative headline Richest University on the Planet Still Getting Richer While Other Universities Are Threatened with Closure, But Who Cares about Them?
Sep 25, 2019: textless Brexit flowchart
Sep 25, 2019: look at what came in the mail This is a lovely and wise little book.
Sep 24, 2019: The Queen and the Duke
Sep 24, 2019: Monk’s specs If you’re ever tempted to think you’re cool, just remember that Theolonious Sphere Monk was wearing those specs in 1947.
Sep 24, 2019: John Mitchell David Steele: Tide offensive lineman Jimmy Rosser recalled that before [Wilbur] Jackson enrolled and Mitchell was recruited, Bryant “told us that he …
Sep 22, 2019: I’m going to say something I never ever believed that I would say in earnest: I think Arsenal should sack Emery and replace him with Mourinho. It …
Sep 22, 2019: intellectuals and influencers Both the public intellectual and the public influencer play an instrumental role in shaping cultural ideals and tying them to the individual’s sense …
Sep 22, 2019: evangelicalism redux Another topic I’ve written about frequently here — though with less pleasure than I’ve had writing about Ruskin — is what evangelicalism was and is …
Sep 22, 2019: about Ruskin There are many posts about John Ruskin on this blog — click on the relevant tag below — but let me add to that material links to two essays, one by me …
Sep 20, 2019: climate hope At the end of this interview, the environmental historian Jason Moore says, “Capitalism … had its social legitimacy because in one way or another it …
Sep 19, 2019: Monk and crew
Sep 19, 2019: Malcolm is very happy when he’s wet.
Sep 10, 2019: consolidation One of the ongoing themes of my online life is accidental dispersal — I inadvertently accumulate sites of digital presence, and then at a certain …
Sep 6, 2019: confuser I wrote recently about software that’s hostile to users who lack an ideally functioning sensorium, but software can also be hostile to users who lack …
Sep 6, 2019: I’m very pleased that my eminent colleague Philip Jenkins is working on a book about the relationship between fertility rates and religious belief — …
Sep 5, 2019: monosyllabic At the excellent Futility Closet I learn of a nineteenth-century fellow who wrote a sermon entirely in words of one syllable: He who wrote the Psalm …
Sep 5, 2019: Reading this story, I find myself remembering that a few years ago my wife sat next to Bart Starr on a Southwest flight. They chatted the whole trip, …
Sep 5, 2019: unsure I don’t often on this blog write from a position of professional expertise. Mainly I’m writing about things I’m not expert in, but am interested in, …
Sep 4, 2019: inequality If you listen to politicians on the left, and especially those who call themselves socialists, describe what’s wrong with our country, the word that …
Sep 3, 2019: Slightly worried as I ask myself just how much bigger this thing can get….
Sep 3, 2019: Latka My post earlier today puts me in mind of something. Think of it as an allegory of social media. In the old sitcom Taxi Andy Kaufman plays Latka …
Sep 3, 2019: what can’t be changed Many outlets have reported in recent days that Facebook is testing the removal of Likes from posts. Let’s say they do eventually implement this …
Sep 2, 2019: terror and history This excellent post by my colleague Philip Jenkins reminds us of an earlier era — just 25 years ago! — when America was worried about right-wing …
Aug 29, 2019: presentism revisited A follow-up to my recent post on a certain variety of chronological snobbery: I see that Louise Doughty has nominated her top 10 ghost stories. Their …
Aug 26, 2019: inaccessible Of all the many task-management apps available for the Apple platforms, the one that fits my needs best, by far, is Things by Cultured Code. And if …
Aug 26, 2019: chronological snobbery The novelist Hannah Beckerman was asked, “I’m an English lit postgraduate who’s slipped into a reading rut since my final exams – what are some good …
Aug 23, 2019: compromises In yesterday’s post I quoted from Deirdre McCloskey’s work on bourgeois life, and I want now to return briefly to that. Late in the first volume of …
Aug 22, 2019: Christianity and capitalism reconsidered David Bentley Hart’s essay on the incompatibility of Christianity and capitalism, featured in the new issue of Plough Quarterly, strikes me as …
Aug 21, 2019: Our dear boy Malcolm has always had trouble with stairs and steps, but it’s gotten worse lately. Turns out that he has a deficiency of …
Aug 20, 2019: eyeballs The issue of my newsletter that I posted today is concerned largely with the Hong Kong protests, but let me add a note to that. In that post I quote …
Aug 20, 2019: nationalism and religion We conservatives, however, have our own preferred division of the political universe: one in which Anglo-American conservatism appears as a distinct …
Aug 16, 2019: ?????
Aug 13, 2019: Well, my fancy(ish) integrated amplifier died today — but never fear! I have a backup. This tiny Lepai amp drives my speakers just fine and with …
Aug 13, 2019: the most dreadful of gods Am I the only reader who sees, in Eliot’s twinned stories of Dorothea and Lydgate (originally two separate novels, of course) an as-it-were …
Aug 9, 2019: vengeance How much of fantasy, I wonder, is revenge fantasy? I’m asking this question, of course, because there’s a new Tarantino movie, and revenge fantasy is …
Aug 8, 2019: posture Was Adorno right? This is perhaps the wrong question to ask, because philosophy at its best offers not definitive answers but the encouragement to …
Aug 6, 2019: great Yesterday my son, who works in the Chicago Loop, saw a woman on a bicycle get hit by a car. She wasn’t seriously injured, but she was knocked to the …
Aug 5, 2019: a road not taken Lately I have been reading some of the wartime letters of Dorothy Sayers — who, I have just learned, pronounced her name to rhyme with “stairs” — and …
Aug 3, 2019: And one of the desserts: corn mochi with blackberry sorbet and various delicious accessories.
Aug 3, 2019: A highlight from last night’s anniversary dinner at Barley Swine: fried buns (like a steamed bun except … fried) with shrimp dumplings.
Aug 2, 2019: 39th anniversary dinner at the amazing Barley Swine in Austin. So, so grateful for my beloved.
Aug 1, 2019: here and there As some of you may have noticed, I’m not posting here very frequently. I think for the foreseeable future I’m only going to be using this …
Jul 28, 2019: Hose time
Jul 28, 2019: First the Eucharistic Feast, then the Breakfast Pizza at Moroso Feast.
Jul 26, 2019: the airless room This is an interview with Kathryn Scanlan about her very peculiar new book, which is made up of selections from a person’s diary — read the interview …
Jul 24, 2019: on social acceleration Recently I’ve read two of the most stimulating, provocative, generative books I’ve read in a long time. One of them is Bewilderments: Reflections on …
Jul 21, 2019: bookmaking After writing my recent post on my enthusiasm for the writing of C. V. Wedgwood, I realized that I didn’t have a copy of her brief biography of Oliver …
Jul 21, 2019: I’ve probably taken too many pictures of our huge oleander, but I think its combination of delicate pink bloom and spiky dark-green leaf is so, …
Jul 21, 2019: Some of our container plants have been struggling a bit in the heat, but this little pairing has thrived madly.
Jul 19, 2019: Malcolm is relaxed but hopeful that there might be more play.
Jul 19, 2019: the most literary decade Popular radio shows featured literary critics talking about recent poetry and fiction. The New Yorker’s book-review editor hosted one of the most …
Jul 15, 2019: neighbors When I awoke I could barely move for the pain; I didn’t know where I was, and I didn’t know how I had gotten there. I could hear, from some nearby …
Jul 15, 2019: the greatest of the Wedgwoods National Portrait Gallery Cicely Veronica Wedgwood (1910–1997) was the most distinguished of the Wedgwoods — with the possible exception of her …
Jul 12, 2019: this is your mind on presentism As a person writing a book about the need to cultivate temporal bandwidth, I am so pleased when various prominent cultural outlets do advance …
Jul 11, 2019: Jamesian aphasia I’m reading Henry James’s late unfinished novel The Sense of the Past for the book I’m writing, and while my opinion of Henry James as a writer is not …
Jul 10, 2019: Biscuit.
Jul 5, 2019: LOVE it when my local (Pinewood) has a new beer on tap and it’s one of my very favorites (in this case Community Public Ale, a classic ESB made …
Jul 5, 2019: this sickness is not unto death People ask me about it all the time, but I have nothing to tell them. I was very ill; I closed my eyes and drifted away; I woke to the call of a …
Jul 2, 2019: Chapter 43 The old man sat on his porch and looked out across the green fields. Another good harvest coming this fall. And the sun shone on the glossy coats of …
Jul 1, 2019: I dub thee SQUIRRELBANE 🗡 🐿 😵
Jul 1, 2019: Unscoured Frodo and his friends knew that the Shire would be changed, but they were not prepared for how radical the change would be. They had not been gone …
Jun 28, 2019: a scholarly mystery As far as I can tell, people are accusing a distinguished papyrologist named Dirk Obbink of selling, wittingly or unwittingly, papyri that actually …
Jun 27, 2019: ruin Let’s agree, per argumentum, that the Boomers ruined everything. Why? According to the STBP (Standard Theory of Boomer Perfidy), because their sense …
Jun 25, 2019: This is a little on-the-nose, don’t you think?
Jun 25, 2019: disobedience Law professor David Skeel in the WSJ: “I do think simple disobedience may sometimes be the wiser course — declining to follow the law and …
Jun 23, 2019: current status
Jun 17, 2019: Cliff swallows going to and from their nests.
Jun 16, 2019: And the flowers strewn across my path.
Jun 16, 2019: It was all worth it for the views.
Jun 16, 2019: And of course I did it, I’m a manly man
Jun 16, 2019: They said the trail is “a little technical in places,” but I didn’t know that meant I’d have to use ropes to get myself down to the canyon floor.
Jun 12, 2019: excerpt from my Sent folder: localism More broadly, you should understand that I am a deeply committed localist and doubt the legitimacy of all nation-states and all ecclesiastical …
Jun 12, 2019: after the platforms Ross Douthat: Yes, it’s understandable for conservatives to worry that if Silicon Valley censors the likes of Molyneux, it will end up censoring them. …
Jun 9, 2019: trying A little less than a year ago I wrote a post about cultivating my blog as a kind of garden. I made reference there to something I heard about from …
Jun 8, 2019: I really can’t get over this oleander. It’s 10 feet tall now and may soon eat my neighbor’s house.
Jun 7, 2019: excerpt from my Sent folder: civility I think the question [of whether civility is a Christian virtue] hinges on whether “civility” is a useful shorthand proxy for a series of traits that …
Jun 7, 2019: responsible scholarship and the growth of Christianity I’ve talked a bit lately about what Christians today might be able to learn from the early church. Let’s do that again. Celsus was a second-century …
Jun 6, 2019: Morning in the back yard
Jun 5, 2019: Rusty Reno: Many of my friends find Donald Trump intolerable. I tell them, “He is a symptom, not a cause, of what you dislike and fear.” It’s past …
Jun 5, 2019: the theater of concurrence Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House was one of the sensations of the nineteenth century because of its portrayal of Nora Helmer, a wife and mother who …
Jun 4, 2019: Realpolitik The Epistle to Diognetus is a second-century letter, a brief work of Christian apologetics. In the fifth section of the letter, the author talks about …
Jun 3, 2019: Quick addendum to my previous post: As much as I am convinced that hegemonic liberalism will never be fair to even vaguely traditionalist religious …
Jun 3, 2019: fair play to you I’m getting a good bit of email today, most of it saying, in cleaned-up language: How dare you accuse us on the left of not playing fair, you …
Jun 3, 2019: Ahmari revisited This morning I have a post up at the Atlantic website on the scuffle Sohrab Amari kicked off with his recent attacks on David French. I want to add …
May 29, 2019: Welp. It’s time for some Serious Editing.
May 29, 2019: So, Wired, it has come to this.
May 29, 2019: to put the point plainly Nolan Lawson: Get off of Twitter. You can’t criticize Twitter on Twitter. It just doesn’t work. The medium is the message. There’s an old joke where …
May 29, 2019: Middle-Aged Moralists When C. S. Lewis gave the Memorial Address at King’s College, London in 1944 — the occasion being very like an American university commencement — he …
May 27, 2019: activists and administrators Conor Friedersdorf on “an under-appreciated tension in the approach of today’s student activists, who simultaneously express outrage at the bad …
May 26, 2019: waking into the world Auden’s single greatest poetic achievement, I think, is his sequence “Horae Canonicae,” which begins with the first hour of the prayerful day, Prime. …
May 26, 2019: Malcolm ten years ago today.
May 25, 2019: HyperCard I very much enjoyed this tribute to HyperCard. I kept all the research notes for most of my early essays and my first book in HyperCard. And I wrote …
May 24, 2019: death recorded This is certainly an embarrassing moment for Naomi Wolf, but I ain’t gloating, for reasons I spelled out in this recent post. In this case, the author …
May 22, 2019: plain text and WordPress Here’s something I often find myself wanting to do: write plain-text files in a text editor using Markdown and then publish directly to WordPress. As …
May 22, 2019: Musée à croissance illimitée Thanks to that excellent blog Futility Closet I’ve learned about Le Corbusier’s idea for a Musée à croissance illimitée, a museum “that would grow …
May 21, 2019: voting with the Sparrows From the new issue of the Economist: A recent study by the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, divides Europe’s voters into four …
May 20, 2019: the shy voter problem Tom Switzer: In 2016 U.S. pollsters had to deal with the “shy Trump” factor. People feared admitting they’d vote for the Republican nominee because …
May 20, 2019: indie web in the New Yorker As a consistent and perhaps obnoxious advocate for the open web — see here and especially here — I was thrilled to see this article by Cal Newport, …
May 20, 2019: ♫ I got friends in low places ♫
May 17, 2019: reasonably worthwhile blog posts from last year It occurred to me recently that I do a lousy job of keeping track of my own blog posts — I regularly forget that I have written about something, and …
May 17, 2019: “the corporate monster is always the corporate monster” That’s the basic idea, that power is power always and that it’s exceedingly unwise to presume that power stops being power when you want to access it. …
May 17, 2019: I first saw this as “Biblical Safety Glasses” and now I’m thinking that there should definitely be such a thing: spectacles that protect readers from …
May 17, 2019: This essay by James Carroll arguing for the abolition of the Catholic priesthood — and, along the way, almost as an afterthought, the whole …
May 16, 2019: Malcolm is very happy after he has played in the garden hose.
May 16, 2019: James Madison Last week when I was in Virginia I got to visit James Madison’s home Montpelier. Madison has long been my favorite of the Founders, but during my …
May 15, 2019: advice Almost everyone knows that one of the great banes of online life is unsolicited advice. The compulsion some people feel to advise strangers is a …
May 8, 2019: These pictures are from the eastern side of the Skyline Drive this morning. The air was clear because the morning sun had burned off the mist. On the …
May 8, 2019: Back to my old stomping grounds. Those Grounds haven’t become less beautiful.
May 6, 2019: ways books go awry When you publish a book and look back over it later, you will find that some things are wrong. Those wrongnesses come in three varieties: Mechanical …
May 4, 2019: #ShunTheTake Last week I walked into one of my classes to discover fourteen students sitting in complete silence. Each one of them — I believe; there may have been …
May 1, 2019: working the refs Last Sunday afternoon, in the aftermath of the first game of the NBA playoff series between the Houston Rockets and the Golden State Warriors, there …
Apr 30, 2019: what dogs think The spate of dog mind-focused books raises the question: After at least 14,000 years of living with dogs, why are we only now getting around to …
Apr 29, 2019: Les Murray is dead I am grieved to learn that Les Murray has died. For many years, if anyone asked me to name the greatest poet writing in English, I knew the answer. …
Apr 26, 2019: the strange pleasure of the mob What would Freud make of group minds in the digital age? I don’t think he’d be surprised by the witch hunts, call-outs, draggings, and pile-ons. On …
Apr 26, 2019: plugged into the machine Alexis Madrigal: As the platforms age, their devotees become more and more distinct from the regular person. For more than a decade now, many people …
Apr 24, 2019: debt and forgiveness For me, the obvious question about the proposal to forgive student loans — as made, for instance, by Astra Taylor here — is this: Why only student …
Apr 22, 2019: Before you take seriously Bret Easton Ellis’s claim that millennials don’t read, look at the tag on this post and read the other posts with that tag. …
Apr 20, 2019: Malcolm is a very good boy. As you can see.
Apr 18, 2019: Amazon’s Project Kuiper, with its plan to put thousands of satellites into low-earth orbit to provide internet access to people who don’t have it, …
Apr 17, 2019: the building on the Île de la Cité Today I found myself thinking that someone should perhaps inform French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe that the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris is a …
Apr 14, 2019: “Entering his eightieth decade he hasn’t lost his taste for that whiff of adventure, either in his walking or his writing.” — from this profile of Ian …
Apr 13, 2019: This reflection by Sarah Hinlicky Wilson makes me think that churches should regularly run Bible studies specifically on the parts of Scripture that …
Apr 11, 2019: scale is the enemy Jeffrey Zeldman: Along those same lines, can the IndieWeb, and products of IndieWeb thinking like Micro.blog, save us? Might they at least provide an …
Apr 11, 2019: "Lord, make me an idiot" NB: I’m writing this only for my fellow Christians. In this blog post, my buddy Rod Dreher says something that he says, in one way or another, in many …
Apr 10, 2019: British eco-fascism The website for the 2017 documentary film Arcadia says that it’s “a sensory journey into the beauty and brutality, magic and madness of our changing …
Apr 10, 2019: Readingthis Vulture piece, I took a while to grasp that, for the musicians interviewed, touring — which used to be what bands had to do to make money …
Apr 9, 2019: Rodger Sherman: What if the UMBC loss was Virginia’s last major letdown before the dawn of a dynasty, the fuel for a fire that burned brighter than …
Apr 5, 2019: extremists Erasmus: The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) is concerned about extremism, and with good reason—but not quite …
Apr 1, 2019: Buruma reflects One question that Ian Buruma has never faced — not when he ran Jian Ghomeshi’s essay, not when he gave interviews in response to the protests, and not …
Apr 1, 2019: Huge if true
Mar 30, 2019: taxonomies If you’re a writer for the Economist: the people to the left of you are socialists, and the people to the right of you are “alt-right” or “far right” …
Mar 29, 2019: getting a new Mac up and running Things I do when I get a new Mac, more or less in order: install Homebrew use Homebrew to install pandoc install BBedit install MacTex type this …
Mar 29, 2019: intersections Re: “intersectionality”: Intersections can diminish as well as intensify. Take Kamala Harris as an example. A woman and a minority (a Jamaican father …
Mar 28, 2019: the right side Ben Shapiro’s book, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, relies heavily on the Miltonian conceit that the use …
Mar 27, 2019: The third thing I do when I get a new computer.
Mar 27, 2019: The second thing I do when I get a new computer.
Mar 27, 2019: The first thing I do when I get a new computer.
Mar 27, 2019: Lovely morning at Lake Waco Wetlands — though the wetlands are still waking up to springtime.
Mar 26, 2019: when political prophecy fails In his column today, Ross Douthat writes: A good many members of the opposition to Donald Trump — a mix of serious journalists, cable television …
Mar 26, 2019: Apple News vs. RSS What Michael Tsai says about Apple News is correct: I continue to find Apple News to be disappointing. It’s like Apple reinvented the RSS reader with …
Mar 20, 2019: I look like I’m singing “Old Man River.”
Mar 20, 2019: cost-benefit ratios Now that Apple has announced its next-generation AirPods, I see that I can get a charging pad that will charge the charging case that will charge the …
Mar 20, 2019: a legal clarification Let me expand on something I wrote in yesterday’s post: Copyright law is not relevant to the legal situation of Francis Spufford’s new Narnia novel. …
Mar 19, 2019: in memoriam Send me out into another life lord because this one is growing faint I do not think it goes all the way — W. S. Merwin, “Words from a Totem Animal”
Mar 19, 2019: a return to Narnia (I had the privilege of reading Francis Spufford’s The Stone Table in draft, with what I believe the enthusiasts call “dawning wonder,” and also with …
Mar 18, 2019: interim tech report Over the past year I’ve been making some significant changes to certain elements of my technological life — significant, but incremental and slow. I …
Mar 17, 2019: success robots I go to schools a lot, have taught at universities and seen a ton of great kids and professors who’ve really sacrificed themselves to teach. A …
Mar 17, 2019: a case of simple theft I subscribed to the digital edition of the late, lamented Weekly Standard before its owner killed it and decided to throw his resources into a …
Mar 16, 2019: on rum and baseball For decades, late February and early March were for me a season of preparation: preparation for baseball. I watched my favorite baseball websites come …
Mar 15, 2019: academic wishful thinking Elite Colleges Don’t Understand Which Business They’re In, says John Fabian Witt of Yale. Alas, they understand perfectly well. It’s just not the …
Mar 14, 2019: a clarification, eighteen years later I was at work, in the LRB office, when I first watched the first plane fly into the first tower: like half the planet, we’d turned the television on …
Mar 14, 2019: Remembering David Martin The great sociologist of religion David Martin has died: you may read an overview of his incredibly wide-ranging career, written by a former …
Mar 13, 2019: a plea to journalists Peter Hamby: Candidates who make policy-by-Twitter, the ones who chase every micro-news-cycle, risk losing sight not just of what voters care about, …
Mar 12, 2019: futurists and historians Martin E. P. Seligman and John Tierney: What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We …
Mar 11, 2019: liturgical reform here; see also this
Mar 11, 2019: Merton and the quest for God I warmly encourage you to read this lovely and thought-provoking essay by my friend Matt Milliner. Here’s a key quotation from the essay: For readers …
Mar 9, 2019: still true
Mar 6, 2019: It’s time.
Mar 6, 2019: I think of this as two imperative sentences.
Mar 2, 2019: Diderot “Rameau’s Nephew” is, in this way, the first debate between two such materialists, both of whom reject superstition and the supernatural but end in …
Feb 28, 2019: a very, very great deal Men's ultimate ends sometimes conflict: choices, at times agonising, and uneasy compromises cannot be avoided. But some needs seem universal. If we …
Feb 27, 2019: out on the town The combination of Corey McIntyre's food and Matthiasson wines is one I won't forget for a very long time. It was wonderful to have Jill Matthiasson …
Feb 27, 2019: A really special night last night at Milo. (That’s duck fat salted caramel popcorn, which you wouldn’t even believe. And each of the …
Feb 26, 2019: nested I just came across this chart I made for my students a few years ago when we were reading the Arabian Nights — I wanted to show them the layers of …
Feb 25, 2019: placeholder for further reflection The one central and indispensable axiom of metaphysical capitalism is “I am my own” — I am a commodity wholly owned and operated by myself in service …
Feb 25, 2019: Kathryn Tanner's altar call Consider this a follow-up to my recent posts on metaphysical capitalism and some stories about the commodification of emotion and connection — and …
Feb 24, 2019: three stories to reflect on Ross Douthat: The sexual ethic on offer in our own era should make Catholics particularly skeptical. That ethic regards celibacy as unrealistic while …
Feb 23, 2019: stock and flow in newsletters A few years ago my friend Robin Sloan wrote a post in which he applied the economic concept of “stock and flow” to our current media scene: “Flow is …
Feb 22, 2019: the fish in the fish store window A writer was invited to teach a religion-and-literature course at a prestigious divinity school, but found himself rather in trouble with his …
Feb 18, 2019: teaching the <em>Gorgias</em> Tomorrow I’ll be teaching Plato’s Gorgias, and today I’ve been reviewing it. It strikes me, as it always does when I read this dialogue, that this is …
Feb 15, 2019: two thoughts on Twitter After being away from Twitter for a few months, I have two thoughts. The first is that I wish I had departed years ago. The second is that when I peek …
Feb 14, 2019: furthermore.... An addendum to the previous post: Not many people on the left seem to realize it, but the metaphysical capitalism I described in my previous post is …
Feb 14, 2019: on cultural socialism and metaphysical capitalism My buddy Rod Dreher is talking a lot these days about “cultural socialism.” I wish he wouldn’t. Rod believes that the term “cultural socialism” is …
Feb 12, 2019: welcome to the new Twitter Hi, and welcome to the New Twitter™! Over the years, many of you have told us how tiresome and time-consuming it is to type your tweets. Well, we have …
Feb 11, 2019: defilement and expulsion A couple of years ago I wrote this: When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, …
Feb 7, 2019: Fabulous new issue of The Point.
Feb 7, 2019: Been around the block with this one a few times.
Feb 6, 2019: the beginning of the end of the republic of podcasts For the last couple of years I have been hearing — from Marco Arment quite regularly — that podcasts are great because they’re the last refuge of the …
Feb 5, 2019: Nietzsche and Montaigne Today I had the privilege of participating in a panel discussion of my friend Rob Miner’s new book Nietzsche and Montaigne. This is the outline of my …
Feb 5, 2019: the deviant’s tale From this article by Kathleen McAuliffe: Using a far cruder tool for measuring sensitivity to disgust — basically a standardized questionnaire that …
Feb 4, 2019: My son and I doing a postmortem.
Feb 4, 2019: I’m needing to get back to Rufi’s Cocina for the incredible tacos (especially al pastor and barbacoa) but above all for the many …
Feb 1, 2019: Roberts’s Churchill All my adult life I have had a strong appetite for books about Winston Churchill. It began, I suppose, when I read the first volume of William …
Jan 31, 2019: insincere controversialists Genuine controversy, fair cut and thrust before a common audience, has become in our special epoch very rare. For the sincere controversialist is …
Jan 31, 2019: I love these old editions. I don’t really use them any more, but I like to take them out and look at them from time to time.
Jan 31, 2019: Update: PDFpen is just as good as ScannerPro at OCRing my handwriting.
Jan 30, 2019: Scanner Pro does an amazing job of recognizing my handwriting.
Jan 30, 2019: Plutarch and the end of the oracles In my History of Disenchantment class, we’ve been discussing Plutarch’s essay on the cessation or the silence or the failure of the oracles. (The key …
Jan 29, 2019: Working on Lucretius, Plutarch, Charles Taylor — and being reminded of how blessed I am to read and think for a living.
Jan 28, 2019: Europe To the authors and signatories of this letter I have one thing to say: “The Faith is Europe, and Europe is the Faith.”
Jan 28, 2019: all the productivity guidance I got I have very little time for the productivity cult, and think it especially injurious to the craft of writing — for several reasons, including those …
Jan 27, 2019: “Gen Z” and social media Christopher Mims of the WSJ has talked to a few members of Gen Z and is here to define the entire cohort’s use of social media for us. As someone …
Jan 23, 2019: “the instantaneous awareness of so much folly” The instantaneous awareness of so much folly is not, I now think, healthy for the human mind. Spending time on Twitter became, for me, a …
Jan 23, 2019: social media, blogs, newsletters Tim Carmody: The blogs I’ve written for (Kottke notwithstanding) have only had so much ability to retain me before they’ve changed their business …
Jan 22, 2019: Count Malcolm as: intrigued but uncertain
Jan 18, 2019: Christie and the mystery After reading this fascinating essay by John Lanchester, my first thought, I will admit, was that he might have read my essay on “Miss Marple and the …
Jan 18, 2019: can’t stop, won’t stop VP Mike Pence says, “Criticism of Christian education in America must stop.” No it musn’t. Nobody and nothing is above criticism. Demanding that …
Jan 18, 2019: these people now run the world Venkatesh Rao: I suppose there’s a 2×2 here: sane versus crazy, alive versus dead. The possibility of sane and alive is the hope that drives …
Jan 18, 2019: The Stone Table One of the best books I read last year is The Stone Table, by Francis Spufford. But don’t look for it on Amazon or Google Books, because you …
Jan 17, 2019: SRO for Jemar Tisby at Baylor
Jan 17, 2019: It’s fun, but it’s also work.
Jan 16, 2019: it’s worse than you thought Alternative headlines: Karen Pence Is Teaching at Christian School Where They Believe “that God spoke the heavens, the earth and all living things …
Jan 16, 2019: Sure, go ahead and reject the only person who can fix this mess. (Via Nina Massey)
Jan 14, 2019: most popular people EVAR Kevin Berger: Hidalgo is among the premier data miners of the world’s collective history. With his MIT colleagues, he developed Pantheon, a dataset …
Jan 13, 2019: when they find a leader We have a new bourgeoisie, but because they are very cool and progressive, it creates the impression that there is no class conflict anymore. It is …
Jan 12, 2019: Tsundoku. Always tsundoku.
Jan 11, 2019: Not that guy, presumably, but rather this guy.
Jan 11, 2019: humans, humanity, humanism At the outset of my book The Year of Our Lord 1943 I describe my narrative method using a cinematic metaphor: I compare it to the famous opening …
Jan 9, 2019: the emperor and the boy scout What was presented to [the young G. B.] Shaw as the Christian faith was not Christian but unitarian, the eternal religion of this world. The greater …
Jan 8, 2019: I think I’ve figured out how to deal with my overflowing inbox.
Jan 8, 2019: Nobody yawns the way Malcolm yawns.
Jan 8, 2019: This is my heart, right here.
Jan 8, 2019: Didn’t really expect this editorial shift, but okay.
Jan 8, 2019: and now to sum up it occurred to me this morning that almost all of the books and essays I have written for the last dozen years or so have arisen from the implications …
Jan 7, 2019: the circulation of <em>Roma</em> Those who say that the personal is the political are wrong, but the error is understandable, and it’s probably better to make the equation than deny …
Jan 7, 2019: Farewell, John Burningham The author of Mr. Gumpy's Outing, one of the most essential and beloved books of my family's life together, has died. Rest in peace, Mr. Burningham. …
Jan 6, 2019: newsletter ICYMI, I have a newsletter now.
Jan 6, 2019: request for permissions Justin E. H. Smith: Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse looks essentially the same to me as these videos that have been appearing on YouTube using …
Jan 6, 2019: scruples I’m no expert, but it seems to me that writing an eight-thousand-word world-historical explanation for why you can’t get through your to-do list is …
Jan 5, 2019: Serial, Season 3 I made it through three episodes, set it aside, came back to it, set it aside again. My problem: How hard Sarah Koenig and crew labor to make sure …
Jan 5, 2019: he’s always the boss LARRY: Well, she's, she's seeing Sy Ableman. RABBI SCOTT: Oh. LARRY: She's, they're planning, that's why they want the get. RABBI SCOTT: Oh. I'm …
Dec 31, 2018: aversion, general repulsion from A Manual of Gesture, by Albert M. Bacon (thanks to Richard Gibson for the link)
Dec 31, 2018: when a writer is wrong
Dec 28, 2018: Science and the Good Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality, by James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky Denunciations of “scientism” are a …
Dec 27, 2018: a Christmas letter from David Jones
Dec 27, 2018: well, back to work
Dec 24, 2018: same
Dec 23, 2018: Festive post-church brunch at Milo
Dec 21, 2018: Of course you did
Dec 21, 2018: advice for <em>Der Spiegel</em> In Der Spiegel’s report on how their star reporter Claas Relotius got away with fabricating stories for years, Ullrich Fichtner writes, “Already, …
Dec 19, 2018: the Book of Job from Old Stile Press
Dec 19, 2018: a letter from David Jones
Dec 19, 2018: Arthurian Legend David Jones's chart of sources for Arthurian Legend, from the Tate. Click image for a larger version.
Dec 19, 2018: knowwedge is what bwings us togeddah today I’ve explained before why I believe generational thinking to be more harmful than helpful. But people who are addicted to generational thinking have a …
Dec 18, 2018: it's all very simple First, insist in a very loud voice that you are a vigorous supporter of religious freedom. Second, add the following: “But of course I’m no supporter …
Dec 18, 2018: Represent
Dec 18, 2018: Visitors
Dec 18, 2018: before coffee
Dec 18, 2018: newsletter news A note for those of you who don’t look at my micro.blog: I have deleted my TinyLetter account and moved my newsletter to buttondown.email. If you have …
Dec 18, 2018: Knuth, Lutheran This is a nice — not a great, but a nice — profile of one of my heroes, Donald Knuth, but it does have an odd little moment: Dr. Knuth lives in …
Dec 17, 2018: the late history of modernism first outline of some ideas to be developed later The long-standard account of literary modernism posits a kind of Heroic Age of High Modernism marked …
Dec 17, 2018: Current status
Dec 17, 2018: Speech-craft In 1878 a man named William Barnes published a book called An Outline of English Speech-Craft. “Speech-craft" is a word Barnes prefers to …
Dec 16, 2018: The Four Last Things: Hell (a sermon by the Rev. Jessica Martin) 3rd Sunday of Advent, 16th December 2018 Old Testament: Zephaniah 3.14-20 New Testament: Phil.4.4-7 Gospel: Luke 3.7-18 The Lord is near. [Phil.4] And …
Dec 16, 2018: TinyLetter woes Well, I was excited about my new newsletter until, four days in, I got the above message. TinyLetter kept asking me incomprehensible questions ("Is …
Dec 15, 2018: Derrida's Margins Derrida’s Margins is a remarkable project: a digital unpacking of Jacques Derrida’s library, starting with De la grammatologie. It’s an astonishing …
Dec 15, 2018: excerpt from my Sent folder: Twitter I left Twitter because I watched people who spent a lot of time on Twitter get stupider and stupider, and it finally occurred to me that I was …
Dec 14, 2018: Milo is just KILLING it.
Dec 14, 2018: A December volunteer
Dec 14, 2018: Christians, Pagans, Jews Richard Schragger and Micah Schwartzman discern a renewal of Christian critiques of paganism and they’re not happy about it. On Twitter, Schwartzman …
Dec 13, 2018: argumentum ad Hitlerum Graeme Wood: Less persuasive, though, are Sullivan’s two other claims about New Religions, in the American context. The first is that liberalism …
Dec 13, 2018: Mail!
Dec 13, 2018: neopagans Neopagans come in many styles, from celebrants of white-supremacist revisions of Norse religion to witches who cast binding spells against Donald …
Dec 13, 2018: excerpt from my Sent Folder: to someone who wants to be a writer Here are some thoughts: Wanting to “be a writer” is, generally speaking, not a good sign. That suggests not a commitment to a vocation but wanting to …
Dec 12, 2018: praise and worship This long article about the state of praise and worship music today provokes several thoughts: Very few things depress me to the extent that praise …
Dec 12, 2018: Sincerely, Edward Abbey Edward Abbey to a correspondent: The ideal off-road journey? I’ll tell you: under water. I would like to see every four-by-four on earth, every …
Dec 11, 2018: counsel for preachers (and other Christians) From a letter by John Wesley, written in August 1760 to a preacher named John Trembath: Certainly some years ago you were alive to God. You …
Dec 11, 2018: why you need to take a break from social media Imagination is strong in a man when that particular function of the brain which enables him to observe is roused to activity without any necessary …
Dec 10, 2018: abandoned mansions
Dec 10, 2018: Hey L.A. area friends:
Dec 8, 2018: Mr Wellmon’s university For the last couple of years I’ve read several essays by my friend Chad Wellmon about the state of the American university, and the place of the …
Dec 7, 2018: one person here understands what Easter is all about Mikhail Svetlov / Getty
Dec 7, 2018: Tending the Digital Commons Facebook is unlikely to shut down tomorrow; nor is Twitter, or Instagram, or any other major social network. But they could. And it would be a good …
Dec 6, 2018: Warhol Despite its subtle and not-so-subtle ravishments, a Warhol canvas is expressively vacant. “There’s no place for our spiritual eye to penetrate it,” …
Dec 6, 2018: maybe it’s time to give up For the past few years I have taught a first-year seminar, here in Baylor’s Honors College, focusing largely on technological and media literary. If I …
Dec 5, 2018: the BAD problem As it happens, a large amount of carbon sits in American dirt. If that carbon escapes into the atmosphere, it will worsen climate change. Should a …
Dec 5, 2018: Alchi
Dec 4, 2018: two comments on a review Two brief thoughts about David Sessions’s review of my recent book: I don’t treat the works and writers that Sessions thinks I should have (see his …
Dec 3, 2018: how Steve Reich discovered his own Judaism I was brought up a secular, Reform Jew, which means I didn’t know Aleph from Bet. I knew nothing, and therefore I cared nothing. My father cared …
Dec 3, 2018: I’m thinking that from here on out I’m gonna imitate Steve Reich’s commitment to the baseball cap.
Dec 3, 2018: excerpt from my Sent folder: Gollum ... let me tell you why Gollum has been on my mind for the last 24 hours or so. Once Gollum takes the Ring, he could slip it on his finger and …
Dec 1, 2018: My son helping me get perspective
Dec 1, 2018: Goodness
Nov 30, 2018: asyntactic Trump is not inarticulate, though people often say that. Rather, he is hyperarticulate in the mode that used to be called “garrulous.” Words …
Nov 30, 2018: a handout
Nov 29, 2018: enough with the "Cultural Marxism" already Alexander Zubatov tries to rescue the term “Cultural Marxism” in this post, and I don’t think he succeeds. Now, he might succeed in …
Nov 28, 2018: the imperative of silence The casual way that American Christians have of talking about God is not simply dispiriting, but is, for some sensibilities, actively destructive. …
Nov 28, 2018: the impeded stream I remember sitting in an empty classroom at Washington and Lee late into the night, working on a poem instead of studying for an exam on international …
Nov 27, 2018: tallgrass prairie [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="1116"] Bluestem grassland, Chase County, Kansas, 31 October, 1979. Photograph by Terry Evans. Click image …
Nov 26, 2018: the position of power redux Robin Hanson begins this post by quoting a passage in Tyler Cowen’s new book Stubborn Attachments in which Cowen talks about whether economics is …
Nov 26, 2018: This is my sixth Texas autumn, and by far the most colorful. I suspect the key is that we’ve had a month of cool, dry weather preceded by a month of …
Nov 25, 2018: bird [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1024”] Coralie Bickford-Smith[/caption]
Nov 24, 2018: And again.
Nov 24, 2018: I seem to have accidentally taken a photograph of a masterpiece of abstract art.
Nov 23, 2018: Spanish Is the Loving Tongue One of the most surprisingly interesting, and moving, moments on Dylan’s More Blood, More Tracks comes on the third disc, when, a few songs in, you …
Nov 23, 2018: my Zettelkasten Over the last few years I have adopted, with increasing confidence and pleasure, a new means of organizing my research. For my most recent book and …
Nov 22, 2018: maintaining lines of connection Warren Ellis: I feel like I want to see some more thought around getting the fuck off social networks but being able to maintain lines of connection …
Nov 22, 2018: We’re not completely without autumn color here in central Texas. (No filters.)
Nov 21, 2018: totalitarian presentism Senator Ben Sasse doesn’t read modern fiction, only old books, and people on social media are getting seriously freaked out. Let’s stop and think …
Nov 21, 2018: This is going to be hard to believe, but these pastries from @milowaco taste just as good as they look.
Nov 21, 2018: race and ethnicity in the Potterverse Race and ethnicity are pretty weird in the Potterverse because of the peculiar ways that fictional world overlaps with our own. This weirdness emerges …
Nov 21, 2018: the call to maintenance I’m full of ideas after reading this amazing essay by Shannon Mattern, “Maintenance and Care: Fixing a Broken World”: In many academic disciplines and …
Nov 19, 2018: what I hear in church The Episcopal Church, on the other hand, couldn’t trick me with promises of divinely ordained succession or sharply define anything that happened in …
Nov 19, 2018: I love pretty much everything about Anglican worship, but I have a special fondness for the procession.
Nov 19, 2018: Tim Larsen on John Stuart Mill My friend Tim Larsen has written an absolutely fascinating brief biography of John Stuart Mill. (It appears in the Oxford Spiritual Lives series, of …
Nov 19, 2018: Not really what I expected when searching for “Christian calendar” …
Nov 17, 2018: Interesting data from Kieran Healy.
Nov 14, 2018: A sermon by the Rev. Jessica Martin, for Remembrance Day Solemn Orchestral Requiem Eucharist, 11 November 2018, Ely Cathedral Epistle: 1 Peter 1.3–9 Gospel: John 5.19–25 The dead will hear the voice of …
Nov 13, 2018: Amazon’s exploitative lust Alana Semuels writes, If nothing else, Amazon’s HQ2 decisions may accelerate America’s great divergence, where highly educated urbanites are doing …
Nov 12, 2018: the imminent collapse of an empire Writers generally don’t get to choose the titles of their pieces, but the confusion in the title and subtitle of this report by Alexandra Kralick — …
Nov 8, 2018: how I drew my mental map of politics Over at Rod Dreher’s joint, he’s got a great series going in which people explain how they have have formed their mental maps of the political world. …
Nov 7, 2018: And here’s something else new I want to try either tomorrow or Friday….
Nov 7, 2018: The food-truck scene in Waco is getting better and better. Today I had a fabulous huarache al pastor at Gary’s Grill (outside Pinewood …
Nov 5, 2018: Psalm God, give me enough light and will To say just what I see, See what I do, Do what I say, Say what you will. — Laurance Wieder
Nov 4, 2018: Kingdom [caption id=“attachment_36107” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”] Jon McNaught, Kingdom[/caption]
Nov 3, 2018: the contingency of collaborative art Big day for me yesterday: More Blood, More Tracks arrived. It’s extraordinary — could be the best of the bootleg series, but then I might well think …
Nov 2, 2018: This is not a good book, this is a truly great book. I hope to find time soon to say why I think so, but in the meantime, please read it if you can.
Nov 2, 2018: academic labor as social media The current argument about whether scholars should cite the work of nasty people — here is the argument against citing them, and here is a rebuttal — …
Nov 1, 2018: what's the point? Tim Burke: It’s hard to feel like there’s a point to public writing at the heart of Trump’s ascendancy. Certainly there’s no point to even trying to …
Oct 31, 2018: The Plantin Polyglot Bible
Oct 30, 2018: it’s not gonna change Kara Swisher: Social media platforms — and Facebook and Twitter are as guilty of this as Gab is — are designed so that the awful travels twice as fast …
Oct 30, 2018: Warren Ellis is extremely correct Usual Hermitage Bullshit Notice – MORNING, COMPUTER: On Saturday at 1201am I turned off my social media. I have a private IG account for looking at …
Oct 29, 2018: how could we be convinced? George Scialabba is one of the best essayists around, but his review of John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism is not one of his better efforts. It begins …
Oct 29, 2018: Waco Creek [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“677”] Erika Huddleston, Waco Creek VI NEW ROAD, 27 x 27 inches, oil on …
Oct 29, 2018: Durham [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1407”] Dennis Creffield, ‘Durham: the Central Tower’ (1987); …
Oct 27, 2018: web design is getting worse and worse For instance, ESPN’s site is so ugly, so crowded, so impossible to navigate that when I really want to read ESPN stories this is how I’m …
Oct 27, 2018: Etno Hut
Oct 27, 2018: Issa Megaron
Oct 26, 2018: Breaking Bread with the Dead I tweeted this news a while back, but am only now finding time to write about it at greater length: My next book will be called Breaking Bread with …
Oct 26, 2018: Writing well ≠ dumbing down This by Ian Bogost is exactly right: I suspect that what scholars and other experts really mean when they express worry about “dumbing down” is that …
Oct 23, 2018: angel [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“544”] Lichfield Cathedral[/caption]
Oct 22, 2018: "drive out the wicked person" Michael Ramsey, from The Anglican Spirit: While holiness is both a fact and a potentiality, it is impossible to enforce the holiness of the church by …
Oct 22, 2018: back to the Mac I’ve spent a lot of time in the past year trying to leave the Mac behind and move full-time to iOS. I’ve done this in large part because the many and …
Oct 21, 2018: American Airlines rejects my reality and substitutes its own Yes, this is a kind of rant, but it’s also something more: an account of how transcendentally weird air travel can be these days. A few days ago my …
Oct 21, 2018: WE REACH FOR A BOOK [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“700”] William Kentridge[/caption]
Oct 18, 2018: ancient feelings Why doesn’t ancient fiction talk about feelings? “I’d often wondered,” says Julie Sedivy, “when reading older texts: Weren’t people back then …
Oct 17, 2018: Hastings House Book of Hours The lovely Hastings House Book of Hours, from this great I Love Typography post, which has other cool images as well.
Oct 10, 2018: extremely spoilery thoughts about Better Call Saul I’m a deeply committed fan of Better Call Saul, to the extent that after each episode I listen, hungrily, to the Better Call Saul Insider Podcast. I …
Oct 8, 2018: a parable for our moment In this moment when more and more people are calling us to denounce family members who vote the wrong way, I find myself thinking of a passage from an …
Oct 8, 2018: two quotations on democracy and the judiciary Samuel Moyn, 2018: In the face of an enemy Supreme Court, the only option is for progressives to begin work on a long-term plan to recast the role of …
Oct 7, 2018: I have so many questions These are all serious questions — not gotchas - they’re questions I don’t know the answers to and wish I did. And of course knowing the answers from …
Oct 6, 2018: the lustful sex Faramerz Dabhoiwala: This is a point in history where the old idea that women are the more lustful sex – which dominated western culture until the …
Oct 2, 2018: [caption id=“attachment_35998” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”]Geta Bratescu[/caption]
Sep 28, 2018: credibility When a person testifies about some past event, and his or her listeners have no external evidence to corroborate or refute that testimony, those …
Sep 26, 2018: “in fact the mind was poorly understood” Astounding, really, that Michel could consider psychology any kind of science at all. So much of it consisted of throwing together. Of thinking of the …
Sep 26, 2018: “a large superfluous establishment of words” We talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannise over them too; we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait …
Sep 26, 2018: the methods of the Official Straighteners Two recent stories — one involving a Chicago priest named Paul Kalchik and one involving Marine le Pen — have something significant in common. Neither …
Sep 25, 2018: is it okay to share praise? Philip Jenkins in the Englewood Review of Books on my book The Year of Our Lord 1943: Alan Jacobs has written a brilliant contribution to the study of …
Sep 25, 2018: Christian language policing Mary Eberstadt: The word gay and related terms like LGBTQ should be avoided for a deeper reason. They are insufficiently respectful of the human …
Sep 24, 2018: remembering Doc I am grieved to hear of the death of Donald Sniegowski, known to one and all as Doc. Doc is father to my dear friends Paul Sniegowski and Gail Kienitz …
Sep 24, 2018: on wrath and the feast day of St. Jonathan Swift Here’s an excellent review by John Wilson of Martha Nussbaum’s new book. With John, I too doubt that fear is the dominant emotion of our moment. My …
Sep 24, 2018: a clash of cultures in London Bridging Home, London, 2018 © Do Ho Suh
Sep 24, 2018: how to evaluate a strong but disputable claim This from John D. Cook is a great example of how to respond to strong but highly disputable scientific claims — in this case Michael Atiyah’s claim to …
Sep 24, 2018: the instrumentalist chain Earlier I wrote of goods that can’t be aimed at directly, and here’s another example of that. Like all college teachers, I have heard many times — …
Sep 24, 2018: on conversation Tim Herrera’s tips for having better conversations are not tips for having better conversations. They’re tips for being better liked. They’re …
Sep 22, 2018: Yahweh’s unearthly patience The impression we get from 1–2 Kings is not that God is a stingy disciplinarian with an anger problem. If anything, the God of 1–2 Kings is …
Sep 21, 2018: on firing Ian Buruma Damon Linker thinks the firing of Ian Buruma is taking the #MeToo movement a step too far: Buruma made a serious editorial misjudgment. But he became …
Sep 20, 2018: on Sloan and Sherlock The super-cool Robin Sloan has a super-cool newsletter — only occasional, alas, but Robin has many irons in the fire these days. He even makes olive …
Sep 19, 2018: dare to make a Daniel In a review of Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, Adrian Vermeule offers an alternative to Deneen’s plea for a renewed localism, and to the …
Sep 15, 2018: “earthquakes and hurricains of the moral World” Revolutions are sudden to the unthinking only. Political Disturbances happen not without their warning Harbingers. Strange Rumblings and confused …
Sep 14, 2018: the tools to survive I’m an edge case. I want an untangled web. I want everything I do to copy back to a single place, so I have one searchable log for each day’s …
Sep 13, 2018: words and deeds Pope Francis has issued several excellent statements on sexual abuse. But his actions haven’t matched his statements. Now he has made an impressive …
Sep 13, 2018: that’s what I want Our love is all of God’s money What is money? Hard to say, really. It’s easier to document what it does, as Dana Gioia has shown: It greases the …
Sep 12, 2018: the report of the Reform Commission This extraordinary ‘ministry of all the talents’ was shaped into a Reform Commission, to produce a report on the ills of the Church and to suggest …
Sep 12, 2018: homes by mail I loved this 99pi episode about houses sold through the Sears catalog, because my family and I lived in one for 25 years. Our “Del Rey” was built in …
Sep 8, 2018: quirky NYT: Frisch’s former students describe him as eccentric, nerdy, prone to lengthy classroom digressions about his stamp collection, dinosaurs or …
Sep 7, 2018: "money is a medium of exchange" The king has set up his mint by Thames. He has struck coins; his dragon’s loins germinate a crowded creaturely brood to scuttle and scurry between …
Sep 7, 2018: hostages This from Andrew Sullivan is the single best metaphor I have yet seen about what it’s like to live in Trump’s world: Sometimes I think it’s useful to …
Sep 7, 2018: the face-blind portrait artist Our ability to recognize faces resides in the right fusiform gyrus of the inferior medial temporal lobe of the brain. People with damage to the front …
Sep 7, 2018: the poet's house One summer many years ago, when I was leading a study tour in Britain, we paid a visit to Sir Walter Scott’s home, Abbotsford House. I led the …
Sep 5, 2018: the cult of the virtuoso theologian Michael Root: A curse of recent theology has been the cult of the virtuoso theologian, the creative mind who recasts the field, the Schleiermachers …
Sep 4, 2018: not our fault Chuck Todd: Reporters, I fully acknowledge, bring their own biases to their work. The questions they ask, and the stories they pursue, are shaped by …
Sep 4, 2018: "religious myths recycled as ersatz social science" John Gray: With the referenda on same-sex marriage and abortion, tolerance and personal freedom have advanced in Ireland – a latecomer to the liberal …
Sep 3, 2018: My David Bentley Hart Problem Though I think David Bentley Hart is a brilliant man, and I have learned a great deal from reading him, I also believe he has some bad intellectual …
Aug 29, 2018: René Girard, please call your office About Alice Flaherty: Years later, she consulted on a pilot for a television drama based on her life: doctor develops mania after personal …
Aug 27, 2018: the strange world of graduate study In an article on the Avita Ronell controversy, Masha Gessen quotes a Facebook comment — apparently from a current or former student of Ronell’s — that …
Aug 27, 2018: a clear choice Matthew Schmitz: If the church really does believe that homosexual acts are always and everywhere wrong, it should begin to live what it teaches. …
Aug 26, 2018: how change happens There’s a general principle that underlies yesterday’s posts about the Catholic Church’s current problems, and it’s this: The more time people spend …
Aug 26, 2018: populist leaders and the defiance of norms After the release of the Vigano letter detailing Pope Francis’s rehabilitation of Cardinal McCarrick, people started saying, “I don’t see how Francis …
Aug 25, 2018: big news, no action The story Rod Dreher reports here would in a certain kind of world be catastrophic for the Catholic hierarchy. I do not believe that we live in that …
Aug 25, 2018: after Catholic fusionism, what? Kevin Gallagher’s essay on “The Eclipse of Catholic Fusionism” is elegantly written, incisive, and largely quite persuasive. I commend it to you, and …
Aug 24, 2018: from Welles to Saul Here’s a passage from the Preface to my new book The Year of Our Lord 1943: Touch of Evil, that Gothic masterpiece by Orson Welles, begins with the …
Aug 21, 2018: once more on generational thinking Reading this post by Rod Dreher, I am moved to say a couple of things I’ve said often before: I believe that thinking in terms of generations is far …
Aug 20, 2018: I have one question Avital Ronell is “original and inspiring.” I’m sure. But did she sexually harass her graduate student? Her “mentorship of students has been no less …
Aug 18, 2018: episcopal feelings One of the more curious aspects of the fallout from the recent revelations of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy is the emergence of a certain language …
Aug 18, 2018: the “gradual decay” of Twitter Am I finally done with Twitter? After years of leaving and coming back, leaving and coming back? If I haven’t learned how to leave Twitter, at least …
Aug 17, 2018: going big, going small Here’s the promised follow-up my recent post on the university. In one sense I want to think bigger than Daniel and Wellmon do, and in another sense I …
Aug 16, 2018: another look at Daniel, Wellmon, and the future of the university Adam Daniel and Chad Wellmon respond to my response to their essay. (They respond to Cathy Davidson too.) Got all that? My first thought is that if I …
Aug 14, 2018: on necks that need millstones around them In the Diocese of Allentown, for example, documents show that a priest was confronted about an abuse complaint. He admitted, “Please help me. I …
Aug 13, 2018: more to come I am very grateful to Jeffrey Bilbro for this extremely thoughtful and thorough response to my new book. For now I just want to respond to one …
Aug 11, 2018: A brief addendum to the previous post: It goes a long way towards explaining why in my writing I so often try to resurrect abandoned metaphors and …
Aug 11, 2018: excerpt from my Sent folder: on exhausted languages What I really am, by vocation and avocation, is a historian of ideas, and when you’ve been a historian of ideas for several decades you’re bound to …
Aug 11, 2018: on sharpness and gentleness I appreciate this from Joe Carter on the times when theological correction needs to be “sharp” — which I think is a better term than “harsh,” the term …
Aug 11, 2018: saving America from exploding Cadbury bars “What do you do for a living?” the supervisor asked. I knew this question was coming. I detest this question. I know from experience that if I tell …
Aug 10, 2018: not for fun At the beginning of Two Serious Ladies, the great Jane Bowles novel, one little girl asks another to play a new game. “It’s called ’I forgive you for …
Aug 10, 2018: excerpt from my Sent folder: authority There are three models of writing I despise: “I am old and have seen everything and therefore can speak with absolute authority”; “I am middle-aged …
Aug 9, 2018: The Profumo Option The other day, in one of his many recent posts on the waves of sexual scandal that are afflicting American churches, Rod Dreher made a passing mention …
Aug 6, 2018: excerpt from my Sent folder: LP & MTD One of these days we’ll be drooling in our wheelchairs in the old folks’ home and saying, “Remember liberal proceduralism and Moralistic Therapeutic …
Aug 5, 2018: addendum Re: the previous post, I often wonder whether the people who claim to reject proceduralism (a) believe they can win and win forever; (b) don’t have …
Aug 5, 2018: nostalgia for proceduralism One of the classic critiques made against the liberal social order is that it is philosophically thin, characterized by an inadequate, narrow, limited …
Aug 4, 2018: an apology A few days ago I wrote a post in which I sought to express solidarity with what many of my faithful Catholic friends are going through these days. I …
Aug 3, 2018: the Clientele, the Public, the Person Adam Daniel and Chad Wellmon: The multiversity [Clark] Kerr described was not the result of any considered plan or coherent philosophy. Rather, it …
Aug 3, 2018: getting real about Facebook Nikhil Sonnad: The solution, then, is for Facebook to change its mindset. Until now, even Facebook’s positive steps — like taking down posts inciting …
Aug 3, 2018: the end of hypocrisy Today, many critics on the right are noting that the New York Times is extending to Sarah Jeong gracious understanding that they refused to Quinn …
Jul 29, 2018: the value of emotional resilience “Trigger Warning: Empirical Evidence Ahead”: Participants in the trigger warning group believed themselves and people in general to be more …
Jul 25, 2018: insensibly Careful writers of narrative, whether that narrative is fictional or historical or journalistic, will, like composers, work with themes and variations …
Jul 25, 2018: the threefold order of ministry This is a topic I find myself thinking about surprisingly often — surprisingly because it’s so far beyond the scope of my expertise and experience. …
Jul 25, 2018: Sustainability and Solidarity Sustainability and Solidarity – Kathleen Fitzpatrick: There is absolutely an institutional responsibility involved in sustaining these projects, but, …
Jul 25, 2018: political mistrust in the long term Elizabeth Bruenig: The gravity and legality of the two exercises in meddling differ, certainly. But they both operate to wound our faith in …
Jul 24, 2018: common prayer I have many faithful Catholic friends who are hurting right now — who are in deep pain, even anguish. They stay in the forefront of my prayers, along …
Jul 24, 2018: saving journalism: Megan McArdle: What can be done? Start figuring out how to make journalism work as a philanthropic enterprise. If you’re a journalist at one of the …
Jul 24, 2018: pronoun trouble Political philosopher Jason Brennan on the case for epistocracy: Here’s what I propose we do: Everyone can vote, even children. No one gets excluded. …
Jul 24, 2018: Chuck Berry, 1958 Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images[/caption]
Jul 24, 2018: The Second Vatican Council Lothar Wolleh
Jul 23, 2018: do not make room for the devil Wesley Hill: If you’ve never been told by your fellow Christians that the personal object of your desire — not just what you might want to do …
Jul 23, 2018: Fractured Europe
Jul 23, 2018: Pocket-Run Pool
Jul 21, 2018: our airport future Two quotes from this interview with Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon. One: SD: The airport is where different promises of the modern world are …
Jul 21, 2018: For the Love of Mars For the Love of Mars: Once we come of cultural age into a mature, considered love for Mars, and see what happens when we act on that love, our crises …
Jul 20, 2018: the church in Imminent America My colleague Philip Jenkins: So just as an intellectual exercise, let’s make a bold prophecy for the 2040s or so. Imagine a near future US where a …
Jul 20, 2018: the point of the sword Sarah Smarsh: What my father seeks is not a return to times that were worse for women and people of color but progress toward a society in which …
Jul 19, 2018: CPU from Introduction to IBM Data Processing Systems (1968)
Jul 17, 2018: the moral ideal When the guide of conduct is a moral ideal we are never suffered to escape from perfection. Constantly, indeed on all occasions, the society is called …
Jul 17, 2018: truth and lies I’ve always had great admiration for those who, in the chaos that generally characterises the present, sensed from the start the enormous dangers of …
Jul 16, 2018: unforeseen consequences Another follow-up on my baseball post. I’m getting two kinds of feedback: (a) you’re a moron, sabermetrics is awesome, and (b) you’re absolutely …
Jul 15, 2018: converging on rational standards: not always bad! This is a follow-up to my just-posted essay on my unchosen-but-apparently inexorable declining interest in baseball. My chief point there is that …
Jul 14, 2018: suffering and not triumph Are we then to deduce that we should forget God, lay down our tools, and serve men in the Church – as though there were no Gospel? No, the right …
Jul 14, 2018: The Event An eye-opening post from Douglas Rushkoff, describing what happened when he was asked to give a talk about “the future of technology” — and ended up …
Jul 14, 2018: Trollope and Brexit Trollope’s Phineas Redux, like the other Palliser novels, has a domestic plot and a political plot, and the political plot here spins out from the …
Jul 13, 2018: Boxes Peter Tarka, Boxes; via Things Magazine
Jul 13, 2018: the blog garden My friend Dan Cohen recently wrote, Think about the difference between a blog post and a book: one can be tossed off in an afternoon at a coffee …
Jul 13, 2018: new uses for old blogs More ideas about ideas: Given my current interest in intellectual gardening rather than architecture, in allowing ideas to emerge rather than trying …
Jul 12, 2018: we work in the dark Tom Phillips
Jul 12, 2018: control and surrender, architecture and gardening Tom Phillips, Brian Eno oil on canvas 35.6 x 25.4 cm 1984-85 collection: the artist Tom Phillips writes: I once devised a television project whose …
Jul 10, 2018: also Just one more quick thought about yesterday’s post: I’ve done this kind of thing before, but usually by trying to delete Twitter altogether. This time …
Jul 10, 2018: victory paper Made by the Randolph Novelty Company in Chicago during World War II; via the Newberry Library’s Instagram
Jul 10, 2018: Letterbugs William Moran, from the Newberry Library
Jul 9, 2018: thanks and a plea I’m already getting some emails in response to my earlier post, and they’re incredibly generous and kind. The message tends to be: Your writings do …
Jul 9, 2018: Episcopalian exclusionism Andrew McGowan: It is worrisome that despite the soaring temperatures of Austin, the current Prayer Book conversations take place in an ecumenical …
Jul 9, 2018: ages of revolution If a man in the fullness of his days, at the end of his life, can pass on the wisdom of his experience to those who grow up after him; if what he has …
Jul 9, 2018: soccer and the impediments to success Brian Phillips: Soccer is beautiful because soccer is hard. Most popular sports artificially enhance the human body. Soccer diminishes it. Instead of …
Jul 6, 2018: and he cried when he realized that there were no more stars to exploit MIT Technology Review: The cosmic horizon is changing. Hooper has worked out how this will affect our neighborhood in the universe, which astronomers …
Jul 6, 2018: Milton’s God (and Google’s) Franklin Foer: What is God? It is only a subject that has inspired some of the finest writing in the history of Western civilization—and yet the first …
Jul 6, 2018: The Rings of Saturn On Monday Robert Macfarlane will be hosting a Twitter book club on W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, which is one of the most compelling and …
Jul 5, 2018: the Ministry of Amnesia I’ve just read, with great interest, John Lanchester’s latest essay on the global financial situation, and as always, Lanchester is informative, …
Jul 5, 2018: re-reading Trollope I am re-reading the Palliser novels, for the first time in 20 years, which means I have largely forgotten what happens in them, and I am reminded that …
Jul 4, 2018: Principalities, Powers, and BLM Eugene Rivers: For the most part, BLM activists – like the post-1965 SNCC activists, the Black Panther Party, and assorted other radical black groups …
Jul 4, 2018: signed with that cross Al Raboteau: African-American Christianity has continuously confronted the nation with troubling questions about American exceptionalism. Perhaps the …
Jul 4, 2018: where citizens were, there shall users be Farhad Manjoo: The real problem is that [the scooters] just appeared out of nowhere one day, suddenly seizing the sidewalks, and many citizens felt …
Jul 4, 2018: The Atomic Theory of Human Life To me, the most interesting and significant element of the opposition to Amy Coney Barrett is the inability of some of her critics to achieve even the …
Jul 1, 2018: Alan Jacobs is a writer who Alan Jacobs is a writer who has a degree of talent in this app that I would love for you haven’t heard anything from the app that I would love for you …
Jun 27, 2018: a position in life It happens that I have practically some connexion with schools for different classes of youth; and I receive many letters from parents respecting the …
Jun 26, 2018: the social utility of religious freedom Reading this post by Rod Dreher, which considers (among other things) the extent to which overt hostility towards tradition-minded Christians is a …
Jun 26, 2018: intra-Anglican ecumenism Bishop George Sumner: TEC and ACNA are still suing one another. The day, now foreseeable, when the suits are over, one way or another, is the day when …
Jun 26, 2018: but how far Underground? This is amazing. Daniel Silva has created a series of maps showing just how far underground any given station of the London Underground is. Note that …
Jun 26, 2018: the Aspen Tech Solutionism Festival I have long loved the Atlantic and am proud of my association with it, but every time the Aspen Ideas Festival rolls around my inner Unabomber emerges …
Jun 25, 2018: memory and invention In her book The Craft of Thought, Mary Carruthers identifies the purpose of memorization in medieval intellectual culture: The orator’s “art of …
Jun 25, 2018: why hospitality matters: ancient poetry edition WI’m reading Emily Wilson’s marvelous translation of The Odyssey this summer, and its emphasis on giving freely to “foreigners and beggars” keeps …
Jun 23, 2018: quality of life Sara Hendren: When does a life worth living cease to become so? When one can no longer eat and must use a feeding tube? A ventilator? When one loses …
Jun 21, 2018: viewpoint diversity and religion Religion: A Viewpoint Diversity Blind Spot?: How could Heterodox Academy address this lacuna? It could, for example, promote the use of surveys or …
Jun 21, 2018: American Legothic [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] (click link for details)[/caption]
Jun 20, 2018: when critique dissolves From Ross Douthat’s column today: But perhaps the simplest way to describe what happened with the surrogacy debate is that American feminists …
Jun 20, 2018: the world of the deal In Trump’s world, you fit into one of three categories. You may be a mark, you may be leverage, you may be a loser. Trump wants to make deals, which …
Jun 18, 2018: tragic humanism Terry Eagleton: The distinction between Hitchens or Dawkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic …
Jun 16, 2018: Richard Powers and the third kind of story An interview with Richard Powers:: The modern human assumption that trees, plants and all other wildlife are “just property” is, to Powers, the root …
Jun 16, 2018: more on temporal bandwidth Two comments about my essay in the Guardian today, both of them regarding points that had to be cut in editing: 1) There’s no sense in which a Hillary …
Jun 15, 2018: on the sky island Earlier this week I drove from my home in Waco to West Texas: first to the little town of Goldthwaite, then South through San Saba, Llano, …
Jun 14, 2018: the whole of the law Sanders comments on family separations at the border: “It is very biblical to enforce the law” https://t.co/5DiL1C4FHt — CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) …
Jun 14, 2018: cashin' in the bonds Why Lorrie Moore Writes | The New Republic: “How to Become a Writer” begins with the urge to write and ends in the desert to which such a desire may …
Jun 13, 2018: VR for bear attacks This sounds really useful! Unless, well, you happen to read Bill Bryson: Now imagine reading a nonfiction book packed with stories such as this—true …
Jun 12, 2018: Davis Mountains State Park (there’s a small herd of pronghorn antelope down below but you can’t see them)
Jun 12, 2018: View from the Observatory
Jun 12, 2018: McDonald Observatory
Jun 12, 2018: June flowers in the Chihuahuan desert of West Texas
Jun 10, 2018: credit and debt David Bentley Hart: The Law not only prohibited interest on loans, but mandated that every seventh year should be a Sabbatical, a shmita, a fallow …
Jun 8, 2018: the mission “We men have an important but-as-yet-unknown mission." Can’t wait to find out what it is.
Jun 8, 2018: proportion When a famous person commits suicide, there are roughly ten million words of sympathy and pity for that person to every one word of sympathy and pity …
Jun 8, 2018: June in central Texas (St Alban’s Church)
Jun 8, 2018: I can never quite get over magnolias
Jun 7, 2018: This one (from one my favorite places, Odd Duck in Austin) is called “Peaching to the Choir”
Jun 6, 2018: One more from the Wetlands
Jun 6, 2018: Lake Waco Wetlands, where most of the wildflowers have passed their bloom — but not all.
Jun 5, 2018: Also contemplation (at Joe T Garcia’s — last time I was here I was drinking margaritas with Chip Edgar and J I Packer)
Jun 5, 2018: contemplation
Jun 5, 2018: Also Anselm Kiefer
Jun 5, 2018: Anselm Kiefer, Book with Wings
Jun 5, 2018: Kimbell Art Museum
Jun 5, 2018: Fort Worth Botanic Garden
Jun 5, 2018: Tolkien and the possibility of healing This is a typically rich Adam Roberts post, bubbling over with a range of wonderful ideas, any one of which blazes a trail that it would be delightful …
Jun 5, 2018: how Rebecca West set fire to everything Sam Jordison on Rebecca West: She had written troubling accounts of the Nuremberg trials, spoken up about repression under communist regimes (and had …
Jun 4, 2018: Facebook wants to matter Siva Vaidhyanathan: There’s no one to punish Facebook if Facebook fails. Facebook’s trying to head off regulation by doing this, this transparency …
Jun 4, 2018: Zona
Jun 4, 2018: “What are they going to break this time?” Riccardo Mori: The WWDC will start in less than a day at this point, and I have no wishlist to share. I used to get excited before this kind of Apple …
Jun 4, 2018: knowing and acting Freddie deBoer sent me this: In Roman times, “belief” in the gods, as we understand it, was irrelevant. An atheist was not someone who didn’t …
Jun 3, 2018: meritocracy, schmeritocracy David Brooks: The real problem with the modern meritocracy can be found in the ideology of meritocracy itself. Meritocracy is a system built on the …
Jun 3, 2018: Corey’s grandma’s biscuits This morning after church we stopped at Milo All Day to pick up kolaches, a cinnamon roll, a pain au chocolat, and, of course, biscuits. I told Teri …
Jun 3, 2018: Di•a•graph•i•a, by Sarah Hulsey
Jun 3, 2018: Karl Barth to his critics Wesley Hill posted this recently. It’s a brilliant letter, and below I am going to put in bold the most important passages – and the ones …
Jun 2, 2018: Of course this is a word. “She blinded me with scients.” Duh.
Jun 2, 2018: I like walking in my neighborhood primarily because of all the live oaks — but I can’t really capture the look of things on my iPhone’s camera — I …
Jun 1, 2018: members of the family C. S. Lewis, from “Membership”: The very word membership is of Christian origin, but it has been taken over by the world and emptied of …
Jun 1, 2018: I’m always for the dogs Jonah Goldberg: It’s worth bearing in mind that dog ownership — when done right — gets you out of the house. Dog ownership is also very often a social …
Jun 1, 2018: campaign slogans The two greatest campaign slogans in history are: Jimmie Davis, songwriter ("You Are My Sunshine") and (successful) candidate for Governor of …
Jun 1, 2018: good-bye Instagram Instagram is very pleased with its algorithm. Good for them – but that algorithm is the reason I have deleted my account. I could never see what …
Jun 1, 2018: seeds of renewal (I had a great time last month speaking at the Mockingbird conference in Noo Yawk City. What follows is an excerpt from the second of the two talks I …
May 31, 2018: delete Jaron Lanier: If you have good experiences with social media, nothing in this book invalidates those experiences. In fact, my hope is that we—meaning …
May 30, 2018: unexpected moderation Wesley Yang: Peterson is virtually always more nuanced than the straw target his detractors have built out of his ideas. He uses the fact that the …
May 30, 2018: where have the readers gone? Jürgen Habermas: The public sphere is crucial to the intellectual, though its fragile structure is undergoing an accelerated process of decay. The …
May 29, 2018: Helliconia
May 29, 2018: The Alteration
May 28, 2018: anti-biblical evangelicals Michael Gerson: According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, white evangelical Protestants are the least likely group in America to affirm an …
May 28, 2018: how I strive for this consistency of outlook “I don’t like the present,” he said. “But I didn’t like the past, either.” — here
May 27, 2018: Kuhn’s world This is very good by Philip Kitcher on Errol Morris’s rather misguided attack on Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. When I …
May 27, 2018: Aristotle the colonizer Agnes Callard: Recently a historian of philosophy named Wolfgang Mann wrote a book called The Discovery of Things. He argues, just as the title of his …
May 26, 2018: the story of Francis Ross Douthat, in this interview with David Moore, sums up his hopes for his new book concisely and cogently: I suppose there are three levels in what …
May 26, 2018: the higher selfishness and the long defeat Here’s a typical passage from Jordan Peterson: We have two general principles of discipline. The first: limit the rules. The second: Use the least …
May 26, 2018: Malcolm posing for his photo shoot this morning.
May 24, 2018: Milo All Day I’m hanging out this morning at a new local place, Milo All Day. Corey MacIntyre, the chef/owner, has been foodtrucking and catering and cooking …
May 23, 2018: counternarratives For each movement of modernity, there has developed a comprehensive counternarrative. The idea that modernity is associated with the secularization of …
May 23, 2018: Reclaiming Jesus This is a great statement, and I agree with every word of it. But how I wish it were possible for Christians to speak prophetically to the abortion …
May 23, 2018: POTUS, tweetblocker Maybe there’s some legal element I don’t understand, but this ruling seems wrong to me. Not that I don’t want to see the Donald discomfited in every …
May 23, 2018: Morning walk.
May 22, 2018: My favorite neighborhood tree.
May 21, 2018: Regent’s Park
May 21, 2018: a Communist and a Tory Clive Wilmer on Ruskin: This Toryism, comparable to that of Swift and Johnson and Coleridge, is based on a belief in hierarchy, established order and …
May 21, 2018: The pulpit of Holy Trinity Sloane Square
May 21, 2018: The lectern of Holy Trinity Sloane Square
May 20, 2018: the right not to be addressed To engage in inventive thinking during those idle hours spent at an airport requires silence. But other people’s minds, over in the peon section, can …
May 20, 2018: contemplation Contemplation is not simply one possible form among others of the act of knowing. Its special character does not flow from its being a particular …
May 20, 2018: listening in museums Khoi Vinh: The [David Bowie Is] exhibition itself is designed thoughtfully and executed with a fair amount of technologically forward-leaning …
May 19, 2018: Courtauld Gallery
May 19, 2018: polyglot politics Peter Leithart: Contemporary politics is polarized between multiculturalists and (for lack of a better term) populists, and the problem of language, …
May 18, 2018: Sunset over the Thames.
May 15, 2018: children v. books If I had followed the great man's advice and never burdened myself with the gift of my children, or if I had never written any novels at all, in the …
May 15, 2018: privileges and rough rides I hate Twitter threads and really wish people would turn them into blog posts instead, and I’m never gonna stop saying that, but this thread by …
May 11, 2018: all us exiles More than once already in the preceding pages mention has been made of the obliteration of English villages. The process is notorious and inevitable. …
May 11, 2018: 1041uuu
May 10, 2018: a brief comment on stories There’s a lot of sentimental and just plain dopey talk about “story” these days. “Tell me your story.” “Everyone has a story.” Yuck. But the remedy …
May 10, 2018: liberalism and democracy This is very shrewd and thought-provoking from Adrian Vermeule: Liberalism both needs and fears democracy. It needs democracy because it needs the …
May 9, 2018: just for the record There are no ideas, no beliefs, no positions that reliably correspond to the phrase “cultural Marxism.” It is a phrase whose use is purely …
May 9, 2018: time machine I longed for the loan of the Time Machine — a contraption with its saddle and quartz bars that was plainly a glorification of the bicycle. What a …
May 9, 2018: two quotations I ate my breakfast, checked my email, and stood up to head to my gate. As I did, I looked down at the small section of my life situated at that …
May 9, 2018: deracination by decree Thomas Chatterton Williams: Is Coates seriously arguing, as he seems to be, that the desire for “liberation from the dictates of that we”—or any we, …
May 7, 2018: ride-hailing and restaurants It’s interesting sometimes to reflect on the major cultural trends that have completely passed you by – and when you get to be my age there are more …
May 6, 2018: no quiet mornings It’s ten minutes till eight on Sunday morning. It’s a lovely and cool and I have my windows open so I can feel the breeze and hear the …
May 5, 2018: addressing biases Nick Phillips: Intellectual diversity addresses a fundamental problem in human cognition: we seek out information that confirms the views we already …
May 4, 2018: studies prove Kevin Williamson: Studies have a way of ceasing to be studies once they are taken up by politicians-in-print like Ezra Klein. They become dueling …
May 4, 2018: everyday people : 1 : On a summer day in 1978, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, I took the woman I was dating to lunch at our …
May 3, 2018: How the Beijing elite sees the world How the Beijing elite sees the world: The Chinese have developed a state system run by a technocratic elite of highly educated bureaucrats under …
Apr 20, 2018: excerpt from my Sent folder: my goal in life My goal at this stage of my life is to get to the point where I don’t know who any public figure is and therefore can’t have an opinion about any of …
Apr 19, 2018: "Poetry makes nothing happen" Alexander Chee: My generation of writers — and yours, if you are reading this — lives in the shadow of Auden’s famous attack on the relevance of …
Apr 19, 2018: Afternoon on Baylor’s campus
Apr 19, 2018: Morning on Baylor’s campus
Apr 19, 2018: "I like this God" When years ago, I finished reading [John Crowe Ransom's] God Without Thunder , I threw it aside, muttering that I would rather burn eternally in hell …
Apr 19, 2018: Christianity and Evangelicalism Kristin du Mez: The second, and harder, task of [an imagined book called] Christianity and Evangelicalism, would be to suggest some steps by which …
Apr 19, 2018: excerpt from my Sent folder: the Mortara case No, Cessario is quite explicit about this: “Both the law of the Church and the laws of the Papal States stipulated that a person legitimately …
Apr 18, 2018: reasons for decline Alex Reid: From a national perspective, the number of people earning communications degrees (which was negligible in the heyday of English majors …
Apr 15, 2018: Steve diBenedetto [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1600”] Steve DiBenedetto: Roman’s Smoke, 2015–2016 / Derek Eller Gallery / …
Apr 13, 2018: you have no idea how frustrating it is ... … to have my name misspelled on my very own book. 😉
Apr 12, 2018: apologies and clarifications (re: First Things) I have had many discussions with readers of First Things, some of whom are good friends and many of whom I rely upon for counsel and guidance. These …
Apr 6, 2018: the sad compatibilist Sohrab Amari writes in Commentary about two kinds of Christian response to the dominant liberal order, the compatibilists and the non-compatibilists: …
Apr 5, 2018: The Huntsman [embed]britishmuseum.tumblr.com/post/1206…[/embed]
Apr 3, 2018: Christians and the academic humanities This post, describing the experience of a friend of my friend Rod Dreher, makes universal judgments about the world of the humanities based on a …
Apr 2, 2018: the just and redemptive image of God As America in its present incarnation, with its present leadership, teeters toward an arrogance, isolationism and self-importance that are the portals …
Apr 2, 2018: it me
Apr 2, 2018: phrenological examination [caption id=“attachment_35327” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”] Wellcome Collection (click image for …
Apr 2, 2018: more on "rhetorical Leninism" When I wrote in a recent post about “rhetorical Leninism,” what did I mean? I recently read Victor Sebestyen’s biography of Lenin, and one of …
Apr 1, 2018: eye massager [caption id="attachment_35322" align="aligncenter" width="700"] This eye massager from the Wellcome Collection looks like something out of Harry …
Apr 1, 2018: Resynth
Apr 1, 2018: National Gallery
Apr 1, 2018: Craeft
Apr 1, 2018: Lenin
Mar 31, 2018: academic patricians and plebes Stanford has 7000 undergraduates. Next quarter I'll be teaching 5% of them (350) in classes that read Luther, Butler, Kant, @SaraNAhmed, Freud, Heine …
Mar 29, 2018: Craigie Aitchison, Crucifixion 9
Mar 29, 2018: a Holy Week thought on rhetorical Leninism If you’re the kind of writer who works to be generous and fair-minded; if you admit that you have priors that incline you towards certain positions …
Mar 29, 2018: what philosophy is for Jean-Paul Sartre was working furiously on his second play, Les Mouches (The Flies), while finishing his major philosophy treatise, L’Être et le néant …
Mar 28, 2018: harmonic convergence In one of my classes today I’m teaching the Dark Mountain Manifesto and in the other I’m teaching the Tao Te Ching, and let me tell you, …
Mar 28, 2018: children's crusades One clever little specialty of adult humans works like this: You very carefully (and, if you’re smart, very subtly) instruct children in the moral …
Mar 27, 2018: speaking truth to the professoriate I’m probably going to write more about Scott Alexander’s take on Jordan Peterson, but for now I just want to note that he’s …
Mar 25, 2018: hope When I see young people out there marching and demonstrating and making their voices heard on behalf of causes I already believe in, wow, does that …
Mar 23, 2018: Prescription: Poem [caption id=“attachment_35283” align=“aligncenter” width=“675”] William Carlos Williams prescribes himself an epic …
Mar 23, 2018: The History of Life Through Time Austin Kleon’s post about his son Owen’s book — finished before Dad’s book has even put its pants on — reminds me of this …
Mar 20, 2018: Levi van Veluw: Veneration charcoal drawings
Mar 20, 2018: exegetical puzzlement Much of Paul Baumann’s review of Ross Douthat’s new book is devoted to intra-Catholic disputes that I won’t presume to adjudicate, but there’s …
Mar 19, 2018: Madonna della Misericordia [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“2500”] (click image for more details)[/caption]
Mar 19, 2018: radio voices, ranked Phoebe Judge Nate DiMeo Roman Mars everybody else in roughly any order
Mar 14, 2018: brain [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1233”] A drawing of neurons by Santiago Ramón y Cajal (click photo for …
Mar 13, 2018: the Berlin sketchbooks of Keir Edmonds [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“750”] (click an image for more information)[/caption]
Mar 12, 2018: Annihilation The best thing about Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy is its uncompromising weirdness — its straightforward facing of the possibility that, …
Mar 12, 2018: The World Is a Ghetto One of my favorite album covers
Mar 9, 2018: engagement 24/7 I’ve talked about this before, in bits and pieces, but just for the record: My wife Teri and I believe that our calling as followers of Jesus Christ …
Mar 8, 2018: farewell to Twitter? (Cross-posted, with edits, fromText Patterns) A few weeks ago I deleted my private Twitter account — it was a good way to keep up with friends, but I …
Mar 8, 2018: The Waco Empire The newest outpost of Chip and Joanna Gaines’s local empire is Magnolia Table, and Teri and I had breakfast there this morning. It was really …
Mar 6, 2018: dignity I went down where the vultures feed I would’ve gone deeper, but there wasn’t any need Heard the tongues of angels and the tongues of men Wasn’t any …
Mar 6, 2018: I'M AN ARTIST YOUR RULES DON'T APPLY [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1240”] (click photo for details)[/caption]
Mar 5, 2018: and I thought John Wilson had many books
Mar 3, 2018: Oxford and Cambridge It was very interesting next day to see Cambridge. In many ways it is a contrast: there is something, I can hardly say whether of colour or of …
Mar 2, 2018: bad trailers For what it’s worth, I have never seen trailers that look as bad as Ready Player One and A Wrinkle in Time. Both of them give every indication …
Mar 2, 2018: Venice in snow [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="2048"] New York Times[/caption]
Mar 2, 2018: Portobello Road Market (1960s) Norman McCaskill
Mar 1, 2018: The Year of Our Lord 1943 [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“860”] Available for pre-order at Amazon.com (clink photo for …
Mar 1, 2018: Photostat [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“675”] Mitch Fraas (@MitchFraas) on Twitter (click photo for …
Feb 28, 2018: this one’s for Austin Kleon It will be asked, How is imitation to be rendered healthy and vital? Unhappily, while it is easy to enumerate the signs of life, it is impossible to …
Feb 28, 2018: biblioteca [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“600”] Susannah Hays, Sacra Theoloigie[/caption]
Feb 28, 2018: well, back to work [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1352”] Daniel Stier, Ways of Knowing[/caption]
Feb 24, 2018: Correggio's deception It being lawful to paint then, is it lawful to paint everything? So long as the painting is confessed—yes; but if, even in the slightest degree, the …
Feb 24, 2018: house An abandoned house on the Isle of Scalpay
Feb 23, 2018: this is the future liberals want
Feb 23, 2018: some clarifications Over at Mere Orthodoxy, Jake Meador responds to this post of mine — but I believe Jake misunderstands what my post is about. He reflects at some …
Feb 23, 2018: text three ways When my buddy Austin Kleon posted his notebook turducken I realized that I have a three-part system too, though a somewhat different one: I use a …
Feb 19, 2018: On Erik Stevens I am breaking my Lenten silence because (a) I am a poor excuse for a Christian and (b) I can’t stop thinking about Black Panther. The movie had some …
Feb 13, 2018: three things Yes: ban porn. Ban it. A blessed Shrove Tuesday to you all. I'll be back in Eastertide. Ciao for now.
Feb 12, 2018: religion and public life revisited I’m late to this party, but there’s something to be said for taking time to think things over. The already-much-discussed book review in First Things …
Feb 11, 2018: making life simpler A great many intellectual positions are obvious and incontestable to people who are ignorant of and incurious about history. That’s why they go to …
Feb 11, 2018: between vanity and avarice In studying your own pages I find that the great majority of the names which are quoted as those of important young writers are wholly unfamiliar to …
Feb 10, 2018: the gifts of the Owner of the World To some of us the Owner of the World has apportioned the gift to tell their fellows that the time to get up has finally come. To others He gives the …
Feb 9, 2018: Will Eisner: The Spirit
Feb 9, 2018: Constable: Trees on Hampstead Heath
Feb 9, 2018: The Black Prince of Burgess and Roberts So: Anthony Burgess, back when he was alive, thought that a movie should be made about Edward the Black Prince and that he should write the …
Feb 9, 2018: Huxtable on Wright
Feb 9, 2018: choice You can’t understand the place and time you’re in by immersion; the opposite’s true. You have to step out and away and back and forward, through books …
Feb 8, 2018: Frank Lloyd Wright, draftsman In Huxtable’s biography of Wright she often comments on the beauty and precision of his pencil sketches: all his professional life he started …
Feb 8, 2018: hide your work To maintain his Olympian position as the self-described inventor of modern architecture, he could admit to no other interest or influence, or …
Feb 8, 2018: the pilgrimage towards Home Dear Dott. Franco, I was moved that so many readers of your newspaper would like to know how I am spending this last period of my life. I can only say …
Feb 7, 2018: annotated Wakes [caption id=“attachment_35135” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”] Dora Garcia’s copy of Finnegans Wake; click …
Feb 6, 2018: the ed-tech snake-oil salesmen This year we in the Honors Program at Baylor were told that we could no longer submit our annual activity reports as MS Word files. Instead, we must …
Jan 31, 2018: “That’s the reality” The reason I lost my church was not specifically because I spoke up. It was because we were advocating for other victims of sexual assault within the …
Jan 31, 2018: Embrace the Pain: Living with the Repugnant Cultural Other This is the text, more or less, of the talk I gave at Duke University last Monday afternoon. The talk is derived from one of the key concepts I employ …
Jan 30, 2018: the invariant ed-tech sequence Some company creates a new "killer app" for Academic Task X that is supposed to make the machinery of academic life run more smoothly but is basically …
Jan 26, 2018: The Bible you carry You spoke of praying for forgiveness. But Larry, if you have read the Bible you carry, you know forgiveness does not come from doing good things, as …
Jan 26, 2018: reading, annotating, quizzing, teaching
Jan 26, 2018: religion as politics, part 2 I get tired just thinking about what David French does here, which is to walk his way patiently through the cataract of vile twaddle that pours from …
Jan 26, 2018: religion as politics, part 1 Daniel Cox writes on FiveThirtyEight.com that white evangelical Protestants may be neglecting their future. As a group, they’re drifting further away …
Jan 21, 2018: reading Charles Taylor
Jan 19, 2018: Most influential public intellectuals? A lot of talk about this among my online friends lately. As a semi-private pseudo-intellectual who writes about public intellectuals, here are my …
Jan 19, 2018: “It just became so obvious” When Colleen Malloy, a neonatologist and faculty member at Northwestern University, discusses abortion with her colleagues, she says, “it’s kind of …
Jan 18, 2018: an earnest prayer Missionary work indeed in heathen countries was being carried on with some energy, but Theobald did not feel any call to be a missionary. Christina …
Jan 18, 2018: notify me — NOT Farhad Manjoo: Another idea is to let you impose more fine-grained controls over notifications. Today, when you let an app send you mobile alerts, …
Jan 18, 2018: the horror of homeschooling Damon Linker has a recommendation for dealing with the enormous social problem of homeschooling: There can and should be greater oversight. As …
Jan 16, 2018: David Bentley Hart's grocery list The notion that there is any milk in this house is a laughable error, one that could be committed only by the most willfully imperspicacious of …
Jan 15, 2018: the future of Christian educational institutions Carl Trueman writes about the future of Christian higher education: Thus, for Christian educational institutions, the way ahead may be very hard. It …
Jan 13, 2018: Trouble No More
Jan 13, 2018: The Crown
Jan 13, 2018: Broken Earth
Jan 13, 2018: why Zadie Smith writes To speak personally, the very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life. — in the Guardian, 13 January 2007. This comes …
Jan 13, 2018: Adam Zagajewski, "The Self" It is small and no more visible than a cricket in August. It likes to dress up, to masquerade, as all dwarfs do. It lodges between granite blocks, …
Jan 11, 2018: The Paige Compositor [caption id=“attachment_41392” align=“aligncenter” width=“509”] Patent application for The Paige …
Jan 11, 2018: Monument Valley II
Jan 11, 2018: Thor: Ragnarok
Jan 9, 2018: gold dust and hero props Annie Atkins is an immensely talented graphic designer who specializes in work for film — the image above is an example — and I’ve just started …
Jan 7, 2018: "The Lord is with you" Sermon by the Rev. Jessica Martin Ely Cathedral, Advent 4 (24th December 2017) Old Testament: 2 Sam. 7.1-11, 16 New Testament: Rom.16.25-27 Gospel: …
Jan 1, 2018: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: 8 [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="1313"] image from the one surviving manuscript of the poem[/caption] My friend Adam Roberts has some …
Dec 31, 2017: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: 7 If you look closely at the picture above (by John Howe, the famous Tolkien illustrator) of Gawain’s confrontation with the Green Knight, you’ll see …
Dec 30, 2017: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: 6 As I noted in my previous post, Gawain’s deal with Bertilak is simple: What each takes during the course of the day he must exchange with the other. …
Dec 29, 2017: David Jones, <em>in festo nativitatis</em>
Dec 29, 2017: excerpt from my Sent folder: myth I still think my analysis in that essay is useful, but I wrote it before what happened in Charlottesville, and long before Roy Moore’s Senate …
Dec 29, 2017: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: 5 At several points in the poem Gawain is referred to as “Mary’s knight,” and it certainly seems that here she has been gracious in answering his …
Dec 28, 2017: David Jones, <em>dum medium silentium</em> [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="1200"]David Jones, Nativity with Beasts and Shepherds (1927)[/caption]
Dec 28, 2017: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: 4 At several points in the poem Gawain is referred to as “Mary’s knight,” and it certainly seems that here she has been gracious in answering his …
Dec 27, 2017: David Jones, Nativity with Shepherds
Dec 26, 2017: David Jones, Nativity
Dec 26, 2017: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: 3 Once the voice has quietly spoken, every knight must ride alone On the quest appointed him into the unknown: One to seek the healing waters, one the …
Dec 25, 2017: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: 2 All the visitor wants is to play a little “Christmas game” — but it appears that no one at Arthur’s court wants to play with him. Perhaps that’s …
Dec 25, 2017: A Child is Born [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“837”] Althea Willoughby, illustration for A Child Is Born by Henry …
Dec 24, 2017: Nativity in Ivory This carved ivory polyptych was made in the early 1300s in France. It shows scenes from the Life of Christ, with the Virgin and Child in the centre. …
Dec 24, 2017: Sir Gawain Is Rising The estimable Robert Macfarlane has helped to organize a group reading on Twitter of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising. The choice makes sense: it’s …
Dec 24, 2017: Craigie Aitchison, "Nativity and Angels"
Dec 24, 2017: Les Murray, "Animal Nativity" The Iliad of peace began when this girl agreed. Now goats in trees, fish in the valley suddenly feel vivid. Swallows flit in the stable as if a …
Dec 21, 2017: Pirate and Traveler [caption id=“attachment_34924” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”]Pirate and Traveler geographical board game (1906), …
Dec 20, 2017: over the bluff and not-so-far away I’ve been spending a few days of retreat and reflection at the amazing Laity Lodge, whose ministry of hospitality to writers, musicians, artists, and …
Dec 20, 2017: Eight Donkeys Huang Zhou (1997)
Dec 20, 2017: Gate [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“510”]門 (Mon, Gate), 2014, 140 cm by 100 cm., by Kanazawa Shōko[/caption]
Dec 19, 2017: Crowley, Pynchon, and the hippies In The Solitudes, the first volume of John Crowley’s Aegypt series, the series’ protagonist Pierce Moffett reflects: He had the idea that not many …
Dec 13, 2017: a medieval brooch Found with a metal detector in Llangattock-Vibon-Avel, Monmouthshire, in 2014. Donated by the finder to the Abergavenny Museum.
Dec 13, 2017: Vegetation of the Old and New Worlds [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“2000”] Tableau comparatif des altitudes de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Monde, …
Dec 13, 2017: Mars Royal Museums, Greenwich: A manuscript globe, hand painted and lettered, representing in 3-dimensional form the maps of Mars published in the American …
Dec 13, 2017: "folks" David Von Drehle writes: I say this with love: Folks in Alabama do loyalty and clan as well as anyone in America. That’s a virtue — up to a point. …
Dec 12, 2017: Faustus's good angel From my book Original Sin: A Cultural History: In 1974, the famous theatrical director John Barton staged [Christopher Marlowe's] Doctor Faustus for …
Dec 12, 2017: more marvelous puppetry The Tin Drum, at Shoreditch Town Hall
Dec 12, 2017: design wit
Dec 12, 2017: By day, a mild-mannered civil engineer ...
Dec 11, 2017: Moomins in winter How I would love to see this puppet show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Dec 5, 2017: the politics of long joy Ten years ago I briefly wrote an online column for the late lamented Books & Culture, and what follows wasthe first entry. It still seems …
Dec 5, 2017: the habitual passenger The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of …
Dec 4, 2017: keep the body receptive I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us: you don’t write the songs anyhow.... So if you’re lucky, you can keep the vehicle healthy and …
Dec 4, 2017: I'm listening Like many people of my generation, I did a lot of damage to my hearing in my youth, but I can still hear the difference between streamed music and …
Dec 3, 2017: autumn textures (central Texas edition)
Dec 2, 2017: Teresa Bejan on free speech I simply don’t understand Teresa Bejan’s argument here. To wit: While trigger warnings, safe spaces, and no-platforming grab headlines, poll …
Dec 1, 2017: unmanly emotion In my squandered youth I was a friend of Ian Hamilton, the biographer of Robert Lowell and J. D. Salinger and a justly renowned figure in London’s …
Nov 27, 2017: Design for Death
Nov 27, 2017: my response to Douthat's response to my answer to Douthat's question Ross Douthat, responding in part to this post of mine, writes: But it’s also possible that evangelical intellectuals and writers, and their friends in …
Nov 26, 2017: Joe Posnanski wises up About 15 or 20 years ago, I realized that talk radio was wrecking my writing process. I would be writing a column, and I would hear the talk radio …
Nov 26, 2017: leaving the Oasis I’m pretty sure my body has a peculiar electromagnetic field that wreaks havoc on the batteries of electronic devices. Not all of them: all of my …
Nov 25, 2017: Babette the Artist This is a slightly edited version of a post I published a long time ago at The American Conservative. The original has disappeared — removed, I …
Nov 23, 2017: on evidence and the life of the mind: a follow-up A twofold follow-up to yesterday’s post: Some people have written to ask me what my evidence is for the claims I made in that post. There’s a good …
Nov 22, 2017: Ray's Yellow Plane [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1920”] Ray’s Yellow Plane (Film Notes), 2013 by Rose Wylie. Photograph: …
Nov 22, 2017: where young evangelicals are headed A long, long time ago, Ross Douthat tweeted this: Reading this makes me wish for an @ayjay take on what he sees as the trends in young-evangelical …
Nov 21, 2017: Auden adapted The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews, Not to be born is the best for man; The second-best is a formal order, Tweet, tweet, for the …
Nov 21, 2017: Hazlitt hating In private life do we not see hypocrisy, servility, selfishness, folly, and impudence succeed, while modesty shrinks from the encounter, and merit is …
Nov 21, 2017: the enlightenment of books I think all the time about alternative ways of organizing my books, but am always thwarted by the fact that some are at home and some at the office. …
Nov 21, 2017: Verticals [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1600”]Anni Albers, With Verticals (1946)[/caption]
Nov 21, 2017: the poison of consequentialism Fromthis conversation: Rebecca Traister: ... the argument for keeping Clinton ... was in part that the power he wielded could theoretically shore up …
Nov 20, 2017: the casting game Everyone who loves movies plays the Casting Game: Who would you cast if you could make a movie based on this novel or that comic? My son and I play …
Nov 20, 2017: silver lining! As horrible as these revelations are about sexually predatory men at the highest levels of our culture, they serve as a reminder of what we Christians …
Nov 20, 2017: free speech for me ... This is a really good evisceration by Jesse Singal of some recent leftist takes on free speech on campus — it is accurate, incisive, and (to me) …
Nov 6, 2017: a law that applies always and everywhere People vary widely in their proclivities and needs alike, so it’s usually impossible to offer advice that applies equally well to everyone. But …
Oct 31, 2017: friendly critic or critical friend? The other day Rod Dreher referred to me as a “friendly critic” of the Benedict Option. I prefer to say that I’m an occasionally critical friend. I …
Oct 30, 2017: Catholicism and Protestantism The Christian doctrine which Protestantism emphasizes is that every human being, irrespective of family, class, or occupation, is unique before God; …
Oct 30, 2017: Vladimir Nabokov on his mother’s religion She found a deep appeal in the moral and poetical side of the Gospels, but felt no need in the support of any dogma. The appalling insecurity of an …
Oct 28, 2017: excerpt from my Sent folder: on Rod Dreher and the BenOp … I just don’t think the question of whether Rod is “the right messenger” for the Benedict Option is a fruitful one. Still less do I want …
Oct 25, 2017: reconsidering "evangelical" Once more about this word “evangelical.” A number of organizations, of various kinds, around the country are rejecting the label, for reasons laid out …
Oct 20, 2017: accountable As a Christian, I am accountable to God, and, as I understand things, that means I am also accountable to the teachings of Holy Scripture and to the …
Oct 13, 2017: the "decline of religion" Here’s something C. S. Lewis wrote in a 1946 essay called “The Decline of Religion”: The `decline of religion’ so often lamented (or welcomed) is held …
Oct 8, 2017: A plea for The Replicant Edit I do not believe that there are any exceptions to the rule that big-budget Hollywood action movies today — within which I include many SF and all …
Oct 4, 2017: a thesis about politics In almost all democratic countries today, the ruling party appears rudderless, spiritless, bereft of ideas; energy may be found only in opposition.
Oct 3, 2017: waveforms A recent Song Exploder episode features Rostam — best known for being in Vampire Weekend — talking about his song “Bike Dream.” Rostam …
Oct 2, 2017: making God To develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead contribute …
Sep 29, 2017: seasons This is a terrific post by Matt Thomas on living by the seasons: “when you think of things in terms of seasons instead of a single day, the …
Sep 28, 2017: politics Politics is the art of living together and being ‘just’ to one another — not of imposing a way of life, but of organizing a common life. The art of …
Sep 26, 2017: Oakeshott on education and culture A culture, particularly one such as ours, is a continuity of feelings, perceptions, ideas, engagements, attitudes and so forth, pulling in different …
Sep 25, 2017: guides to the current moment This is just a placeholder for a future, more-properly-thought-out reflection: since last November’s election I’ve noticed, in posts and …
Sep 25, 2017: the rad-trads and ecumenical hope Many typos and missed auto-errors now fixed; sorry about those I find myself thinking often about this 2014 essay by Pat Deneen, one of the smartest …
Sep 24, 2017: Bruce Chatwin at Sotheby's For me, his great gift – on the page and in person – was visual generosity. He made you see different things and look at things differently. It was …
Sep 23, 2017: Le Guin's golden age Between 1968 and 1974 Ursula K. Le Guin published • A Wizard of Earthsea • The Left Hand of Darkness • The Tombs of Atuan • The Lathe of Heaven • The …
Sep 22, 2017: you say Brexit, I say Euroapoculamus There are various methods applied to translate hapaxes that aren’t conventional words. In the case of “apoculamus” from the Satyricon, classicists can …
Sep 22, 2017: Dear Jenny Dear Jenny: The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once. For me, the hardest part comes first, getting something — …
Sep 21, 2017: Twitter: not actually a company Twitter [is] not actually a company, it’s a dysfunctional non-profit that accidentally provides a valuable service. — Tim Bray
Sep 20, 2017: "we" A brief follow-up to yesterday’s post: Another interesting element of Kevin Kelly’s rhetoric is his use of “we.” This is something I have written …
Sep 20, 2017: Jasper Johns New show in London.
Sep 20, 2017: Paul Nash [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“725”]Paul Nash, Night Landscape (1912)[/caption] More about Nash here.
Sep 19, 2017: two quotations on technological power A vigilant, eyes-wide-open embrace works much better. My intent in this book is to uncover the roots of digital change so that we can embrace them. …
Sep 17, 2017: forgiveness Meaning comes not from systems of thought but from stories, and the Jewish story is among the most unusual of all. It tells us that God sought to …
Sep 15, 2017: Dr. Dinosaur This is going to sound terrible, but Dr. Dinosaur always reminds me of David Bentley Hart. They have similar levels of self-confidence, they often …
Sep 13, 2017: litmus tests and revulsion In trying to explain to National Review why she doesn’t apply a religious litmus test to judicial nominees, Sen. Dianne Feinstein in fact …
Sep 12, 2017: Richard Thompson: creativity from resistance Many years ago now John Updike noted his response to much modern art: “we feel in each act not only a plenitude (ambition, intuition, expertise, …
Sep 11, 2017: you and I, dear reader If one reads through the mass of versified trash inspired by, for instance, the Lidice massacre, one cannot avoid the conclusion that what was really …
Sep 8, 2017: The Democrats' religious tests for public office I write, as a university president and a constitutional scholar with expertise on religious freedom and judicial appointments, to express concern …
Sep 8, 2017: Kurt Jackson paints the Cot
Sep 4, 2017: Altamira [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“2048”] “After Altamira, all is decadence.” — Picasso[/caption]
Sep 2, 2017: movement It’s a very odd experience to hold precisely the same theological positions that I have held for thirty years and be increasingly perceived by people …
Sep 1, 2017: nothing to see here A crack reporter for the Los Angeles Times will later write that they were arrested for charging the police, which couldn’t be less true. A Berkeley …
Aug 31, 2017: how to read biblical scholarship when you’re not a biblical scholar I’ve spent many unedifying hours reading books by biblical scholars in ways that have not been … ideal for my purposes. Today I’m going to …
Aug 30, 2017: at the edge of your range Yesterday afternoon I was listening to Fresh Air with Terry Gross, an episode featuring a replay of part of a 1988 interview with Otis Williams of the …
Aug 24, 2017: Raphael's apostles [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1128”] Ashmolean Museum, Oxford[/caption]
Aug 23, 2017: Another Week Ends (in Charlottesville) Well, for starters, I am (we are) still very much dealing with the local fallout. I’m referring to the incredibly kind teaching aide at my son’s …
Aug 22, 2017: my writing advice Given that I’ve written a book about reading, and a book about thinking, maybe I should write a book about writing? I don’t think so. …
Aug 18, 2017: agenda Reflecting on all the social and political chaos of the past week, journalists are asking — I see many of them asking — what effect the anger about …
Aug 18, 2017: Mermaid Avenue etc. Mermaid Avenue is a curious and delightful musical collaboration featuring Billy Bragg, Wilco, Natalie Merchant, and others playing the music of Woody …
Aug 17, 2017: guidance for my students (& others) As a new school year is about to begin, I’m going over the things I want to say to my first-year students — the ones I’m welcoming not just to …
Aug 17, 2017: animated Pelicans More Covers from Henning M. Lederer on Vimeo.
Aug 16, 2017: writing with the prospect of being hanged In the preface to his great — and I do mean great — book Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, Richard Hays comments on the peculiar and difficult …
Aug 16, 2017: the NYT's rhetoric of authority This Vulture profile of Michiko Kakutani is a little too inside-baseball for me — perhaps because Kakutani was never going to review one of my books — …
Aug 15, 2017: appropriate musical technology Very soon after Exile, so much technology came in that even the smartest engineer in the world didn’t know what was really going on. How come I could …
Aug 14, 2017: the freelancers’ merry-go-round Freddie deBoer is pretty tired of the freelance-writing merry-go-round: I just find, at this point, that the process of pitching, composing, …
Aug 13, 2017: the post-Christian culture wars In his great book God’s Long Summer, Charles Marsh demonstrates that the Civil Rights struggle in the Deep South was largely an intra-Christian …
Aug 9, 2017: ways and means of debate On the current debate among “small-o orthodox” Christians about sexuality and orthodoxy, I warmly recommend this post by Matthew Lee Anderson. It’s …
Aug 9, 2017: "this is what you no longer understand" We live in an era in which the overwhelming majority of filmgoers will have no experience of military life whatsoever, either as veterans or relatives …
Aug 8, 2017: the mystery of Google’s position Google’s position could be: All studies suggesting that men-taken-as-a-group and women-taken-as-a-group have measurably different interests or …
Aug 6, 2017: orthodoxy, heresy, and definitions Maybe this will help to clarify some matters concerning the definition of “orthodoxy.” Jamie Smith aroused a lot of outrage when he asked, “Do you …
Aug 5, 2017: addendum Quick addendum to this morning’s posts: I’ve already heard from several Catholic friends and emailers that my comments and caveats and recommendations …
Aug 5, 2017: “Why is this even a question?” Imagine a pacifist to a just-war theorist: “Jesus says, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ Jesus says, ‘Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes …
Aug 5, 2017: on sexuality and the grammar of orthodoxy Alastair Roberts says that Jamie Smith “den[ies] the place of the creed in teaching us Christian morality”; what Smith actually says is that “that …
Aug 2, 2017: life among the crackheads Damon Linker: After six months of unremitting chaos, lies, ignorance, trash-talking vulgarity, legislative failure, and credible evidence of a desire …
Aug 1, 2017: a brief quote and a brief thought John Stuart Mill once wrote of the English, “It appears to them unnatural and unsafe, either to do the thing which they profess, or to profess the …
Aug 1, 2017: Hommage à Bernanos [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Arcabas[/caption]
Aug 1, 2017: Sainte Anne instruisant Marie [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="2276"]Arcabas[/caption]
Aug 1, 2017: the supper at Emmaus [caption id="attachment_34532" align="aligncenter" width="700"]Arcabas[/caption]
Aug 1, 2017: “first epistemological impressions” God appeared very early to me. His hair was parted down the middle. I understood that we were related because he had made Adam in his own image, …
Aug 1, 2017: Perugino A post shared by National Portrait Gallery (@nationalportraitgallery) on Aug 1, 2017 at 1:52am PDT
Jul 31, 2017: London’s “nightmare scenario“ Before Britain voted last summer to leave the European Union, Crossrail was conceived for a London open to the world and speeding into the future. …
Jul 30, 2017: Karma Police, arrest ... well, pretty much everybody The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. …
Jul 28, 2017: bad academic writing? Inconceivable! This very essay gets published, with only slight variations, every year. I always wonder whether the people who publish them know how long precisely …
Jul 28, 2017: how being rich wrecks your soul As stratospheric salaries became increasingly common, and as the stigma of wildly disproportionate pay faded, the moral hazards of wealth were largely …
Jul 28, 2017: murdered by the sky I have a screenplay to write, several issues of comics, three lectures and a handful of other things. And it won’t stop raining. I’m trapped in this …
Jul 27, 2017: the Lego offices in London
Jul 26, 2017: impairment Trump hasn’t had a stroke or suffered a neurological disaster, and his behavior in the White House is no different from the behavior he manifested …
Jul 26, 2017: “an expression of what we are” “The pseudo-Gothic was much ridiculed, and nobody builds like that anymore. It is not authentic, not an expression of what we are, so it was said. To …
Jul 26, 2017: The Shadow knows I’ve already had some people asking me what I think about this review. The answer is: Not very much. Levinovitz says that Dreher’s and Esolen’s books …
Jul 26, 2017: the Old South and the New Left The influence, which has not been sufficiently noted, of Southern writers and historians on the American view of their history has been powerful. They …
Jul 26, 2017: FastMail update A quick follow-up to my previous post on ditching FastMail: After telling tech support that I had scheduled my account for deletion — FastMail doesn’t …
Jul 24, 2017: a homily to remember by Jessica Martin The preacher in most Anglican traditions works under strict time constraints: what one has to offer must be given in just a few minutes. When anything …
Jul 24, 2017: the wisdom of Xún Zǐ On his blog this morning, Rod Dreher publishes a fascinating letter from a reader in China, who suggests that the work of Xún Zǐ might be a good …
Jul 23, 2017: London Bridge Imagined reconstruction of old London Bridge; pencil drawing by Paul Stroud
Jul 23, 2017: Dick Whittington’s Cat There’s an argument on the Wikipedia page for the story of Dick Whittington and his cat about whether young Whittington could have heard the ringing …
Jul 23, 2017: "I have Calculated and the time is nigh" — Brenna Bychowski, via John Overholt on Twitter
Jul 22, 2017: Gog and Magog, Guildhall, London
Jul 22, 2017: faith We’re in a society that thinks entirely about faith, because of our sense of encroachment by Islam, and our defiance against that because we have our …
Jul 21, 2017: conservatives and health care In his influential “The Road to Serfdom,” the economist Friedrich Hayek argued that the state should “assist the individual in providing for those …
Jul 20, 2017: coda to my previous post Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining. — Saul Bellow, The …
Jul 20, 2017: writing by the always-wrong Please read the whole of this beautiful post by Sara Hendren — and then I want to reflect on its conclusion: I want a world full of disabled voices, …
Jul 19, 2017: Goodbye FastMail For several years now I’ve enjoyed using FastMail, a paid email service. Email is sufficiently important that I don’t mind paying for it, especially …
Jul 19, 2017: the healing to come The fact that the body, and locality and locomotion and time, now feel irrelevant to the highest reaches of the spiritual life is (like the fact that …
Jul 18, 2017: two minutes The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid …
Jul 18, 2017: free speech ≠ chronic stress The articles Barrett links to are mostly about chronic stress — the stress elicited by, for example, spending one’s childhood in an impoverished …
Jul 18, 2017: Quentin Blake’s birds
Jul 18, 2017: Cheri Smith, The Art Room Stone (2016); watercolour on paper, 504 × 666 mm
Jul 18, 2017: sacraments I often think I’m the only person in the world who cares about this, but … here’s a very nice piece on dystopian fiction that uses the terms …
Jul 17, 2017: Claremont-McKenna statement In the aftermath of the blockade on April 6, the College learned important lessons that must further strengthen our resolve. Our Athenaeum must …
Jul 17, 2017: Handy-Dandy Benedict Option Flowchart I see Rod is still engaging his critics, and now we’re into the deep weeds of just how important Obergefell is or is not for the future of …
Jul 17, 2017: civility rethought What contemporary theorists of civility can and should take away from [Roger] Williams is his recognition of the inevitable disagreeableness of …
Jul 16, 2017: late-career Papacy: two models It strikes me that the future of the Roman Catholic Church in my lifetime, and perhaps well beyond, may largely be determined by which of his two …
Jul 15, 2017: Sinaia Monastery [caption id=“attachment_34274” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”] Sinaia Monastery, Romania; interior of the Old …
Jul 14, 2017: a scholar "under attack" [Nancy MacLean] has continued this narrative of being “under attack” in various interviews, and most recently in a story in Inside Higher Ed, where …
Jul 13, 2017: Steven Pinker on Harvard’s proposed club ban 1. A university is an institution with circumscribed responsibilities which engages in a contract with its students. Its main responsibility is to …
Jul 12, 2017: the Great Red Spot Source: The Closest-Ever Look at Jupiter’s Great Red Spot - The Atlantic
Jul 12, 2017: blaming the media Now, more than half of Republicans think that colleges and universities have a negative effect on our culture.... Why? Certainly in part because …
Jul 12, 2017: universities under threat? Meanwhile, in my very large network of professional academics, almost no one recognizes any threat at all. Many, I can say with great confidence, …
Jul 11, 2017: sandwiches You learn a lot about people by noting what trivial things they obsess over, and today’s David Brooks column is a perfect example. Let me be really …
Jul 11, 2017: writ in water This man comes to Peili Square in #Lanzhou every morning (at least every morning I've been here) and paints poetry on the ground with water. This is …
Jul 10, 2017: no feelings may be hurt Suppose, I asked the students, an observant Jew has a florist shop. One day, a customer, who is also Jewish, comes to the shop to say she’s getting …
Jul 9, 2017: the shooting gallery Day and night addicted people come and go by the dozens through once-boarded windows. Some get high and collapse onto mattresses. Some come looking …
Jul 7, 2017: writerly priorities Usually when I write a post, it’s not because I think the subject is the most important thing going on in the world. Sometimes I write about a topic …
Jul 7, 2017: on not being excluded from a stupid narrative I wrote recently about not writing about politics, but I have been reminded this morning that such avoidance is more easily vowed than accomplished — …
Jul 7, 2017: Chief Justice John Roberts to the graduates of ninth grade Now commencement speakers are also expected to give some advice. They give grand advice, and they give some useful tips. The most common grand advice …
Jul 6, 2017: the weakness of religion I am by most measures a pretty deeply committed Christian. I am quite active in my church; I teach at a Christian college; I have written extensively …
Jul 6, 2017: Lake Waco Wetlands These wetlands aren’t on the lake as such, but are just off one inlet of it. They are remarkably beautiful and very little-known, even here in Waco. …
Jul 5, 2017: against epistocracy Only those narrow few who benefit from today’s system of elite rule could possibly see such rule as a good thing, or contemplate its further …
Jul 5, 2017: an image After Henrik Ibsen became a great man, a great artist, one of the most famous people in Europe, fans and scholars made their way to the places in …
Jun 29, 2017: why copy editors matter The ugly secret of newspapers is that copy editors do a great deal of what non-journalism people think reporters or other editors, with fancier …
Jun 29, 2017: [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“690”]Pfeiffer Chapel at Florida Southern College, designed by Frank Lloyd …
Jun 29, 2017: The Burial of the Dead The Christian church has another narrative, but we must teach it to ourselves over and over repeatedly, or the world will run away with it altogether. …
Jun 29, 2017: revolutionary products When Jobs announced the device, he called it “a revolutionary product”, one of those that comes along and “changes everything”. In many ways he was …
Jun 28, 2017: enough already I’m trying to make myself stop talking about politics, for the most part — I will make the very occasional exception for the two issues I am, …
Jun 28, 2017: the Gospel as narrative attractor What I am finding is that the gospel, as a narrative, seems to function as a kind of attractor for me while I am telling stories. Without deliberately …
Jun 28, 2017: Hogwarts School of Art and Music: A Refutation of Ross Douthat It’s rare for me to disagree with my friend Ross Douthat as strongly as I do when reading this column. Alas, Ross has fallen under the malign …
Jun 27, 2017: definition as poetry ABER, adj., sharp, acute, as an edge-tool; clear, well-defined, as a cloudless sky; eager, as a hungry fish at a bait; secure, as a knot on a line; …
Jun 27, 2017: Anglicans and the echo of history There are impulses at work in the Church, on both the right and the left, a desire to sweep away the tired old past and to start over again. This …
Jun 27, 2017: transcendent experience I became interested in ecstatic experiences when I was 24 and had a near-death experience. I fell off a mountain while skiing, dropped 30 feet, and …
Jun 27, 2017: books and bookness On artist’s books
Jun 26, 2017: China’s “fairy bridge” [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“700”] via archhunter.de[/caption]
Jun 26, 2017: Vengeance When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of …
Jun 26, 2017: how not to headline a story on religious freedom Earlier today I tweeted this: Lede: accurate Dek: misleading Hed: utterly ridiculous https://t.co/yyNnRLayvA pic.twitter.com/TmbRfJuBpf — Alan Jacobs …
Jun 26, 2017: Firestacks Julie Brook. Via Austin Kleon on Twitter, I think.
Jun 24, 2017: Plain Words — TypeToy
Jun 24, 2017: PROUNEN [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“936”]Ross Wolfe[/caption]
Jun 24, 2017: roots and crowns Before coming back I had been willing to allow the possibility — which one of my friends insisted on — that I already knew this place as well as I …
Jun 23, 2017: Jonathan Swift clarifies his purpose I I hope no reader imagines me so weak to stand up in the defence of real Christianity, such as used in primitive times (if we may believe the authors …
Jun 23, 2017: Fuschia and Steerpike [caption id=“attachment_30159” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”]Mervyn Peake[/caption]
Jun 22, 2017: a tribute I should think, computing moderately, that 15 angels, several hundreds of ordinary women, many philosophers, a heap of truly wise & kind mothers, …
Jun 22, 2017: inward isolation Are we to live in an age in which every mechanical facility for communication between man and man is multiplied ten-thousandfold, only that the inward …
Jun 19, 2017: walking apart, walking together When Christian communities decide that they must, for whatever reason, walk apart, then the question that they should all be prepared to answer is …
Jun 16, 2017: two quotations on the shape of lives The problem of meaning is created by limits, by being just this, by being merely this. The young feel this less strongly. Although they would agree, …
Jun 16, 2017: a useful bit of perspective for the fururists I’m not convinced that a civilization that is struggling to cure male-pattern baldness is ready to take on the Grim Reaper. — Maciej Ceglowski
Jun 16, 2017: Malcolm is ten years old today
Jun 15, 2017: Las Conchas Trail A mile or so down the road from one of the most spectacular things I have ever seen — theValles Caldera, the massive caldera of an ancient volcano, …
Jun 15, 2017: Palo Duro Canyon So you’re driving through the panhandle of Texas with the land flat as a bedsheet as far as the eye can see, and then all of sudden the ground …
Jun 15, 2017: Pelphase, Interphase, Gusphase “Now,” he said, swiveling his head to look at his pupils, “here is how the cycle works.” He marked off three arcs. “We …
Jun 15, 2017: Augustine and Pelagius No doubt the spiritual and moral standards for the Christian life had relaxed quite a bit since the days of persecution, when even the hint of …
Jun 15, 2017: the public interrogation of Tim Farron Farron’s religious beliefs may be publicly interrogated, even if he has an immaculate history of quarantining them lest they contaminate his …
Jun 14, 2017: Trump and Constitutional Law This is a great idea for a podcast: What the Trump presidency, with its manifold eccentricities, can teach us about Constitutional law. After all, on …
Jun 14, 2017: The Gospel of Taylorism in Truro Via Archbishop Cranmer I learn that the Anglican Diocese of Truro in Cornwall is looking for a new employee. The good Archbishop is exercised by this …
Jun 13, 2017: The long slow work of combatting ignorance As our cultural elites lose even the most elementary biblical literacy, this is going to happen more and more often: reading the Bible-saturated …
Jun 12, 2017: thought, speech, writing A continual negotiation was going on between thought, speech and writing, thought having as a rule the worst of it. Speech was humble and creeping, …
May 30, 2017: from the Galloway Hoard [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“700”]the Galloway Hoard[/caption] Another item of note is a gold pin …
May 29, 2017: Sports commentary follies, 1/3749 As you can tell from my title, I am planning to provide an exhaustive inventory of dumb things that sports pundits and commentators say. I will begin …
May 27, 2017: from the Staffordshire Hoard Stunning.
May 27, 2017: Hypocrisy? Darryl Hart says I have accused my fellow evangelicals of “hypocrisy” in voting for Trump. Well, no. I noted a major shift, from the 1990s to now, in …
May 27, 2017: Ravilious The upcoming Eric Ravilious exhibition at the Towner Art Gallery will apparently include his wonderful calendars.
May 26, 2017: Ware on Steinberg Saul Steinberg, “The South” (1955). Chris Ware on Steinberg here.
May 26, 2017: building walls What we have here, in other words, is a piece of pornography written in order to stimulate the political libidos of paranoiacs who find their Twitter …
May 25, 2017: Hud [caption width=“470” id=“attachment_30080” align=“aligncenter”] Japanese movie poster, from Voices of East …
May 25, 2017: "the social obligation to be happy" Modern society, as a whole, tends toward a sort of institutional optimism, espousing Hegelian notions of history as progress and encouraging us to …
May 25, 2017: goonery It’s dismaying to see some conservatives defending or making excuses for Gianforte’s assault — I guess they haven’t been paying attention to the …
May 23, 2017: the wrong side So today I want to speak about why we chose to remove these four monuments to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, but also how and why this process can …
May 22, 2017: "the spoils of death's conquered empire" Since, therefore, we see in [Jesus Christ] qualities so human that they stand in no way apart from the common weakness of mortals, and qualities so …
May 22, 2017: Gary Snyder on poetry Poetry as a tool, a net or trap to catch and present; a sharp edge; a medicine; or the little awl that unties knots. — "Poetry, Community, & …
May 21, 2017: the smell of strawmen burning I enjoy talking with Rusty Reno — as I did just yesterday, here in Waco! — but he is, I have learned over the years, a frustrating person to argue …
May 20, 2017: populism and conservatism Bret Stephens is so, so right about this: “Populism is not conservatism, which by definition entails resistance to public whims. Conservatives who …
May 20, 2017: "a benevolent green nationalism" This, by Paul Kingsnorth from his new book, speaks for my politics about as completely as anything I’ve read in a long time: Some of the new …
May 20, 2017: now that's a true writer After my wife goes to her office, a day of uninterrupted work yawns ahead. Musicians wake up knowing what they want to do each day: they want to play …
May 19, 2017: comprehension The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension …
May 19, 2017: the best emoluments clause We consider it an impious deed to take away anything from the teachers of our youths, since they should rather be encouraged in their magnificent work …
May 10, 2017: social dissolution “If the president continues to act in this way, we shall rapidly descend into a terrifying state of social dissolution. The rule of law will …
May 10, 2017: taboos “If you’ve read Walkaway (or my other books), you know that I’m not squeamish about taboos, even (especially) my own,” says Cory Doctorow. …
May 10, 2017: 15 hours Russell Berman tweets: “15 hours later, not one of the top 4 House Republican leaders have issued a statement on the president’s firing of …
May 9, 2017: Lucretius annotated [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“2000”] De Rerum Natura and some lovely marginal comments[/caption]
May 8, 2017: on dialogue and normalization You hear a lot these days from people who refuse to engage in dialogue with others who hold certain views because to converse with them would be to …
May 3, 2017: remix? culture? “Everyone can see it,” she told me. “It’s identical except for the signature. I was very shocked. Someone just took my hard work.” Devins, however, is …
May 3, 2017: all hat, no cattle T. S. Eliot and his sister Marion, during Eliot’s 1958 visit to the U.S. with his new wife Valerie. At one point in the trip they visited …
May 2, 2017: life in Texas Just enjoying my usual tableside refresher here as Teri returns from H-E-B, where she bought another case of this life-giving substance. When she was …
May 1, 2017: The BCP and me I’m pretty happy with my biography of the Book of Common Prayer. It has some typos and other embarrassing errors that didn’t get caught in the editing …
Apr 27, 2017: Michael and Jemele Just for the record, this old socially conservative white guy thinks Michael Smith and Jemele Hill are the best thing that’s ever happened to …
Apr 27, 2017: hurt the people first Among the many takes I’ve read on yesterday’s ESPN layoffs, the most incisive, I think, is this one from Tom Ley: And so today’s layoffs seem to …
Apr 26, 2017: the great distillery tour! My former student Gabriel RiCharde is now working for the pride of Waco, Balcones Distilling, and today he gave me a tour. It was really fascinating. …
Apr 26, 2017: ANNOUNCEMENT: The Charles Murray Award for Inciting the Hatred of People Who Have Never Read a Word You've Written and Never Will This year’s winner: Rod Dreher!
Apr 26, 2017: the absolutizing of fright Farhad Manjoo: In Silicon Valley, current events tend to fade into the background. The Sept. 11 attacks, the Iraq war, the financial crisis and every …
Apr 25, 2017: ANGELS ANGELS ANGELS ANGELS ANGELS Back in the day (i.e. the 1970s) when I worked in a bookstore, it was fairly common for people to come in and ask, “Do you have Billy …
Apr 25, 2017: Jimmy Wales and journalism “If we have a community guiding the work and we have people who are paying to be monthly supporters we can do the numbers and say, well for this many …
Apr 21, 2017: Church of the Loaded Arms Nothing says “Come unto me, all ye who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” like an armed police force.
Apr 20, 2017: Baylor's nonexistent cliff I’m not happy with this story about Baylor’s new president, Linda Livingstone, by my friend Ruth Graham, which is an unfamiliar experience for me …
Apr 19, 2017: travel Always rather embarrassing to wonder what one gets out of travel to make up for its privations, except that it requires so much more imagination to …
Apr 16, 2017: conservation [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“481”] The Stavelot Triptych at the Morgan Library (via John Overholt on …
Apr 16, 2017: chicks [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“800”] by An Lin[/caption]
Apr 16, 2017: Port Glasgow
Apr 16, 2017: Cookham
Apr 14, 2017: choices From all the irrefutable testimonies of human misery there is no logically sound path to the great heavenly Physician; from the fact that we are sick …
Feb 28, 2017: Lenten silence Friends, there will be no posts here (or on Text Patterns, or on Twitter) until the Easter season. Blessings to you all.
Feb 27, 2017: the Map of Peace A post shared by British Library (@britishlibrary) on Feb 27, 2017 at 5:58am PST
Feb 27, 2017: Barth: great hope and little hopes Hope seizes, or rather is seized by, the promise of the future. To that extent, it is the great hope, the expectation of the eternal life, which has …
Feb 25, 2017: "the death of gods is a chain reaction" A mythology, if it is to be effective, must be all-encompassing. The death of gods is a chain reaction; each drags another down into the abyss. …
Feb 24, 2017: advice to teachers Just a quick follow-up to my last post: So you’re a teacher, and your students don’t meet your expectations. They’re not well-informed. They know …
Feb 24, 2017: excerpt from my Sent folder: kids these days The percentage of young people willing to entertain a genuinely countercultural Gospel has always been small. It hasn’t changed in my 35 years …
Feb 24, 2017: hi
Feb 23, 2017: one more note on motivated reasoning This is something I’ve been worrying over, specifically as a Christian, for a long time: … It seems to me that the people who are really …
Feb 23, 2017: on spears, throats, and motivated reasoning Some really good words from Matthew Loftus here: I want the BenOp to succeed because I do think that Christian communities in the West will need to …
Feb 21, 2017: hate + stupidity Christians who want religious liberty only for Christians are managing the remarkable twofer of maximal uncharitableness and maximal stupidity. They …
Feb 19, 2017: unfair, unbalanced, and afraid I admire British journalism and have always thought American papers should be more like the British. But it is startling to see how vicious the New …
Feb 17, 2017: Eno's rough drafts An iTunes playlist of rough drafts contains 4412 tracks; the most recent of them, something called “Jubilant Hair Sad,” was made just the night …
Feb 16, 2017: good to go My social media are either deleted or shut off in some way, but it’s not hermitage, because friends and comrades know how to reach me. I’ve just …
Feb 15, 2017: on narcissism Allen Frances writes: Fevered media speculation about Donald Trump’s psychological motivations and psychiatric diagnosis has recently encouraged …
Feb 15, 2017: Dust The first two books of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy offered some of the most vividly, magnificently imagined fantasy I’ve …
Feb 14, 2017: two descriptions of the university It is not that I wanted to know a great deal, in order to acquire what is now called expertise, and which enables one to become an expert-tease to …
Feb 13, 2017: resourceful Christianity Rod Dreher has been asking lately whether various Christian traditions possess the resources that need to practice a genuinely countercultural form of …
Feb 13, 2017: Tom Waits 15 years ago, me today Austin Chronicle: Where are you, in an office or a small room fielding calls? Tom Waits: I’m out on my own recognizance in the day room, gluing …
Feb 12, 2017: current status
Feb 11, 2017: Mr. Penumbra in Japan [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“854”]Japanese cover for Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour …
Feb 11, 2017: good times in Waco I live in Waco, Texas, which is a relatively small city and a relatively poor city, a city with its share of problems both historic and current — but …
Feb 10, 2017: What We’re Fighting For If we choose to believe in a morally diminished America, an America that pursues its narrow selfish interests and no more, we can take that course and …
Feb 10, 2017: dealing with lies Here is what we are supposed to do: rebut every single lie. Insist moreover that each lie is retracted — and journalists in press conferences should …
Feb 10, 2017: productive smudging “Another thing he talked about that’s actually useful, and this is my favorite one, he said that blackboards smudge productively, which is just a …
Feb 10, 2017: New Atheist axioms The progress of science will make religious belief less and less plausible; that is, science cannot develop in ways that would make religious belief …
Feb 7, 2017: the experience of free will I think it’s generally known that one wing of the New Atheism, led primarily by Jerry Coyne, has made the denial of free will a major cause. Well, so …
Feb 6, 2017: theatrical memories Recently, Teri and I have been watching both Victoria and The Crown — an interesting pair of experiences which I may say something about in a future …
Feb 6, 2017: The Christians of Nigeria A terrifying and tragic story from the Spectator: Nigerians have their own view as to what is really going on: a suspicion fuelled again as I leave …
Jan 31, 2017: judging judges It has long been frustrating to me that the only criterion by which Americans — almost without exception — evaluate judges is: Did he or she make …
Jan 31, 2017: Henri Nouwen’s Weakness Was His Strength Initially Nouwen looks like a poster boy for activism. Climbing the ladder to the highest echelons of the ivy-covered ivory tower, jetting around the …
Jan 30, 2017: a necessary coinage Drumpfengeworfenheit: The condition of finding oneself “thrown” into Donald Trump’s America.
Jan 30, 2017: Jeremy Begbie on Roger Lundin He cared about words – or better put, he cared for people through words: his students, colleagues and readers. That was why he labored so hard to find …
Jan 30, 2017: Holocaust [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1704”] proposal for a Holocaust Memorial in London, by Anish Kapoor and …
Jan 29, 2017: Krazy Kat [caption id=“attachment_29851” align=“aligncenter” width=“545”] Chris Ware on George Herriman[/caption]
Jan 29, 2017: Pope Francis and Donald Trump: the same man? There’s a very unfortunate moment in Jason Horowitz’s account of the conflict between Pope Francis and the Knights of Malta: Now, suddenly, [Francis] …
Jan 29, 2017: "Where would we go?" I look at them and I see us, sitting in that strangely-lit room with the Immigration and Naturalization Service officers who processed us and to whom, …
Jan 28, 2017: you know who you are It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your …
Jan 28, 2017: a lesson from France Not content to expose [Eric Zemmour's] exaggerations and fabrications, their instinct — a deep one on the French left since the days of the Popular …
Jan 27, 2017: idolatry Christians have a word to describe the worship of that which is not God: idolatry. Idolatry, of course, can be a quite impressive form of devotion. …
Jan 26, 2017: Doomsdumb Doomsday Clock Moves Closer to Midnight, Signaling Concern Among Scientists - The New York Times. It moves! All by itself! (I wrote about this little …
Jan 26, 2017: Donald Trump wants to build a wall here The Rio Grande at Big Bend National Park
Jan 25, 2017: English Weather
Jan 24, 2017: a dialogue on punching Frankly, I’m glad Richard Spencer got punched in the face, and I hope that happens to people like him every. single. day. Seriously? You’re okay with …
Jan 24, 2017: the Pevensies and puberty A comment on “the problem of Susan” and more particularly this post by Adam Roberts: My thesis: None of the Pevensies goes through puberty …
Jan 24, 2017: The London Necropolis [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1000”]The London Necropolis[/caption]
Jan 24, 2017: want to know what "begging the question" means? Here you go: So most likely when Trump refers to “the media” as the most dishonest people on the planet, he refers only to professional journalists. …
Jan 24, 2017: The Evenings [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1567”]wonderful cover design[/caption]
Jan 23, 2017: George Mackley [embed]thingsmagazine.tumblr.com/post/1562…[/embed]
Jan 23, 2017: everybody got some The black bloc guy got a moment he’ll treasure for life. Richard Spencer got an aching jaw, but he also got some more Twitter followers, his name in …
Jan 23, 2017: youth and age Among other pleasing errours of young minds, is the opinion of their own importance. He that has not yet remarked, how little attention his …
Jan 23, 2017: interviewing Eno “I just don’t want to talk about history. All that shit! You can find all this in other interviews I’ve done. I’ve been 40 years talking about other …
Jan 22, 2017: pity the poor referee There were so many bad calls in the Arsenal-Burnley match I just sweated through that I can’t figure out whether Burnley got hosed. Certainly …
Jan 22, 2017: gonna be a fabulous four years Media: We are outraged by the behavior of the Trump administration! Trump administration: We are outraged by your completely biased and unwarranted …
Jan 21, 2017: Reading Calvin Lately I’ve been trying to read John Calvin, and I’m struggling. When I was in graduate school I read the whole of the Institutes, and as I recall I …
Jan 20, 2017: a helpful reminder of the way we were Imagine if this happened today: Hundreds of young Americans—white, black, and Hispanic—disappear from their everyday lives and secretly form urban …
Jan 20, 2017: sage quotation for the new political era Did you ever feel that there was a net cast over us and we were all held in this net by a hegemony of spiders as yet unidentified? — R. A. Lafferty, …
Jan 19, 2017: no pleasant harmony Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict …
Jan 19, 2017: fighting Kruse: Michael, in your book, and other places, too, he has talked about how much he enjoys fighting. And he certainly fought a lot of people …
Jan 18, 2017: A Lover's Question One of the wonderful things about the music of the late 1950s is the way that it can blend the genres and cultures we’re used to. Elvis’s debt to …
Jan 18, 2017: performative anxiety If you say that the election of Donald Trump to the presidency is an existential threat to this nation, or at least to the more vulnerable within it, …
Jan 16, 2017: fake news, 1902 edition A doctored photo claiming to show the moment that the campanile of St. Mark’s in Venice collapsed. Reproduced all over the world.
Jan 14, 2017: soccer Saturday I’m looking forward to the Gunners' inevitable draw with Swansea this morning (presumably with a Giroud equalizer in extra time). I don’t …
Jan 13, 2017: mea maxima culpa I spent a bit of time and energy trying to convince my Catholic friends that Pope Francis’s apparent pastoral relaxation of the rules for …
Jan 11, 2017: autópsia [embed]50watts.tumblr.com/post/1557…[/embed]
Jan 10, 2017: translation (2) “Everything is political” = “Everything is political when people whose politics I dislike try to talk about something other than …
Jan 10, 2017: translation “You may not have said it, but you implied it” = “I continue to insist that you believe this nasty thing even though I have no …
Jan 10, 2017: The Tree [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1240”]Wistman’s Wood[/caption] In the last chapter, Fowles relates a …
Jan 8, 2017: a thought on Endo's Silence (a comment on this post by Adam Roberts) … let me just offer one thought about Silence (the novel — like you, I haven’t seen the …
Jan 8, 2017: Horizontorium John Jesse Barker after a design by William Mason (active 1822–1860), Horizontorium, 1832. Lithograph. — Graphic Arts Collection, Princeton (via John …
Jan 7, 2017: the circle
Jan 7, 2017: how to find
Jan 7, 2017: catalog card
Jan 7, 2017: rosie roses [embed]fromwithinabook.tumblr.com/post/1544…[/embed]
Jan 7, 2017: John Fuller This is a really lovely profile of the poet and critic John Fuller, whom I admire greatly in both of his roles, on the occasion of his eightieth …
Jan 6, 2017: jon klassen [embed]jonklassen.tumblr.com/post/1554…[/embed]
Jan 6, 2017: Valhalla [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1920”]Anselm Kiefer[/caption]
Jan 5, 2017: turf The message is clear. The only web site that you can trust to last and have your interests at heart is the web site with your name on it. — Manton …
Jan 5, 2017: the limits of pluralism Much of the history of religion in America has been written to emphasize the triumph of pluralism. Perhaps rightly so. That has meant, however, that …
Jan 2, 2017: my Premier League mid-season awards Goalkeeper: David de Gea Central defender: David Luiz (can't believe I'm saying this) Fullback/wingback: James Milner Defensive midfielder: N'Golo …
Jan 1, 2017: reading Perlstein Here’s a typical passage from Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge — and apologies in advance for being too lazy to type it out. This one concerns …
Dec 30, 2016: The Glass House, fogged [caption id=“attachment_29714” align=“aligncenter” width=“592”] by Fujiko Nakaya[/caption]
Dec 29, 2016: monastic warfare Satan, issuing orders at nightfall to his foul precurrers, was rumoured to dispatch to capital cities only one junior fiend. This solitary demon, the …
Dec 27, 2016: how the Premier League has changed Jürgen Klopp
Dec 26, 2016: what Twitter does to journalism Earlier today I tweeted: “Gap that needs to be filled: the journalism that journalists ignore while spending all day every day insulting each other on …
Dec 26, 2016: we have to talk about Mesut Mesut Özil creates an impossible situation for his manager. He can go for long periods — and by “long periods” I mean several weeks — in a kind of …
Dec 24, 2016: a theology of culture Another photo from that NYT story on the restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece. I have long dreamed of writing a comprehensive theology of culture — one …
Dec 24, 2016: restoring the Ghent Altarpiece Story in the New York Times. Click the photo for a larger image.
Dec 23, 2016: reading cybernetics old-school When I discovered, as I related in a Text Patterns post, than Thomas Pynchon claimed to have been influenced, as a young writer, by Norbert …
Dec 23, 2016: the problem is ... 4-year-old was screaming on our walk, so I gave him my notebook and pen and told him to write down his problem. [Translation: THE PROBLEM IS NOT ME] A …
Dec 21, 2016: a listening Pope? Speaking as an interested outsider to recent intra-Catholic disputes, I find this article completely incomprehensible. Gaillardetz tells us that Pope …
Dec 21, 2016: re-litigating the Reformation With the 500th anniversary of the Reformation coming on, I’m already seeing pieces — they annoy me too much for me to link to them — that see …
Dec 21, 2016: Hauerwas on Mary If [Charles] Taylor's characterization of our time as empty - a characterization I suspect many of us will find forces a self-recognition we would …
Dec 21, 2016: now this is a crèche [caption id=“attachment_29635” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”]Garry Wills on Neapolitan crèches[/caption]
Dec 20, 2016: dependence God's gift at Christmas is relationship, not just another human relationship but relation to God the Father by standing where Jesus stands, standing …
Dec 20, 2016: Gazzetta Football Italia
Dec 20, 2016: a friendly reminder Even in the beginnings of this one and only Church of God there arose certain rifts, which the Apostle strongly condemned. But in subsequent centuries …
Dec 20, 2016: ecumenism in action The prayer shared, and said in earnest unison, by writers for Catholic and conservative evangelical websites: We thank you, Lord, that we are not as …
Dec 19, 2016: story Every few days, it seems, I come across that ridiculous claim that there are seven kinds of story. Anybody who knows anything knows that there’s …
Dec 17, 2016: against consequentialism an unspoken Advent sermon, of sorts In my recent involvement in the ongoing debate about sexuality and the church, I’ve heard a number of people argue …
Dec 13, 2016: "This is the prayer of Christian hope" Euthanasia and physician assisted suicide are not a “solution” to suffering, but an elimination of the suffering human being. It is therefore the …
Dec 12, 2016: "the stately monuments of superstition" Adams never tired of quoting the supreme phrase of his idol Gibbon, before the Gothic cathedrals: "I darted a contemptuous look on the stately …
Dec 11, 2016: <em>The Hobbit</em> as prequel Prequels (and reboots) also threaten to over-explain: learning just how Anakin Skywalker turned to the Dark Side of the Force or how Bilbo ended up …
Dec 11, 2016: Light Masonry [caption id=“attachment_29602” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”]Jason Bruges, Light Masonry[/caption]
Dec 11, 2016: fences and funnels I haven’t said anything about American politics since the election, largely because I don’t think there’s much to say. I am simply waiting to …
Dec 11, 2016: bad soccer I’ve read a number of stories this morning about last night’s MLS Cup final between Seattle and Toronto, but none of them have said the …
Dec 11, 2016: Dash Shaw, map [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“534”]Dash Shaw, Boney Borough Map from “Body World,” 2007, pencil and ink …
Dec 11, 2016: Perry Steindel, map [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“864”]Perry Steindel, Untitled, 1965, pen and pencil on paper[/caption]
Dec 6, 2016: The Feast of St. Nicholas [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“480”] Via Rod Dreher[/caption]
Dec 5, 2016: why it matters I’m sure I haven’t read all the responses to my recent ecclesiastic posts, but of the ones that I have read, (a) all of them have been critical, and …
Dec 5, 2016: a response to replies to responses to ... Thanks to an email from a friend, I just discovered that I am part of an ongoing controversy in ways that I knew nothing about. I’m tempted just to …
Dec 5, 2016: on wheat and weeds In the early 1950s Helmut Thielicke preached a series of sermons at St. Michael’s Church in Hamburg on the parables of Jesus. They have been collected …
Dec 5, 2016: "such an obvious thought" All you then have to do is to keep out of his mind the question “If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should …
Dec 5, 2016: the church and the present moment What is the ‘present moment’ of the Church’s life like? Well, it is all too like the response of the disciples in Jesus’ lifetime. How very tempting, …
Dec 5, 2016: who I am Matthew’s narrative does not allow the believer — in particular the articulate and educated believer, the teacher, the expert — any fixed answer to …
Dec 5, 2016: Beautiful Minecraft [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1280”]images from the book Beautiful Minecraft[/caption]
Dec 2, 2016: common ground Well, at least we’ve found one thing Democratic and Republican leaders can agree on: anti-Semitism is no big deal. I’m sure Steve Bannon …
Nov 29, 2016: a brief response to Andrew Wilson I’m not altogether sure why Andrew Wilson includes me in this post — he says, “I’ve deliberately avoided talking about … the question of whether those …
Nov 28, 2016: Travelin This is the tombstone next to my dad’s at Hopewell Cemetery in Hanceville, Alabama.
Nov 28, 2016: The Prayer Duel “Well, there is precedent,” Pravuil said. “I mean, if you look at it in a certain way.” I asked him what he meant. He said, “Elijah and the priests of …
Nov 28, 2016: leagues [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500”]Mahendra Singh[/caption]
Nov 26, 2016: the more things change... The night of May 7, after a chase that began in Watts and ended some 50 blocks farther north, two Los Angeles policemen, Caucasians, succeeded in …
Nov 25, 2016: the history of flight — CABINET // Through the Vaste Spaces of the Aire: An Interview with Clive Hart
Nov 25, 2016: George Widener The art of George Widener
Nov 24, 2016: easy answers to hard problems Now, this is comical, though in a sad sort of way. The post is based on the Moral Foundations Theory Framework, which posits that there are several …
Nov 24, 2016: thanks to Vincent Lloyd … for two important reflections on the possibilities and perils of the black Christian intellectual: here and here. What both of these pieces …
Nov 23, 2016: save these for later via Waxy
Nov 22, 2016: The Guardian plumbs the depths (I hope) I gotta say, Rod is right: The Guardian has published a guide to conservative websites that … I mean, seriously, I have no words for this. Let’s put …
Nov 22, 2016: Dialogue “I just don’t believe that this should even be a question!” “Neither do I, and neither do many who live to see such times. But that is not for us to …
Nov 22, 2016: On False Teachers: Bleat the Third Steve Holmes recently wrote of his experience defending the traditionalist view on homosexuality at the Society for Biblical Literature conference: I …
Nov 22, 2016: The Sacraments and the Honey of Love: A Second Bleat In one of his posts on the possibility of a Benedict Option for Christians, Rod Dreher made a really, really important point: This is not the fault of …
Nov 22, 2016: Anglicanism and Eucharistic Discipline: A Bleat For some time now I’ve had reflections on theological and pastoral controversies — some in the Anglican world, some the evangelical, some in …
Nov 21, 2016: so it's like this For years now you’ve been hanging out with your friends at a nice little bar, a place you’re all comfortable with. It’s not perfect; it can get a …
Nov 21, 2016: English as she is spoke The text of a Colorado ballot initiative: Shall there be an amendment to the Colorado constitution concerning the removal of the exception to the …
Nov 20, 2016: social media strategery All partisan logic is precisely the same: Strategy 1: Practice deflection by whataboutism. When somebody points out that your side has done something …
Nov 16, 2016: thought for today American politics is now nothing more than rival assertions of tribal identities. There are no Americans; there are no human beings; there are only …
Nov 14, 2016: wisdom for Christians from Jacques Maritain It is not enough for a population or a section of the population to have Christian faith and be docile to the ministers of religion in order to be in …
Nov 13, 2016: construction [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]Louis Lozowick[/caption]
Nov 12, 2016: thanks for the Ed's up From Ed Yong’s newsletter: After the last newsletter, one reader wrote in asking me to stop linking to political pieces. He felt it …
Nov 12, 2016: midnight [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500”]Frederick Ardley[/caption]
Nov 11, 2016: just a reminder I almost never look at the replies to my public Twitter account. I only need to hear so many times that I’m a stupid reactionary, or, well — the …
Nov 11, 2016: flipping the script Donald Trump spends eighteen months stoking the fires of racial and ethnic resentment and now says that it is time to bind up the nation’s …
Nov 10, 2016: a curious absence, explained This long and characteristically thoughtful post by Alastair Roberts — you should read it all, it covers so many important issues, some of which I …
Nov 10, 2016: Brother Bill and those who scorned him Annie Karni in Politico: But in general, Bill Clinton’s viewpoint of fighting for the working class white voters was often dismissed with a hand wave …
Nov 9, 2016: thoughts, mostly in tweet-like form The Bush/Clinton era in American political history is definitively over. Reaganism is over. It is easier to shame people out of admitting how …
Nov 9, 2016: looking ahead If the political and media establishments were merely out of touch with much of the country, that would be one thing. But it's worse than that. They …
Nov 8, 2016: to everything there is a season And we are about to commence the season of recriminations. The election won’t end anything except a certain form of speculation; all the hatreds …
Nov 7, 2016: please pause in your praise of Janet Reno Reno was no drama queen, but she participated in a number of dramas: the Waco siege of the Branch Davidians, the Oklahoma City bombing, the …
Nov 7, 2016: election-eve selfie I shall not cease from mental fight Nor shall this axe sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In the wreckage of this land
Nov 7, 2016: the bigger killer: Joseph Stalin or George W. Bush? [caption id=“attachment_29406” align=“aligncenter” width=“908”]here[/caption]
Nov 7, 2016: Wesley Hill on being an Anglican I view my Anglican confession of justification by faith as, in this sense, a gift to the Church Catholic. I want, precisely as an Anglican, to …
Nov 7, 2016: the invisible regime Ross Douthat is trying this morning to bring some perspective to American liberals: Liberal analysis of right needs to recognize ways in which a …
Nov 5, 2016: the philosopher as troll Positionality is the gathering of the drive’s plundering of the constancy of the orderable, which itself is solely imposed upon such that it would …
Nov 5, 2016: self-portrait [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“1074”] via Beware the Bibliophilia[/caption]
Nov 5, 2016: Do you suppose ... … (I wonder as I read this) First Things would ever run an interview with a former Catholic who had become an Episcopalian? Actually, I …
Nov 5, 2016: unlikely bedfellows It’s interesting — and, to me, encouraging — to note how much overlap there is between the critiques of the existing order embodied in the …
Nov 4, 2016: Parents fear that religion will make their children outcasts If you decline to pass your religious beliefs on to your children because you think such beliefs could hurt them socially then there is no meaningful …
Nov 4, 2016: no need for explanations As I’ve been saying for months now, I plan on Election Day to do what I’ve done since 1992: vote for an independent Presidential candidate — …
Nov 3, 2016: Dark Sky, you used to be decent
Nov 3, 2016: surrealism
Nov 3, 2016: Dylan paints I tried to create the two dimensional image using a mathematical system. At times, the background and foreground converge. Natural scenery is always …
Nov 2, 2016: in a way?
Nov 2, 2016: The Feast of All Souls It was Odilo’s stroke of genius to place his new holiday as the matching bookend of All Saints’. For ... there are suffering souls who depend on the …
Nov 2, 2016: Baylor University - Message from Dr. David E. Garland Many journalists continue to demand the release of the "Pepper Hamilton Report." You should know, while the lawyers from Pepper Hamilton gave …
Nov 1, 2016: Habitat 316/D [caption id=“attachment_29345” align=“aligncenter” width=“900”]here[/caption]
Nov 1, 2016: Andy Baio with some useful reminders Last week, Twitter announced they’re shutting down Vine. Twitter, itself, may be acquired and changed in some terrible way. It’s not hard to imagine a …
Nov 1, 2016: the story of All Saints' Day Peter Brown, that great historian of early Christianity, has given the most cogent explanation for the arising of the cult of the saints in the late …
Oct 27, 2016: bookstores, illustrated by Bob Eckstein — Lithub
Oct 25, 2016: P. D. James [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“800”]P. D. James by Michael Taylor (1996), National Portrait Gallery, …
Oct 25, 2016: Kandinsky [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“737”]via Biblipeacay[/caption]
Oct 24, 2016: heresy and schism I believe that it is in the question of schism rather than heresy that the key to the problem of the disunity of Christendom is to be found. For …
Oct 24, 2016: counting my blessings The very best thing about having been born into an economically marginal family in Birmingham, Alabama, having been raised largely by my grandmother …
Oct 24, 2016: [gallery] bibliolectors: Un baño de libros (ilustración de Joost Swarte)
Oct 24, 2016: Wars, hot or cold, are also missing from standard science fiction versions of the future. Interplanetary wars don’t count, and neither do wars with …
Oct 21, 2016: thingsmagazine: Hoxton Square, by Adam Dant
Oct 20, 2016: the conspiracy is real W/the unprecedented & now documented corruption at the dark heart of HRC campaign, why would ANYONE accept the results till they're proven? — Eric …
Oct 19, 2016: and then when it's convenient they'll change back No group has shifted their position more dramatically than white evangelical Protestants. More than seven in ten (72%) white evangelical Protestants …
Oct 19, 2016: Pentti Lumikangas Venetsian muisto 1984
Oct 19, 2016: Pentti Lumikangas Kupolit 1980 35 x 25 cm
Oct 19, 2016: [gallery] rare-posters: Cycles Brillant. 1925. A. M. Cassandre. 30 3/8 x 46 1/8 in./77.1 x 117.2 cm This is one of Cassandre’s most economically …
Oct 19, 2016: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Minor White - Waterfall, Stony Brook State Park
Oct 19, 2016: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Pentti Lumikangas, etching, 1985
Oct 18, 2016: David French is correct When Metaxas votes for Trump, and when I write in my choice, we’ll both be voting for losing candidates. The difference is that my choice will be fit …
Oct 18, 2016: Voyage of the H. M. S. Beagle Yesterday I stopped by South Congress Books in Austin and picked up this gorgeous 1957 Heritage Press edition of Darwin’s Voyage. Photos …
Oct 18, 2016: [gallery] mikidora: Victorian morphine set
Oct 18, 2016: One cold spring night, the promise of summer held back as if in spite, I emerged from a subway station on the edge of Williamsburg, on my way to meet …
Oct 18, 2016: a vote for X is a vote for X I keep hearing from Trump supporters that if I vote for a third-party or write-in candidate — for convenience' sake let’s say Evan McMullin, …
Oct 17, 2016: When a reviewer starts explaining how the preparation of a quiche Lorraine at the restaurant he has visited differs from the way one prepared a true …
Oct 17, 2016: [gallery] wesleyhill: David Robinson, Speak (1980). This piece is displayed at Regent College in Vancouver, where it is described this way: “Speak …
Oct 16, 2016: [gallery] kafere: Warsaw - Łazienki Palace
Oct 16, 2016: [gallery] thingsmagazine: The Red Barn
Oct 16, 2016: [gallery] Library of Congress, via John Overholt on Twitter
Oct 15, 2016: [gallery] (via the foot of a diving beetle)
Oct 14, 2016: things have changed Matthew's "judge not" passage is a warning to Christians not to judge self-righteously, uncharitably, hypocritically, hypercritically, in a spirit of …
Oct 14, 2016: New York provincialism, alive and well When people say, as they sometimes do, that New Yorkers are the most provincial people on the planet, here’s the kind of thing they’re …
Oct 14, 2016: True Confessions (Wheaton College edition) This long article/essay/meditation by Ruth Graham on the disturbing events at Wheaton College last year — click on the “wheaton” tag at the bottom of …
Oct 14, 2016: answering letters (to <em>Harper's</em>) Thanks to those who responded to my Harper’s essay by writing letters to the editor — or to those whose letters were published, anyway (there are …
Oct 13, 2016: so why not Hillary? So why am I not voting for Hillary Clinton? I think she’s seriously afflicted by dishonesty and hubris, and has demonstrated no ability to learn …
Oct 13, 2016: Nobel Dylan I bought my first Bob Dylan record 45 years ago, and I’ve been listening to him closely and frequently ever since. I’ve written about how much he …
Oct 12, 2016: the counsel of Eric Metaxas I have a few thoughts about this op-ed by Eric Metaxas. (FYI, I don’t know Eric well, but I do know him, and I think he’s written and done …
Oct 11, 2016: I think I've finally grasped the logic We must set aside our Christian convictions to support Donald Trump so he will protect us against Hillary Clinton’s war on our Christian …
Oct 11, 2016: John Wilson and <em>Books & Culture</em> This morning, in the weekly newsletter of Books and Culture, John Wilson announces that the coming November/December issue of the magazine will be its …
Oct 10, 2016: [gallery] drawingarchitecture: Mario Ricci, Residui D’Architetture
Oct 10, 2016: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Cross-section of the Cordouan lighthouse
Oct 9, 2016: Jeremy Corbyn is no Donald Trump, and vice-versa. But the moral lesson is the same. This tale of two parties is a powerful allegory about what happens …
Oct 8, 2016: "the wisdom of repugnance": a test case In this post I want to connect my earlier post about what needs to be done to reclaim the term “evangelical” with my frequently-asserted hostility to …
Oct 8, 2016: historical addendum to the previous post The word ‘Protestant’ ... originally related to a specific occasion, in 1529, when at the Holy Roman Empire’s Diet (imperial assembly) held in the …
Oct 8, 2016: Steal It Back The always-thoughtful Alastair Roberts asks: In light of the ignominious behaviour of leading ‘evangelical’ voices in supporting and standing by …
Oct 8, 2016: Douglas Coupland: ‘I’m actually at my happiest when I’m writing on a plane’ Douglas Coupland: ‘I’m actually at my happiest when I’m writing on a plane’ If you told me I had to write the way that Coupland now writes, I’d give …
Oct 8, 2016: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Tulio Cralli
Oct 8, 2016: [gallery] archidrawings: © roberto burle marx - site plan - late 50s / early 60s
Oct 7, 2016: Yet the author of The Age of Anxiety and the author of The Gutenberg Galaxy turn out to have more in common than their conflict might suggest. Both in …
Oct 7, 2016: I find it amusing to reflect on the idea that mankind may sometime soon grow tired of reading and that writers will do so too, that the scholar will …
Oct 7, 2016: The education of German youth, however, proceeds from precisely this false and unfruitful conception ofculture: its goal, viewed in its essence, is …
Oct 7, 2016: Betrayed by Our Leaders: A Young Conservative Responds to Endorsements of Donald Trump Betrayed by Our Leaders: A Young Conservative Responds to Endorsements of Donald Trump I think what Peters says here is basically correct, but I don’t …
Oct 6, 2016: [gallery] pupdesign: Today we say goodbye to the eminent graphic designer, Elaine Lustig Cohen (1927-2016). Her website provides a fitting …
Oct 6, 2016: [gallery] alphonsopeluso: My @IITArchitecture Advanced Modeling student’s 3D prints. The theme was ‘Effects’.
Oct 6, 2016: [gallery]
Oct 6, 2016: The aesthetic challenge of slow TV is less about attention, in other words, than about use. Yes, the screens have won, it grants. But no, we needn’t …
Oct 6, 2016: the luxury of dismissal Some American Christians say they fear a coming persecution. When they start working across denominational lines I’ll think they mean it. If you think …
Oct 4, 2016: I don’t trust this stuff anymore. It was the very reliability of it — in user-friendly design, as well as stability of functionality — that was the …
Oct 4, 2016: [gallery] Alexander Gorlin Architects’ Boston Road Supportive Housing (2013-2016), Bronx, New York; Martin Filler writes about this building here
Oct 4, 2016: I think Lewis is also the most beautiful writer. The clarity is so fine. And the intimacy. If you’re suffering from grief, to read his book on …
Oct 4, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“16588”] The Bible Design Blog with first thoughts on the 6-volume ESV …
Oct 4, 2016: imagining history A lot of the lure for me in peeling away the skyscrapers was the way this ancient New York I was imagining, only just on the doorstep of modernity, …
Oct 4, 2016: There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them …
Oct 4, 2016: [gallery] dduane: Kindness.
Oct 3, 2016: [gallery] paperholm: 631.
Oct 3, 2016: It seems a category error to expose a pseudonymous novelist as if you were acting in the public interest; to adopt the tools and language of …
Oct 3, 2016: [gallery] architecture-drawings: Tadao Ando
Oct 3, 2016: [gallery] bauhaus-movement: Lego’s homage to Mondrian
Oct 3, 2016: [gallery] sosbrutalism: Collage for a proposal for a British New Town with a million people from the book Civilia (Kenneth Browne / Ivor de Wolfe, …
Oct 3, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16614”]
Oct 2, 2016: [gallery] houblon: Planter linear lighting
Oct 2, 2016: [gallery] conceptmodel: Memory notebooks: conceptual architectures based on memory and experience,mixed media and cut paper in Japanese fold …
Oct 1, 2016: How often, for instance, we hear the following commonplace repeated: ‘Whether Catholics, Protestants, Jews or Free-Thinkers, we’re all Frenchmen,’ …
Oct 1, 2016: Many conservatives—including many friends and fans—don’t like that answer because they think I have to bend the knee to some abstract binary: If I’m …
Oct 1, 2016: [gallery] Léon Stynen & Paul De Meyer, architects, in collaboration with prof.-ingenieur André Paduart & architect André Vlieghe, Sint-Rita, …
Oct 1, 2016: [gallery] The Canterbury Psalter
Oct 1, 2016: [gallery]
Oct 1, 2016: [gallery] archdaily: #brick ?? #Tsinghua University Canteen by Song Und Partner Atelier ???? #architecture #ArchDaily #china #iphonesia #Instagood …
Sep 30, 2016: [gallery] itscolossal: Buildings Shaped Like Letters of the Alphabet Made with Photographic Collage by Lola Dupre
Sep 30, 2016: Trump and incommensurability Dismayed by the recently announced list of “scholars and writers” supporting Trump for President, I sat down this morning to write a brief post …
Sep 30, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16643”]
Sep 29, 2016: A Tradinista! Manifesto A Tradinista! Manifesto I’m interested in how points 11 and 12 are related. If you “uphold the value of the indissoluble marriage of one man and one …
Sep 29, 2016: It has been hard not to notice that whereas John Paul II spoke of “the culture of death” and Benedict XVI of “the dictatorship of relativism,” Francis …
Sep 29, 2016: Bryant has seen many familiar faces on the embalming table. He embalmed his mother, honoring one of her more difficult requests. ‘She didn’t want …
Sep 29, 2016: The search for a stable definition of melancholy is itself melancholic, because the emotion is inscrutable, unknowable, shading into so many differing …
Sep 29, 2016: The right to vote should be restricted to those with knowledge – Jason Brennan | Aeon Ideas The right to vote should be restricted to those with knowledge – Jason Brennan | Aeon Ideas Until you would-be epistocrats grasp the nettle and tell …
Sep 29, 2016: Scholars & Writers for Trump - American Greatness Scholars & Writers for Trump - American Greatness A few comments about this: Some of the signatories really surprise me. Some don’t. I’m not …
Sep 29, 2016: P. D. James — one of my favorite faces. I look at her and think It would not be possible to keep anything hidden from that woman.
Sep 29, 2016: I would have things as they were in all the days of my life, as in the days of my longfathers before me: to be the Lord of this City in peace, and …
Sep 29, 2016: Envisioning Trump as the restorer of heroic Western life — whether imperial, kingly, or mythical — is quite an act of creation. There is nothing about …
Sep 28, 2016: Church tower of the village of Graun in Lago di Resia - Italy; by Martin R on Flickr via ChurchCrawler (Source: https://www.flickr.com/)
Sep 28, 2016: [gallery] The city of Liège, Belgium in 1914, under siege, and in 2009. When, in August 1914, the German armies decided to cut through Belgium on …
Sep 28, 2016: Francis is a Jesuit, and like many members of Catholic religious orders, he tends to view the institutional church, with its parishes and dioceses and …
Sep 28, 2016: One thing can hardly come under the Hush Hush — I mean the beautiful planetary conjunction last Tuesday. Did you happen to see the moon (first …
Sep 28, 2016: Greek kings, Egyptian pharaohs britishmuseum: The general Ptolemy founded the Greco-Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled Egypt for nearly 300 years after Alexander the Great’s …
Sep 27, 2016: Trump announced that he considered saying something ‘very rough’ about Hillary Clinton or her family but in the end elected not to. He said this with …
Sep 26, 2016: what would you do? what would you do? It’s odd to me that so many people other than Freddie have an opinion about whether he should have taken his new job, but for what …
Sep 26, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16669”]
Sep 25, 2016: [gallery] architecturevii: Church of the Saint Apostles: Peter and Paul in Siedliska, Poland. Pretty big, as for village. © Igor Snopek
Sep 25, 2016: [gallery] architecture-drawings: CONCEPT ART, WALK HOME, WALL·E, 2008 Pixar: The Design of Story
Sep 25, 2016: Wodwo Vergil: Eclogue 4 This thing of ours. You ever look at the world, like, really look at it? It’s a great dome, some real supernatural architecture, roof so smooth and …
Sep 24, 2016: My correspondent felt that my argument betrayed a failure to understand his generation. ‘I’m a regular social media and in-class arguer against people …
Sep 24, 2016: [gallery] biblipeacay: ”The Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero’s 1927 monograph Depero Futurista, also known as The Bolted Book, because it is …
Sep 23, 2016: Convergence My friend Wesley Hill recently posted a wonderfully concise and elegant outline of what we might call first steps in theological anthropology. …
Sep 23, 2016: Nostalgia Whenever you suggest that history is a matter of losses as well as gains, whenever you call attention to what we’ve lost along the way, whether it’s …
Sep 23, 2016: [gallery] arquigraph: Takefumi Aida ’ It’s impossible to make architecture move, although i’d like to’ T. Aida Aida started with ‘silence’ in …
Sep 22, 2016: Leaving the EU is no small affair. It probably will have enormous effects on the UK, Europe, and much of the rest of the world. But just what these …
Sep 21, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16700”] bibliotheca-sanctus: The Thompson Memorial Library at Vassar College …
Sep 21, 2016: patriotism true and false On all sides we hear to-day of the love of our country, and yet anyone who has literally such a love must be bewildered at the talk, like a man …
Sep 21, 2016: Until about 30 years ago, writers like [Graham] Greene were not at all accessible to the reading public; they did not turn up for signings at …
Sep 21, 2016: We have learned to find our identity in our velocity. And that’s not just physically dangerous, but spiritually devastating. — Russell Moore
Sep 21, 2016: [gallery] JoeMyGod
Sep 21, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16709”]
Sep 20, 2016: [gallery] Lin employed an equally timeless form for the nearby Riggio-Lynch Chapel of 2004, a simple but beautifully crafted wooden structure whose …
Sep 20, 2016: excerpt from my Sent folder: execution I’m absolutist about these matters, I guess. I think universal rules for police should be: If someone is unarmed, you can’t execute him. If someone …
Sep 20, 2016: Do you remember those kids in high school who used to brag that they laughed while watching horror films? The impulse is almost scarier than the …
Sep 20, 2016: I want us to be free – just long enough – that I have time to tell my brothers and sisters who do not know Jesus and tell them about a deeper and …
Sep 20, 2016: [gallery] Mat Bingham, the badgers and foxes of Cutlers Rough
Sep 20, 2016: [gallery] thingsmagazine: The Mysteries of Nature and Art, 1635
Sep 19, 2016: As women have taken greater positions of leadership in the United States, they have also left a leadership vacuum behind them. In middle-class, highly …
Sep 19, 2016: pigeonholes One of the most frequent comments I’ve heard in response to my essay in Harper’s is that it’s self-refuting: If a Christian …
Sep 19, 2016: If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to …
Sep 19, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16729”] archidose: Bolles+Wilson, Münster library, 1993
Sep 19, 2016: [gallery] rickinmar: Monticello…..designed by Thomas Jefferson, and drawn for him by Robert Mills in 1803. Collection of Massachusetts Historical …
Sep 18, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“16735”] Illustration from an article on how to tell if you’re a jerk. When …
Sep 18, 2016: humility, shame, etc. I want to follow up, briefly, on yesterday’s post. The presiding spirit of the ESV, from its beginning to its conclusion, is J. I. Packer. Packer just …
Sep 18, 2016: My own kind of incrementalism draws on a different attitude than a lot of what you hear on the right and the left for the past few years. I am not of …
Sep 18, 2016: [gallery] Palmyra
Sep 18, 2016: [gallery] archimaps: Plans and elevation of the First Congregational Church, Danbury
Sep 18, 2016: [gallery] Churches painted by John Piper
Sep 18, 2016: [gallery] Baptismal font at St. Basil, Toller Fratrum
Sep 17, 2016: The Frozen Standard Version Beginning in the summer of 2016, the text of the ESV Bible will remain unchanged in all future editions printed and published by Crossway—in much the …
Sep 17, 2016: [gallery] houghtonlib: Stokes, Will. The vaulting-master, or, The art of vaulting, reduced to a method, comprized under certaine rules, 1652. SG …
Sep 17, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16757”]
Sep 16, 2016: [gallery] gurafiku: Japanese Poster: Secondhand Book Expo. Satomi Tanaka. 2010
Sep 16, 2016: Sussex
Sep 16, 2016: Each New Year begins for me not on January 1, not on Rosh Hashanah, but on the first day of classes. I must then put away my laconic interiority, my …
Sep 16, 2016: [gallery]
Sep 16, 2016: [gallery] cover of the book prospectus; book description here
Sep 16, 2016: [gallery] All About Lettering
Sep 16, 2016: That, I suspect, is what really rankles those who gnash their teeth when someone lectures them about how art is all about borrowing and exchanging …
Sep 16, 2016: [gallery] Every new banknote deserves its very own explanatory website.
Sep 16, 2016: [gallery] bibliolectors: Vamos preparando las lecturas de otoño (ilustración de Eva Vázquez)
Sep 16, 2016: [gallery] archidose: 1/ Cross-section of the Rotunda in Leicester Square in which Barker’s panorama of London was exhibited (1801) 2/ Patent image of …
Sep 15, 2016: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Emiliano Ponzi
Sep 15, 2016: [gallery] clawmarks: Cyprian Leowitz - Eclipses luminarium - 1555 - via BSB
Sep 15, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16802”]
Sep 14, 2016: Life is rough in Dallas right now. They’ve got no district attorney, no quarterback, and they’re about to have no police chief. The city leads the …
Sep 14, 2016: Read good writing, and don’t live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens …
Sep 13, 2016: Where would this train of logic lead? How many other associations to which students belong might be judged, with equal or greater plausibility, to be …
Sep 13, 2016: [gallery] blue-electrode: How to get married, although a woman, or, The art of pleasing men by a Young Widow (1892).
Sep 13, 2016: [gallery] Princeton University Press has posted online all the images from Roger Penrose’s new book Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of …
Sep 13, 2016: [gallery]
Sep 13, 2016: [gallery] discardingimages: announcing angel ‘Emerson-White Book of Hours’ (detached leaf), Ghent ca. 1480 LA, J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 60, recto
Sep 13, 2016: [gallery] Making ink from car exhaust
Sep 13, 2016: [Geoffrey Hill] always was, of course, a Christian poet, and much of his poetry is about wrestling with his faith (or more specifically, wrestling …
Sep 12, 2016: [gallery] World’s highest bridge nears completion. Watch the video at the link, if you like vertigo.
Sep 12, 2016: [vimeo 169673676 w=250 h=141] casualoptimist: The Last Punchcutter - One for the letterpress obsessives + tool aficionados One for the letterpress …
Sep 12, 2016: [gallery] rare-posters: Bugatti. 1930. René Vincent. 38 x 54 3/8 in./96.5 x 137.8 cm
Sep 12, 2016: Wallace had his reasons for grammatical zealotry in the classroom, but it wasn’t about being Gradgrindian or prescriptive. I think Wallace is rightly …
Sep 12, 2016: But of all the marvellous and mighty acts related of Him, this altogether surpasses human admiration, and is beyond the power of mortal frailness to …
Sep 12, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16839”]
Sep 11, 2016: [gallery] Late-summer Sunday morning back garden action
Sep 11, 2016: Isn’t that just about the most paralyzingly unrapturous question you’ve encountered in any textbook? ‘Explain your answer.’ No, thank you. I will not …
Sep 11, 2016: [gallery] todaysdocument: Shadowy Towers of the World Trade Center rise behind St. Paul’s Chapel, ca. 1973. “Historic Trinity Church on lower …
Sep 11, 2016: Whatever one makes of the current claims about the effects of our supposed Age of Distraction, it should be evident that their cause is unlikely to be …
Sep 10, 2016: [gallery] larameeee: Water Purification Plant, W. G. Quist, Berenplaat, 1959-1965 Photo: Kim Zwarts
Sep 10, 2016: [gallery] openmarginalis: Four Leaves from the Arabic Version of Dioscorides’ De materia medica, W.750 by Dioscordines Pedanius, of Anazarbos and …
Sep 10, 2016: [gallery] paperholm: 608. Current status
Sep 9, 2016: excerpt from my Sent folder: liturgy I only attended low-church evangelical congregations for a few years after I became a Christian, but those were tough times for me, and more than once …
Sep 9, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16867”] A Plan for the Borough of Clinton (never to be built), Harvard …
Sep 9, 2016: outsider language, insider language Obviously, a huge compliance failure at Wells (where I worked from ‘05-'09). But also a cautionary tale about incentive comp schemes. — Josh Barro …
Sep 9, 2016: [gallery] Legendary graphic designer Michael Bierut, a Pentagram partner who’s created visual branding for clients ranging from United Airlines to …
Sep 9, 2016: [gallery] rare-posters: Les Beatles. 1962. Paul Colin. Maquette for a potential French release of an early Beatles record. 11 7/8 x 11 7/8 in./30 x …
Sep 9, 2016: It’s hard to ignore the hideous character failings at the core of the man, and for this purpose maybe especially his fundamental infidelity toward all …
Sep 9, 2016: [gallery] thingsmagazine: US of A, 1575 (Bonhams)
Sep 9, 2016: The Flight 93 Election I do not understand why this essay is getting the play it’s getting. It simply recycles every cliché of the Trumpite right. Acknowledging that Trump …
Sep 9, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16882”]
Sep 8, 2016: [gallery] drawingarchitecture: Jarosław ”Viking” Olszewski
Sep 7, 2016: [gallery] “And then, when we least expected it, the ghost of Steve Jobs made its fateful entry….”
Sep 7, 2016: [gallery] plansofarchitecture: Kay Fisker, Jagtgården, 1924, Copenhagen, Denmark
Sep 7, 2016: [gallery] plansofarchitecture: Caruso St. John, New Station Square, 2016, Lausanne, Switzerland
Sep 7, 2016: [gallery] fragmentosnomadas: La imaginación y el sueño son fuerzas de cambio y vida. Josep Maria Esquirol. La resistencia íntima. Ensayo de una …
Sep 7, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16903”]
Sep 6, 2016: [gallery] bibliolectors: Mumin lector (ilustración de Kate Alizadeh)
Sep 6, 2016: [gallery] Pont Minllyn, Afon Dyfi, Wales
Sep 6, 2016: [gallery] (via Greasepaint | Simon Beattie) Guidelines for Soviet Russian theatrical companies. Via John Overholt on Twitter.
Sep 6, 2016: [gallery] paperholm: 604.
Sep 6, 2016: As American cities expanded during the Gilded Age, city planners pushed for tree-lined streets and leafy parks as public health measures. In …
Sep 6, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16925”]
Sep 5, 2016: writing and failure Indeed, this is the (unexpected) discovery I have made. It is that having been holding out against failure for a long time, having been committing to …
Sep 5, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16929”]
Sep 5, 2016: [gallery] austinkleon: “The Worst Thief Is He Who Steals The Playtime of Children” stickerette Paper gummed label, also known as “stickerette” or …
Sep 5, 2016: [gallery] A Sea of Glistening Solar Panels Photographed at the Nevada SolarReserve by Reuben Wu (via Adam Roberts on Twitter)
Sep 5, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16938”]
Sep 5, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16941”]
Sep 5, 2016: US Edition! golden-hill: I’m delighted to report that Golden Hill will be published in hardcover in the United States by Scribner. Dates are not yet decided, but …
Sep 5, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16945,16946”] (via Bookmarking Book Art — Leilei Guo | Books On Books)
Sep 4, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16949”] plansofarchitecture: Alberto Burri, Grande Cretto, 1984-2015, …
Sep 3, 2016: To the extent that we look on our wounded division and blame only other parties, seeing no good in them and no fault in us, we have not yet come to …
Sep 3, 2016: 12 Romans walk into a bar... I’ve been thinking a good bit lately about this passage from Julian Baggini’s review of Martha Nussbaum’s new book: Unconditional forgiveness, in …
Sep 3, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“16953”] nypl: Enter the labyrinth, exit with your next read.
Sep 3, 2016: dissidents, not intellectuals These and other trends have made me sensible of how different our circumstances are from those in which Neuhaus learned to speak as both a Christian …
Sep 3, 2016: the writer steps up to the plate Sports metaphors are of course overused, but it occurs to me that one particular set of them — ones involving batting in baseball — are uniquely …
Sep 2, 2016: Waugh Christopher Sykes, in his biography of his friend Evelyn Waugh, recalls how Waugh treated the soldiers under his command in World War II: To the …
Sep 2, 2016: Stackhouse on Jacobs What Jacobs doesn’t happen to mention, however, is the attitude of most Baby Boomers toward Christianity as One of the Things We Definitely Aren’t. …
Sep 2, 2016: Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown and author of the book How to Win at College, has interviewed hundreds of students about …
Sep 2, 2016: Me: ‘Hey, Siri, find me a Catholic Mass to go to.’ My phone: ‘I don’t know how to respond to that.’ Me: ‘Okay then, take me to a strip …
Sep 1, 2016: Kaepernick’s decision to sit for the anthem did not rely on disruption. In fact, it was so unobtrusive that it wasn’t even noticed the first time he …
Sep 1, 2016: Selfie Takers are not snobs, at least as far as I can see. In fact, they seem pretty indiscriminate in their appreciation of works of art. And their …
Sep 1, 2016: crooked neighbors Onward we went, asking people everywhere we stopped about the Flushing Remonstrance. None of them knew anything about it. We ended up at the Macedonia …
Sep 1, 2016: [gallery]
Aug 31, 2016: The Christian intellectual tradition is alive and well The Christian intellectual tradition is alive and well With the caveat that this a rather different topic than the one I wrote my essay on, my …
Aug 31, 2016: choices Fusion’s Patrick Hogan counted 47 institutions and industries that millennials have been accused of destroying so far, including credit, car culture, …
Aug 30, 2016: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Marklin building set
Aug 30, 2016: Fox News went on the air in October 1996. Since that time, the GOP has won the popular vote for president exactly once: in 2004, by a whopping 2.4 …
Aug 30, 2016: In 2003, a study allegedly demonstrated that ‘conservatism is a syndrome characterized by rigidity, dogmatism, prejudice, and fear'—a slander …
Aug 30, 2016: I must introduce a parenthetical protest against the abuse of the current term ‘social justice.’ From meaning 'justice in relations between groups or …
Aug 30, 2016: Now how about this: We know that greenhouse gases are producing destabilizing changes in the Earth’s climate. And that human beings evolved from other …
Aug 29, 2016: Alien contact thinkpiece ideas based on this How disappointed they’ll be in us when they learn about Trump Why the only person they should be allowed to see and speak to is Beyoncé …
Aug 29, 2016: Virtually every writer I know has [a ritual]. One claims to sharpen half a dozen pencils. Another gulps down a can of beer (never mind the hour). A …
Aug 29, 2016: At one time, the University of Chicago might have been thought to be the one place above all others that was capable of preparing its students to …
Aug 29, 2016: journalism A person whose financial requirements are modest and whose curiosity, skepticism, and indifference to reputation are outsized is a person at risk of …
Aug 29, 2016: [gallery columns=“2” size=“medium” ids=“16981,16982”] When I read Alexandra Harris’s Romantic Moderns, I thought …
Aug 29, 2016: There’s no way we could ever carry out any experiment to test for the multiverse’s existence in the world, because it’s not in our world. It’s an …
Aug 29, 2016: John Ruskin, 65 Casa Contarini Fasan, Venice (1841). Ashmolean.
Aug 29, 2016: John Ruskin, Abbeville: Church of St Wulfran from the River (1868). About the moment in the forenoon when the modern fashionable traveller, intent on …
Aug 28, 2016: missingozu: Ozu’s notebook for End of Summer(1961)
Aug 28, 2016: hypocrisy If there were a Nobel prize for hypocrisy, then its first recipient ought to be Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook boss. On 23 August, all his 1.7 billion …
Aug 28, 2016: But when you divide the brain into bitty bits and make millions of calculations according to a bunch of inferences, there are abundant opportunities …
Aug 28, 2016: There’s a nesting doll quality to many of the game’s recipes. Early on, for example, I had to build and charge my ship’s Hyperdrive. That required me …
Aug 27, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“17019”] — Glen Baxter
Aug 26, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“17022”] “Picturization”
Aug 26, 2016: What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists My clients know so little about current research in physics, they aren’t even aware they’re in a foreign country. They have no clue how far they are …
Aug 26, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“17026”] Malcolm wishes you all a happy National Dog Day
Aug 25, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“17032,17030,17031”] desvre: A 1960s Bungalow in Hilversum, The Netherlands …
Aug 25, 2016: Jacobs’s effort is thoughtful and well worth engaging. But I am not sure we have a shortage of Christian intellectuals (although I may be biased …
Aug 25, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“17036”] Zsofia Schwenger
Aug 25, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“17039”] the white egret orchid
Aug 25, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“17042”] design-is-fine: Ivan Chermayeff, poster for American Museum of …
Aug 24, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“17049”] turnbullrarebooks: Finely engraved frontispiece to William Morris’s …
Aug 24, 2016: a question for David Gushee My favorite moment in this column by David Gushee comes when he says, “I have been a participant in the effort to encourage Protestant religious …
Aug 24, 2016: Italy’s Fragile Beauty Italy’s Fragile Beauty - The New York Times. Earthquakes are not the only threat to Italian beauty. Floods and landslides have become more frequent …
Aug 24, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“17052”] thetriumphofpostmodernism: Welfare Palace Hotel, Rem Koolhaas & …
Aug 23, 2016: The Hugh Hewitt argument Vote for Trump because IF he nominates to the Supreme Court one of the judges that he has put on his shortlist and IF that judge is confirmed and IF …
Aug 23, 2016: The NPR.org audience has grown dramatically in recent years, to between 25 and 35 million unique visitors each month. But far less than 1% of that …
Aug 23, 2016: You can barely get a hearing anymore unless you plan to burn everything to the ground (as long as Twitter and Snapchat are left unscathed so the …
Aug 23, 2016: The soil-collection project is part of a plan to erect the first national memorial to lynching victims, to be built on six acres of vacant land in …
Aug 23, 2016: [gallery] dzajn: Architektura na ścianie? Fantastyczne ozdoby wykonane przez braci Chisel & Mouse. Zdjęcia: archatlas. Architecture on your …
Aug 22, 2016: excerpt from my Sent folder: Wendell Berry About Berry, first of all, I don’t think he has ever had an especially broad audience — his message is too discomfiting for that. And while I …
Aug 22, 2016: excerpts from my Sent folder: whaddaboutism Thanks for this response. One of the things I have inadvertently done with that essay is to make people think of Christian Public Intellectual as a …
Aug 22, 2016: Brett Foster, “Back to School Rondeau” It’s almost time to set aside the waning distractions of first youth, the life contained for years at home. What’s home? The place you grow out of, …
Aug 21, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“17067”] thingsmagazine: “Shaded Rocks, West Texas”, woodcut, Max-Karl …
Aug 20, 2016: take it to the bank Whenever a college or professional football player commits some act of violence — against a woman, against a dog, against some dude in a bar at two in …
Aug 20, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17070”] bibliotheca-sanctus: Shiba Ryōtarō Memorial Museum Library in …
Aug 20, 2016: Cambridge University Press recognizes the importance of making its web services available to the largest possible audience and has attempted to design …
Aug 20, 2016: Packer and Stott 1.) Lots of people accused J.I. Packer and John Stott of being “soft” because they stayed in the Church of England so long. — Russell Moore (@drmoore) …
Aug 20, 2016: [gallery] bibliolectors: Observación al natural y bibliogràfica (ilustración de Manon Gauthier)
Aug 20, 2016: [gallery] archidose: Mina Gospavic BERLIN ARTSPARK, Berlin, Unit 21, 2012
Aug 20, 2016: [gallery] fromwithinabook: Take a seat
Aug 19, 2016: [gallery] Yesterday morning at 8:00 a.m. local time, in five cities around the U.S., the anarchist collective INDECLINE erected five copies of a nude …
Aug 19, 2016: Colossal head of Serapis britishmuseum: This head depicting the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis is from a colossal statue that stood over 4 metres tall. The statue is thought to …
Aug 19, 2016: [gallery] the-book-design: www.facebook.com/Kolektiv.studio
Aug 19, 2016: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Kim Boske
Aug 18, 2016: I was going into town one day and had gotten as far as the gate when I realized that I had odd shoes on, and one of them clean and the other dirty. …
Aug 18, 2016: Francis Schaeffer and subaltern counterpublics I am truly grateful for all the responses my essay in Harper’s is receiving, and I’ve been doing my best to give a fuller account of my thinking when …
Aug 18, 2016: [gallery] archidose: Samuel Ball Platner, Detailed Maps of the Forum, Palatine and Capitoline Hills, and Insula Tiberina from The Typography of …
Aug 18, 2016: once more around the Christian intellectual block So, let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. My essay Owen Strachan’s first response my counterblast Strachan’s second response I …
Aug 17, 2016: [gallery] lustik: Kate Bowles.
Aug 17, 2016: [gallery] robsheridan: Selected stills from Phase IV, a gorgeously filmed sci-fi movie from 1974, directed by Saul Bass (sadly his only feature …
Aug 17, 2016: A response to Owen Strachan I’m very grateful to Owen Strachan for his thoughtful response to my recent essay on Christian intellectuals. Let me go straight to what I believe to …
Aug 17, 2016: [gallery columns="1" size="full" ids="17125"] In my recent essay on Christian intellectuals, I say that one way to measure the influence of such …
Aug 17, 2016: An estimated 10 billion people will inhabit that warmer world. Some will become climate refugees—moving away from areas where unbearable temperatures …
Aug 17, 2016: [gallery]
Aug 16, 2016: if I could... If I could edit my essay on Christian intellectuals as I saw fit, I’d make it a lot longer, of course. But in light of the responses I’ve been getting …
Aug 16, 2016: excerpt from my Sent folder: singing the Lord's song in a strange land … I would say that openly Christian writers are often welcome at the WSJ, as long as they don’t say anything that contradicts the foundational …
Aug 16, 2016: from “The Critic’s Art”; “Windows of the Fifth Order,” drawing by John Ruskin from his Modern Painters
Aug 16, 2016: Drawing from a Photograph of Part of Santa Maria della Spina, Pisa, John Ruskin
Aug 16, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“17139”] drawingdetail: John Ruskin, La Merveille, Mont St Michel, Normandy, …
Aug 15, 2016: John Ruskin, Decoration by Disks: Palazzo dei Badoari Partecipazzi, 1851, Vol. 1 of The Stones of Venice; from an exhibition at the University of Mary …
Aug 15, 2016: the easy road of the Christian intellectual On Twitter, Joseph L. Boston is arguing that I’ve written Martin Luther King, Jr. (among others) out of my history of post-World-War-II …
Aug 15, 2016: [gallery] fragment-12: Alexander Rodchenko, Studies for construction, 1921 Crayon on paper 48.3 x 32.3 cm
Aug 14, 2016: "Intellectual" is not a term of praise I’m getting lots of feedback on my essay on Christian intellectuals, and because there’s a great deal to say about the subject — far more than I could …
Aug 14, 2016: [gallery] bibliotheca-sanctus: Livreria Lello in Porto, Portugal
Aug 13, 2016: excerpt from my Sent folder: on Constantinianism [in response to an email from a reader of this essay] But in answer to your question — “isn’t this a better state of affairs?” — I’d …
Aug 13, 2016: [gallery] paperholm: Crossing to Paperhom. (detail) The exhibition Alt-w: Blush Response, featuring new work from Paperholm, is open now on the …
Aug 13, 2016: [gallery] front elevation of the United Church, New Haven CT
Aug 13, 2016: The Watchmen Half a century ago, such figures existed in America: serious Christian intellectuals who occupied a prominent place on the national stage. They are …
Aug 13, 2016: [gallery] robertogreco: Four crows flying in a snowstorm, Maki Sozan, Taishô era–Shôwa era, 20th century
Aug 13, 2016: [gallery] untappedcities: NYC That Never Was: Trinity Church Gets Eclipsed by a Massive Skyscraper http://bit.ly/185UA7w
Aug 12, 2016: [gallery] Plan for the University of Victoria campus
Aug 12, 2016: Slavery in New York golden-hill: We have it so firmly fixed in our minds that slavery was a southern thing that it seems intuitively wrong for it to have been a feature …
Aug 11, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“17170”] Anonymous Italian artist Roman ruins 18th century Prado
Aug 11, 2016: [gallery] Atelier LOIDL Landscape Architects
Aug 11, 2016: But [Montrell Jackson’s [“ethic of mutuality”] ought to unsettle us too. In extending his offer of fellowship to “protesters, officers, friends, …
Aug 10, 2016: [gallery] cafeinevitable: Reading by Eleni Kalorkoti
Aug 10, 2016: [gallery] freakyfauna: The Wrexham coverlet by James Williams (completed in 1842. Found here and here.
Aug 10, 2016: [gallery] The art of Victoria Crowe, whose amazing work I just discovered.
Aug 10, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17190”] Gian Paolo Panini Villa Albani, Rome 18th century Morgan Library, …
Aug 10, 2016: [gallery] Mr. Silva of Libreria Books said “an old-fashioned space” is clearly appealing to book lovers. He said his shop has had twice as many …
Aug 10, 2016: Every human action gains in honor, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come. It is the far sight, the quiet and …
Aug 10, 2016: God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already …
Aug 10, 2016: [gallery] paperholm: Paperholm group 8.
Aug 10, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17201”] bibliotheca-sanctus: Trinity College Library in Dublin, Ireland
Aug 10, 2016: [gallery] “Hawes Water,” Henry George Alexander Holiday, about 1859, at the V&A
Aug 10, 2016: [gallery] Drawing of an ancient Egyptian garden, Thebes, 18th Dynasty
Aug 10, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“17210”] betonbabe: SEVEN PHASES IN THE EVOLUTION OF THE OLD LONDON BRIDGE, …
Aug 10, 2016: [gallery] (Posting ironically, given that it hasn’t rained here in Central Texas in weeks and we’re over 100º every day)
Aug 9, 2016: John Ruskin’s house, Brantwood. There is a sanctity in a good man’s house which cannot be renewed in every tenement that rises on its ruins: and I …
Aug 9, 2016: [gallery] teachingliteracy: little house on the bookshelf.
Aug 9, 2016: [gallery] Michael Graves, from the post just cited
Aug 9, 2016: Truro [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“17225”] Designs for Truro Cathedral, 1878 Artist: William Burges. Image …
Aug 9, 2016: [gallery] Baskerville’s Vergil
Aug 9, 2016: [gallery] Baskerville’s Bible
Aug 9, 2016: Ancient Egyptian board game britishmuseum: This is a 3,000-year-old games box from ancient Egypt. Board games were very popular among all levels of society, especially the game …
Aug 9, 2016: These mobs are an alarm. They are telling you something has gone wrong in the system; something was wrong before you saw the proof. Your inventions …
Aug 9, 2016: [gallery] The cover of the Queen Mary Psalter
Aug 9, 2016: [gallery] “Bracken Cave is the summer home of more than 15 million Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis), making it the world’s largest bat …
Aug 9, 2016: [gallery] shihlun: 20th Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival
Aug 8, 2016: [gallery] The Essex House Psalter
Aug 8, 2016: [gallery] The first page of the Doves Press Bible from the collection of Southern Methodist University
Aug 8, 2016: [gallery] What remains of Rival, North Dakota
Aug 8, 2016: [gallery] bibliolectors: Inmersión en la biblioteca (ilustración de Victoria Antolini)
Aug 8, 2016: [gallery] bibliolectors: Hay una cierta magia que se produce cada vez que leemos (ilustración de Jameela Wahlgren)
Aug 8, 2016: [gallery] bibliolectors: Cada cual elige sus libros favoritos (ilustración de Elise Gravel)
Aug 7, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17264”] Philip Webb, drawing for the Red House
Aug 7, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17267”] Ionisch basement en kapiteel met varianten, Giovanni Battista …
Aug 7, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17270”] Richard Norman Shaw
Aug 7, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17273”] Richard Norman Shaw
Aug 7, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17276”] Richard Norman Shaw
Aug 7, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17279”] bonitavista: La Valletta, Malta (photo via baiba)
Aug 6, 2016: [gallery] This has always been one of my favorite album covers. Wonderful music as well.
Aug 6, 2016: [gallery] The new Ferrari California T. Possibly even cooler than the one Cameron’s father owned.
Aug 6, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17290,17291,17292,17288,17289”] Robert Iwrin’s Dawn to Dusk, in Marfa, Texas
Aug 6, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17295”] lostinurbanism: Spectators at the Wall of Respect, Chicago. …
Aug 6, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17298”] polychroniadis: ‘Cylindrus’ by Dennis Ramos.
Aug 6, 2016: [gallery] Christos Pantocrator in South Carolina
Aug 5, 2016: Imagine Imagine if Hillary said, “What I did with that private email server was stupid and wrong. I am sorry and I will learn from this and not make the same …
Aug 5, 2016: [gallery] sovtime: Мурманск начала 1970-х. Волга ГАЗ-24 рядом с гостиницей Параллель. Murmansk in early 70s. Volga GAZ-24 near the hotel The …
Aug 5, 2016: Eric Hoffer on Trump I have recently been reading Eric Hoffer’s 1950 bestseller The True Believer, and it’s a fascinating book for this moment. It seems to me to offer a …
Aug 5, 2016: It would be amusing to watch any one who felt an idle curiosity as to the language and secrets of lovers opening the Browning Letters. He would …
Aug 5, 2016: Trump and women. This isn’t new. This is something old that has recrudesced, an atavism that has “become raw again.” This is a wound with the scab …
Aug 5, 2016: On August 2, 1100, the English king William Rufus was killed by an arrow while hunting in the New Forest, probably in an assassination, possibly by a …
Aug 5, 2016: [gallery]
Aug 4, 2016: this is how crazy things have become As a #NeverTrumper would you take that deal? Donald exits on condition that @RNC nominate Donald Jr, Eric or Ivanka? https://t.co/J7Hm4yD4J3 — Hugh …
Aug 4, 2016: I had some bad moments with him. I hadn’t been there more than a few months when he caught me looking out of the window onto Russell Square. I had my …
Aug 4, 2016: The Museum at war The British Museum: Britain officially entered the First World War on 4 August 1914. This is a look back at some of the measures the Museum took to …
Aug 3, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17318”] wordsandeggs: Way too many fabulous images from vintage Hungarian …
Aug 3, 2016: [gallery] nortonliterature: If you can’t get enough villains in your life through The Cursed Child, try out the Norton Critical Edition Periodic …
Aug 3, 2016: [gallery] John Latham, Film Star (1960). A lovely profile of Latham’s work may be found here.
Aug 3, 2016: Lakoff on evangelicals Those whites who have a strict father personal worldview and who are religious tend toward Evangelical Christianity, since God, in Evangelical …
Aug 3, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17328,17329,17330,17331”] scanzen: Four NASA publications, 1972. via …
Aug 3, 2016: [gallery] This Japanese map of Shanghai is color-coded to indicate who lived and worked there. Green indicates Japanese residential districts, for …
Aug 3, 2016: Every time Ryan talks about patriotism, every time he talks about conservative ideals, the orange face of Trump seems to rise moon-like behind his …
Aug 2, 2016: [gallery] jonklassen: from a new series of books Mac Barnett & me are working on. This is from the first book called “Triangle” - it’ll be out …
Aug 2, 2016: Starting out from the fact that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own …
Aug 2, 2016: The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints of a superhuman detachment and …
Aug 2, 2016: Consider the Khan affair. Were Trump’s remarks tasteless? Absolutely. But no more so — I’d actually say quite a bit less so — than countless other …
Aug 2, 2016: Cypriot female sphinx britishmuseum: This Cypriot incense burner was discovered in the lost ancient Egyptian city of Thonis-Heracleion. Over 2,500 years old, this object …
Aug 1, 2016: The Satanic Temple — which has been offering tongue-in-cheek support for the fallen angel in public arenas that have embraced prayer and parochial …
Aug 1, 2016: The sexual assault scandal that took down Baylor University’s president and revered football coach also found a problem with a bedrock of the school’s …
Aug 1, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17347”] smithsonianlibraries: Petition to start using these names for …
Aug 1, 2016: The essay (or the essay-affect) at its best interrogates these questions of truth and verification, bringing the reader directly into the process of …
Aug 1, 2016: [gallery] The frontispiece (above) offers a striking visual image of a “comprehensive” organization of knowledge. Extending from the bottom of the …
Aug 1, 2016: I put this appeal before any other observations on Dickens. First let us sympathise, if only for an instant, with the hopes of the Dickens period, …
Aug 1, 2016: [gallery] bauhaus-movement: Bauhaus Movement
Aug 1, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17358”] thingsmagazine: Allan McNab, Atrani, 1926
Jul 31, 2016: the Bread of Life A sermon preached to the Episcopal clergy of Dallas , April 13, 2016. The texts were the martyrdom of Stephen (Acts 7:51 – 8:1) and the “I am the …
Jul 30, 2016: back when he was famous “Well, God is almighty, I guess. But I think he’s on vacation right now because of all the crap that’s happening in the world, ’cause it wasn’t like …
Jul 29, 2016: martyrs This op-ed by Paul Vallely is one of the more contemptible things I’ve read in a while, and given that I’m on Twitter, that’s saying …
Jul 29, 2016: Isn't it pretty to think so? A lot of times in our culture there’s this de facto humanist swagger that says, “Oh yeah, religion. We used to do that shit.” But my advice would be, …
Jul 29, 2016: Eliot at the Institute for Advanced Study Finally there was T. S. Eliot, who had long been both Oppenheimer’s favorite poet and [Oppenheimer's old friend Francis] Fergusson’s. Indeed, over the …
Jul 29, 2016: DFW on "our literary culture" It’s actually not true that our literary culture is nihilistic, at least not in the radical sense of Turgenev’s Bazarov. For there are certain …
Jul 29, 2016: Mount Sakurajima
Jul 28, 2016: how partisanship disables thinking A perfect example: Here's a screenshot of that @NCGOP tweet about @timkaine, since they deleted it. #DemsInPhilly pic.twitter.com/LbAywwnnob — Ben …
Jul 28, 2016: Candidate keywords Keywords more likely to appear in Clinton’s corpus include women, families, economy, together, work, American (and America), future, rights, create, …
Jul 27, 2016: how little do we know How little do we know how other people live in the houses close to us! We see the houses looking like our own, and we see the people come out of them …
Jul 27, 2016: TrumpWords [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“800”]Zachary Crockett[/caption]
Jul 25, 2016: two parties My friend Ross Douthat disagrees, mostly, with Avik Roy’s contention that the Republican Party is dead, but by contrast I suspect that Roy is too …
Jul 24, 2016: Wolfe on Chomsky I won’t vouch for the scholarly accuracy of Tom Wolfe’s skewering of Noam Chomsky, but oh my goodness is it fun to read. (Subscribe to get …
Jul 22, 2016: júlia sardà: This is the cover of “The Liszts”...
Jul 22, 2016: a memory Reading this essay sent me down the twisted paths of memory…. When I was twenty and in college, I came home for a weekend and almost as soon as …
Jul 22, 2016: Whose Fault is Trump? Trump. A Republican Party that for decades has, in its sycophantic panting after a hyperrich donor class, ignored the people who have now turned to …
Jul 20, 2016: the limits of our mourning Robert Macfarlane and Adrian Cooper write, It is still shocking to read that 46 per cent of ancient semi-natural woodland in the UK was either …
Jul 19, 2016: Mac status update Last year, when I upgraded from Yosemite to El Capitan, my MacBook’s wi-fi stopped working. I could occasionally connect to the internet, but …
Jul 18, 2016: Angkor Wat This transformation of legend into fact has been a theme of the LiDAR surveys. Angkor's huge population is described in temple inscriptions and …
Jul 17, 2016: playing Todd I think Todd Rundgren is one of the great pop songwriters, and it occurred to me recently that I’d like to learn to play a few of his songs on …
Jul 17, 2016: Nicolas Mourot [embed]drawingarchitecture.tumblr.com/post/1475…[/embed]
Jul 17, 2016: Klee - Ad marginem [embed]theegoist.tumblr.com/post/1467…[/embed]
Jul 17, 2016: wheels [embed]darksilenceinsuburbia.tumblr.com/post/7563…[/embed]
Jul 17, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17361,17362,17363,17364,17365,17366,17367,17368,17369,17370”] …
Jul 17, 2016: [gallery] drawingarchitecture: Javier Cardiel
Jul 17, 2016: [gallery] houghtonlib: Ituarte, Julio. Ecos de México : (Aires nacionales) : capricho de concierto para piano, 1886. Sheet Music 133 Houghton …
Jul 17, 2016: [gallery] theegoist: Paul Klee - Ad marginem, 1930 https://frieze.com/event/kleeagueli
Jul 17, 2016: [gallery] robertogreco: One of the highlights of my summer has been reading Luke Pearson’s Hilda books. I like the description that Alexandra Lange …
Jul 17, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17387”] momalibrary: Subtle cover design alert: the skyline appears to be …
Jul 17, 2016: [gallery] ccadrarebooks: Continuing with our seasonal Grasset postings, July means it’s time for water lilies! From Eugène Grasset’s La plante et ses …
Jul 17, 2016: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17395”] hamonikakoshoten: まどわしの空間 遠近法をめぐる現代の15相
Jul 17, 2016: A magical stela britishmuseum: This so-called ‘magical stela of Horus’ (a stela is a large tablet, usually made of stone) depicts the god Horus in the conventional …
Jul 17, 2016: If certain words and turns of phrase habitual in today’s journalism do not inspire physical disgust, then abandon your pursuit of culture. Friedrich …
Jul 17, 2016: [gallery] fromwithinabook: Village Corner Wire, Wadding & Vintage Books
Jul 15, 2016: Liberty! except for, you know... The good news is that both libertarianism and the LP have roughly arrived at places where that kind of two-way tolerance is the rule, not the …
Jul 11, 2016: the classiest of class acts Thanks for everything, Timmy. May you enjoy the decades of Dungeons and Dragons and paintball that you have so richly earned.
Jul 10, 2016: Hanif Kureishi on Matthew Evans Matthew was a charismatic man who could lead without being bossy and was ruthless without cruelty. He had glamour, charm and class. Careless and …
Jul 10, 2016: Travis Bone [caption id=“attachment_16157” align=“aligncenter” width=“518”]designer and illustrator Travis Bone[/caption]
Jul 7, 2016: bear this in mind A Department of Justice study revealed that a whopping 84 percent of police officers report that they’ve seen colleagues use excessive force on …
Jul 7, 2016: Proust proofs [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“540”]Proust proofs[/caption]
Jul 7, 2016: again Here we are again — seems it was only yesterday … Oh, right, it was. Yesterday’s prayer is today’s prayer, must be, can’t not be. I have written a …
Jul 6, 2016: Alton Sterling and "thoughts and prayers" Alton Sterling was shot and killed by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. A great many things will happen on social media in the next few days, almost …
Jul 3, 2016: Frank Stitt and company: doing it right I was just chatting on Twitter with my friend Chad Wellmon about our favorite restaurant, Highlands Bar and Grill in my home town of Birmingham, …
Jul 1, 2016: The Lord of Limit: Geoffrey Hill, R.I.P. The poet Geoffrey Hill has died, age 84. As a token of my esteem for him, I’m posting here a review I wrote in 2004 for Books and Culture of his …
Jun 28, 2016: I think that sums it up [caption id=“attachment_16134” align=“aligncenter” width=“650”]NICE, FRANCE - JUNE 25: Dejection for England fans …
Jun 27, 2016: democracy FAIL Since ancient times, philosophers have tried to devise systems to try to balance the strengths of majority rule against the need to ensure that …
Jun 26, 2016: on the reckless lending of megaphones Everybody knows that there are people like this — smug, self-satisfied, massively condescending towards everyone whom they believe to be less …
Jun 25, 2016: Farewell, Michael Bradley? Not so long ago, Michael Bradley was a young, rising, dynamic midfielder who was making a real name for himself in Serie A. Then he came to Roma and …
Jun 25, 2016: The City of God is not Brussels Christians are duty bound for theological and historical reasons to support the ever closer union of Europe (which does not imply a superstate) and to …
Jun 24, 2016: a matter of temperament As a conservative-liberal-socialist, I don’t fit onto any political maps that I know of, and I am accustomed to feeling slightly out of place — …
Jun 24, 2016: the thinkpiece so dumb that it makes you shut your computer down and go for a walk Oh, sure, UK : EU :: Texas : USA. I mean, if Texas had been an independent nation for a thousand years before joining a brand-new United States twenty …
Jun 24, 2016: needed: a grip A view from the English channel, looking towards England — as seen in the fevered imagination of Felix Salmon. "That world—the world of hope, the …
Jun 24, 2016: some early thoughts about the Brexit One: I only wish this had happened when I was in London last week: those snooty waiters at those posh restaurants would have fallen at my feet when I …
Jun 22, 2016: excerpt from my Sent folder: on Imagination “Imagination” became a word to conjure with in the Romantic era, thanks largely to Coleridge, with some help from Shelley, but it’s …
Jun 22, 2016: the joys of overseas travel Yesterday I woke up in Rome at 6:30am, had a quick breakfast at the absolutely delightful hotel my friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey had …
Jun 22, 2016: capitulation (2) Evangelical leaders: If you back Trump, for the rest of your days, you will be forced to live with having had a hand in fracturing our nation on the …
Jun 22, 2016: capitulation There is a unity which we must seek, and a unity we cannot allow. The capitulation of the Religious Right is now complete. It is a tragically comic …
Jun 20, 2016: overheard in the Roman forum “This is a medium-sized temple. But this is a LARGE temple.” “And then he fell in love with a boy. Well … the homosexual laws …
Jun 17, 2016: A Day of Infamy Sometimes rhetoric has consequences. If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people they are under threat, that their country has been stolen …
Jun 15, 2016: a convergence I don’t know, maybe I’m eventually going to get used to writing on a phone…. I just want to take a moment to emphasize again how strongly I agree with …
Jun 14, 2016: what the BenOp is for I’m not sure I have a firm grip on Matthew Loftus’s response to my questions for critics of the Benedict Option. His chief criticism of my post seems …
Jun 13, 2016: an encounter Cooks on a break, sitting outside their café Cook (in what might be an Italian accent): Excuse me, sir — are you English? Me: I’m afraid not, …
Jun 13, 2016: sanity I’m working in the British Library this morning and it feels like sanity, you know? People of all shapes and sizes and colors seeking to …
Jun 9, 2016: permission to despair of American politics Don't let anyone steal that disgust from your heart. It is a precious thing. You should treasure your disgust as a sign of your decency, particularly …
Jun 9, 2016: Humpty Dumpty and the BenOp Carl [Trueman] is right to note that the Benedict Option does not entail withdrawal from politics. It entails something far worse—a continuation of …
Jun 8, 2016: from the Mick Jones Rock & Roll Public Library here
Jun 8, 2016: religious freedom revisited It grieves me to see that as religious freedom for American Christians comes increasingly under attack, some American Christians — I'm not even going …
Jun 8, 2016: empathy and leniency Judge Aaron Persky empathized with Brock Allen Turner and could easily imagine what it would be like to lose sports fame (as Persky enjoyed), to lose …
Jun 7, 2016: excerpt from my Sent folder (5) I developed a hatred for neckties in my youth, when I worked for several years in a bookstore that required me to wear at all times a big plastic name …
Jun 6, 2016: Christians aren't the only ones with fantasies It’s hard to imagine a more extraordinary claim than that some hidden intelligence created a universe of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each …
Jun 6, 2016: on second thought In writing about the Benedict Option, I have often lamented American Christians' comparative neglect of the church in favor of something like …
Jun 3, 2016: Klinsmann and the blame game Some thoughts about this interview with Jürgen Klinsmann: He’s remarkably explicit about the players who have disappointed him and why they have …
Jun 3, 2016: excerpt from my Sent folder (4) Anyway, here’s my take: Most academics who were raised as Christians and remain so have gone through a process of sifting their inheritance, taking …
Jun 3, 2016: excerpt from my Sent folder (3) … As someone who was raised in a functionally non-Christian family and became a Christian in college, I have something like an anthropological …
Jun 1, 2016: more commentary on current events The powers and duties assigned to the emperor were broad and comprehensive. They were, moreover, rapidly enlarged as functions traditionally attached …
Jun 1, 2016: commentary on current events In the light of these ancient concepts, Ceasar emerges as a figure at once fascinating and dangerous. For the spirit thus depicted is one of sublime …
Jun 1, 2016: questions for the critics of the Benedict Option The model of Christian social formation that Rod Dreher calls the Benedict Option comes in for a great deal of criticism, some of it from people I …
May 30, 2016: on moderation in consistency My liberal friends complain about my conservative views, my conservative friends about my liberal ones. Some of them seem equally puzzled about where …
May 26, 2016: Anti-Anti-Trump? Again, that sounds exactly right to me, which is why I'm anti-anti-Trump. He is a very flawed candidate, but the success of his candidacy is not …
May 26, 2016: John Webster, RIP I had known John for a couple of years only when the Society for the Study of Theology met in his then home university of Oxford in 2000. In one …
May 23, 2016: getting what we ask for If the office of the presidency can turn George Bush's "humble foreign policy" to "setting a fire in the minds of men" or President Obama's Nobel …
May 22, 2016: this pretty much covers it But others simply believe Mr. Trump is unfit to serve in the Oval Office. Michael K. Vlock, a Connecticut investor who has given nearly $5 million to …
May 22, 2016: not again I am depressed by the news that Jose Mourinho is coming back to the Premier League to manage Manchester United. I am depressed not because of anything …
May 20, 2016: 'I Want Soul' On my bedside table, you’ll find mostly poetry, books on self-healing and medicine, contemplative literature. Ultimately, I want a peak experience in …
May 19, 2016: My current employer, Baylor University — by which I mean also its students, alumni, and supporters — is right now learning in a very hard way …
May 19, 2016: a prayer in time of war Most merciful God, the Granter of all peace and quietness, the Giver of all good gifts, the Defender of all nations, who hast willed all men to be …
May 18, 2016: At the origin of the democratic sense, taken in its human truth, there is not the desire to ‘obey only oneself,’ but rather the desire to …
May 16, 2016: Recent and Forthcoming Work A few notes about current and future plans: I won't be blogging much, if at all, over at The American Conservative, largely because I’ve come to …
May 10, 2016: ¡Guerra Civil! [caption id=“attachment_15976” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”]here[/caption]
May 9, 2016: what shattered the GOP People that now panic about incipient caudillismo and the dangers of a nationalist demagogue didn’t care when Bush expanded the security state, …
May 7, 2016: What Makes Texas Texas Texas, of course, comes by its sense of being a place apart honestly: From 1836-1845, it was its own country, the Republic of Texas, and it has long …
May 5, 2016: twentieth-century British printmaking here
May 5, 2016: DeLillo forgets I’ve been thinking lately, I’m not sure why, about my earlier novels, and I’m quite surprised how little I recall of them. I don’t know whether it’s …
May 1, 2016: the adventures of Jenner and Phelps I heard as good a story as I know this week about old Phelps the Provost of Oriel — you probably remember him, with the beard and the black straw hat. …
Apr 29, 2016: learning from history Ever since I started work on the Dialogue on Democracy that I wrote for a while, and may pursue again, someday, I’ve been reading stuff by and …
Apr 24, 2016: Gunner haiku What suffering do you plan to inflict today, Arsenal? Enough. Other clubs are worse, but only you so deftly raise hopes, then crush them. Wounded may …
Apr 21, 2016: "he who is true" If the Word was indeed made flesh, then it is demanded of men that their words and their lives be in concord. Only he who is true can speak the truth. …
Apr 21, 2016: Into All the World The message powerfully communicated in this book is entirely clear: when using the term "evangelical," it is now imperative to consider the entire …
Apr 20, 2016: a cogent and disturbing summing-up If the police kill, lie about it and take the law into their own hands, no one can be confident in calling for help during a crisis, nor can we rely …
Apr 17, 2016: FTFY, NYT [caption id=“attachment_15943” align=“aligncenter” width=“545”] original map here[/caption]
Apr 16, 2016: readers reborn If the reading of adults is as inefficient as Professor Adler asserts – and I agree with him – it is because most of them are reading only in order to …
Apr 14, 2016: Khoi on Kindle For me, the Kindle seems to be all works and no looks—the Oasis is a step forward only if you regard the visual language of day planners from the …
Apr 14, 2016: I don’t code, and don’t have the technical chops to be genuinely geeky, but my habit of muttering “Priori Incantatem” to …
Apr 14, 2016: one more brief round with Ross D. My thanks to Ross Douthat for taking the time to respond to my thoughts on Pope Francis’s recent Apostolic Exhortation. I’m just going to …
Apr 14, 2016: Thanks to the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas Back from the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas clergy retreat, where I was privileged to be a speaker alongside the amazing Fleming Rutledge, I have a …
Apr 11, 2016: Here’s how undiscerning and weak-willed I am: I’m off for three days to speak to and consort with the gang of publicans and sinners …
Apr 11, 2016: one answer to my question In my recent post I asked, “So why the hostility from so many conservative Catholics? I am not certain, but from what I have heard over the …
Apr 11, 2016: more charity for Francis, I say! Well, I guess my friend Michael Brendan Dougherty did not get my memo counseling charity towards Pope Francis, since his column is titled “The …
Apr 9, 2016: a new rule I just came up with a new rule for writing today, one that I plan to adhere to for the rest of my life: If it infuriates you, don’t write about …
Apr 8, 2016: vindication for Sam Hinkie Jeff Bezos says that if Amazon has a good quarter it’s because of work they did 3, 4, 5 years ago—not because they did a good job that quarter. …
Apr 8, 2016: a first thought on Amoris Laetitia In a passage that’s already getting a lot of attention, Pope Francis writes, Because of forms of conditioning and mitigating factors, it is …
Apr 7, 2016: a sudden change of heart Yesterday as I was driving home from work my local NPR station informed me that I was about to hear an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, and I thought: …
Apr 6, 2016: a world without pronouns As I was draftingthis morning’s post on the issues surrounding transgenderism, a good many related ideas were floating around in my head. For …
Apr 5, 2016: Jon Klassen [caption id=“attachment_15903” align=“aligncenter” width=“545”]here[/caption]
Apr 3, 2016: R. S. Thomas, "The Answer" Not darkness but twilight in which even the best of minds must make its way now. And slowly the questions occur, vague but formidable for all that. We …
Apr 2, 2016: when to rename a building Ashe Schow argues that university administrators shouldn’t give in to protesters who want to rename campus buildings because that will just encourage …
Apr 1, 2016: why I love my job On Monday morning I’ll be sending an email to my students reminding them that then need to bring both Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene …
Apr 1, 2016: pretentiousness I remember about eight years ago spending an afternoon at MoMA and then heading down to Soho for evening drinks at the loft of a friend of a friend. …
Mar 30, 2016: Japanese Covers of Gene Wolfe books [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“530”]via the 50 Watts Tumblr[/caption]
Mar 30, 2016: teaching Dawkins I always give my students reading quizzes, and this morning, as I was making out a quiz, I found myself writing this: 7) How does gene-level …
Mar 25, 2016: I remember two things The man who wrote "Amazing Grace" lived to be a very old man. For many years he worked as a priest in London. His teaching, his sermons his hymns, …
Mar 24, 2016: genz There is no more overrated analytical category than the “generation” – it is at least an order of magnitude worse than useless …
Mar 24, 2016: I think the biggest religious choice I ever made was my decision to teach at Wheaton College. As I suggested the other day, being employed by Wheaton …
Mar 24, 2016: R.I.P. There has never been a greater footballer.
Mar 23, 2016: on <em>The End of the Tour<em> As part of my ongoing reckoning with David Foster Wallace, a writer whose work I have mixed responses to but whom I can’t put out of my mind, I …
Mar 22, 2016: rags and brambles: a meditation for Holy Week What is at issue here is a species of vision that breaks down the rigid lineaments of a world that interprets itself principally according to the …
Mar 20, 2016: more from Inga Moore [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“950”]from The Secret Garden[/caption]
Mar 20, 2016: spring cleaning [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“564”]Inga Moore depicts Mole’s spring cleaning, from The Wind in the …
Mar 18, 2016: moving past the knowledge piece When we met around a conference table, the college’s president, Eileen Aranda, explained the lack of explicitly religious coursework. “We have moved …
Mar 18, 2016: origins of the Tories and Whigs The recess of the English Parliament [in 1641] lasted six weeks. The day on which the Houses met again is one of the most remarkable epochs in our …
Mar 18, 2016: the archangel on his bicycle [caption id="attachment_15841" align="aligncenter" width="788"]Arcabas[/caption]
Mar 18, 2016: young Jesus in the Temple [caption id="attachment_15837" align="aligncenter" width="545"]Arcabas[/caption]
Mar 18, 2016: a painful truth Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books involves constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings …
Mar 14, 2016: McLuhan at Hogwarts In one of my classes we’re reading McLuhan’s Understanding Media, and today I called my students' attention to this passage: Alexis de …
Mar 12, 2016: snaky codex This, by Leigh McCloskey, looks like the cover of the visitors’ book at Slytherin House.
Mar 11, 2016: political twins Some of the more aggressive leftist student protestors — these people, for instance, or these — have three things in common with the more aggressive …
Mar 11, 2016: Christian ethics in time of political turmoil When a man’s ways please the LORD, he makes even his enemies to be at peace with him. —Proverbs 16:7 You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is …
Mar 10, 2016: astronomical drawings [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“540”]astronomical drawings from the NYPL[/caption]
Mar 10, 2016: the birds [quicktime width=“600” height=“336”]blog.ayjay.org/wp-conten…[/quicktime]
Mar 9, 2016: errors that can't be corrected In my previous post I linked to my review in First Things of Vodolazkin’s novel Laurus, which bears the title “Russian Brahmin.” But when …
Mar 9, 2016: recent publications I’ve had a few articles and reviews come out so far this year, and for the handful of people who might be interested, here’s a list: …
Mar 9, 2016: Dan Treier on tragedy and wisdom My friend Dan Treier has written a long, thoughtful, sober, and wise post on what Wheaton College — and other Christian institutions — can learn from …
Mar 7, 2016: slowing down the Warriors [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“650”]via warriorsworld.com[/caption] Of all the things that separate …
Mar 5, 2016: I think I can, I think I can, I think I can ...
Mar 2, 2016: Wikipedia pages that are in my browser history for some reason List of fictional toxins List of instruments by Harry Partch Traditional dyes of the Scottish Highlands Computational Complexity Theory Sequential …
Mar 2, 2016: Dylan's notebooks here
Mar 1, 2016: tough guys Some lines from a Daily Beast story about Breitbart’s support for Trump: “Never f*** with Breitbart. Ever.” “If a guy comes after our audience …
Mar 1, 2016: pain? What does Kottke mean, “John Oliver’s 22 minutes of pain for Donald Trump”? That segment, you can be sure, caused zero seconds of …
Feb 29, 2016: Waco: on the road to success? [caption id=“attachment_15779” align=“aligncenter” width=“545”]The Brazos River in Waco[/caption] James Fallows …
Feb 26, 2016: choices I think American conservatism today very much needs to be pulled towards compassion; I think American liberalism today very much needs to pulled …
Feb 25, 2016: Twitter's missing manual A ton of people have been linking to this, which is meet and right, because it’s excellent. (There were even a couple of things I, Past Master …
Feb 25, 2016: a few thoughts on Chris Ware Chris Ware is sort of the anti-Hergé. He follows Hergé in two major respects. First, there’s the the clear-line style of drawing, which Ware seems to …
Feb 25, 2016: please pass the Chew-Z So here we have Nathan Jurgenson, who works for Snapchat, arguing, quite sincerely, with a vocabulary drawn from new media studies, social theory, and …
Feb 23, 2016: the flipped lecture: addendum A couple of people have written to point out a flaw in the proposal I made the other day — and yeah, they have a point. That point is that in a …
Feb 23, 2016: Legacies: Five Years after @MayorEmanuel Despite the mountain of profanity that most of these accounts offer — admittedly a pretty big part of @MayorEmanuel’s playbook as well — none of them …
Feb 23, 2016: the flipped lecture My friend Andy Crouch is a writer and editor who does a lot of public speaking, and he commented on Twitter the other day that he doesn’t enjoy …
Feb 23, 2016: Fury Road To The White House Okay, so, what if, by the time of the Republican Convention, the GOP decides it cannot possibly have Trump as the Republican candidate, and games the …
Feb 22, 2016: operating systems & the Reformation I wrote this some years ago in a post that has now been taken down — reposted here — but with Umberto Eco’s death the topic is fresh again. Thus …
Feb 20, 2016: Teaser Trailer: Republican Nomination 2016 [embed]https://youtu.be/gaTCLIFcX5E?start=19&end=24[/embed] Starring James Earl Jones as GOP Establishment and Malcolm McDowell as Trump …
Feb 20, 2016: Rage — sing, goddess, of the rage Perhaps we are witnessing a return to a mode of more immediate access that in turn informs a sort of faceless orality—to the sort of thing we might …
Feb 18, 2016: Tolkien and Charles Williams Charles Williams (1886–1945) was a cult figure in his lifetime, and he remains one. The word “cult” here describes someone who cannot easily be judged …
Feb 16, 2016: chalk streams The Chalk Streams of Norfolk with Stephen Fry from Relevant Films on Vimeo.
Feb 15, 2016: flower in amber A 45 million-year-old flower
Feb 15, 2016: Teaching the Hebrew Bible in the context of campus sexual violence I am a graduate of two schools now under investigation by the Department of Education for their failure to address sexual violence and sexual …
Feb 14, 2016: early title pages [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1000”]Regiomontanus’s Kalendarium (1476)[/caption] More here.
Feb 13, 2016: the state of Apple software “We’re frustrated of course to hear it overall characterized as this, quality is dropping overall,” Federighi continued, “because we know that’s not …
Feb 10, 2016: a suggestion about the future of Wheaton College When I was visiting Wheaton College last week I happened to hear a story on NPR about Intel’s attempts to create a more diverse workforce, with more …
Feb 8, 2016: the world we live in The fact that LeGrier’s actions had forced Officer Rialmo to end LeGrier’s life, and to accidently take the innocent life of Bettie Jones, has caused, …
Feb 8, 2016: rules for evaluating the political significance of behavior Anything good that happens to me happens because of my hard work. Anything bad that happens to me happens because of unforeseeable circumstances and …
Feb 8, 2016: LOTR revisited Isn’t it time to start imagining a remake of Lord of the Rings? Not time to have one just yet, mind you, but time to consider what it ought to …
Feb 7, 2016: a conclusion and a beginning Now that the crisis at Wheaton College has been more or less sorted out — though the repercussions will continue to be felt for years, and the …
Feb 6, 2016: Virginia Tech and Flint — As Flint Fought to Be Heard, Virginia Tech Team Sounded Alarm. I think every college and university should be asking itself, What are we doing that …
Feb 4, 2016: Fripp's fire That’s one of my favorite images of Robert Fripp. Lately I’ve been listening rather obsessively to a relatively neglected track from …
Feb 4, 2016: theorist-consumers The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in …
Feb 3, 2016: same old, same old I had to get to my iPad in order to read Walt Mossberg and John Gruber’s articles about poorly performing Apple software because my brand-new …
Jan 31, 2016: How to Raise a Creative Child? In adulthood, many prodigies become experts in their fields and leaders in their organizations. Yet “only a fraction of gifted children eventually …
Jan 28, 2016: it has come when you cut a red pepper and end up with some sort of malevolent barbershop quartet straight from the hellmouth pic.twitter.com/eWFRA4zFHc — Timothy …
Jan 27, 2016: Beauty Beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned …
Jan 23, 2016: the artist in her place [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“1050”]Louise Bourgeois in her studio, 1974[/caption]
Jan 23, 2016: Hilde Kruger [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“540”]via the 50 Watts Tumblr[/caption]
Jan 22, 2016: “Shakespeareomics” Towards the end of last year I saw Benedict Cumberbatch playing Hamlet and then Justin Kurzel’s fantastic film version of Macbeth. In chatting about …
Jan 22, 2016: making the Apple Watch desirable Dan Moren has two major requests, a camera and a faster chip. But to implement these would almost certainly mean that the Watch would stay the same …
Jan 21, 2016: today in: results no one could possibly have anticipated In a review published earlier this month, a team of cognitive psychologists from the University of California, San Diego and the Massachusetts …
Jan 20, 2016: Planet 9 And the astrophysicist says “You look fine, Planet 9, Planet 9, you look fine We’ve been looking for you too long”
Jan 19, 2016: once more on the academic-freedom merry-go-round My former colleague Tracy McKenzie has posted a fine reflection on academic freedom and Christian colleges and universities, a topic that I have …
Jan 19, 2016: Newman's gentleman It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. …
Jan 15, 2016: How to Become Batman This episode of Invisibilia is beautiful and moving: &lt;/p&gt;<br /><br />
Jan 15, 2016: my reading workflow I’ve previously described my writing workflow — and what I wrote then is still applicable today. Pandoc rules. But what about my reading workflow? …
Jan 15, 2016: Punk London [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“580”]an upcoming map booklet[/caption]
Jan 14, 2016: the El Capitan disaster I hate writing on an iPad, and yet I’m writing this post on an iPad. Why? Well, that’s a long story. My first great mistake was installing …
Jan 14, 2016: understanding evangelicalism ... … is hard. Evangelicalism is a much more complex phenomenon than many of its detractors, and for that matter many of its adherents, are willing …
Jan 14, 2016: tech report: Fitbit Charge HR I’ve been using this for about six months, but I think I’m done with it. I like the simple, bare-bones design of the thing, and the very …
Jan 13, 2016: book early to avoid disappointment On the Acknowledgments page of The Thing Itself, the new novel by Adam Roberts, there’s this: As an atheist writing a novel about why you should …
Jan 12, 2016: Hamlet the tweeter: a template for future use HAMLET What is he whose grief Bears such an emphasis? whose phrase of sorrow Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand Like wonder-wounded …
Jan 10, 2016: What I am telling my Wheaton Art students on Monday It’s strange that even while this controversy has caused so much grief and suffering, you will likely benefit from it, because you will study harder …
Jan 10, 2016: Words Unwired? Five years ago Ben Lerner, Atticus Lish and Ottessa Moshfegh had yet to publish any fiction. John Jeremiah Sullivan had yet to publish a book of …
Jan 7, 2016: a bit of housekeeping I’ve moved a few links from the sidebar to the About page, for neatness' sake. And I’ve added to that sidebar a link to my Pinboard page, …
Jan 6, 2016: students speaking truth to power We expect to be held accountable, but we would also hold accountable our professors as well. Nothing will guarantee our attendance if we do not have …
Jan 6, 2016: honest answers to common questions BP: Is there a question you wish someone would ask you? CB: The question I wish people would ask me is “How do I order your books in bulk?” — From …
Jan 5, 2016: excerpt from discussions on the Twitter HQ Slack channel A: We’re still getting hammered in the press — well, everywhere really — for all the abuse some of our users take. Do we have any new ideas …
Jan 4, 2016: For What It’s Worth: A Review of the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” | Dan Cohen A wonderfully thought-provoking meditation on uniqueness, value, scarcity, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproducibility, and similar …
Jan 4, 2016: Gill Sans [caption id=“attachment_15584” align=“aligncenter” width=“672”]Sample page of Gill Sans, via Flickr user …
Jan 4, 2016: Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were N-word" It has been published and adapted as Ten Little Indians and Ten Little Soldier Boys (though also, I have to say, sometimes republished under its …
Jan 3, 2016: A New Role for Comments on Chronicle.com Our default expectation is not that we’ll try to give every comment an airing; it’s that we’ll highlight worthwhile material. What counts as …
Jan 2, 2016: Dusty sings "So Much Love" [embed]youtu.be/H71YMS0Dj…[/embed] Why don’t people go around telling one another about this song? Like, all day, every day? This is …
Jan 2, 2016: Fayetteville councilman calms church gunman Wright said the man, who has not been identified by police yet, was carrying the rifle without a clip in one hand and a loaded ammunition clip in the …
Jan 2, 2016: The Gospel of Life Today is the Feast of Saints Basil & Gregory Nazianzen, which reminds me that some years ago I wanted to write a book for the church that took the …
Jan 2, 2016: The Gospel of the Trees Before I decided to turn it into a website, I had an idea for a book to be called The Gospel of the Trees. I just came across the map I made when I …
Jan 1, 2016: two quotations from Saul Bellow's <b>Herzog</b> One: But how was he to describe this lesson? The description might begin with his wild internal disorder, or even with the fact that he was quivering. …
Jan 1, 2016: Can right-wing populism be stopped? To judge from what gets them going at campaign rallies and on Twitter, Trump supporters think the appropriate response to white working-class decline …
Jan 1, 2016: my best blog posts of 2015 The Thrilla in Manila and the End of Boxing How I Became a Soccer Fan Three related posts: The Value of Disagreement, Disciplinary Bulverism, and …
Jan 1, 2016: Happy New Year, y'all [embed]youtu.be/o-uUS6bSO…[/embed]
Jan 1, 2016: this pretty much says it all [video width=“400” height=“224” mp4="blog.ayjay.org/wp-conten…" loop=“true” …
Dec 31, 2015: Giles Fraser on Karl Barth It will be a century this coming summer that the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth began his revolutionary commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the …
Dec 31, 2015: reinventing the university in the Enlightenment For Schelling, the eighteenth-century university reproduced the effects of information overload in institutional and pedagogical form. It not only …
Dec 30, 2015: what's wrong with football, episode 124,372 I have been watching less and less football in the past couple of years, for the same reason that thousands of other people have become uncomfortable …
Dec 30, 2015: The Paranoid Style of American Policing It will not do to note that 99 percent of the time the police mediate conflicts without killing people, any more than it will do for a restaurant to …
Dec 29, 2015: guild books and bestsellers In one of the prefaces to The Epistle to the Romans, Barth comments ruefully on having written a bestseller; and while the book is quite difficult in …
Dec 29, 2015: my contribution to The American Conservative 2015 books symposium Beyond any question, the four volumes by Elena Ferrante commonly called the Neapolitan Quartet constituted the most powerful and memorable reading …
Dec 29, 2015: Abdelhamid Abaaoud, Man of the Year 2015 Abaaoud is the Man of the Year for personalizing the terror. He is Man of the Year for symbolizing Western impotence and indifference in the battle …
Dec 28, 2015: Barth and Israel Above is one of several quite similar comments that I wrote in my copy of The Epistle to the Romans as I read Barth’s exegesis of Romans 9-11. …
Dec 28, 2015: Manger: sermon by Jessica Martin There is no creature more needy than a human baby. For those first months, even years, all the nourishment apparently comes from adult to child. (What …
Dec 27, 2015: Oliver Sacks remembered by his nephew, Jonathan Sacks Some years on, after a long, chilly swim off Long Island, we sat on the beach and discussed life. Oliver, by now sporting a beard fit for an Assyrian …
Dec 27, 2015: future Lagos [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“800”]Idumota Market, Lagos 2081 A.D. by Ikire Jones, Olalekan Jeyfous …
Dec 26, 2015: pane e vino [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“600”]The men and women of the Bose monastic community gathered in …
Dec 26, 2015: type [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1200”]a Christmas card from Cartlidge Levene, via Creative …
Dec 25, 2015: in memory Teri and I tonight lifted a glass of Prosecco in memory of our so dear and so-greatly-lamented friend Brett Foster — who loved all things Italian, and …
Dec 25, 2015: a Byzantine Gospel of Luke [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1576”]11th century; Biblioteque Nationale, Paris[/caption]
Dec 24, 2015: oh really? source
Dec 24, 2015: what Christianity is (and is not) for As a believing Christian, I have come to a point where I find articles like Scruton’s increasingly frustrating. That large numbers of Europeans no …
Dec 24, 2015: Karl Barth and The Thing Itself In speaking of God, human logic characteristically ignores both His nature and the fact that, when the reference is to Him, the argument from …
Dec 24, 2015: an educational Dark Age? In response to this post on a lament by David Gelernter, one of Rod Dreher’s commenters cites, as evidence of cultural decline, an episode of MAS*H in …
Dec 23, 2015: reading Barth on Romans (2) No other possibility is open to me except the possibility of being a man of the earth – O wretched man that I am! We have seen at last the reality of …
Dec 23, 2015: my year in tech I’m not doing a “my year in reading” post — because I never do a “my year in reading” post — but in its stead here’s an account of my year in …
Dec 22, 2015: obligatory Star Wars post Just for the record: My view of the prequels is precisely that of every rational person, even though I only saw one of them. I saw each of the first …
Dec 22, 2015: reading Barth on Romans The judgment of God is the end of history, not the beginning of a new, a second, epoch. The difference between that which lies beyond the judgment and …
Dec 21, 2015: old disciplines, new people The practices of the ancient Church were forged in eras of the porous self and were responsive to its fears and vulnerabilities. Can they be nearly as …
Dec 21, 2015: excerpt from my Sent folder (2) … I’ve written a couple of angry things in defense of Wheaton, since I left, but I think my having left made it possible for me to get away …
Dec 21, 2015: excerpt from my Sent folder (1) … When I think about the larger context of all this, I am always reminded of something Lewis says in a preface to Mere Christianity: that he …
Dec 17, 2015: conversation with Rod Dreher about Christine Ferber's confiture
Dec 17, 2015: worthy of note … that the Chicago Tribune’s editorial on the current Wheaton College kerfuffle is considerably more charitable and fair-minded than the …
Dec 17, 2015: the most incisive commentary on today's disputes about whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God The process whereby ‘faith and works’ become a stock gag in the commercial theatre is characteristic of that whole tragic farce which we call the …
Dec 16, 2015: PSA I have no opinions on controversies in the evangelical Christian world — including those concerning the college where I was employed for many years — …
Dec 16, 2015: waves [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“1484”]Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds over Utah[/caption]
Dec 16, 2015: money bags [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“600”]Money bags, collected by Ben Schott’s grandfather[/caption]
Dec 16, 2015: Potter covers These are really well done, as opposed to those.
Dec 16, 2015: 4 B.C. My colleague Philip Jenkins on the extremely violent and politically disrupted era in which Jesus was born.
Dec 15, 2015: people trying to think about sex robots Richardson and Levy stand on opposite sides of a busy road, watching technology speed past towards a clouded horizon. If the future of sex (as all …
Dec 15, 2015: "the power of a discourse that is never open to reply" Uttering the unacceptable in prose and exploring the elusive, not-yet-captured depth of things in poetry have in common the crucial recognition that …
Dec 14, 2015: some books I wrote about in 2015 Some of these behind a paywall; some of the reflections more extensive than others. Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage Adam Roberts’ edition of …
Dec 14, 2015: ascesis Once upon time, it involved scourging the flesh or living in a hermitage or spending years atop a pillar. Now it’s doing without your phone for …
Dec 12, 2015: before "Steves" [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“2928”]From the 1984 manga “The Apple II Story”[/caption]
Dec 9, 2015: Millman on Trump I’m not saying that having a President – or even a major candidate – who spouts xenophobic rants is a good thing. It’s a bad thing. I’m just …
Dec 9, 2015: my recommendation [caption id=“attachment_15408” align=“aligncenter” width=“433”]I’d like to suggest that we replace the entire …
Dec 9, 2015: HITCHCOCKA [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500”]via things magazine tumblr[/caption]
Dec 8, 2015: December in Texas 2 Same day, same neighborhood as the set of images posted earlier today. It’s pretty weird having Spring and Fall at the same time.
Dec 8, 2015: theological anthropology [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“800”]by Tobias Rothe[/caption]
Dec 8, 2015: December in Texas All from my yard today.
Dec 8, 2015: another win for subtle insinuation
Dec 7, 2015: liberalism as normcore Attempts to demean the conservative temperament — even assuming that there is such a thing as the conservative temperament — bother me less than the …
Dec 7, 2015: tell me more If the doctor could see her patient as a person who is suffering instead of as a set of medical conditions, she might become more empathetic. That is …
Dec 7, 2015: in which I sum up my posts on the recent controversies in academia I have been trying for a while now, and in multiple locations, to articulate an argument about recent modes of student disaffection in American …
Dec 7, 2015: mass shootings and culture wars What's so fascinating and occasionally unnerving about the B-plot to our gun tragedies is the way they become a search for the far more diffuse and …
Dec 7, 2015: the last word on the humanities The late Robert Nisbet used to tell a story about the academic scientist who was angrily accosted by his humanist colleague for “speaking against the …
Dec 6, 2015: my prediction Rod Dreher has been reporting on what appears to be a recently implemented editorial strategy at New York Daily News: whatever happens, the Christians …
Dec 4, 2015: 'tis the season We don’t get a great deal of autumn color here in central Texas, but what we have comes now — in December — as people are putting up their …
Dec 4, 2015: reverse covers Probably someone has made this point before, but it occurred to me a while back that you can better appreciate both a cover of a song and the original …
Dec 4, 2015: Coach Pop's secrets I really enjoyed this between-quarters interview, and not only because Pop’s hug for Sager (who has been away from the game for a long time …
Dec 3, 2015: in which I get into the lifehacking game Here’s the handout I’m giving to my freshman seminar in a few minutes, as we meet for the last time. My guide to collegiate lifehacking, …
Dec 3, 2015: Zuck's sleight of hand Zuckerberg and Chan did not set up a charitable foundation, which has nonprofit status. He created a limited liability company, one that has already …
Dec 3, 2015: Nick's knowledge Nick Bilton must have known Steve Jobs extremely well to know that other people who say they knew Steve Jobs really well didn’t know Steve Jobs …
Dec 2, 2015: your tweets are not helping The media faces a growing challenge in how its content is spread and recycled. When I asked various law enforcement and forensic psychology experts …
Dec 2, 2015: Coleridge writes Coleridge on Measure for Measure — literally on Measure for Measure — from Adam Roberts' wonderful blog documenting his ongoing engagement with the …
Dec 2, 2015: an ongoing dialogue Over at The American Conservative, I have been unfolding a dialogue on democracy. There have been six installments so far — One Two Three Four Five …
Dec 2, 2015: Evgeny Vodolazkin speaks As I finished writing Laurus , I told my wife I worked three years on this novel, and now you will read it, and so will my colleagues — but nobody …
Dec 2, 2015: the real objection Pro-life rhetoric isn't the real issue for pro-choicers anyway. The bedrock pro-life view -- which, if you haven't figured it out already, I share -- …
Dec 1, 2015: what cells look like Source: Amazing Micrographs Show What Cells Really Look Like | WIRED
Dec 1, 2015: on hermeneutical democracy Rod asks about “hermeneutical democracy” and one scholar’s insistence that Protestants “own their Protestantism” by accepting that they have no guide …
Nov 30, 2015: the blame game In June, racist Dylann Roof massacred nine black Christians meeting for a mid-week Bible study. He hoped to launch a race war, as he explained in a …
Nov 30, 2015: isochronic map This is an isochronic map – isochrones being lines joining points accessible in the same amount of time – and it tells a story about how travel was …
Nov 30, 2015: Men of Talent! In 1904, more men of talent in Alabama than California — so at least some things haven’t changed. — Rebecca Onion, Map of the Most Intellectual …
Nov 30, 2015: it turns out ... … that political rhetoric leads to violence only when some people are talking. I might as well put this on record: I don't believe that there …
Nov 28, 2015: open wide via Steven Kawalit
Nov 28, 2015: surviving the zombie planet I’m an edge case. I want an untangled web. I want everything I do to copy back to a single place, so I have one searchable log for each day’s …
Nov 27, 2015: Corinthians This essay by Jacqueline Rose on the Oscar Pistorius trial is powerful and provocative, and I commend it to you without reservation. What follows is …
Nov 27, 2015: education and virtue If we wish men to practise virtue, it is worth while trying to make them love virtue, and feel it an object in itself, and not a tax paid for leave to …
Nov 25, 2015: white I probably ought to be deeply sympathetic to this this post by Jay Nordlinger. I didn’t come from a background as impoverished as the high-powered …
Nov 24, 2015: two kinds of Christian book Sometimes it seems to me that there are really only two types of Christian books: Platitudes and Planners. The Platitudes tell us with great …
Nov 24, 2015: Europe and Islam: A clash of failures For now, most French intellectuals are offering their rote prayers to the French way of things, saying that the shock of the Paris attacks means that …
Nov 23, 2015: Irish cross [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“780”]Processional cross. Bronze, tin, gold, amber, oak (now reconstructed …
Nov 22, 2015: in which I offer a comprehensive analytical interpretation of the curious response of university administrators to the most extreme demands of student protesters The customer is always right.
Nov 21, 2015: in which some podcasts describe themselves honestly The Message: Our story is pretty incoherent, but we know you’ll forgive us because we have, in choosing our characters, ticked every possible …
Nov 21, 2015: boys on the porch [caption id=“attachment_15264” align=“aligncenter” width=“362”] Malcolm and me in our old house in Wheaton. I miss …
Nov 20, 2015: I’m at the age at which articles like this profile of Michael Walzer are terrifying. Walzer’s scholarly and writerly career has effectively outlived …
Nov 20, 2015: closing down the mosques It’s not about closing down mosques. It’s about closing down anyplace — whether it’s a cafe, a diner, an internet site — anyplace where radicals are …
Nov 19, 2015: here I am again Over the past couple of years I’ve been going back and forth between this blog and my Tumblr, trying to figure out which one works best for me. I …
Nov 19, 2015: And so if the word is basically ‘ISIS’, but in Arabic, why are the people it describes in such a fury about it? Because they hear it, quite rightly, …
Nov 17, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17406,17407,17408,17409,17410,17411,17412,17413,17414,17415”] …
Nov 17, 2015: Student Activism Is Serious Business Student Activism Is Serious Business So according to Roxane Gay, the students protestors — all of them, I suppose; she never acknowledges any …
Nov 17, 2015: It’s true that in a certain sense, to share means that there aren’t differences between us, that we have the same doctrine – underscoring that word, a …
Nov 17, 2015: [gallery] Yep, I think this pretty much covers it
Nov 16, 2015: In some quarters of American life, evangelical Christians are viewed as fearful and xenophobic—afraid of “the other.” Perhaps in a few cases, which …
Nov 16, 2015: In 2006, Indonesia passed a law requiring minority religious groups to collect signatures from the local majority group before building houses of …
Nov 16, 2015: Pope Cracks Door to Lutheran Communion Pope Cracks Door to Lutheran Communion I guess I understand why Rod feels the way he does about this, but on Saturday I participated in a friend’s …
Nov 15, 2015: The purest and truest adherents of Christianity have always hindered and called into question its worldly success and so-called ‘power in history’ …
Nov 13, 2015: Roger Lundin This morning, as I prepare to leave for Wheaton, where I will attend the funeral of Brett Foster, I learn that Roger Lundin has died. Roger was my …
Nov 12, 2015: College Encourages Lively Exchange Of Idea - The Onion - America's Finest News Source College Encourages Lively Exchange Of Idea - The Onion - America’s Finest News Source BOSTON—Saying that such a dialogue was essential to the …
Nov 12, 2015: It turns out that if you’re a curious, motivated individual in the Swat Valley or Ado-Ekiti, access to knowledge and information means a lot to you: …
Nov 12, 2015: [vimeo 145248208 w=250 h=141] Delightfully weird. (Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
Nov 12, 2015: I have one thought Today I hear from one source that the killing of Tamir Rice was “objectively reasonable” and from another that when some students and faculty at …
Nov 12, 2015: This unquestionably was a tragic loss of life, but to compound the tragedy by labeling the officers conduct as anything but objectively reasonable …
Nov 12, 2015: But persistent or not, the myth of the unemployed humanities major is just that: a myth, and an easily disproven one at that. Georgetown University’s …
Nov 12, 2015: We honour today those whose readiness to respond to the human duty to serve others became, because of the times they lived in, choices unto death. We, …
Nov 11, 2015: I find it amusing to reflect on the idea that mankind may sometime soon grow tired of reading and that writers will do so too, that the scholar will …
Nov 11, 2015: Brett Foster, “Back-to-School Rondeau” It’s almost time to set aside the waning distractions of first youth, the life contained for years at home. What’s home? The place you grow out of, …
Nov 11, 2015: [gallery] Another example: this is what happened when I pressed my finger on the sentence beginning “The suspended….” I tried scrolling up and down, …
Nov 11, 2015: [gallery] I keep reading that iOS is a robust, mature operating system now. Then I try to select a paragraph of text.
Nov 11, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17444”] People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and a …
Nov 11, 2015: In short, I support people creating “safe spaces” as a shield by exercising their freedom of association to organize themselves into mutually …
Nov 11, 2015: [gallery] publicdomainreview: Victorian illustrations predicting the advent of video chat more than 100 years before Skype. See more here: …
Nov 11, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17455”] thingsmagazine: Aaron Ho
Nov 10, 2015: sweatervestboy: Profiles of Brett Foster Poetry Foundation Image Journal Kingdom Poets Wheaton College Books by Brett Foster Poetry The Garbage Eater …
Nov 10, 2015: Tributes are already beginning to arrive for my dear friend Brett Foster, who died last night at an obscenely early age. Wesley Hill, with whom Brett …
Nov 9, 2015: People think they don’t understand math, but it’s all about how you explain it to them. If you ask a drunkard what number is larger, 2/3 or 3/5, he …
Nov 9, 2015: The Room Three is exactly what fans have been hoping for, and more. Though several classical elements have changed, they’ve changed for the better. …
Nov 9, 2015: [gallery]
Nov 6, 2015: It has been the fate of many poets to find that the world is at once too much and not enough, to be driven to suicide and madness, or to the creation …
Nov 6, 2015: Aunt Polly blushed crimson with humiliation, and frowned and shook her head at Tom. “Experience,” said Holmes, laughing.“ Miss Prism. “My …
Nov 6, 2015: The top ten PhD-granting institutions account for more than half (56 percent) of all articles published. Authors with PhDs from Harvard, Yale, …
Nov 4, 2015: britishmuseum: The ancient Greeks saw the Celts as warlike peoples whose strange customs set them apart from the civilised Mediterranean world. …
Nov 3, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17471”] houghtonlib: From the Houghton Instagram, a 1944 fine-press edition …
Nov 3, 2015: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Clyde Holliday, - The first photograph from space, 24 October 1946
Nov 3, 2015: [gallery] thingsmagazine: The first photograph of Mars, Mariner 4, July 1965
Nov 1, 2015: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Aerial Life, W.H.Robinson, 1918
Nov 1, 2015: [gallery] gerrycanavan: politics y’all
Oct 31, 2015: [gallery] Andy Goldsworthy
Oct 31, 2015: The ‘driest place on Earth’ is covered in pink flowers after a crazy year of rain The ‘driest place on Earth’ is covered in pink flowers after a crazy year of rain
Oct 31, 2015: [gallery] Flux Machine
Oct 31, 2015: Letter to the Catholic Academy Letter to the Catholic Academy I’m especially pleased that Ross has doubled down here on the use of the term “heresy.” In the column that I responded …
Oct 31, 2015: [gallery] jonklassen: a small story i did last year for Monkey magazine. Monkey is a Japanese magazine, so that is why the action goes right-to-left. …
Oct 31, 2015: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Little Nemo, Winsor McCay
Oct 30, 2015: From the 1971 German film by Hellmuth Costard, Fußball, Wie Noch Nie (Football As Never Before), soon to be re-released with a new score (Source: …
Oct 30, 2015: [gallery] A page from the oldest known draft of the King James Bible
Oct 30, 2015: [gallery] the jewel caterpillar
Oct 30, 2015: From her dialect my mother left me one specific word that she used to describe how one felt when one was pulled here and there by contradictory …
Oct 29, 2015: Dark matter’s existence perplexes people who find it implausible that the vast majority of matter in the universe would be undetectable by our senses …
Oct 29, 2015: Different Managers Use Pressing in Different Ways Different Managers Use Pressing in Different Ways The Inside Channel is one of the best soccer blogs I know. Jake Meador writes especially clearly, …
Oct 29, 2015: Martese Johnson and other UVa black students are in effect complaining about racial profiling, about singling out black students and treating them …
Oct 29, 2015: The batter has to estimate the necessary position by doing an impressive amount of computation. All a batter has to go on is a view of the unfolding …
Oct 29, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17524”] The construction noise almost drove me out of my mind, but in the …
Oct 29, 2015: [gallery] houghtonlib: Two circular images from our Instagram account, a compass rose from a map of Siberia, and an Islamic prayer calendar from a …
Oct 29, 2015: On Not Saying What You Mean I’ve had a few snarky things to say on Twitter about the Douthat Kerfuffle, and I’d like to say more, but I’m struggling with the evasiveness of some …
Oct 29, 2015: [gallery] Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of a Woman (Agnes Dürer)
Oct 28, 2015: After young adulthood, he says, the reasons that friends stop being friends are usually circumstantial—due to things outside the relationship itself. …
Oct 28, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17536”] publicdomainreview: Frontispiece to Charles Howard Hinton’s The …
Oct 28, 2015: Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), Head of a woman, about 1505–1507 britishmuseum: Metalpoint was a major part of artistic practice across northern Europe by about 1400. The fame of Netherlandish artists such as Jan …
Oct 28, 2015: This article reports the results of a nationwide audit study testing how Christian churches welcome potential newcomers to their churches as a …
Oct 28, 2015: Worse, calling people names is disgraceful. Especially in the name of religion. These ad hominem attacks—an attack not on the argument but on the …
Oct 28, 2015: Diversity in the Christian University Diversity in the Christian University My friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey on Christian higher education and the problem of “diversity” — to which …
Oct 28, 2015: [youtube …
Oct 27, 2015: An Open Letter to Ron An Open Letter to Ron
Oct 27, 2015: That is the moral-ideological core of conservatism today. It presumes that life is a competition or race, that people are unequal in talent, drive, …
Oct 27, 2015: “Secular, but Feeling a Call to Divinity School,” by Samuel G. Freedman (On Religion column, Oct. 10), identifies an important trend at major …
Oct 27, 2015: The scientific evidence linking both processed meat and tobacco to certain types of cancer is strong. In that sense, both are carcinogens. But smoking …
Oct 27, 2015: [gallery] The article is fine, but I really like this illustration by Mike McQuade
Oct 26, 2015: [gallery] Only one thing the WHO has ever studied is “probably not carcinogenic”
Oct 26, 2015: Far from being a secret Muslim who was indifferent to the death of an American diplomat, or a progressive peacenik who resents U.S. leadership, Obama …
Oct 26, 2015: [gallery] From The Negro Motorist Green Book
Oct 26, 2015: I am reminded of a story I recently read on a website called Marketwatch. This story explained to me that reading fiction can improve empathy. It was …
Oct 25, 2015: Britain’s got talent.
Oct 24, 2015: Americans have not, in fact, become more tolerant. Rather, they have shifted their dislike to new groups. For example, “Muslim clergymen who preach …
Oct 24, 2015: [gallery] myimaginarybrooklyn: John Austen’s woodcuts for Aristophanes’, “The Frogs.”
Oct 24, 2015: In one sense there were differences, and not just that I was younger and slenderer first time round. Food and service are both much better than when I …
Oct 23, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17578”] Unsexy Halloween costumes, via Matt Novak and John Clifford on …
Oct 23, 2015: [gallery] deckerlibrary: Today is Ursula K. Le Guin’s 85th birthday! To celebrate, we are taking a look at Aaron Johnson and Michael Bixler’s artist …
Oct 22, 2015: So if selfhood implies individuality, or if our undeniable individuality justifies the sense of selfhood, then there is another mystery to be …
Oct 22, 2015: Thank you for your lovely and thoughtful submission to the magazine, which we are afraid we are going to have to decline, for all sorts of reasons. …
Oct 22, 2015: On the left, Ryan’s getting called a hypocrite. Salon’s Joan Walsh became an instant hero when she claimed Ryan was getting “credit for something a …
Oct 22, 2015: The university was once a microcosm, a miniature world offering the whole of knowledge in a restricted arena. Every discipline represented had its …
Oct 22, 2015: [gallery] via Adam Roberts
Oct 21, 2015: [gallery] Illustrations by Tonke Dragt of her books
Oct 19, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17598”] natgeofound: A man herds sheep with the help of his collies in …
Oct 19, 2015: However, Downs offers readers far more than just a historical record and campaign manual. He explores the social and political developments that have …
Oct 19, 2015: One of the most regular running jokes in my family, for many years now, is that I don’t play Wii Boxing because I think it’s too violent. We make a …
Oct 18, 2015: Instead of design, there is calculation: the more erratic the path, eccentric the loops, hidden the blueprint, the more efficient the exposure, …
Oct 18, 2015: A wall covered in spines, shelved from floor to ceiling, recognises the correspondence between bricks and books. It is the point at which knowledge …
Oct 18, 2015: [gallery] Mike Joyce, from Print Process
Oct 18, 2015: [gallery] thingsmagazine: The End of Print. More.
Oct 18, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17611”] nypl: There are some swoon-worthy abstract motifs in our …
Oct 18, 2015: [gallery] Macintosh, at Print Process
Oct 15, 2015: Dialogue on Democracy, Part 4 Dialogue on Democracy, Part 4
Oct 15, 2015: There are many who consider as an injury to themselves any conduct which they have a distaste for, and resent it as an outrage to their feelings; as a …
Oct 13, 2015: “Would something be lost if autism were banished from the world? Probably. Autistic people have a unique way of looking at the world that lets them …
Oct 13, 2015: “What’s missing from the discussion is a recognition that the choices of feminist sex workers could, in fact, be immoral. By insisting that we respect …
Oct 13, 2015: A majority of the school’s astronomy faculty, which Dr. Marcy has been a member of since 1999, said in a letter posted online Monday that he should …
Oct 13, 2015: If someone tells you “coding is the new literacy” because “computers are everywhere today,” ask them how fuel injection works. By teaching low-level …
Oct 13, 2015: [gallery] Burial in Bradford of the “Jesus Man”: A local man, Michael Kerrigan, penned a poem for the funeral, A Touch of Jesus, which he read from …
Oct 12, 2015: Why I Unfollowed You on Instagram Why I Unfollowed You on Instagram This is remarkable: a collection of buzzwords where a human being (presumably) used to be. This is someone who with …
Oct 12, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17627”] yusefalahmad: nemfrog: Relative visibility of colors at a distance …
Oct 10, 2015: It is illustrated in the experience of almost all ethical doctrines and religious creeds. They are all full of meaning and vitality to those who …
Oct 10, 2015: [gallery] Typewriter Revolution
Oct 10, 2015: Dialogue on Democracy Over at The American Conservative, I’ve been posting, in installments, a dialogue on democracy — more specifically, on whether democracy is a failed …
Oct 10, 2015: Since the 1980s I’ve been reading predictions that soon, very soon, intelligent and responsive machines will converse with us in our own language. I …
Oct 9, 2015: [gallery] Speaking of Elena Ferrante … A month or so after completing her Neapolitan tetralogy I’m still thinking, every day, about these books. It’s …
Oct 9, 2015: On Wednesday, Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You, which won Amazon’s book of the year award, simply tweeted a request to teachers not …
Oct 9, 2015: [gallery] lawrenceleemagnuson: Lawren Harris (1885-1970) Lake Harbour, South Shore, Baffin Island, Morning (1930) oil on beaverboard 30.2 × 38.2 cm …
Oct 8, 2015: “A Thank-You Note, to Be Accompanied with Lyre,” Brett Foster portraitoftheartistasayoungman: I have spent only three days here so far, and have been gut-sick the entire time, but I’ve managed to write three …
Oct 8, 2015: [gallery] drawingarchitecture: Michelangelo LaTona, A Monument in Two Dimensions, 2015, Graphite, Ink, Paper, Mylar, Collage, Spray Paint, 18"x12"
Oct 8, 2015: The law requires that patients be referred for psychological examination if the doctor suspects they have depression or mental illness. But some …
Oct 7, 2015: [gallery] Abu-Bakarr Mansaray, A Nuclear Mosquito From Hell (2004)
Oct 7, 2015: In addition to measuring your ability to pay, as in the United States, the scores serve as a measure of political compliance. Among the things that …
Oct 7, 2015: [gallery] This is worth buying if only for Garnette Cadogan’s moving, mournful, and yet hopeful essay on walking while black, especially in New York, …
Oct 7, 2015: Apparently, ISIS needs to do more than torture women and children and behead members of religious minorities in order to be considered newsworthy. …
Oct 6, 2015: Blessed Are the Green of Heart Blessed Are the Green of Heart I don’t know that I’d read this since I published it, but now that I have read it, I think it holds up pretty well. …
Oct 6, 2015: Walking is a way of connecting, of feeling our feet on the ground, a very ordinary and surprisingly spiritual thing. Author Kathleen Norris writes of …
Oct 6, 2015: Ramsey’s solution? “Fellow Christians who are serious about their faith” should “think about getting a handgun permit.” He included a link to a state …
Oct 6, 2015: In this way, intolerance is not a static measure. If it were, we would still be measuring it based on freedom granted to communists, as Stouffer did …
Oct 5, 2015: Many advocates of assisted suicide try to redefine it as something else—indeed, to redefine human dignity and human life itself. [Brittany] Maynard …
Oct 5, 2015: I found myself recalling the story of the T’ang Dynasty artist Wu Tao-Tzu, who is said one day to have gathered his friends to show them his most …
Oct 3, 2015: [gallery] lawrenceleemagnuson: Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (UK 1889-1946) The Arrival (c.1913) oil on canvas 76.2 x 63.5 cm
Oct 3, 2015: When I cook, I like people to be able to identify the food. I like people to feel comfortable. I want people to look at my food and start salivating …
Oct 2, 2015: We always have to improve just a little, just as everything has to be “growth-based”, a little bigger next year than last year. It’s never good enough …
Oct 2, 2015: [gallery] Assault death rates, 1960-2013
Oct 1, 2015: [youtube …
Oct 1, 2015: [gallery] Michael Phillips has recreated the techniques by which William Blake made his illustrated books. Here he is choosing and mixing colors as …
Oct 1, 2015: Nothing to see here, folks. Just a vulgar woman who was snuck in. The Holy Spirit is definitely not afoot. It was practically an accident, really. Or …
Oct 1, 2015: For 20 years I taught James Joyce’s Ulysses every year, but I don’t get to anymore—new university, new job description. I miss it terribly, even …
Sep 29, 2015: In the end, the show of force looked more like a show of fear – a case where American exceptionalism was merely our exceptional paranoid obsession …
Sep 29, 2015: The most memorable encounter between Day and Auden took place in 1956. By then, the Catholic Worker Movement, with its network of shelters and …
Sep 29, 2015: [gallery] Handmade embroidered notebooks, via thisiscolossal
Sep 29, 2015: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Ottoman Astrolabe
Sep 29, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17687”] For Michaelmas: Jacob Epstein, St Michael’s Victory over the Devil …
Sep 28, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17690”] eastmanhouse: Main Street, Saratoga Springs, Original photographer: …
Sep 28, 2015: But for her words to rise to the level of an extraordinary ‘big lie,’ a vicious slander of abortion providers everywhere, it seems to me that …
Sep 28, 2015: Once upon a time, Wesleyan students would have responded through grassroots organizing, not through supplicating at the feet of administrators and …
Sep 28, 2015: [gallery] houghtonlib: The future Queen Elizabeth, age 19, writes to her half-brother King Edward VI shortly before his death in 1553. The power …
Sep 28, 2015: Some, or even all, of these challenges may be misguided, silly, or narrow-minded. But even if you’re firmly opposed to “banning books”—and I am!—it’s …
Sep 28, 2015: Working and lower-middle-class children are less likely to participate in structured extracurricular activities than their more privileged peers while …
Sep 28, 2015: How to Watch Tonight’s Blood Moon sweatervestboy: I followed all the expert advice: at the moon’s perigee I rowed myself deep into the night and anchored even deeper in the Pacific’s …
Sep 28, 2015: [gallery] thingsmagazine: (via)
Sep 28, 2015: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Porsche, 1957
Sep 26, 2015: [gallery] So Pluto is bigger than Texas. An implausible claim.
Sep 26, 2015: I can almost bring Yogi back in memory, up at the plate, powerfully round and thick and bearish in his work-smudged pinstripes, with his head (in a …
Sep 26, 2015: Remember 'Beakman's World'? The Wacky Scientist Is Still Big In Latin America Remember ‘Beakman’s World’? The Wacky Scientist Is Still Big In Latin America
Sep 26, 2015: [youtube …
Sep 26, 2015: Due North | VQR Online Due North | VQR Online This powerful essay by my friend Garnette Cadogan has just been selected for <em>The Best American Essays …
Sep 24, 2015: [gallery] I’d be hard-pressed to say what this is if I didn’t know
Sep 24, 2015: [gallery] Love this photo
Sep 24, 2015: [gallery] from Laurence Hyde’s’s Southern Cross
Sep 24, 2015: [gallery] from Lynd Ward’s Vertigo
Sep 24, 2015: The papal entourage eventually decided to give in to the dissidents’ pleas for a meeting at the last minute, as an afterthought, but the results were …
Sep 24, 2015: [gallery] clawmarks: Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita - Paradijsvogel (1914) - Hoornull (1915) - Ringull (1878-1943)
Sep 24, 2015: Intellectual Diversity in the Legal Academy Intellectual Diversity in the Legal Academy Elite law faculties are overwhelmingly liberal. Jim Lindgren has proven the point empirically. I will …
Sep 22, 2015: The church is not tied to a text in such a way that nothing will ever be done for the first time. In new situations those who ‘indwell’ the story of …
Sep 22, 2015: [gallery] lawrenceleemagnuson: Maurice de Vlaminck (France 1876-1958) Le village (n.d.) watercolor on paper 15.5 x 20.5 in.,
Sep 22, 2015: making book So after my talk at Carleton College today, in which among other things I praised the technology of the codex, my host Fred Hagstrom asked me, “Have …
Sep 20, 2015: [gallery] drawingarchitecture: Eu Jin Lim, Unfolded internal elevations of Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion, Penang, Malaysia.
Sep 20, 2015: Yet also, yn the name of al that ys goode, studye biforehand and do nat place all of thy trust yn the All-Nighter alone. As yt ys wyth the feedinge of …
Sep 18, 2015: Just doesn’t feel good – Marco.org Just doesn’t feel good – Marco.org Since few buyers of Peace are likely to seek refunds — Apple makes the process unwieldy, and many buyers will want …
Sep 18, 2015: I was brought up in the church, back in the old days before the deluge when church-going, confirmation and so on were ordinary landmarks of life, but …
Sep 18, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17746”] nemfrog: Firefighers practice a rescue, 1913
Sep 17, 2015: [gallery] 50watts: Illustration by Heinrich Valk, Estonia 1976 (50 Watts collection)
Sep 17, 2015: [gallery] newberrylibrary: This 18th-century infographic showing “English Government in 1790” was part of a pamphlet explaining different Western …
Sep 17, 2015: Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another. One may refuse to receive him when …
Sep 17, 2015: Ahmed There are many, many things that could be said about Ahmed Mohamed’s experience, but the most important one, I think, is this: the staff at his school …
Sep 16, 2015: [gallery] lawrenceleemagnuson: Lesser Ury (Germany 1861-1931) Abendstimmung am Grunewaldsee - Evening at Grunewaldsee (1910s) oil on canvas 115.5 x …
Sep 16, 2015: The coming reckoning for publishers is not “because of Apple”. It’s because of the choices the publishers themselves made, years ago, to allow …
Sep 16, 2015: God, endow the king with your own justice, his royal person with your righteousness, that he may govern your people rightly and deal justly with your …
Sep 16, 2015: [gallery] lawrenceleemagnuson: Max Ackermann (Germany 1887-1975) Weisse Linien spielen - Play, White Lines (1946) oil on cardboard 55 x 37.7 cm
Sep 16, 2015: An Unprofessional Review Ashley Null’s review of my biography of the Book of Common Prayer is really irresponsible work. Let me briefly explain. Null writes that Jacobs …
Sep 15, 2015: [gallery] lawrenceleemagnuson: Fernand Léger (France 1881-1955) Stairway (1925) oil on canvas 55.5 x 46.7 cm
Sep 14, 2015: [gallery] lawrenceleemagnuson: Felix Vallotton (Swiss 1865-1925) Wolken (1890)
Sep 14, 2015: [gallery] lawrenceleemagnuson: Max Weber (1881-1961) Chinese Restaurant (1915) oil, charcoal, and collaged paper on linen 101.6 × 122.2 cm Whitney …
Sep 14, 2015: [gallery] Shi zhu zhai shu hua pu This is the earliest Chinese book printed by the technique of polychrome xylography known as douban invented and …
Sep 13, 2015: [gallery] visualgraphc: thisiscommonground: Toko - Architects Registration Board #design #graphicdesign #purple
Sep 13, 2015: [Frank Cioffi] walked the few miles to the brutal architectural dystopia that was the University of Essex from his home in Colchester wearing an early …
Sep 13, 2015: [gallery] Taliesin West
Sep 13, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17786”] Mies van der Rohe, Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper project; Berlin, …
Sep 13, 2015: [gallery] muspec: Today, we’ve got an interesting study in form and content in the form of two editions of the same book. On the one hand, we have a …
Sep 13, 2015: “When politicians today praise America’s system of checks and balances, they seem to understand it as a self-correcting mechanism: When one branch …
Sep 13, 2015: "package deal ethics" We are all easily lured into what might be called “package deal” ethics: if you are committed to one cause you will probably be committed to a …
Sep 12, 2015: This Adorable Alabama Bookstore Only Sells Signed Copies This Adorable Alabama Bookstore Only Sells Signed Copies This is a really nice article about the Alabama Booksmith, but it manages to describe the …
Sep 11, 2015: These gently animated book covers by Javier Jensen are wonderful! Via Open Culture.
Sep 11, 2015: Five years ago we bought a house built in 1988 in the town of Bedrock, Indiana — a town that met all of our qualifications of having a drive-up …
Sep 11, 2015: In a fascinating article called “The Japanese Preschool’s Pedagogy of Peripheral Participation,”, Akiko Hayashi and Joseph Tobin describe a twofold …
Sep 11, 2015: Books don’t change your life. At most, if they are good, they can hurt and bring confusion. Elena Ferrante
Sep 10, 2015: [gallery] deckerlibrary: Believe it or not, these vibrant images are not silkscreened, instead they are examples of pochoir, a refined stencil-based …
Sep 9, 2015: Indeed, the Post article is really a critique of Hillary Clinton for not doing enough to supply fellow Democrats with thoughts not their own to parrot …
Sep 9, 2015: [gallery] I don’t yet know what I think about hypothes.is, but this drawing of Vannevar Bush’s Memex in their video is great.
Sep 9, 2015: Religion Comes Religion comes from our pity for humans They are too weak to live without divine protection. Too weak to listen to the screeching noise of the turning …
Sep 9, 2015: What we learned from USA's friendlies with Brazil and Peru What we learned from USA’s friendlies with Brazil and Peru Not sure how much we learned, but we received further confirmation that the USMNT has …
Sep 9, 2015: [gallery] Images from a newly illustrated edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Sep 9, 2015: But this is not an argument for Trump as a serious presidential candidate. It is really no argument at all. It is catharsis masquerading as principle, …
Sep 8, 2015: I defer to no one in my love for America and for Christianity. I have devoted my life to the study of both of them. I have tried to live up to my …
Sep 8, 2015: [gallery] The Hotel Okura in Tokyo is closing
Sep 8, 2015: GOP voters who are passionate supporters of Kim Davis may well find that photo [with Ted Cruz] inspiring, and appreciate that a Republican …
Sep 8, 2015: [gallery] gerrycanavan: double your fun
Sep 8, 2015: Britain is braced for the onslaught of Light Afternoon Drizzle Brian, then the nightmare of Rather Blustery Morning Samantha. Stock up on nail guns …
Sep 8, 2015: Electioneering unapologetic-book: In the unlikely event that anyone reading this is a member of a Deanery Synod in the diocese of Ely, and has a vote: I am running …
Sep 8, 2015: The Millions of Catholics Who Aren't Catholic The Millions of Catholics Who Aren’t Catholic Plenty of Americans have picked their religion, and so they think of religion as something to be …
Sep 8, 2015: Ernest Hemingway’s Theory of Omission seems to me to be saying to writers, “Back off. Let the reader do the creating.” To cause a reader to see in her …
Sep 8, 2015: [gallery] myloveforyouisastampedeofdata: Mind is a relational process regulating the flow of information.
Sep 7, 2015: [gallery] Sometimes you just need a photo of the Faroe Islands.
Sep 7, 2015: Among the truly great poets, the handful of absolute masters, the most neglected is Horace. This was not always so, but when the study of Latin fell …
Sep 7, 2015: Churches do not pay federal and state income taxes on their basic operations. However, neither do other nonprofit organizations such as colleges, …
Sep 7, 2015: Looking back, I’m grateful for the education the Church gave me. I walked out, I dare say, with its best principles in my heart, and maybe I left its …
Sep 6, 2015: Welcome to the world of “app-install interstitials”. They are, IMHO, a pain in the butt. On the scale of web annoyances, they rate just below pop-up …
Sep 5, 2015: ‘Cramer said, “I’m not a fool.’ Wolfe nodded again. 'We all feel like that occasionally.’ Another great passage from Rex Stout’s Over My Dead Body
Sep 5, 2015: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Daniel Mullen, paintings (via things)
Sep 5, 2015: [gallery] Nikolaus von Schillinger’s Instagram
Sep 5, 2015: This dichotomy in how uncertainty can be perceived by different classes and different individuals is important to recognize, for it has always …
Sep 5, 2015: When men use the metaphor, I can’t help but hear womb envy: ‘You can create life? I can create life, too!’ But this life, this book, is intellectual, …
Sep 5, 2015: Trumpish vocabulary Top 13 Trumpish words: I they you Trump very great he China said me money going Mexico By contrast, the top 13 Jeb-ish words: the …
Sep 5, 2015: I think you’re very very beautiful and if you ever ask me to come and read aloud to you I will. Archie Goodwin, in the Nero Wolfe mystery Over My Dead …
Sep 5, 2015: Queen Elizabeth II acceded to the throne aged 25 following the death of her father King George VI on 6 February, 1952. On 9 September she will have …
Sep 4, 2015: Teacher’s report If I were an editor … well, actually, I’m not sure what I would do if I were an editor. So let me just speak as a teacher. If a student submitted this …
Sep 4, 2015: You speak of ‘the curriculum [you] impose,’ but I deny that you have the right to impose anything. I am passing through this place, headed for the …
Sep 4, 2015: When we started, and were playing in pubs, I wasn’t the singer … I was the drunk rhythm guitarist who wrote all these weird songs. We went through …
Sep 4, 2015: [gallery] fromwithinabook: Last week these two book sculptures joined Byard Art’s Mixed Summer Exhibition, which continues until 13 Sep
Sep 3, 2015: [gallery]
Sep 3, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17869”] thisisgrey: now
Sep 3, 2015: the chief principles of Texas driving as I have inferred them in my 26 months of living in the Lone Star State At some point during the execution of a right turn, but always before your car is completely out of the road you have been driving on, be sure to come …
Sep 3, 2015: Al helped himself to my fries as I chatted him up over a dinner of ‘ugly burger’ (double-decker burger and fried egg on toasted wheat). He told me …
Sep 2, 2015: The full significance - canonically, ecumenically and theologically - of Francis’s bold move will be picked over for a long time. But its real point …
Sep 2, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17875”] Dan K Norris creates alternative movie and TV posters. Via Tim …
Sep 2, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“17878”] from an intricate hand-drawn map of London
Sep 2, 2015: The drama of ideas in which students got caught up owed its momentum to the peculiar, and in some respects paradoxical, gifts of the teacher. Although …
Sep 2, 2015: A teacher may get good, even astounding, results from his pupils while he is teaching them and yet not be a good teacher; because it may be that, …
Sep 2, 2015: [gallery] jonklassen: interior illustration from “The Nest” by Kenneth Oppel coming out this fall
Sep 2, 2015: Cultivating unsettledness about biblical language and unsettledness about our own—these are good reasons for studying Hebrew and Greek. But perhaps …
Sep 1, 2015: Bradley Voytek: The fact that I, a practicing neuroscientist, can openly admit to giving a shit about the human side of neuroscience without fearing …
Sep 1, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17888,17889,17890,17891”] harvardfineartslib: A look at the production and …
Sep 1, 2015: If you don’t wash your hands, your health is at the mercy of the filthiest person in your dorm. If you don’t wear earplugs, your sleep is at the mercy …
Sep 1, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17895”] natgeofound: Men blast granite to build tunnels for a hydroelectric …
Sep 1, 2015: [gallery] unapologetic-book: Quilts by Bernice Martin #3: rose window
Sep 1, 2015: It’s ironic, I guess, that the strangeness, alienation, and terror that Franzen (sort of) wants to chronicle are busy revealing themselves all day …
Sep 1, 2015: Journalism follies, Catholic edition Pope Francis has done a big, big thing: he has made it dramatically easier for women who have had abortions to be reconciled to the Church. But take a …
Sep 1, 2015: Wes Craven appreciation - Chicago Tribune As a senior at Wheaton, Craven struggled with the neurological disorder known as Guillain-Barre syndrome. For most of the year he was paralyzed from …
Aug 30, 2015: Oliver Sacks He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next best — there …
Aug 29, 2015: One piece of evidence that preregistration can act as a strong corrective comes from clinicaltrials.gov, a registry of publicly and privately funded …
Aug 28, 2015: The Hunger Games salute [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1920”]Thai people protesting a military takeover of their government …
Aug 28, 2015: Alan dreams of suya I woke up in the middle of the night last night with an inexplicable but overwhelming craving for a food that I haven’t eaten in nearly 25 …
Aug 28, 2015: Imperfect Goodbyes and the Hope of Resurrection In the days after my grandmother’s graveside funeral, I returned to a lecture given in Andover Chapel at Harvard University in 1955 by the then-famous …
Aug 26, 2015: the cup of life is not bitter enough.... We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put …
Aug 24, 2015: Meet the anonymous programmers who spread the Ashley Madison leak But this is the nature of modern hacks. An inscrutable data dump draws in helpful technologists who want everyone to have access to information, not …
Aug 20, 2015: How to Escape the Echo Chamber It seems that books—with their combination of physicality and otherness, quietness and intellectual confrontation—present the best way for us to …
Aug 19, 2015: Stop Universities From Hoarding Money As part of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act expected later this year, Congress should require universities with endowments in excess of …
Aug 6, 2015: Netflix’s New Parental Leave Policy Could Make Things Worse for Women By encouraging mothers, who are the still the primary parent at home, to bond with their baby for a long period of time with the expectation they’ll …
Aug 6, 2015: Twitter digest, August 6, 2015 When the Iranians developed their nuclear capability to the fullest — Thanks, Obama — and dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, our only consolation was that …
Aug 5, 2015: looking on the bright side If nothing else of value comes from this Planned Parenthood fiasco, I am at least moderately helpful for one thing: that more of my liberal friends …
Aug 5, 2015: Tell me anything but this, liberals: Tell me that you aren’t just pro-choice but pro-abortion, tell me that abortion is morally necessary and …
Aug 5, 2015: The Science of California's Unprecedented Drought - Scientific American Realistically, though, it is hard to imagine a state as innovative as California simply allowing the pride of its fields to disappear. More than a …
Aug 5, 2015: Leaving the New Republic, and what its mass exodus taught me about the future of magazines The week TNR imploded, I shipped hundreds of advance review copies that Leon had opted not to review to New York, to serve as showpieces on the …
Aug 5, 2015: Drinking Soylent With The Last Of The California War Boys | MORNING, COMPUTER Seasteading’s been and gone for the second (third?) time, the secession and Six-State-California guys have been and gone. It is that time in the cycle …
Aug 4, 2015: gotta be one of those
Aug 4, 2015: Wright on Hill When I saw that N. T. Wright had reviewed Wesley Hill’s new book Paul and the Trinity, I thought, “I know what he’s going to say: …
Aug 4, 2015: Owen Chadwick on A. E. Benson Arthur Benson ... was in the evening summer of his life. He wrote beautiful, at times too beautiful, prose. He published at least one book a year; …
Aug 1, 2015: I am not all here I am not all here, I am here now preaching upon this text, and I am at home in my Library considering whether S. Gregory, or S. Hierome, have said …
Jul 31, 2015: Matthew 20:1-16 Phenomenon: “Two of Mr. Price’s most valued employees quit, spurred in part by their view that it was unfair to double the pay of some new hires …
Jul 30, 2015: Twitter So sad about Cedric the lion! So sad about Cedric the lion! So sad about Cedric the lion! The guy who killed Cedric ought to be put to death himself. …
Jul 29, 2015: Brooks redux redux I’m sure this new column proves once more that David Brooks is History’s Greatest Monster, but I’ll have to wait for y’all to …
Jul 29, 2015: minimalist media management But if Apple is committed to a cruft-ridden iTunes, other developers could step in the void. It’s not just classical music libraries: Many users with …
Jul 26, 2015: Then a demonstrator directed his attention to an older man all but melting on a bottom step. “He looked fatigued, lethargic — weak,” Mr. Smith said. …
Jul 26, 2015: iCloud Photos gets right everything that Apple Music gets wrong. Like Marco, I can imagine many reasons why Apple took a different route with music …
Jul 26, 2015: [gallery] This is a fine book cover design
Jul 26, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17908”] netlex: Nadia Khodasevich-Leger (Russia, 1904 - 1982) Abstract …
Jul 24, 2015: Boomer-bashing That we are now in the midst of a carnival of Boomer-bashing is testament to the dubious triumph of generational thinking, the prevailing tendency, …
Jul 22, 2015: As early as the 17th century it was recognised that each ‘day’ in the Creation story might represent something far longer, preparing the way for the …
Jul 21, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17913”] I like this cover.
Jul 21, 2015: [gallery] Philosophy Club
Jul 21, 2015: Have you ‘always been completely truthful in your public statements about your net worth,’ my attorneys asked Donald. 'I try,’ was his reply. When …
Jul 20, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“17920”] Title: “The Half Hour Library of Travel, Nature and Science for …
Jul 20, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“17923”] Title: “The Angel of the Revolution: a tale of the coming Terror. … …
Jul 20, 2015: [gallery] Beirut. From this interview with Elias Khoury
Jul 20, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17929”] architectural-review: Design for a West End Club House from the RIBA …
Jul 20, 2015: [gallery] via Pulp Librarian on Twitter
Jul 20, 2015: the good old days [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1024”]via Pulp Librarian on Twitter[/caption]
Jul 19, 2015: Iggy reads Gibby I feel a great comfort and relief knowing that there were others who lived and died and thought and fought so long ago; I feel less tyrannized by the …
Jul 17, 2015: Brooks redux I got a good many responses to my earlier post on the widespread social-media agita about David Brooks, and almost all of them said something like …
Jul 17, 2015: Brooks redux I got a good many responses to my earlier post on the widespread social-media agita about David Brooks, and almost all of them said something like …
Jul 17, 2015: Can Grande [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“800”] John Ruskin, Study of the Tomb of Can Grande della Scala at …
Jul 17, 2015: Brookshass No journalist or columnist inspires the kind of hatred in my Twitter timeline that David Brooks inspires. And nothing in my whole experience with …
Jul 17, 2015: [gallery] jessnevins: The Best of the Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes: The Chevalier de Trelern. De Trélern, Chevalier. The Chevalier de Trélern was …
Jul 16, 2015: colors [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“868”]Polychromatic decoration as applied to buildings in the mediaeval …
Jul 16, 2015: John Ruskin, Part of the Palazzo Priuli, Venice
Jul 16, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“17943”] John Ruskin, An Italian Village
Jul 16, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17946”] Ruskin’s drawing of Giacomo Boni, The Palazzo Dario, Venice
Jul 16, 2015: [gallery] ancientart: The Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek, Lebanon, ca. 150 AD. This stunning Roman temple, still very well preserved, is actually larger …
Jul 16, 2015: [gallery] Kazimir Malevich, Composition with the Mona Lisa (1914)
Jul 16, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17959”] Via John Overholt, the permissible colors for decorating the …
Jul 16, 2015: [gallery] blech: Landmark 1979 California Water Atlas Debuts Online, from the David Rumsey Historical Map collection in 2010. toffeemilkshake: …
Jul 16, 2015: My ideal burger is bun, cheese, burger. Sometimes bacon. Ketchup on the side, so I can control it. Pickles—yes! Obviously. And the cheese thing has to …
Jul 16, 2015: [gallery] architectural-review: The Dragline Silk Project. The project will aim to push the boundaries of biomimetics, and how these ideas can be …
Jul 16, 2015: [gallery] architectural-review: Section Detail; Old Folk’s Home, Morecambe
Jul 15, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17974”] Narrowboaters’ Cooperative
Jul 15, 2015: [gallery] architectural-review: T Grisi, Rammed earth chapel
Jul 15, 2015: Is the writing life as strange as people think? Not at all. I wake pre-light to the piercing cry of the Dawn Bird, a phosphorescent creature whose …
Jul 14, 2015: darkness The historical record is like the night sky: we see a few stars and group them into mythic constellations. But what is chiefly visible is the …
Jul 14, 2015: Page 15 of the new student handbook of Cedarville University tells students to obey “the laws of the land.” However, there’s at least one law the Ohio …
Jul 11, 2015: a common conversation BenOp Proponent: Now, to be clear, we certainly aren’t advocating running for the hills. BenOp Opponent: I just think it’s absurd for Christians to …
Jul 9, 2015: “It’s utterly insane that you still need to put a period before a person’s Twitter handle, such as “.@twitter,” if you want everyone to see …
Jul 7, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17982”]
Jul 4, 2015: Chicago ... in Minecraft
Jul 4, 2015: Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government — they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under …
Jul 4, 2015: a house for Essex the story is here
Jul 4, 2015: balloon creatures [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] by isopresso[/caption]
Jul 3, 2015: the unexpected Francis (of Assisi) In years of teaching, I have often been astounded at how unhappy students can be when they encounter a different Francis from the one they expect. …
Jul 3, 2015: send money The world is full of miserable places. One way of living comfortably is not to think about them or, when you do, to send money. — Tracy Kidder, …
Jul 3, 2015: from Christendom to Europe The process was one of a progressive eclipse of Christendom by Europe (defined as a geographical notion in a relationship of distance with other parts …
Jul 3, 2015: TumblrHatr I just wrote a post about the many, many things I’ve come to hate about Tumblr — I say “come to hate” because many of these problems …
Jul 3, 2015: Things I Hate about Tumblr azspot: ayjay: A partial list: Tumblr Radar on the Dashboard Recommended Blogs on the Dashboard Occasional promoted content on the website Constant …
Jul 3, 2015: Things I Hate about Tumblr A partial list: Tumblr Radar on the Dashboard Recommended Blogs on the Dashboard Occasional promoted content on the website Constant promoted content …
Jul 3, 2015: mjlee "spatial outlaws" [caption id=“attachment_15086” align=“aligncenter” width=“1800”] mjlee, “spatial outlaws”[/caption]
Jul 3, 2015: [gallery] drawingarchitecture: moon joo lee, ‘House 6’. pen, color pencil on mylar, newspaper, 36"x24"
Jul 3, 2015: [gallery] designclever: Ana Núñez ananunez.rocks
Jul 3, 2015: Too much linear thinking in news Twitter would be a formidable competitor if they had leadership that understood their own product. Zuck uses Facebook confidently and skillfully. …
Jul 2, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17994,17995,17996,17997”] thingsmagazine: Swissted (via things)
Jul 1, 2015: my big fat intellectual project my big fat intellectual project
Jul 1, 2015: [gallery] I have just learned, more than two months late, that Barbara Reynolds has died at the age of 100. May she now rest in peace — she rested …
Jul 1, 2015: the three big stories of modernity the three big stories of modernity
Jul 1, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18005”] design-is-fine: Hubert Saget, advertising poster for Leica, 1930. …
Jun 30, 2015: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Mario Ceroli, La casa dell'architetto, 1966
Jun 30, 2015: This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life. It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life. It is and it was always …
Jun 30, 2015: [gallery] robertogreco: ethel-baraona: >> So long as the realm of necessity remains a social dream, dreaming will remain a social necessity. …
Jun 30, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18015”] la-face-b: Justin Lortie
Jun 30, 2015: [gallery]
Jun 29, 2015: Even if there were borders to my empathy, those borders would most certainly extend into South Carolina. Several of my African ancestors entered this …
Jun 29, 2015: I remain ambivalent about marriage as the centerpiece of the struggle for LGBT rights, not in the least because, for all the reasons I mention above, …
Jun 29, 2015: Lost on Scalia the high judge and legal philosopher, it seems, is the whole of the natural law tradition, a tradition that holds law to be, among …
Jun 29, 2015: The degree of disdain directed to Christian faith and worship by the intelligentsia and the commentariat, especially in the Northeast where I’ve lived …
Jun 29, 2015: [gallery] houghtonlib: The binding of a Gradual, or choir book, Northern France, ca. 1525. Designed to be visible from a distance, this book is a bit …
Jun 29, 2015: He likes doing this; that’s the point. Being on tour, being competitive, being celebrated: This stuff feels more satisfying to him than the lonely …
Jun 29, 2015: I would affirm the need for a radical break with that form of Christianity which is called the denomination. Sociologists have rightly pointed out …
Jun 29, 2015: Uber, algorithms, and trust Uber, algorithms, and trust
Jun 29, 2015: Business critics say Twitter is falling because the suits don’t know what do to with the service. In reality, it’s failing because our social mobs …
Jun 29, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18033”] I do not know where I came across this image of St. Basil the Great …
Jun 29, 2015: Greif is relentlessly sober and earnest about writers who eschewed sobriety and earnestness. He acknowledges “mockery” and “irony,” but I don’t know …
Jun 28, 2015: The bobbies – the name given to the Metropolitan Police – were created in 1829 by Home Secretary Robert Peel at a time when the military was feared. …
Jun 28, 2015: I don’t know exactly what Benedict Option evangelism might look like. I don’t know what kind of diminished numbers of converts we might see in the …
Jun 27, 2015: frequently unobserved distinctions (a) Approving the outcome of a judicial decision (b) Accepting as valid the legal reasoning in support of that outcome (a) Believing in the need to …
Jun 27, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18040”] houghtonlib: Miller Bros. 101 Ranch. Wild West Show. Daily review : …
Jun 27, 2015: The issue of gay marriage has come up a lot since the Massachusetts court decision. Tell me what you think about it. Why do evangelicals care so much …
Jun 26, 2015: [gallery] Clementa Pinckney’s memorial service is being held in Charleston today. Well done, good and faithful servant. May you rest in peace and rise …
Jun 26, 2015: Simply put, mutual responsibility towards offspring naturally demands a long-term commitment (at least 18 years) while mutual attraction and erotic …
Jun 26, 2015: Today’s decision … will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy. In the course of its opinion, the majority …
Jun 26, 2015: [gallery] Those who have: happy. Those who have not: sad.
Jun 26, 2015: How I Became a Soccer Fan How I Became a Soccer Fan A story from back in the day.
Jun 26, 2015: Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd. Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd. Thinking about what happiness is.
Jun 26, 2015: a parable a parable about religion, technology, modernity
Jun 26, 2015: [gallery] design-is-fine: Gerardo Dottori, Il Trittico della Velocita, The triptych of velocity, 1927. Italy. Via wiki
Jun 26, 2015: [gallery] thingsmagazine: La Poeme Electronique
Jun 26, 2015: reconciliation and forgiveness Reconciliation is only possible when forgiveness meets repentance. And meaningful social change requires the kind of social reconciliation that can …
Jun 25, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18065”]
Jun 25, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“18068”] eadfrith: Holkham Bible Picture Book - folio 2r; God the Creator …
Jun 25, 2015: [gallery] amare-habeo: Max Ernst (German, 1891-1976) Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non - Euclidean Fly (Junger Mann, beunruhigt durch den …
Jun 25, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18074”] thingsmagazine: It’s all about the Curtas (see also things …
Jun 25, 2015: Even though the pope makes broad, sweeping warnings about the way people use technology, he reserves one particularly biting criticism for people who …
Jun 25, 2015: A social conservative might be predisposed to dislike union organizers, until he considers them as one of the last voices for voluntary social …
Jun 23, 2015: Next time you want to gripe about the place of Christians in the public square, my liberal and secularist friends, think of Mother Emanuel AME, and …
Jun 19, 2015: love is not blind “Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.” — GKC
Jun 19, 2015: [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1000”] from 2kindsofpeople[/caption]
Jun 19, 2015: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Mendoza, Argentina[/caption]
Jun 18, 2015: before Francis The problem arises from the strange status of human nature in the cosmos; we are a part of the whole yet we are a very peculiar part, the part that is …
Jun 18, 2015: “The problem arises from the strange status of human nature in the cosmos; we are a part of the whole yet we are a very peculiar part, the part that …
Jun 18, 2015: the interpretation of symbols The problem here is one of the interpretation of symbols. One of my Southern students insists that the flag does not represent racism or slavery to …
Jun 18, 2015: The problem here is one of the interpretation of symbols. One of my Southern students insists that the flag does not represent racism or slavery to …
Jun 18, 2015: first thoughts on Laudato Si A book frequently quoted in this encyclical is Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World. Pope Francis has long been interested in and influenced …
Jun 18, 2015: A book frequently quoted in this encyclical is Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World. Pope Francis has long been interested in and influenced …
Jun 17, 2015: Let us not pretend that this kidnapping scheme gone awry was somehow moral, or tolerable, just because it was lawful. Let us not accept the notion …
Jun 16, 2015: The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired …
Jun 16, 2015: how big Africa is how big Africa is
Jun 16, 2015: [gallery] how big Africa is
Jun 15, 2015: Cattedrale Multiculturale drawingarchitecture: Mariuo Ricci, Cattedrale Multiculturale, 2015
Jun 15, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18087”] drawingarchitecture: Mariuo Ricci, Cattedrale Multiculturale, 2015.
Jun 14, 2015: the technique of the Black Magician In all ages, the technique of the Black Magician has been essentially the same. In all spells the words are deprived of their meanings and reduced to …
Jun 14, 2015: A satisfactory human life, individually or collectively, is possible only if proper respect is paid to all three worlds [Work, Carnival, and Prayer]. …
Jun 12, 2015: "Joy is not the satisfied contemplation of an accomplished result, the emotion of victory, the..." “Joy is not the satisfied contemplation of an accomplished result, the emotion of victory, the satisfaction of having succeeded. It is the sign of an …
Jun 12, 2015: Joy is not the satisfied contemplation of an accomplished result, the emotion of victory, the satisfaction of having succeeded. It is the sign of an …
Jun 12, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18093”]
Jun 11, 2015: "Hunt’s comments are as silly as they are outdated; his Nobel Prize clearly wasn’t awarded for..." “Hunt’s comments are as silly as they are outdated; his Nobel Prize clearly wasn’t awarded for political correctness. But this is precisely the point. …
Jun 11, 2015: Hunt’s comments are as silly as they are outdated; his Nobel Prize clearly wasn’t awarded for political correctness. But this is precisely the point. …
Jun 11, 2015: In a Wednesday press conference, Casebolt’s attorney, Jane Bishkin, revealed that prior to answering the call about the party, Casebolt had responded …
Jun 11, 2015: "Take tenure out of the University of Wisconsin and the people who can will - over time - leave. If..." “Take tenure out of the University of Wisconsin and the people who can will - over time - leave. If we had a single national system, that would be one …
Jun 11, 2015: Take tenure out of the University of Wisconsin and the people who can will - over time - leave. If we had a single national system, that would be one …
Jun 11, 2015: "Tell me that you program in Java, and I believe you to be either serious or boring. In Ruby, and you..." “Tell me that you program in Java, and I believe you to be either serious or boring. In Ruby, and you are interested in building things quickly. In …
Jun 11, 2015: "So don’t let these boys come up here and whisper sweet nothings in your ears about saving the world..." “So don’t let these boys come up here and whisper sweet nothings in your ears about saving the world with free wifi and clean water. We could go all …
Jun 11, 2015: Tell me that you program in Java, and I believe you to be either serious or boring. In Ruby, and you are interested in building things quickly. In …
Jun 11, 2015: "So don’t let these boys come up here and whisper sweet nothings in your ears about saving the world..." “So don’t let these boys come up here and whisper sweet nothings in your ears about saving the world with free wifi and clean water. We could go all …
Jun 11, 2015: So don’t let these boys come up here and whisper sweet nothings in your ears about saving the world with free wifi and clean water. We could go all …
Jun 11, 2015: "Our five senses are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their..." “Our five senses are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of …
Jun 11, 2015: Our five senses are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of …
Jun 11, 2015: sweatervestboy: Reading a library copy of James Wright after 1... sweatervestboy: Reading a library copy of James Wright after 1 a.m., I get a handwritten message from Cindy via tumblr …
Jun 11, 2015: [gallery] sweatervestboy: Reading a library copy of James Wright after 1 a.m., I get a handwritten message from Cindy
Jun 11, 2015: If you don’t want to watch it all, just watch the first... If you don’t want to watch it all, just watch the first minute as Hermann Zapf writes the beginning of the alphabet. via tumblr …
Jun 11, 2015: [vimeo 5385464 w=250 h=188] If you don’t want to watch it all, just watch the first minute as Hermann Zapf writes the beginning of the alphabet. …
Jun 10, 2015: austinkleon: Paul Bacon, 91, Whose Book Jackets Drew Readers... austinkleon: Paul Bacon, 91, Whose Book Jackets Drew Readers and Admirers, Is Dead “He didn’t see himself as a sensitive artist; he was there to …
Jun 10, 2015: Iconic book cover by Paul Bacon, who died Monday at the age of... Iconic book cover by Paul Bacon, who died Monday at the age of 91 via tumblr ift.tt/1L2ulaj
Jun 10, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18109,18110,18107,18108”] austinkleon: Paul Bacon, 91, Whose Book Jackets …
Jun 10, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18113”] Iconic book cover by Paul Bacon, who died Monday at the age of 91
Jun 10, 2015: Mavis Staples is so much cooler than you or me Mavis Staples is so much cooler than you or me via tumblr [ift.tt/1KreaC9](http://ift.tt/1KreaC9)
Jun 10, 2015: [youtube …
Jun 10, 2015: "A recent New York Times article showed that the rate of suicide among black children has increased..." “A recent New York Times article showed that the rate of suicide among black children has increased substantially over the years. In contrast, the …
Jun 10, 2015: From Bible Gateway. Note that the heading refers only to sexual... From Bible Gateway. Note that the heading refers only to sexual immorality, while Paul refers to sexual immorality and greed and drunkenness and …
Jun 10, 2015: [gallery] From Bible Gateway. Note that the heading refers only to sexual immorality, while Paul refers to sexual immorality and greed and drunkenness …
Jun 10, 2015: I will always be a sucker for Leica porn I will always be a sucker for Leica porn via tumblr ift.tt/1dwcbiY
Jun 10, 2015: [gallery] I will always be a sucker for Leica porn
Jun 10, 2015: I had both of these editions back in the day. Both books blew my... I had both of these editions back in the day. Both books blew my mind, though in very different ways. via tumblr ift.tt/1Gyho7c
Jun 10, 2015: drawingarchitecture: Anne Dessing drawingarchitecture: Anne Dessing via tumblr [ift.tt/1KVjY4T](http://ift.tt/1KVjY4T)
Jun 10, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18126,18125”] I had both of these editions back in the day. Both books blew …
Jun 10, 2015: [gallery] drawingarchitecture: Anne Dessing
Jun 9, 2015: In relatively recent debates over toleration, there has developed a view that says toleration is simply not enough. In tolerating others, we …
Jun 9, 2015: Benedictine counterpublics Much conservative discussion of the Benedict Option forgets that the ultimate goal for MacIntyre is a community rooted in tradition driven by …
Jun 9, 2015: "This unrestrained and insidious turn taken by the disoriented British-values campaign was exposed..." “This unrestrained and insidious turn taken by the disoriented British-values campaign was exposed last month when it emerged that young Muslim …
Jun 9, 2015: This unrestrained and insidious turn taken by the disoriented British-values campaign was exposed last month when it emerged that young Muslim …
Jun 8, 2015: "When talking about the need to reform the criminal justice system, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) often..." “When talking about the need to reform the criminal justice system, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) often cites the case of Kalief Browder, a Bronx teenager …
Jun 8, 2015: When talking about the need to reform the criminal justice system, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) often cites the case of Kalief Browder, a Bronx teenager who …
Jun 8, 2015: "Maria Albertina Iraheta Guardado was 37 when she decided to leave the Dos Bocas community in Santa..." “Maria Albertina Iraheta Guardado was 37 when she decided to leave the Dos Bocas community in Santa Rosa de Aguán, Honduras, and emigrate to the Bronx …
Jun 8, 2015: Maria Albertina Iraheta Guardado was 37 when she decided to leave the Dos Bocas community in Santa Rosa de Aguán, Honduras, and emigrate to the Bronx …
Jun 6, 2015: Photo via tumblr ift.tt/1KMRgDa
Jun 6, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18137”]
Jun 4, 2015: "When I first started getting some attention, stories published here and there, Don DeLillo took me..." “When I first started getting some attention, stories published here and there, Don DeLillo took me aside and gave me some advice that ended up being …
Jun 4, 2015: When I first started getting some attention, stories published here and there, Don DeLillo took me aside and gave me some advice that ended up being …
Jun 3, 2015: "Another fantasy of liberal education is that the student who advances to the university should take..." “Another fantasy of liberal education is that the student who advances to the university should take up the study that interests him most. For a small …
Jun 3, 2015: Another fantasy of liberal education is that the student who advances to the university should take up the study that interests him most. For a small …
Jun 2, 2015: "Pour tenir dans la lutte qui oppose les deux seuls grands pays d'Europe restés démocratiques à un..." “Pour tenir dans la lutte qui oppose les deux seuls grands pays d’Europe restés démocratiques à un régime de domination totale, quelques formes …
Jun 2, 2015: Pour tenir dans la lutte qui oppose les deux seuls grands pays d'Europe restés démocratiques à un régime de domination totale, quelques formes que le …
Jun 2, 2015: newberrylibrary: Chromatic Wood TypeHappy Typeface Tuesday!... newberrylibrary: Chromatic Wood Type Happy Typeface Tuesday! These wood type samples are chromatic specimens from the William H. Page Wood Type Co., …
Jun 2, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18143,18144,18145,18146”] newberrylibrary: Chromatic Wood Type Happy …
Jun 1, 2015: Dione (foreground) and Rhea Dione (foreground) and Rhea via tumblr ift.tt/1I1DW00
Jun 1, 2015: [gallery] Dione (foreground) and Rhea
Jun 1, 2015: Top: word-cloud generated from cat-lovers’ explanations of... Top: word-cloud generated from cat-lovers’ explanations of their love of cats. Bottom: word-cloud generated from dog-lovers’ explanations of their …
Jun 1, 2015: [gallery] Top: word-cloud generated from cat-lovers’ explanations of their love of cats. Bottom: word-cloud generated from dog-lovers’ explanations of …
Jun 1, 2015: thingsmagazine: Death, What’s in it for me?, Harland Miller thingsmagazine: Death, What’s in it for me?, Harland Miller via tumblr [ift.tt/1LWQ0gV](http://ift.tt/1LWQ0gV)
Jun 1, 2015: otticattica: We’ve been working the brilliant Ivan Poupyrev and... otticattica: We’ve been working the brilliant Ivan Poupyrev and team at Google ATAP to help design interactions, products and visualisations with …
Jun 1, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18156”] thingsmagazine: Death, What’s in it for me?, Harland Miller
Jun 1, 2015: [gallery] otticattica: We’ve been working the brilliant Ivan Poupyrev and team at Google ATAP to help design interactions, products and visualisations …
May 31, 2015: [gallery] brucesterling: *Still not enough to physically drown all the Global Warming denialists in Texas, but getting there Two notes for Bruce …
May 30, 2015: "According to Conway, there is a “disconnect” between the desire to travel into space and the desire..." “According to Conway, there is a “disconnect” between the desire to travel into space and the desire to understand it. This “disconnect” is a more …
May 30, 2015: According to Conway, there is a “disconnect” between the desire to travel into space and the desire to understand it. This “disconnect” is a more …
May 29, 2015: The great Jimmy Rushing — Mister Five By Five — along with Count... The great Jimmy Rushing — Mister Five By Five — along with Count Basie, for whom he did his best singing. What a master. via tumblr ift.tt/1PTQjzI
May 29, 2015: [gallery] The great Jimmy Rushing — Mister Five By Five — along with Count Basie, for whom he did his best singing. What a master.
May 29, 2015: This astonishingly advanced and beautiful car was also known... This astonishingly advanced and beautiful car was also known by the punning pronunciation of the initials DS in French as “La Déesse” – the goddess. …
May 29, 2015: [gallery] This astonishingly advanced and beautiful car was also known by the punning pronunciation of the initials DS in French as “La Déesse” – the …
May 24, 2015: "Have you heard of the Benedict Option?" Have you heard of the Benedict Option? If not, you will soon. It’s the name of a deeply pessimistic cultural project that’s capturing the imaginations …
May 24, 2015: "In a statement conceding defeat, the Iona Institute, the main opposition group, said it would..." “In a statement conceding defeat, the Iona Institute, the main opposition group, said it would continue to affirm ‘the importance of biological ties …
May 24, 2015: Have you heard of the Benedict Option? If not, you will soon. It’s the name of a deeply pessimistic cultural project that’s capturing the imaginations …
May 24, 2015: In a statement conceding defeat, the Iona Institute, the main opposition group, said it would continue to affirm ‘the importance of biological ties …
May 24, 2015: Any time I make [on Twitter] some sort of joke along racial lines or dealing with racial politics, I know that immediately there’s going to be a wave …
May 24, 2015: "Thirty years ago, in the ‘1984’ Macintosh commercial directed by Ridley Scott, a young..." “Thirty years ago, in the ‘1984’ Macintosh commercial directed by Ridley Scott, a young woman smashed the big screen her fellow citizens were forced …
May 24, 2015: Thirty years ago, in the ‘1984’ Macintosh commercial directed by Ridley Scott, a young woman smashed the big screen her fellow citizens were forced to …
May 22, 2015: "In a time when ‘to other’ has become a condemnatory verb, randos are the other. If the..." “In a time when ‘to other’ has become a condemnatory verb, randos are the other. If the mores in a given ZIP code preclude snarling at people for …
May 22, 2015: Photo via tumblr ift.tt/1ApI1YY
May 22, 2015: Photo via tumblr ift.tt/1ApI1YY
May 22, 2015: In a time when ‘to other’ has become a condemnatory verb, randos are the other. If the mores in a given ZIP code preclude snarling at people for their …
May 22, 2015: [gallery]
May 22, 2015: The eros of weakness and power that fuels public shaming shows up in one last uncanny and sickening detail of Sacco’s case: the delight her shamers …
May 22, 2015: prunvs: Flowering Desert, Chile The flowering desert is a... prunvs: Flowering Desert, Chile The flowering desert is a climatic phenomenon that occurs in the Atacama Desert, known as the driest place in the …
May 22, 2015: [gallery] prunvs: Flowering Desert, Chile The flowering desert is a climatic phenomenon that occurs in the Atacama Desert, known as the driest place …
May 20, 2015: drawingarchitecture: Sabrina Morreale drawingarchitecture: Sabrina Morreale via tumblr [ift.tt/1LmC14v](http://ift.tt/1LmC14v)
May 20, 2015: [gallery] drawingarchitecture: Sabrina Morreale
May 20, 2015: Some time ago, identity and a sense of self-worth got hitched to labor and productivity. Consequently, each new technological displacement of human …
May 19, 2015: Bibliodyssey: Japanese Falconry Bibliodyssey: Japanese Falconry via tumblr ift.tt/1edlogI
May 19, 2015: [gallery] Bibliodyssey: Japanese Falconry
May 18, 2015: Charisms A thought I had while eating hot dogs with friends today: What if Christian colleges and universities were to think of educating their students into …
May 17, 2015: robertogreco: The Aftershocks, Rebecca Mock (via migurski) robertogreco: The Aftershocks, Rebecca Mock (via migurski) via tumblr [ift.tt/1dbB6c7](http://ift.tt/1dbB6c7)
May 17, 2015: Photo via tumblr ift.tt/1dbB5F1
May 17, 2015: [gallery] robertogreco: The Aftershocks, Rebecca Mock (via migurski)
May 17, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18198”]
May 16, 2015: David Shrigley. I think Frank Chimero pointed me to this on... David Shrigley. I think Frank Chimero pointed me to this on Twitter. via tumblr ift.tt/1d7h0iV
May 16, 2015: [gallery] David Shrigley. I think Frank Chimero pointed me to this on Twitter.
May 16, 2015: drawingarchitecture: Charlie Hodgson, Untitled I (Tribalism,... drawingarchitecture: Charlie Hodgson, Untitled I (Tribalism, Brutalism & Defensive Architecture), 2015, Ink, Acrylic and Coloured Pencils on …
May 16, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18204”] drawingarchitecture: Charlie Hodgson, Untitled I (Tribalism, …
May 16, 2015: SpaceX travel posters SpaceX travel posters via tumblr ift.tt/1PpWiMk
May 16, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18207”] SpaceX travel posters
May 16, 2015: Someone said to me the other day that MAD MAX is “his Star... Someone said to me the other day that MAD MAX is “his Star Wars.” His modern myth. A myth of the time of steel and petrol, that’s about collapsing …
May 16, 2015: [gallery] Someone said to me the other day that MAD MAX is “his Star Wars.” His modern myth. A myth of the time of steel and petrol, that’s about …
May 16, 2015: "Blackwell explained that the bass drum, sock cymbal, and the snare are on the one and three. He told..." “Blackwell explained that the bass drum, sock cymbal, and the snare are on the one and three. He told me to ignore the bass guitar because it was more …
May 16, 2015: Blackwell explained that the bass drum, sock cymbal, and the snare are on the one and three. He told me to ignore the bass guitar because it was more …
May 15, 2015: Scripture and slavery The inability of evangelicals to agree on how slavery should be construed according to Scripture, which all treated as their ultimate religious norm, …
May 15, 2015: "One time I met a guy who had invented a heart valve that saved half a million people. He and I got..." “One time I met a guy who had invented a heart valve that saved half a million people. He and I got to talking, and he had a habit of pausing to think …
May 15, 2015: One time I met a guy who had invented a heart valve that saved half a million people. He and I got to talking, and he had a habit of pausing to think …
May 14, 2015: from Wake in Progress from Wake in Progress via tumblr ift.tt/1E7Tqb0
May 14, 2015: [gallery] from Wake in Progress
May 14, 2015: It seems obvious that Obama, Putnam, and the liberal elites they speak for want to believe that American Christians are narrow-minded and obsessed to …
May 14, 2015: "The decision by corporate leaders to take a political stand over a controversial issue is therefore..." “The decision by corporate leaders to take a political stand over a controversial issue is therefore of great interest. Corporations and business …
May 14, 2015: The decision by corporate leaders to take a political stand over a controversial issue is therefore of great interest. Corporations and business …
May 13, 2015: My immensely talented friend Claire Holley has a new record... My immensely talented friend Claire Holley has a new record coming out and it is really special. via tumblr [ift.tt/1cy9lcH](http://ift.tt/1cy9lcH)
May 13, 2015: First Things First God bless Rod Dreher for continuing to post critiques of his Benedict Option. But I still haven’t seen a critique that is genuinely to the point — …
May 13, 2015: [youtube …
May 13, 2015: First Things First God bless Rod Dreher for continuing to post critiques of his Benedict Option. But I still haven’t seen a critique that is genuinely to the point — …
May 13, 2015: thingsmagazine: A rare ivory anatomical model of a pregnant... thingsmagazine: A rare ivory anatomical model of a pregnant woman, German, late 17th century via tumblr [ift.tt/1RFZ5zH](http://ift.tt/1RFZ5zH)
May 13, 2015: [gallery] thingsmagazine: A rare ivory anatomical model of a pregnant woman, German, late 17th century
May 13, 2015: "Bible Belt near-Christianity is teetering. I say let it fall. For much of the twentieth century,..." “Bible Belt near-Christianity is teetering. I say let it fall. For much of the twentieth century, especially in the South and parts of the Midwest, …
May 13, 2015: Bible Belt near-Christianity is teetering. I say let it fall. For much of the twentieth century, especially in the South and parts of the Midwest, one …
May 10, 2015: In the Civil Rights era, we had the theological resources to address the injustices that people were suffering. People with social, cultural, and …
May 7, 2015: More vital information here. Via John Overholt on Twitter. More vital information here. Via John Overholt on Twitter. via tumblr ift.tt/1F0BGmZ
May 7, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18231”] More vital information here. Via John Overholt on Twitter.
May 7, 2015: In a few months, the Supreme Court will likely conclude that same-sex civil marriage is a constitutional right. That will mean increased liberty for …
May 6, 2015: One of a series of wonderful photos of people using the New York Public Library, here, via Slate Vault.
May 6, 2015: [gallery] One of a series of wonderful photos of people using the New York Public Library, here, via Slate Vault.
May 6, 2015: Is it a good movie? No, not if you want plots you can follow... Is it a good movie? No, not if you want plots you can follow and visuals that don’t seem to be maiming themselves. (On the other hand, why would you?) …
May 6, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18238”] Is it a good movie? No, not if you want plots you can follow and …
May 6, 2015: newberrylibrary: Happy National Tourist Appreciation... newberrylibrary: Happy National Tourist Appreciation Day! “Yosemite and the Big Trees of California” This advertisement, created in 1881, encouraged …
May 6, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18241”] newberrylibrary: “Yosemite and the Big Trees of California” This …
May 6, 2015: thingsmagazine: ‘Bauer 8mm’, a French lithographic poster,... thingsmagazine: ‘Bauer 8mm’, a French lithographic poster, circa 1960 via tumblr [ift.tt/1zMir0m](http://ift.tt/1zMir0m)
May 6, 2015: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18244”] thingsmagazine: ‘Bauer 8mm’, a French lithographic poster, circa …
May 5, 2015: The “Benedict Option” Revisited What Rod Dreher calls the Benedict Option has been getting a lot of pushback from critics — and Rod hasn’t even explained in any detail what he means …
May 5, 2015: The term “Internet Of Things” is a desperate attempt to make a pointer for a field that barely exists yet. We do this a lot these days. We use the …
May 5, 2015: "The problem that I and many other Baptists had with Carson speaking at the Pastors’ Conference is..." The problem that I and many other Baptists had with Carson speaking at the Pastors’ Conference is not primarily that he is an Adventist. My problem is …
May 5, 2015: The term “Internet Of Things” is a desperate attempt to make a pointer for a field that barely exists yet. We do this a lot these days. We use the …
May 5, 2015: magictransistor: (Unknown). Jacob Lawrence Displays his... magictransistor: (Unknown). Jacob Lawrence Displays his Painting “Embarkation” During the War. 1940s. via tumblr …
May 5, 2015: [gallery] magictransistor: (Unknown). Jacob Lawrence Displays his Painting “Embarkation” During the War. 1940s.
May 5, 2015: citiesofsound: Johann Dogiel, Blood-pressure rhythms in dogs,... citiesofsound: Johann Dogiel, Blood-pressure rhythms in dogs, cats and humans in response to the sounds of musical instruments, Leipzig Institute for …
May 5, 2015: [gallery] citiesofsound: Johann Dogiel, Blood-pressure rhythms in dogs, cats and humans in response to the sounds of musical instruments, Leipzig …
May 4, 2015: "With the nation’s eyes on Baltimore (and Baltimore’s eyes on Sandtown), what has struck me, as..." “With the nation’s eyes on Baltimore (and Baltimore’s eyes on Sandtown), what has struck me, as someone who has lived here for five years, is the …
May 4, 2015: With the nation’s eyes on Baltimore (and Baltimore’s eyes on Sandtown), what has struck me, as someone who has lived here for five years, is the speed …
May 4, 2015: Susan Holman: This child met my gaze at the 2013 Kumbh Mela,... Susan Holman: This child met my gaze at the 2013 Kumbh Mela, a Hindu bathing festival in rural India, where her family was working. She stands just a …
May 4, 2015: [gallery] Susan Holman: This child met my gaze at the 2013 Kumbh Mela, a Hindu bathing festival in rural India, where her family was working. She …
May 4, 2015: The usual morning visitor The usual morning visitor via tumblr ift.tt/1DP09qf
May 4, 2015: [gallery] The usual morning visitor
May 3, 2015: It seems to me that in recent years the people who have done the most to make some worthwhile change possible have been the truth-tellers, those who …
May 3, 2015: momalibrary: A wrapped $50 stack of ARTCASH, comprised of two... momalibrary: A wrapped $50 stack of ARTCASH, comprised of two “ones” by Andy Warhol, and two $24 bills by Tom Gormley. ARTCASH was a benefit party …
May 3, 2015: momalibrary: A wrapped $50 stack of ARTCASH, comprised of two... momalibrary: A wrapped $50 stack of ARTCASH, comprised of two “ones” by Andy Warhol, and two $24 bills by Tom Gormley. ARTCASH was a benefit party …
May 3, 2015: [gallery] momalibrary: A wrapped $50 stack of ARTCASH, comprised of two “ones” by Andy Warhol, and two $24 bills by Tom Gormley. ARTCASH was a benefit …
May 2, 2015: movieposteroftheday: Japanese speed for PLAYTIME (Jacques Tati,... movieposteroftheday: Japanese speed for PLAYTIME (Jacques Tati, France, 1967) Size: 14.5" x 20", folded to 14.5" x 10" Designer: unknown Poster …
May 2, 2015: [gallery] movieposteroftheday: Japanese speed for PLAYTIME (Jacques Tati, France, 1967) Size: 14.5" x 20", folded to 14.5" x 10" …
May 2, 2015: Neil Gaiman: Why I love Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Neil Gaiman: Why I love Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: Lovely tribute by Neil Gaiman to one of my very favorite books. I have mixed feelings about …
May 2, 2015: Neil Gaiman: Why I love Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Neil Gaiman: Why I love Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: Lovely tribute by Neil Gaiman to one of my very favorite books. I have mixed feelings about …
May 2, 2015: Neil Gaiman: Why I love Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Neil Gaiman: Why I love Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Lovely tribute by Neil Gaiman to one of my very favorite books. I have mixed feelings about …
May 1, 2015: Charlie Hebdo’s murdered editorial director, Stéphane Charbonnier, said he aimed to “banalize” all areas of discourse that were too fraught to …
May 1, 2015: I thought this business about “Wisconsin Republicans... I thought this business about “Wisconsin Republicans denying beans to the poor” was a partisan distortion, but apparently not. I haven’t voted for a …
May 1, 2015: [gallery] I thought this business about “Wisconsin Republicans denying beans to the poor” was a partisan distortion, but apparently not. I haven’t …
May 1, 2015: "My students are often Christians who are old enough to mock mercilessly the people that gave of..." “My students are often Christians who are old enough to mock mercilessly the people that gave of their time sacrificially to disciple them when they …
May 1, 2015: My students are often Christians who are old enough to mock mercilessly the people that gave of their time sacrificially to disciple them when they …
May 1, 2015: "I have a book-ish nature. I understand faith the way C.S. Lewis did, which is that I like books that..." “I have a book-ish nature. I understand faith the way C.S. Lewis did, which is that I like books that help explain the world to me. A lot of theology …
May 1, 2015: robertogreco: “Some exquisite Katsuhiro Otomo for the morning... robertogreco: “Some exquisite Katsuhiro Otomo for the morning (from ’Tokyo Metro Explorers’). That last Otomo panel is best seen in sequence.” …
May 1, 2015: I have a book-ish nature. I understand faith the way C.S. Lewis did, which is that I like books that help explain the world to me. A lot of theology …
May 1, 2015: [gallery] robertogreco: “Some exquisite Katsuhiro Otomo for the morning (from ’Tokyo Metro Explorers’). That last Otomo panel is best seen in …
May 1, 2015: announcement Now that I’ve resurrected my Tumblr, I’ll just be using this blog to mirror what gets posted there. So if you use RSS you won’t want …
May 1, 2015: The invention of ‘printing,’ though ingenious compared with the invention of ‘letters,’ is no great matter. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter IV: Of …
May 1, 2015: The chronicles of American Christianity are littered with pronouncements of the shallowness of evangelicalism—set-ups for testimonies of leaving the …
May 1, 2015: It is exceedingly difficult these days to call attention to the dull-minded policing by academics and online activists without being ridiculed in …
May 1, 2015: Nietzsche saw art, and Lady Philosophy, as a benign illusion that sustains us in the face of the awful truth, which would cause our eyeballs to …
May 1, 2015: New York is a publishing center, the business center of American culture. Here culture is prepared, processed and distributed. Here the publishers …
Apr 30, 2015: Conservatives United A number of people have been praising this essay by Yuval Levin: American conservatism has always consisted of a variety of schools of social, moral, …
Apr 30, 2015: Raising Higher Education to Its Full Potential? Students are attracted to the sunny campus lawns, close attention from professors, and those coveted “critical thinking skills,” but often they need …
Apr 29, 2015: so you want to move to Brooklyn... New York is a publishing center, the business center of American culture. Here culture is prepared, processed and distributed. Here the publishers …
Apr 23, 2015: withdrawals and commitments My buddy Rod Dreher writes, What I call the Benedict Option is this: a limited, strategic withdrawal of Christians from the mainstream of American …
Apr 4, 2015: Craigie Aitchison, Crucifixion Window, St. Mary the Boltons Church, London
Apr 4, 2015: Meditations for the three hours, Good Friday 2015 Luke’s Saviour meets us eagerly with that forgiveness in two episodes unique to his Gospel. Jesus speaks from the cross: ‘Father, forgive them, for …
Apr 3, 2015: Craigie Aitchison, "Crucifixion (1993)"
Apr 1, 2015: Craigie Aitchison, "Crucifixion 9"
Mar 24, 2015: Bellow's Mailbox I have watched the mailbox anxiously for your story. (You see the mailbox has not lost its potency; it is still the little cold tin womb in which the …
Mar 18, 2015: The Law That Changed Modern America This year, America observes the fiftieth anniversary of many transformative events. Some are to be celebrated; others are to be mourned. Earlier this …
Mar 14, 2015: current status
Mar 14, 2015: “Ginny!” said Mr. Weasley, flabbergasted. “Haven’t I taught you anything? What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself …
Mar 13, 2015: How to Dispense with Conservatism in One Essay This essay by Elizabeth Stoker Breunig is several things: a memoir, a moving tribute to a teacher, a celebration of Pope Francis, a denunciation of …
Mar 13, 2015: Understanding Father Neuhaus I did not know Richard John Neuhaus intimately, or even well; we met only a couple of times, and corresponded a bit over the years. But I was involved …
Mar 12, 2015: Why I Don't Believe Twitter Will Do Anything to Address Abuse Today I tweeted, “Okay that Twitter says it will deal better with abuse, but policies are only as good as their implementation. I left @flickr because …
Mar 12, 2015: On Margaret Sanger I may have said enough on Twitter about Rachel Marie Stone’s post on contraception and Margaret Sanger, but it’s hard to be perfectly clear on …
Mar 9, 2015: Beloved Reading Daniel Meldelsohn’s new essay on Sappho, I recall an essay of my own from some years ago — a reflection on Anne Carson’s …
Mar 8, 2015: Arrangement In a memorable scene from her memoir The Florist’s Daughter, Patricia Hampl describes what it was like, when she was a child, to watch her father …
Mar 7, 2015: Routes to the Corner Office In fact, Bruni’s breezy anecdotes tend to reinforce the very assumption they ostensibly question: that prestige, power, and wealth are the major goals …
Mar 4, 2015: Surveillance and Care Another day, another story about the legal trouble you can expect if you’re a free-range parent. This matters, a lot, and what’s at stake needs to be …
Mar 1, 2015: About "It" Consider these sentences: Wilson nailed it. Jones just doesn’t get it. It’s about ethics in games journalism. It’s not about politics. It. And: …
Feb 21, 2015: Code Fetishists vs. Antinomians Charles Taylor explains many (most?) internet debates — and a great many others from the past two hundred years. If you ever wonder why people on …
Feb 17, 2015: Antisemitism and Evidence Freddie deBoer’s critique of Conor Friedersdorf’s post on European antisemitism is too careless. Freddie: Friedersdorf spends the requisite amount of …
Feb 17, 2015: <em>Pax Scientia</em>: Thanks, But I'll Pass Armand Marie Leroi is an evolutionary biologist — and also a scientific imperialist. No, that’s not an insult: it’s his own account of the matter. …
Feb 16, 2015: Notes for a Book I Won't Write I’m always getting ideas for books that are very much worth writing but which I know I’ll never get around to writing because other …
Feb 15, 2015: Stevens This endlessly elaborating poem Displays the theory of poetry, As the life of poetry. A more severe, More harassing master would extemporize Subtler, …
Feb 15, 2015: Suffrage Anybody who believes at all in God must believe in the absolute supremacy of God. But in so far as that supremacy does allow of any degrees that can …
Feb 13, 2015: The System A friend recently asked me what word processor I use. I was preparing to link him to a couple of posts I’ve written about that in the past and then …
Feb 12, 2015: The Mighty Wonders, "Old Ship of Zion" [audio mp3="blog.ayjay.org/wp-conten…"][/audio] From Baylor’s Black Gospel Music Restoration Project; see the blog post here.
Feb 11, 2015: The Swallow From Upper Egypt, ca. 1479–1458 B.C; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Some thoughts by Patrick Kurp here.
Feb 10, 2015: Another Note About Reading In response to my posting of some rather directive thoughts on reading by Dorothy Sayers, a friend wrote: “Hey, I thought you were the ‘read at whim’ …
Feb 10, 2015: Dorothy Sayers, "A Note on Creative Reading" In 1940, when the Second World War was underway and the Battle of Britain had begun, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote a little book for Gollancz called Begin …
Feb 4, 2015: Computational Humanities and Critical Tact Natalie Kane writes, When we talk about algorithms, we never talk about the person, we talk about the systems they operate on, the systems they …
Feb 1, 2015: Stefan Fatsis is Wrong This post by Stefan Fatsis is remarkably dumb. Let me explain why. When people disagree with dictionary-makers’ decisions about which words belong in …
Jan 29, 2015: On Not Defending the Humanities I don’t think that the humanities or the liberal arts can be defended, at least not in the sense that most people give to “defended.” Here’s why, …
Jan 24, 2015: The Old Hobby-Horse Rides Again As we come towards the end of an octave of prayers for Christian unity, I’d like to suggest that one way to pursue such unity is to avoid writing …
Jan 24, 2015: Kurzweilian Whiggery Tim Urban writes, The movie Back to the Future came out in 1985, and “the past” took place in 1955. In the movie, when Michael J. Fox went back to …
Jan 22, 2015: Auden and the Dream of Public Poetry This essay was originally published in this book. I’m posting it here because I think fairly well of it — though I would write it very differently …
Jan 19, 2015: Two kinds of critics in the world.... I’m very interested in Andrew Piper’s new work on the “conversional novel”: My approach consisted of creating measures that tried to identify the …
Jan 19, 2015: [caption id=“attachment_14599” align=“aligncenter” width=“1000”]Eu Jin[/caption] Many wonderful images on the site …
Jan 14, 2015: Coleridge on the Reading of Fairy Tales My Father (who had so little of parental ambition in him, that he had destined his children to be Blacksmiths &c, & had accomplished his …
Jan 11, 2015: Repeatedly (but not often enough) Zoe Corbyn in the Guardian on Nick Carr’s The Glass Cage: Not everyone buys Carr’s gloomy argument. People have always lamented the loss of skills …
Jan 10, 2015: BUT “I condemn those heinous killings, but…” “First i condemn the brutal killing. But…” “No, journalists are not legitimate targets for killing. But…” …
Jan 9, 2015: Random thoughts on <em>Charlie Hebdo</em> I don’t think the most important question about what happened is “Do we support Charlie Hebdo?” I think the most important question is, “Do we …
Jan 9, 2015: More About My New Writing Assignment When, a few days ago, I posted the details of my radically subversive new writing assignment, I got a number of replies from my friends on Twitter. …
Jan 8, 2015: The Dance of Death The programme from the Group Theatre’s production of Auden’s verse drama The Dance of Death (1933) contains a synopsis written by Auden …
Jan 8, 2015: [caption id=“attachment_14574” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”]Strouzas[/caption] [caption …
Jan 7, 2015: [caption id=“attachment_14567” align=“aligncenter” width=“643”]Cover for a (second!) Chinese edition of my book …
Jan 7, 2015: [caption id=“attachment_14564” align=“aligncenter” width=“520”]David Jones, Madonna and Child in the Landscape …
Jan 6, 2015: Good News for Mac Users Cabel Sasser, writing about how 2014 went at Panic Software, breaks down November sales by unit sold: And then by revenue: Cabel isn’t totally …
Jan 6, 2015: Bonhoeffer and the Song of Songs This is the text of a lecture I gave several years ago at an American Academy of Religion meeting. I’ve never known what to do with it. Its a purely …
Jan 6, 2015: Selling Books An interesting trio of books for Random House to be advertising in the April 24, 1944 issue of The New Republic — in the margin, by the way, of an …
Jan 2, 2015: Changes I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, but in between semesters I always take some time to re-evaluate how I’m spending my time, and over the last few …
Dec 30, 2014: Assignment: Commentary and Anthology Just in case anyone is interested, here’s a draft of something I’ll be handing out to my students in a couple of weeks. In most of your courses in the …
Dec 29, 2014: signing off A note to the few who read this tumblelog: I don’t expect to be posting here any more. It’s been fun — for almost eight years! — but it’s time for me …
Dec 28, 2014: Also a test This also is a test, which may be safely ignored.
Dec 28, 2014: This is a test This is a test. This is only a test.
Dec 28, 2014: [gallery] Now this is a great idea.
Dec 28, 2014: The most fascinating and, in many ways, cheering story of 2014 is almost wholly counterintuitive: the survival of the printed book. A heart-warming …
Dec 27, 2014: [gallery] homelimag: Vega Cottage on an Island in Norway by Kolman Boye Architects from Homeli.co.uk ~ { Facebook | Twitter | Tumblr }
Dec 27, 2014: [gallery] homelimag: Elqui Domos Astronomical Hotel for Star Gazers by Rodrigo Duque Motta from Homeli.co.uk ~ { Facebook | Twitter | Tumblr }
Dec 27, 2014: [gallery] Uneven Growth at MoMA
Dec 27, 2014: [gallery] lindahall: Etienne Trouvelot – Scientist of the Day Etienne Trouvelot, a French painter turned American astronomical artist, was born Dec. …
Dec 27, 2014: Today many of the communal forms of life that might once have been thought to link the fates of the strong and weak are attenuated or all but …
Dec 26, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18325”] The death of Stephen the Protomartyr; woodcut from ‘Liber …
Dec 26, 2014: The response that I both respect the most, and which discourages me the most, is this one: black people should not have to debate their intellectual …
Dec 25, 2014: [youtube …
Dec 25, 2014: During the day to come, Christmas Day, some time, someone will show themselves undefended, helpless, awkward, clumsy, unapt, undignified, undone. That …
Dec 24, 2014: [youtube …
Dec 24, 2014: [gallery] from a promotional campaign for the Schusev State Museum of Architecture
Dec 24, 2014: R. S. Thomas, "The Coming" And God held in his hand A small globe. Look, he said. The son looked. Far off, As through water, he saw A scorched land of fierce Colour. The light …
Dec 24, 2014: It looks, from home, that he is going after his guests but when you are the guest, you can feel the many ways he’s protecting you – cushioning the …
Dec 23, 2014: accounting for modernity This is one of my placeholder posts, in which I lay out the barest outline of thoughts that I hope to develop in detail at some later date. Points …
Dec 23, 2014: Christmas at home Mother-in-law: Alan, can I get up and let you sit in this chair? Me: No, Mom, I’m comfortable where I am. MIL (5 min. later): Are you sure you don't …
Dec 23, 2014: [gallery] From the installation of James Lee Byars’s “Made with Paper”, 1967
Dec 23, 2014: [gallery] pleasecometotheshow: From a note in the MoMA artist file of James Lee Byars, “This biographical statement was distributed for the Byar’s …
Dec 23, 2014: We have suffered a general loss of concepts, the loss of a moral and political vocabulary. We no longer use a spread-out substantial picture of the …
Dec 23, 2014: fairy tales and myths The individual fairy tale is not itself a myth, but it presupposes a mythic framework of surprise, dependence or vulnerability, the balancing of …
Dec 22, 2014: [gallery] wesleyhill: Sr. Grace Remington, OCSO, “Mary and Eve” (2005) (h/t Elizabeth Scalia)
Dec 22, 2014: So I’m fine with AI, because I don’t believe in it in the usual way it is interpreted, as machine consciousness. I don’t think that will happen, …
Dec 22, 2014: In my free time, I enjoy making things with rocks, doing patio jigsaw patterns in quartzite around my house (I have one patio where three stones that …
Dec 20, 2014: [gallery] architectural-review: Edward Crooks: The Theatre of Progress See the full project on the AR’s revolutionary new digital magazine at …
Dec 18, 2014: Teenagers can feel religious longings just as powerfully as they do romantic ones. There is nothing sinister in teens talking in the language of …
Dec 18, 2014: the origin of the great errors There can be no doubt that all the great errors which have overtaken the preaching and theology of the community in the course of its history have had …
Dec 18, 2014: Is it true, this talk of a loving and good God, who is more than one of the friendly idols whose rise is so easy to account for, and whose dominion is …
Dec 18, 2014: I have not been on a fascinating journey of self-discovery recently, and I would not like to share it with you. Thanks be to God, we have far better …
Dec 17, 2014: Some common reasons they gave for not buying e-textbooks were that screens make their eyes tired, working on a computer makes them prone to …
Dec 16, 2014: I also know that Messiah is among my favourite works to perform each year. How could this be? Why doesn’t this extreme familiarity (I have memorized …
Dec 16, 2014: Getting a bad review is no longer an elite experience. Writers and non-writers, mandarins and proles, we’ve all been trolled, oafed, flambéed in some …
Dec 16, 2014: For Whitefield, clearly, one can be aware of, and even repent of, particular sins without having a clear understanding of one’s spiritual and moral …
Dec 14, 2014: the future of ambition I’m not sure this essay by Michael Hanlon on the lack of technical and scientific progress over the past 40 years adds much to other recent …
Dec 14, 2014: [gallery] See all the metrics. Some interesting things about this one: the relative illiteracy of New Yorkers; the extremity of the top and bottom …
Dec 14, 2014: It is a very religious world, far more religious than it was 50 years ago…. Furthermore, in every nook and cranny left by organized faiths, all manner …
Dec 14, 2014: In the meantime, the problem seems to grow only more urgent. There’s a ton of ugly vitriol being poured into social media. We need to keep the …
Dec 14, 2014: Near the end of “Labor’s Love Lost,” his illuminating new book on the decline of the working-class family, the Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew …
Dec 12, 2014: A few years ago, I formulated a working hypothesis that has guided my professional efforts as an editor ever since. It goes something like this: The …
Dec 12, 2014: [gallery] Folio from a Majma al-Tavarikh (Compendium of Histories) of Hafiz-i Abru. Chinese Emperor standing in a Pavilion. The Metropolitan Museum of …
Dec 12, 2014: It is hard not to resent Flaubert for making fictional prose stylish—for making style a problem for the first time in fiction. After Flaubert, and in …
Dec 12, 2014: The odds of computers becoming thoughtful enough to decide they want to take over the world, hatch a nefarious plan to do so, and then execute said …
Dec 11, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18378”] drawingarchitecture: Nicole Marple, Capture to Catalog, Mixed Media …
Dec 10, 2014: [gallery] momalibrary: Elsbeth Heddenhausen. Bucher (n.d.) in Das Deutsche Lichtbild, Jahresschau 1933 (Berlin: Robert & Bruno Schultz, 1933). -jt …
Dec 10, 2014: [gallery] ryersonlib: Promotional booklet for Lincoln Automobiles, located at 39, Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Printed by Draeger Frères in …
Dec 10, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18390”] theparisreview: At MoMA PS1, Bob and Roberta Smith offer art …
Dec 9, 2014: [caption id=“attachment_14519” align=“alignnone” width=“800”] One of the first Bibles set in Roman type[/caption]
Dec 9, 2014: [gallery] One of the earliest Bibles in Roman type
Dec 9, 2014: [gallery] a newly discovered letter from C S Lewis
Dec 9, 2014: [gallery] drawingarchitecture: Alexander Kindlen, The Maelstrom // The Descent, analogue & digital mixed media, 2014.
Dec 8, 2014: [gallery] eastmanhouse: Vortograph Alvin Langdon Coburn, British, b. United States 1882 - 1966 1917, printed ca. 1950 gelatin silver print Image: …
Dec 8, 2014: Many of the loudest opponents of releasing the report don’t normally think that “violence and deaths” from protests or terrorist attacks can ever be …
Dec 8, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18406”] archimaps: Rendering of the Chrysler Building during construction, …
Dec 6, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18409”] houghtonlib: American wood type co., South Windham, Conn. [Specimens …
Dec 6, 2014: britishmuseum: The Twelve Months at Kew Gardens. Print series by Thomas Robert Way (1861–1913). January February March April May June July …
Dec 5, 2014: [gallery] biblipeacay: *The Mezmerizing Architecture of Mosques* via Metafiler.
Dec 5, 2014: So, some personal news. Today I resign from The New Republic. But I am excited to join Fusion! Which I am also resigning from, effective immediately. …
Dec 5, 2014: Thoughts Occasioned by My Staying Home to Crank Through These Papers Because They Simply Have to Be Returned Today “Just one more cup of coffee to get me fortified.” “Yes, I posted on the demise of TNR last night, but I think there’s something else I need to get …
Dec 5, 2014: And isn’t there a place for just that – for a group of writers and thinkers to put out a publication that doesn’t seek to maximize pageviews or …
Dec 5, 2014: one more thought on TNR It happens every week in Silicon Valley: a tiny startup working on some interesting technology is “acquired” by one of the bigger fish in the pond, …
Dec 5, 2014: This, I think, is the ground of the strange ‘relatability’ of these globally popular novels: not class, or race, or gender, or school experience or …
Dec 5, 2014: Q&A about 'Unapologetic' with David Heim of The Christian Century unapologetic-book: Interview in the 10 December 2014 issue, online here. Your book is not “apologetic” in the classic sense of presenting a rational …
Dec 4, 2014: Goodbye, TNR If you hear anyone say, “Good grief, The New Republic isn’t dead, it’s just moving to New York and transitioning from being a magazine to being a …
Dec 4, 2014: More importantly, Christians believe our baptism is not just a set of beliefs. One could come up with some new way to follow Abraham Lincoln or Ayn …
Dec 3, 2014: Frankly, nothing is more controversial in American life than this issue of whether or not we are going to be reconciled across racial lines. I have …
Dec 3, 2014: As I point out in my new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, there was a time in our nation’s history when Americans …
Dec 3, 2014: ‘In the early 2000s, particularly after 9/11, we saw a paradigm shift from community policing and problem-oriented principles to the war on terror, …
Dec 3, 2014: And yes, we are living longer, but this has disappointingly little to do with any recent breakthroughs. Since 1970, the US Federal Government has …
Dec 3, 2014: Sometimes, completing a book is that great expulsion of a strange pressure that we like to dignify with childbirth metaphors but which is much more …
Dec 2, 2014: It’s called The Book of Life because it’s about the most substantial things in your life: your relationships, your income, your career, your …
Dec 1, 2014: [gallery] archimaps: Piranesi’s design for a stage scene
Dec 1, 2014: [gallery] archimaps: Section of the Villa Surkoff, St. Petersburg
Dec 1, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18437”] archimaps: Erastus Salisbury Field’s Historical Monument of the …
Dec 1, 2014: I was in a Printing house in Hell & saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation. In the first chamber was a …
Dec 1, 2014: [gallery] drawingarchitecture: Maruio Ricci, Wordgame, 2013.
Dec 1, 2014: [gallery] A new spider species. Please let me know if this is fake, because it’s hard to believe.
Dec 1, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18447,18448”] from Eric Gill’s Four Gospels
Nov 30, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18454”]
Nov 30, 2014: [gallery] drawingarchitecture: Stefanidis Konstantinos, DUST COLLECTOR/ Creating dust-clouds for power generation (2013)
Nov 30, 2014: This kind of obedience is the substance of the Gospel - the institutional power to teach is its counterfoil. Obedience is a loving response to an …
Nov 29, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18461”] drawingarchitecture: Matthew Darmour-Paul, “De-Composite” 2014, …
Nov 28, 2014: In the pew in which we invariably sat there was a leather-bound Prayer Book with a brass clasp. It was always there and became for me an object of …
Nov 28, 2014: demolition work Another reason for the upsurge in writing about religion may lie in the failure of a convincing anti-capitalist discourse to emerge after the …
Nov 28, 2014: [gallery] the Etherington brothers
Nov 27, 2014: [gallery]
Nov 27, 2014: [gallery] portrait arabesque, by Roger de La Fresnaye. Via Wood s hole
Nov 27, 2014: This year, as Thanksgiving bleeds into the rest of the winter holiday season, as Republicans sharpen their knives for the fight with Obama over his …
Nov 27, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18476”] This is what book covers should look like.
Nov 27, 2014: Security researcher GironSec has pulled Uber’s Android app apart and discovered that it’s sending a huge amount of personal data back to base – …
Nov 27, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18480,18481,18482”] smithsonianlibraries: Tips for the fancy [Thanksgiving] …
Nov 27, 2014: What, then, does detective fiction say about her? ‘That I am a woman who likes life to be ordered. In a long life, I have never taken a drug or got …
Nov 27, 2014: attnmgmtblog: Alan Jacobs, on The Attentive Reader. So it turns out that if we want to think seriously about how we read and the conditions under …
Nov 26, 2014: There were particular books that donned the shelves and coffee tables in pretty much every Christian home in the 70s and 80s. There was, of course, …
Nov 26, 2014: And that is because the death of all of our Michael Browns at the hands of people who are supposed to protect them originates in a force more powerful …
Nov 26, 2014: These advice columns are becoming a genre unto themselves. The stock villain: crazy right-wing uncle, the jokes about stuffing. But I recognize them …
Nov 26, 2014: Here’s the simple fact that no one wants to talk about. Spotify says it pays out seventy per cent of its revenues to rights holders. Well, that’s very …
Nov 26, 2014: But ritual dazzles more than it convinces. Beyond the converted, the less committed observer will see the facts piling up and conclude that one can be …
Nov 25, 2014: My murder-mystery plot was extremely elaborate, with lots of strange clues involving balsa wood, and that was going to be fun, I thought. But then …
Nov 25, 2014: The idea that Michael Brown’s death is being emphasized too much by the black community, which should instead be concerning itself with “black on …
Nov 25, 2014: [Perhaps the British government could] take advantage of the Palace of Westminster’s imminent overhaul to evacuate it and move Parliament around, like …
Nov 25, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“18495,18496”] You have no computers – or none that I have seen. So many …
Nov 24, 2014: The Attentive Reader Recently I gave a talk at Vassar College for a meeting of LACOL, the Liberal Arts Consortium for Online Learning. Rather than writing out a lecture, I …
Nov 23, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18499”] architectural-review: The ghosts of surveillance.
Nov 20, 2014: Sullivan’s statement was a missive from the bureaucratic bowels of an accounting machine. It was surely manufactured by public relations specialists …
Nov 20, 2014: According to a report by the Occupational Safety & Health Administration, the top ten leading causes of injury in the workplace are as follows: • …
Nov 20, 2014: I am not particularly interested in the book as object, or in the technology of the transmission of the text. Cuneiform, papyrus and codex, Linear A …
Nov 20, 2014: [gallery] Paul Nash’s Landscape of the Megaliths, featured in Adam Thorpe’s On Silbury Hill. Image: Lauren McLean/V&A Images, via the New …
Nov 20, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18508”] houghtonlib: Poster for a 1917 production of Caliban by the Yellow …
Nov 19, 2014: Not long ago an enterprising professor at the Harvard Business School named Mike Norton persuaded a big investment bank to let him survey the bank’s …
Nov 19, 2014: ‘Social justice’ is an awkward term for an immensely important project, perhaps the most important project, which is to make the world a more …
Nov 19, 2014: In his latest speech, Archbishop Welby acknowledged for the first time that the Lambeth conference—a once-in-a-decade gathering of Anglican …
Nov 18, 2014: [gallery] smithsonianlibraries: “not compatible with iOS devices” from Animal mechanism: a treatise on terrestrial and aerial locomotion (1874)
Nov 18, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18518”] Austin Kleon: David Hockney, on his favorite drawing: There’s a …
Nov 18, 2014: [gallery] thingsmagazine: William Steiger
Nov 17, 2014: To all of us, I believe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Roman Empire is like a mirror in which we see reflected the brutal, vulgar, …
Nov 17, 2014: [gallery] From this collection of optical illusions. Look at the hi-res version to get the full effect.
Nov 16, 2014: I came originally from a place that had a serious cool deficit, so I really became a nerdish tabulator of cool. As a writer, I wanted to know how it …
Nov 15, 2014: [gallery] The source of this impasse is the design itself—a signature work of the overpraised architect Frank Gehry, whose whispered name is enough to …
Nov 14, 2014: [gallery] During the session for the seminal “Great Balls Of Fire”, Jerry Lee Lewis and Sun Records boss Sam Phillips engaged in an impassioned, …
Nov 14, 2014: School, by its very nature, tends to make a total claim on the time and energies of its participants. This, in turn, makes the teacher into custodian, …
Nov 13, 2014: And that’s where the problem lies. We’re still behaving like the rebel alliance, but now we’re the Empire. We got where we are by ignoring outsiders …
Nov 13, 2014: [gallery] Love House, Takeshi Hosaka, architect
Nov 12, 2014: Accurate Post Titles I Paid an Obscene Amount of Attention to Something Stupid But I Had an Emotionally Complex Response to It So It’s Totally Worth Your Time to Read This …
Nov 12, 2014: Žižek himself is a curious mixture of illusion and reality. In Trouble in Paradise, he speaks of Hamlet as a clown, and he himself is both …
Nov 11, 2014: When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the …
Nov 10, 2014: [gallery] morning walk along the Brazos
Nov 10, 2014: [gallery] still life with lizard
Nov 10, 2014: [gallery] abandoned house, Namibia
Nov 7, 2014: [gallery] subtilitas: Tadao Ando - Ryotaro Shiba museum, Osaka 2001. Via, photos © Will Pryce.
Nov 7, 2014: ProTip: Don’t use 4square to checkin to the location you admin your darkweb drug marketplace https://t.co/vaXz0qCAvS pic.twitter.com/ByEC9QTSLO — the …
Nov 7, 2014: I have a reinforced understanding of medical tv shows as America’s primary expression of horror fiction. On any number of levels. Related: the whole …
Nov 7, 2014: [gallery]
Nov 6, 2014: an update … on some things: A while back, I decided to ditch the New York Times — and I’m still regularly infuriated by the bigotry and ignorance of its …
Nov 6, 2014: [gallery] austinkleon: René Magritte with Dominique de Menil (and his dog Lou-Lou) at a rodeo in Simonton, Texas, 1965 Today at the Magritte Museum …
Nov 6, 2014: A final thought on the cultic. The word has a primitive feel. This is intentional. Christianity should be far better at foregrounding its exotic …
Nov 5, 2014: From these simulations, the logic of the game goes, you can abstract urban design principles. Where our cities appear unpredictably chaotic and …
Nov 5, 2014: Finish That Book! - The Atlantic Finish That Book! - The Atlantic I was just complaining about this post on Twitter, so let me flesh out my complaints a bit. As you can see if you …
Nov 5, 2014: Today we have a lot of technical innovation, but not a lot of political creativity. The ecosystem no longer produces as much entrepreneurship — …
Nov 5, 2014: Last week my colleague David Brooks wrote a column on the decline of political imagination, and the way that data-driven campaigning, in particular, …
Nov 5, 2014: [gallery] architectural-review: National Pantheon of Kazakhstan. Competition proposal 2014. Lara Lesmes, Fredrik Hellberg, Top Tachapol Tanaboonchai …
Nov 5, 2014: a way of writing There is a genre of writing to which I am particularly devoted, but whose name I do not know. I can only give examples. I think it may have been …
Nov 5, 2014: Consider the fact that it takes roughly one million spins on Pandora for a songwriter to earn just $90. Avicii’s release “Wake Me Up!” that I co-wrote …
Nov 4, 2014: The Concordat Analogy | R. R. Reno | First Things The Concordat Analogy | R. R. Reno | First Things Rusty Reno replies to me, and though I tried to comment on the site, I am not sure my comment went …
Nov 4, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18583,18584,18585”] thingsmagazine: The art of Peter Firmin (via things)
Nov 4, 2014: and one more note on politics I’m a seamless-garment pro-lifer who strongly opposes foreign-policy adventurism, wants to see the total dismantling of the national-security-state …
Nov 4, 2014: Look, I don’t expect the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but the stupidity and unseriousness of our politics is exhausting. It makes me think in more more …
Nov 4, 2014: Those of us who vote for third parties do so primarily because we feel that the Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin, beholden to …
Nov 3, 2014: in which David Sessions and I keep talking David Sessions has patiently answered my questions, so let me offer a few replies in turn. First, I don’t think that “writing on the internet, arguing …
Nov 3, 2014: Walsh’s ignorance and douchebaggery may be in a class by themselves, but his prominence is the product of forces that implicate the entire internet, …
Nov 3, 2014: [gallery] The International Space Station at night is kinda scary. Via c|net.
Nov 3, 2014: Should Airplanes Be Flying Themselves? | William Langewiesche Should Airplanes Be Flying Themselves? | William Langewiesche The people who have been mocking Nick Carr’s inquiries (in The Glass Cage) into the …
Nov 3, 2014: Edwards as a Christian theologian begins with belief in a creator, whose role in existence and experience no doubt elaborated itself in his …
Nov 3, 2014: It is not given to us to be as close to those we love as God is. We are always a little separate from one another, always something of a mystery. That …
Nov 3, 2014: Contraception, sleeping around, co-habitation, and gay sex are done in private. By and large, over the last few decades the Church in the West has …
Nov 3, 2014: But here’s what I find alarming: Confronted with a president who 1) spied on every American, 2) covered up torture, 3) continued a War on Drugs …
Nov 2, 2014: Michiko Kakutani, who writes reviews for The New York Times, is the same way. She’ll review a book like David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, which is one …
Nov 1, 2014: “It is hard even to guess at the number of Christians in China. Official surveys seek to play down the figures, ignoring the large number who worship …
Nov 1, 2014: I don’t think avoiding Twitter is pragmatic if your audience is there, but it’s also unwise to dump all of your writing into bite-size pieces that are …
Nov 1, 2014: [gallery] Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges
Nov 1, 2014: [gallery] Carvings from the gate of Nijo Castle, Kyoto
Nov 1, 2014: HOW TO WRITE — Medium HOW TO WRITE — Medium Fifty pieces like this appear on the internet every week. About them all I have just one question: What if what people who are …
Oct 31, 2014: A Ukrainian man who claimed responsibility for organizing a campaign to send heroin to my home last summer has been arrested in Italy on suspicion of …
Oct 31, 2014: [gallery] robertogreco: “Skull with clock eyes at La Calaca Festival (photograph by Reka Nyari)” (via “Celebrating Life While There’s Still Time: …
Oct 31, 2014: [gallery] A-minus?? There’s not a mark on it! What are you counting off for?? I’m complaining to the Dean.
Oct 31, 2014: On this Reformation Day, it is good to remember that Martin Luther belongs to the entire church, not only to Lutherans and Protestants, just as Thomas …
Oct 30, 2014: [gallery] xo-skeleton: Étienne Louis-Boullée, Newton’s Cenotaph, c. 1784
Oct 30, 2014: a message I just wrote to Dropbox Just a few days ago I upgraded my Dropbox account and added additional files and folders to the Dropbox folder. Since then no syncing has actually …
Oct 30, 2014: Yes, there is a traditional gamer lifestyle. God ordained that it’s one man, one joystick. Read your Bible folks, it’s right there… in Sega Genesis. …
Oct 30, 2014: [gallery] Little River Canyon, Alabama
Oct 30, 2014: ‘Here’s the secret to living in a log house: You got to love the color brown,’ Kevin said. 'But you can hang a picture anywhere.’ A Visit to a Proud …
Oct 30, 2014: [gallery] thegetty: “I do not like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if they are tall, straight, and flourishing. I do not …
Oct 30, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18635,18636,18637”] My father-in-law, James Lynn Collins, died last night, …
Oct 30, 2014: [gallery] “But the Weyerhaeuser headquarters seem purpose-built, rhetorically and materially, for one of Seattle’s growing companies. As Way noted to …
Oct 29, 2014: at least 2.5 cheers for publishers As Megan McArdle reminds us, “Publishers are middlemen. Everyone hates middlemen.” Maybe we can think a little more clearly about all this if we drop …
Oct 29, 2014: A lot of work goes into publishing a book. Someone needs to edit the manuscript. The manuscript must be typeset and copy-edited. A cover has to be …
Oct 29, 2014: a hero of our time The essay is called “Vanishing Act.” The tag line: “How does a man disappear?” Yes, Martin Sklar had disappeared, all right; so thoroughly that it was …
Oct 29, 2014: [gallery] The Wear, Durham
Oct 29, 2014: [gallery] University Parks, Oxford
Oct 29, 2014: [gallery] High Street, Oxford
Oct 29, 2014: [gallery] Holy Island (Lindisfarne)
Oct 29, 2014: [gallery] Regent’s Park, London
Oct 29, 2014: [gallery] Mt. Seymour, North Vancouver, B.C. (old lo-res photo)
Oct 29, 2014: [gallery] The Rio Grande, Big Bend National Park
Oct 29, 2014: [gallery]
Oct 29, 2014: [gallery] Ansel Adams
Oct 28, 2014: Why did the face in the Oval Office change but the policies remain the same? Critics tend to focus on Obama himself, a leader who perhaps has shifted …
Oct 28, 2014: The Assemblies of God, one of America’s largest and fastest-growing denominations, celebrated its 100th birthday this year. Almost all of its growth …
Oct 28, 2014: Here’s the key, I think: It’s because gay and lesbian people perceive Christianity as not just asking for a certain modification or a certain …
Oct 28, 2014: Taking into account the state of scientific research at the time as well as of the requirements of theology, the encyclical Humani Generis considered …
Oct 28, 2014: To those who know a little of christian history probably the most moving of all the reflections it brings is not the thought of the great events and …
Oct 28, 2014: [gallery] publicdomainreview: Four remarkable “plantscapes” from the Austrian botanist Kerner von Marilaun’s Pflanzenleben (1887). Read more about …
Oct 28, 2014: Any ambiguity about whether Douthat was merely predicting a schism or actively threatening one was settled with his column this past Sunday, in which …
Oct 28, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18685”] newberrylibrary: Chicago was a hotbed of music publishing during …
Oct 28, 2014: Portions of this chapter are peppered with numbers. Some passages are also thick with the language of simple mathematics. Readers may well ask whether …
Oct 28, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18689”] Via the Tripe Marketing Board and several other people on Twitter.
Oct 28, 2014: We have made him. To actually, truly believe in the advertisements that shape our culture—to let them penetrate one’s soul—is to become Jeff Koons. He …
Oct 28, 2014: [gallery] biblipeacay: Paul Klee etching: ‘Stachel der Clown’ (?Sting the Clown) 1931 [link]
Oct 28, 2014: [gallery] robertogreco: This image is what got me thinking about Arabic and flags today. Manuscript from the 18th century in the Moroccan style of …
Oct 27, 2014: The truth is that no one so much as herself would have approved of my doing this. Art was the only thing for which she felt very seriously. Had it …
Oct 27, 2014: The dullness comes from this election’s lack of a compelling macro-theme. Yes, there are national refrains: Democrats in state after state call their …
Oct 26, 2014: The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may …
Oct 26, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18702”] Edward Wilson, an old master. You need not see what someone is …
Oct 25, 2014: They called it ‘interactive fiction,’ and it was absolutely interactive fiction. You read the text, and you took actions, and your actions influenced …
Oct 25, 2014: [gallery] 60ansdevadrouille: Sur le Gange au petit matin à Varanasi (Bénarès)., en période de basses eaux. février 1988.
Oct 24, 2014: Just as the self-esteem movement was not a panacea leading to happy, successful, and well-adapted children, … empathy interventions may not stop …
Oct 24, 2014: [gallery] Photographs of Hong Kong by Fan Ho
Oct 24, 2014: a good, good man My father-in-law, Lynn Collins — the best man I’ve ever known — has come to the last stage of his life. He won’t be with us much longer. He’s a …
Oct 24, 2014: Perhaps the foremost trend our nostalgia keeps us from seeing is the vast decentralization of American life, which has characterized the early years …
Oct 23, 2014: [gallery] smithsonianlibraries: Bruce soon found out that you just don’t challenge a skeleton to a bare-knuckle fight. From: “The English dance of …
Oct 22, 2014: When we develop and use educational technologies that monitor a student’s every moment in school and online, we groom that student for a lifetime of …
Oct 22, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18721”] jellobiafrasays: le troisieme homme (1967 ed.)
Oct 22, 2014: Outside of pockets of extreme deprivation, children’s society is severely restricted by our practice of placing children under the equivalent of house …
Oct 21, 2014: When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, `Would that she were.’ For I do not think it at …
Oct 20, 2014: [gallery] austinkleon: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s four types of readers From lecture two of his Seven Lectures On Shakespeare and Milton (Thx …
Oct 19, 2014: Marilynne Robinson is one of the great religious novelists, not only of our age, but any age. Reading her new novel Lila, one wonders how critics …
Oct 19, 2014: absurdity and perfidy
Oct 17, 2014: [gallery] austinkleon: I wrote a little something about reading here.
Oct 17, 2014: To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the …
Oct 17, 2014: For obit writers, the whole world is necessarily divided into the dead and the pre-dead. That’s all there is. Paris Review – What It’s Like to Write …
Oct 17, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18741,18742,18743,18744”] biblipeacay: From an auction collection of 28 …
Oct 17, 2014: a word to those on the journey Many Christian organizations, as they think about their treatment of gays and lesbians, and their theology of sexuality more generally, are …
Oct 16, 2014: Which religion will have the toughest time reconciling aliens with its beliefs? The ones that have decided that we humans are the sole focus of God’s …
Oct 16, 2014: Siracusa Shortcuts Once more, John Siracusa has written a massive review of the newest iteration of the Macintosh operating system — 26,000 words of thoughtful and …
Oct 16, 2014: The University of Chicago Press is pleased to announce the launch of History of Humanities, a new journal devoted to the historical and comparative …
Oct 16, 2014: I’ve been asked more than once what the formula for effective action against Ebola might be. It’s often those reluctant to invest in a comprehensive …
Oct 15, 2014: The superhero death ritual is so exhausted at this point that the cynicism of Marvel acknowledging Wolverine’s inevitably temporary absence feels …
Oct 15, 2014: [gallery] World’s tallest cow
Oct 15, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18756,18757”] disciplinedd: Periodic Table
Oct 14, 2014: [gallery] houghtonlib: Borelli, Giovanni Alfonso, 1608-1679. De motu animalium, 1685. *IC6 B6447 680db Houghton Library, Harvard University
Oct 14, 2014: A scholar’s business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. …
Oct 14, 2014: [gallery] Henry Sidgwick
Oct 13, 2014: The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or, more properly …
Oct 11, 2014: If this particular book is not giving me pleasure now, it may give me pleasure later, if I allow it to do so. Maybe it’s just starting slowly but will …
Oct 11, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18769”] rindertjagersma: Onderwijsinge in de perspective const | Hondius. The …
Oct 11, 2014: That music you hear in the distance? It’s St Augustine, St Teresa, Teilhard de Chardin, Pascal, Kierkegaard and Simone Weil all singing together, and …
Oct 10, 2014: [gallery] Mulberry Street, New York City, ca. 1900 — via this story
Oct 9, 2014: Is there something here we fear to face, except when clothed in safely sterilized professional speech? Have we grown reluctant in this age of power to …
Oct 9, 2014: In the history which I require and design, special care is to be taken that it be of wide range and made to the measure of the universe. For the world …
Oct 9, 2014: Strange that as modern philosophy transfers the visible wealth of nature more and more to the mind, the mind should seem to lose courage and to become …
Oct 9, 2014: Greg Egan's amazing web site Greg Egan’s amazing web site It seems pretty clear that when the Australian SF writer Greg Egan designed his home page in 1997, he achieved the …
Oct 8, 2014: This man who speaks to you was born 55 years ago in Vienna. One month after his birth he was put on a train, and then on a ship and brought to the …
Oct 8, 2014: Is Ebola the ISIS of biological agents? Is Ebola the Boko Haram of AIDS? Is Ebola the al-Shabaab of dengue fever? Some say Ebola is the Milosevic of …
Oct 8, 2014: [gallery] thingsmagazine: One of our favourite endpapers: The Wind in the Willows, illustration by E.H.Shepard
Oct 8, 2014: Why do the doomsayers exist? For one, it is common for each generation to think it is alive at the single most pivotal time in history. Surely we sit …
Oct 8, 2014: When you are very young, you think old people must feel inside as old as they appear on the outside. But as you move towards agedness yourself, you …
Oct 8, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18787”] biblipeacay: APOLLINAIRE, GUILLAUME—DUFY, RAOUL — LE BOEUF. BOIS …
Oct 8, 2014: A 2004 paper by education researcher Gary R. Pike published in Research in Higher Education … found the U.S. News rankings for 14 public research …
Oct 8, 2014: [gallery] smithsonianmag: Photo of the Day: Tufa Towers Photo by Marshall Fisher (Las Vegas, Nevada, USA); Mono Lake, California, USA
Oct 7, 2014: There is no such thing as practical knowledge, and so there is no such thing as a practical major. This country graduates 350,000 business majors a …
Oct 7, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18795”] architectural-review: Ralf Alwani, Mitten Crab Fishery and Eel …
Oct 7, 2014: Adobe is gathering data on the ebooks that have been opened, which pages were read, and in what order. All of this data, including the title, …
Oct 7, 2014: The Maker of man became Man that He, Ruler of the stars, might be nourished at the breast; that He, the Bread, might be hungry; that He, the Fountain, …
Oct 6, 2014: Tolkien’s ring of power is a plain gold ring, of course, and embodies a series of quite complex valences to do with binding, with vows and marriage. …
Oct 6, 2014: [gallery] jonklassen: Here’s a poster I did for the German Literature Prize, which is being presented at the Frankfurt Book Festival this week. They …
Oct 6, 2014: rebel technology Electronic technologies are seeking to escape my control — and they are largely succeeding! This must stop. Take Ello, about which I have written. I …
Oct 6, 2014: Once upon a time, a visiting scholar presented a lecture on the topic: ‘How many philosophical positions are there in principle?’ ‘In principle,’ he …
Oct 6, 2014: Pope Francis … sent a subtle but powerful signal last month when he presided over the marriage in Rome of 20 couples of various ages, whose lives were …
Oct 6, 2014: Hollis said more than 13,000 students bought season tickets to this year’s home games. Their corner of the stadium never filled Saturday for one of …
Oct 6, 2014: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Pettibone New Improved Sciopticon Magic Lantern, c1890
Oct 6, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“18810”] thingsmagazine: Machine a Vapeur, Michel Clement, c 1857-1860
Oct 5, 2014: [gallery] architectural-review: Hedvig Skjerdingstad, ‘Copenhagen City Museum – A Matter of Time’, 2014 www.skjerdingstad.com
Oct 4, 2014: It seems to me that this post on children at museums and this post on medical missionaries in Africa are effectively the same post, asking the same …
Oct 3, 2014: [gallery]
Sep 29, 2014: [gallery columns=“2” size=“full” ids=“18820,18821”] houghtonlib: Today is National Coffee Day, but here, from our …
Sep 29, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18824”] houghtonlib: Click here for a zoomable high-res image, and read …
Sep 27, 2014: [gallery] Lovely day for a hike … until a nearby volcano erupts — via @pourmecoffee on Twitter
Sep 27, 2014: [gallery] the poet and the medium
Sep 27, 2014: A Different Kind of Reader — Medium A Different Kind of Reader — Medium by me
Sep 27, 2014: A Different Kind of Reader Everyone should read this reflection by Frank Chimero — no matter how long it takes. Here’s Chimero summing up his thoughts on sites, like this one, …
Sep 27, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” link=“file” ids=“18835”] Mr Gumpy’s Outing, by the great John …
Sep 27, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18840”] Jon Klaasen, How to Draw a Bear Thinking about Something
Sep 26, 2014: [gallery] jonklassen: moon deer
Sep 26, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“18846”] thingsmagazine: David Hockney, ‘The Desk’
Sep 26, 2014: [gallery] architectural-review: Architectural fantasy of the decaying building of the Cardiff Coal Exchange
Sep 26, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18852”] drawingarchitecture: Nicole Marple, 2014, Mixed Media.
Sep 26, 2014: Yahoo shuts down ... Yahoo It doesn’t look like much, but that little yellow icon … for several years in the early days of the Web, the sight of it would give me …
Sep 26, 2014: Progress Report: Continued Product Focus Progress Report: Continued Product Focus yahoo: By Jay Rossiter, SVP, Cloud Platform Group At Yahoo, focus is an important part of accomplishing our …
Sep 26, 2014: to know as I am known (by Apple) Take a good look at the iOS screenshot above and you’ll see something interesting. Look just above the keyboard, at the row of suggested words — a new …
Sep 26, 2014: Platonic solids Some fine Layer Tennis today…
Sep 26, 2014: The pundits who say that President Obama has failed to demonstrate leadership have never considered whether the public is capable of following him, or …
Sep 26, 2014: Closely related is the sheer exhaustion of being constantly tapped into in the network. Every tweet I read or write elicits some small (or not so …
Sep 24, 2014: Students in my history of architecture course are amused to discover that the final exam offers a choice of questions. Some are bone dry (“discuss the …
Sep 22, 2014: The spirit of truth can dwell in science on condition that the motive prompting the [scientist] is the love of the object which forms the stuff of his …
Sep 22, 2014: In the essay On the Greatness of Richard Wagner, [Thomas] Mann explains that Wagner was incapable of working without “palpable expressions of an …
Sep 22, 2014: [gallery] drawingarchitecture: Josh Riek | “Untitled” A Song About Chaos, 2014
Sep 22, 2014: [gallery] The Quantified Self, sixteenth century edition: from The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine, by Nancy G. …
Sep 22, 2014: Further irrelevancies unapologetic-book: I made a radio documentary for the BBC about the influence in the 1930s of a cult book, An Experiment with Time, that seemed to …
Sep 22, 2014: How is it that for a person who cares about the way things look and feel more than anyone else in the world that iTunes looks like a spreadsheet? Bono …
Sep 22, 2014: No one has deleted more U2 songs in the last five years than the four members of U2. Bono
Sep 19, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18870,18871,18872,18873”] ryersonlib: Z neznámých přičin Published in …
Sep 18, 2014: Geeks claim to know what it’s like to love art that’s been neglected or reviled by their culture. Well, this is the status of fans of traditional high …
Sep 17, 2014: [youtube …
Sep 17, 2014: [youtube …
Sep 17, 2014: [youtube …
Sep 17, 2014: "post-religious spirituality" In other words, the Christian alternative to the post-religious spirituality outlined earlier is not simply ‘religion’ as some sort of intellectual …
Sep 17, 2014: Instead of accepting a common opinion that Twitter is slowly replacing RSS readers, we should flip that around. What kind of changes could be made to …
Sep 17, 2014: Revolutionaries readily sacrifice living people to achieve the glorious future. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, they tell us, but …
Sep 17, 2014: He said a day came at the hospital when his doctors summoned him down to a room, where he sat “like a monkey, hunched over on a stool,” while about 10 …
Sep 16, 2014: [gallery] thingsmagazine: The Celebrated & Extraordinary Exhibition… of the Industrious Fleas
Sep 16, 2014: [gallery] member of The African Choir, 1891
Sep 16, 2014: Future shock is over. Apple Watch reveals that we suffer a new affliction: . The excitement of a novel technology (or anything, really) has been …
Sep 16, 2014: [gallery] Fire at Yosemite, by Darvin Atkeson. Via @pourmecoffee on Twitter.
Sep 12, 2014: In romantic thought, repetition is the enemy of freedom, the greatest force of repression both in the mind and in the state. Outside romanticism, …
Sep 12, 2014: Killer Over the Rainbow I wrote this for the Oxford American a long time ago (Issue 27/28). I’ve added YouTube links. Forget about the marriage — his third, her first — to …
Sep 12, 2014: [youtube …
Sep 12, 2014: [gallery] xkcd
Sep 12, 2014: That Confucius’s characterization of the [Zhou] period as a golden age may have been an idealization is irrelevant. Continuity with a “golden age” …
Sep 11, 2014: [gallery] biblipeacay: *CODES - Imaginary Maps of Nonexistent Cities* by Federico Cortese via @Oniropolis.
Sep 11, 2014: [gallery] 2headedsnake: Ekaterina Panikanova
Sep 10, 2014: [A] kimono is made from exactly one bolt of fabric. The way the pattern of a kimono is constructed, not one scrap of fabric remains after the garment …
Sep 10, 2014: [gallery] starry-eyed-wolfchild: “As the nights get darker, look no further than our latest item. Take a glance in this fascinating art journal, the …
Sep 10, 2014: I don’t have any advice [for younger writers]. You are asking me to live in an era other than the one that formed me. But I will tell you this: An …
Sep 9, 2014: If history matters – and I think it does just like sentiment and family matter – then whatever this place’s shortcomings and mistakes it’s worth …
Sep 9, 2014: [gallery] pearl-nautilus: Emma Kunz (1892 - 1963) - Artist & Researcher - Geometric Visionary “My art is destined for the 21st Century.” - Emma …
Sep 9, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18932”] rindertjagersma: Onderwijsinge in de perspective const | Hondius. The …
Sep 8, 2014: If Reddit wants to be thought of as a government, we’ll call it what it is: a failed state, unable to control what happens within its borders. At …
Sep 8, 2014: [gallery] drawingarchitecture: Miles Gertler, Islands. Three: Subtraction. 2013.
Sep 8, 2014: Sibilant Fricative: David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks (2014) Sibilant Fricative: David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks (2014) Adam Roberts’s thoughts on the book rhyme with my own, but are also different in …
Sep 7, 2014: [gallery] robertogreco: “Was ‘Internet’ First Used For A Transistor Radio?” (via Neural)
Sep 6, 2014: [youtube …
Sep 6, 2014: [gallery] Maddy Rosenberg, Dystopia
Sep 6, 2014: [gallery] Brian Dettmer, Brittanica Tower
Sep 5, 2014: [gallery] Jeannine Mosley made a Menger sponge out of business cards.
Sep 5, 2014: [gallery] lizettegreco: One of our Bots.
Sep 5, 2014: There’s a current problem in biomedical research,” says American biochemist Robert Lefkowitz, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. “The …
Sep 5, 2014: Is it uncharitable to want a book that achieves so much to do more? Perhaps. Taken on its own terms, “The Human Age” is a dazzling achievement: …
Sep 5, 2014: my own private Kanban What you see above is a picture of an approach to task management I’ve been using lately — a simplified and individual version of the Kanban model …
Sep 4, 2014: Until the late 19th century, according to historian Howard Chudacoff, age wasn’t such a defining fact about people’s lives. A professor at Brown …
Sep 4, 2014: It’s not the sort of accomplishment that ESPN is likely to crow about, but Philadelphia Phillies center-fielder Ben Revere is on track to set an …
Sep 4, 2014: [gallery] biblipeacay: danathur: Opus mago-cabalisticum et theologicum by George von Welling, 1719. An overview of Gnosis material, including by …
Sep 3, 2014: [gallery] natgeofound: A solitary fisherman’s home keeps watch on quiet Placentia Bay in Newfoundland, Canada, 1974.Photograph by Sam Abell, National …
Sep 3, 2014: Political parties are organizations that are publicly and officially designed for the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and of …
Sep 3, 2014: Inevitably, I looked around for help; I’ve done enough liturgical work to know that there are always riches from which to borrow. That said, the …
Sep 3, 2014: I have been saying for a while that creativity has taken the place of salvation and divine grace, which have lost credibility with the wane of …
Sep 2, 2014: There’s a scene in the 1961 movie The Hustler in which Paul Newman, as a wild and talented young pool player called Fast Eddie Felson, gets his first …
Sep 2, 2014: But some have suggested that companies like Twitter have more nefarious motivations for refusing to address Internet harassment than a simple lack of …
Sep 2, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“18974”] Cover by the strange and gifted Ethel Reed. From the collection of …
Sep 2, 2014: COBOL, a language first introduced in 1959 by Grace Hopper (‘Grandma COBOL’), still processes 90 per cent of the planet’s financial transactions, and …
Sep 1, 2014: 1 Yan 2 Tan 3 Tethera 4 Pethera 5 Pimp 6 Sethera 7 Lethera 8 Hovera 9 Covera 10 Dik 11 Yan-a-dik 12 Tan-a-dik 13 Tethera-dik 14 Pethera-dik 15 Bumfit …
Aug 31, 2014: Create systems that are ambivalent about the open or closed web. If I create a tool that’s good at posting content to Facebook and Twitter, it should …
Aug 31, 2014: always remember My blog’s older than Twitter and Facebook, and it will outlive them. It has seen Flickr explode and then fade. It’s seen Google Wave and Google …
Aug 30, 2014: It was only after a decade away from Skipton that I was finally able to garner the courage to return and testify against my abuser. When I first told …
Aug 29, 2014: The Judean Tribune released a biography of Jesus of Nazareth, sweeping through his life, between community supporter and organizer,and darker periods …
Aug 29, 2014: I imagine a future in the church when the call to chastity would no longer sound like a dreary sentence to lifelong loneliness for a gay Christian …
Aug 28, 2014: [gallery] Minding the Modern begins with an extended meditation on Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of a Gentleman in his Study (1528-30). The young man’s …
Aug 27, 2014: Wilson recently calculated that the only way humanity could stave off a mass extinction crisis, as devastating as the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 …
Aug 26, 2014: In May 2011, Vanderbilt’s director of religious life told me that the group I’d helped lead for two years, Graduate Christian Fellowship—a chapter of …
Aug 25, 2014: Text printed on the best paper with no margins or unbalanced margins is vile. Or, if we’re being empathetic, sad. (For no book begins life aspiring to …
Aug 24, 2014: One other thing occurred to me as I watched the big SFX-splurgy conclusion, and it was this: when will big budget Hollywood find a way of ending SF …
Aug 22, 2014: For some, the idea of imitating the knight of faith will seem too easy — after all, you can do it while living in a middle-class neighborhood in …
Aug 22, 2014: Sure, we may now be a nation of cohabiting, contraception-using, homosexuality-supporting, pot smokers, but we’ve also become a nation that’s …
Aug 21, 2014: I think those hesitations are largely right, and as a Christian, I’d add that I have to wonder what these kinds of communities do to reach out to the …
Aug 21, 2014: This little episode captures something I’ll see over and over again in Yemen. Faced with a problem, you find out who is in charge, escalate to the …
Aug 21, 2014: I had been on the ground helping Al Jazeera America cover the protests and unrest in Ferguson, Mo., since this all started last week. After what I saw …
Aug 21, 2014: This is a book that I admire and do not understand. I admire it because it is a full, engaging account of a way of life not my own. I do not …
Aug 20, 2014: [gallery] More avant-garde magazines from Monoskop
Aug 20, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19000”] From Monoskop’s collection of avant-garde magazines
Aug 20, 2014: Although I started this project as an exercise in historical theology, a constructive thesis emerged: when Christian doctrines assert the truth about …
Aug 20, 2014: Yes, there is good reason to think that many of these unjustifiable homicides by police across the country are racially motivated. But there is a lot …
Aug 20, 2014: It is not a journalist’s job to protect us from the ugly facts. Neither is it his job to protect the sensitive from the painful truth or anyone, …
Aug 20, 2014: The Middle East and parts of central Africa are losing entire Christian communities that have lived in peace for centuries. The terrorist group Boko …
Aug 19, 2014: [youtube …
Aug 19, 2014: The 46-year-old (he turns 47 on Monday) could be mistaken for just another Midwestern music lifer, forever doing the Thursday-to-Saturday club grind, …
Aug 18, 2014: According to Apuleius, Pleasure is the daughter of Cupid and Psyche – of Love and the Soul, that is, a sufficiently elevated pedigree, one would have …
Aug 16, 2014: [youtube …
Aug 16, 2014: [gallery] Miles
Aug 16, 2014: [gallery] Cobb
Aug 16, 2014: [gallery] Chambers
Aug 16, 2014: [gallery] Evans
Aug 16, 2014: [gallery] Cannonball
Aug 16, 2014: [gallery] Trane
Aug 15, 2014: No matter the text that he’s ostensibly engaged with, Mr. Keating, like Hamlet in Stéphane Mallarmé’s wonderful description, is forever “reading in …
Aug 15, 2014: [gallery] Bhurtpore, taken by Samuel Bourne in 1865
Aug 15, 2014: Fin and Rye are proficient with most of the hand and power tools that form the backbone of any working farm. By the time they were eight, both of them …
Aug 14, 2014: [youtube …
Aug 14, 2014: CT: Yes, but I have to say that there are lots of very, very valid criticisms of the form that “you didn’t take account of …” because, as I tried to …
Aug 13, 2014: In Afghanistan, we patrolled in big, armored trucks. We wore uniforms that conveyed the message, “We are a military force, and we are in control right …
Aug 13, 2014: Set the douche bags aside, and some of the remaining comments do have value—I agree! But that’s a strange response, falsely set up in opposition to …
Aug 13, 2014: The remake of the bachelor’s degree should begin with its starting point. Many 18-year-olds are simply not ready to start college only three months …
Aug 11, 2014: [gallery] “The Autarch is genteel by comparison, less dehumanising, and we can admire it today as a museum piece, like we would the contraptions that …
Aug 10, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19050,19051,19048,19049”] The books that meant the most to me in my teen …
Aug 10, 2014: [gallery] I like what happens when you type “old book covers” into Google Image Search.
Aug 10, 2014: [gallery] thingsmagazine: There must be better ways of teacing a child to read than this. Not recommended. Bad reviews at the NPL, via.
Aug 10, 2014: So we must protect and respect each other, no matter how hard it feels. No matter how wrong someone else may seem to us, they are still human. No …
Aug 4, 2014: There’s an irony in parents’ flawed perceptions, and their very real consequences: at the same time parents significantly limit the freedom and …
Aug 4, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19063,19064,19065”] Penguin-style Miyazaki posters
Aug 4, 2014: Tonight begins the fast of Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the month of Av, the Jewish collective day of mourning. All the great calamities of Jewish …
Aug 4, 2014: Samuel Johnson, in his life of Dryden, reports that throughout the spring of 1686 the fifty-six-year-old laureate could often be seen strolling …
Aug 2, 2014: [gallery] Time for a caption contest, I think.
Aug 2, 2014: And, finally, a key component often overlooked: Dylan’s artistic process. On a fundamental level, he doesn’t trust mediation or planning. The story of …
Aug 2, 2014: Dylan Thomas Vernon Watkins wrote in an obituary that Thomas had lived his life as a consistent manifestation of Christian principle. This has provoked some …
Aug 1, 2014: Aldus was smart about exploiting the combination of new, humanist learning with the physical intimacy of smaller books. To effect this intimacy, Aldus …
Aug 1, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19076”] Via the Smithsonian Libraries. Let’s just say that all together: The …
Aug 1, 2014: DAY 1: Let there be light, God said, and there was light. DAY 2: Let there be morons, God said, and there were morons. DAY 3: Hey, morons, God said, I …
Jul 31, 2014: [gallery] classicpenguin: blackballoonpublishing: Penguin Books Founder Allen Lane with a Penguin and, ah, a penguin Happy Birthday, Penguin and …
Jul 31, 2014: As comedian Penn Jillete elegantly pointed out, the way people avoid giving offense to Islam amounts to a damning condemnation in itself. It is …
Jul 30, 2014: The new regime is not totalitarian, fascist, socialist, capitalist, conservative, or liberal, according to the accepted and common definitions of …
Jul 30, 2014: [gallery] bookpatrol: Lynd Ward - master of the wordless novel myimaginarybrooklyn: muspeccoll: Lynd Ward’s sinister wood engravings for Madman’s …
Jul 30, 2014: local culture Which form of contemporary Christianity is best suited to living out the time of exile that is fast approaching American Christians? This is the …
Jul 30, 2014: Riding my "Christian unity" hobbyhorse, one more time Yesterday I got a number of responses to this tweet: Is *any* situation is dire enough to make some Christians think of what we share, rather than “My …
Jul 29, 2014: [gallery] publicdomainreview: Double-page spreads from Adriaen Coenen’s Visboek (Fish Book), an epic 800+ page tome on all things fish and …
Jul 29, 2014: [gallery] Tim Bobbin’s Rap at the PYRATES
Jul 28, 2014: [gallery]
Jul 27, 2014: These covers for a Chinese edition of The Lord of the Rings, by Jian Guo, have been all over my Twitter feed, but I like them so much I’m going to …
Jul 27, 2014: [gallery] Possibly my favorite item in the British Museum is this miniature altarpiece, which, as you can see, opens to show an immensely detailed …
Jul 26, 2014: [gallery] boyopress: Fountain Room menu, circa 1933
Jul 26, 2014: the short long term Consider this a follow-up to this morning’s post on religious freedom. Someone — and not a stranger — recently said to me on Twitter, “I am concerned …
Jul 26, 2014: Public gatherings—and most private ones, as well—made him jumpy. For years he had passed up family weddings and graduations, town meetings, …
Jul 26, 2014: how to think about religious freedom Despite my recent insistence that I would write only one post on religious liberty — I was so naïve in those days — I’d like to follow up on some …
Jul 26, 2014: If I am right that the liberal project is ultimately self-contradictory, culminating in the twin depletions of moral and material reservoirs upon …
Jul 26, 2014: Whether or not agriculture was the “worst mistake in the history of the human race,” the choice, once made, was made for good. With a global …
Jul 25, 2014: Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, …
Jul 25, 2014: Some marriage experts don’t agree that polyamory’s impact on children is neutral, though. “We know that kids thrive on stable routines with stable …
Jul 25, 2014: A quarter of the U.S. population — and 40 percent of the population of New York, where my novel is set — self-identify as Catholic. One of the most …
Jul 24, 2014: It is harder to divest oneself of inner riches than of outward possessions; the rich man can sell all he has and give it to the poor. Those who find …
Jul 24, 2014: Sexual autonomy is increasingly more important to contemporary Americans than religious liberty, which was one of the founding principles of our …
Jul 24, 2014: The takeaway message is this: no one needs churches to be nice or tasteful. If churches have a future, it’s in addressing our existential darkness: …
Jul 23, 2014: [gallery size=“large” type=“columns” ids=“19135,19136”] The Rio Grande at Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend National …
Jul 23, 2014: [gallery size=“large” type=“slideshow” ids=“19140,19141,19142,19139” orderby=“rand”] Pictures taken …
Jul 19, 2014: My best Beloved keeps his throne On hills of light, in worlds unknown; But he descends and shows his face In the young gardens of his grace. Isaac …
Jul 19, 2014: Enough is Enough The historical blindness, moral obtuseness, and self-satisfied pomposity of this op-ed by Timothy Egan is only the most recent in a long line of New …
Jul 19, 2014: Those “courageous” progressives don’t really value the opinions or affirmations of conservative evangelicalism anyway. What they really value, long …
Jul 19, 2014: If the ultimate aim of education in the liberal arts is to draw us out of ourselves, to teach us the language of praise and gratitude, then Jimmie …
Jul 18, 2014: It seems like many people think that if you drive yourself crazy, then you can write. I’m absolutely not interested in that. It made sense to me to be …
Jul 18, 2014: [gallery] Kiana Farkash, please cook a meal for me
Jul 18, 2014: [gallery] natgeofound: A farmer embraces his dog in his stonewalled field on Inishmore Island in Ireland, March 1971.Photograph by Winfield Parks, …
Jul 18, 2014: For almost four decades (yikes!) I’ve worked as a freelance writer, feeling enormously blessed to make a good living by writing about issues of faith …
Jul 17, 2014: academic freedom redux My professional life has been framed by two very different institutions. For the first twenty-two years of my academic career, I taught at the …
Jul 17, 2014: My professional life has been framed by two very different institutions. For the first twenty-two years of my academic career, I taught at the …
Jul 17, 2014: Christian protest and Christian witness Christians have a long way to go in affirming the value of pluralism for all members of society. We might begin by recognizing its role for our gay …
Jul 17, 2014: Christians have a long way to go in affirming the value of pluralism for all members of society. We might begin by recognizing its role for our gay …
Jul 17, 2014: my course on the "two cultures" FOTB (Friends Of This Blog), I have a request for you. This fall I’m teaching a first-year seminar for incoming Honors College students, and our topic …
Jul 17, 2014: the problems of e-reading, revisited In light of the conversation we were having the other day, here is some new information: The shift from print to digital reading may lead to more than …
Jul 17, 2014: spontaneity Is our overvaluation of spontaneity not, after all, born of a deep-seated fear – the fear of missing out? If we commit to one social plan for the …
Jul 17, 2014: Is our overvaluation of spontaneity not, after all, born of a deep-seated fear – the fear of missing out? If we commit to one social plan for the …
Jul 16, 2014: "new ways of being in our bodies" The mature practitioner (not me) will discover a steady clarity in the vision of self and world, and, in “advanced” states, an awareness of unbroken …
Jul 15, 2014: more rooftops thingsmagazine: Michael Wolf, Paris Roof Tops
Jul 15, 2014: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Michael Wolf, Paris Roof Tops
Jul 15, 2014: the airline seat of the future Seriously. Via Adam Roberts on Twitter.
Jul 15, 2014: [gallery] Airline seat of the future. Seriously. Via Adam Roberts on Twitter.
Jul 14, 2014: rooftop life Rooftop terrace for a house in Rotterdam. Design by Hunk Design, photos by Thomas Mayer.
Jul 14, 2014: Evangelicals and Americans Is evangelical Christian morality still viable in American public life? This is the question lurking in recent debates over religious-liberty issues, …
Jul 14, 2014: [gallery] Rooftop terrace for a house in Rotterdam. Design by Hunk Design, photos by Thomas Mayer.
Jul 14, 2014: Is evangelical Christian morality still viable in American public life? This is the question lurking in recent debates over religious-liberty issues, …
Jul 14, 2014: freakish fundamentalists Moore is fond of saying that Christianity should be “freakish” or “strange” and shouldn’t fit so neatly into the culture at large. His arguments sound …
Jul 14, 2014: Moore is fond of saying that Christianity should be “freakish” or “strange” and shouldn’t fit so neatly into the culture at large. His arguments sound …
Jul 14, 2014: Levertov, illustrated poetrysociety: Ohara Hale’s delightful illustrations of Denise Levertov’s poems; via Brain Pickings
Jul 14, 2014: [gallery] poetrysociety: Ohara Hale’s delightful illustrations of Denise Levertov’s poems. via Brain Pickings
Jul 11, 2014: reforms The reforms never seem to work. This makes the need for reform all the more urgent. The country now spends more than $650 billion on primary and …
Jul 11, 2014: The reforms never seem to work. This makes the need for reform all the more urgent. The country now spends more than $650 billion on primary and …
Jul 11, 2014: elder, brother It was said of one of the elders that he persevered in a fast of seventy weeks, eating only once a week. The elder ask God to reveal to him the …
Jul 11, 2014: It was said of one of the elders that he persevered in a fast of seventy weeks, eating only once a week. The elder ask God to reveal to him the …
Jul 11, 2014: illiberal But wait, some will object: You can’t reduce contemporary American liberalism to the illiberal outbursts of loudmouthed activists, intemperate …
Jul 11, 2014: But wait, some will object: You can’t reduce contemporary American liberalism to the illiberal outbursts of loudmouthed activists, intemperate …
Jul 11, 2014: the genius of Eno The genius of Eno is in removing the idea of genius. His work is rooted in the power of collaboration within systems: instructions, rules, and …
Jul 11, 2014: The genius of Eno is in removing the idea of genius. His work is rooted in the power of collaboration within systems: instructions, rules, and …
Jul 11, 2014: 410 Bleecker Street thingsmagazine: 410 Bleecker Street, just one of James Gulliver Hancock’s drawings of All the Buildings in New York
Jul 11, 2014: a reality not our own All that is necessary is that we not be hypocritical, that we recognize why we read and admire writers like Simone Weil. I cannot believe that more …
Jul 11, 2014: [gallery] thingsmagazine: 410 Bleecker Street, just one of James Gulliver Hancock’s drawings of All the Buildings in New York
Jul 11, 2014: All that is necessary is that we not be hypocritical, that we recognize why we read and admire writers like Simone Weil. I cannot believe that more …
Jul 10, 2014: cynically Julie Posetti: Some journalists and editors have told me that they’re thinking of closing their Facebook accounts in the wake of this scandal - what’s …
Jul 10, 2014: cute In a slapdash reply to an article I published at Slate, the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne provides just such a response. First, he pretends that …
Jul 10, 2014: straw men and new atheists A straw man can be a very convenient property, after all. I can see why a plenteously contented, drowsily complacent, temperamentally incurious …
Jul 10, 2014: Julie Posetti: Some journalists and editors have told me that they’re thinking of closing their Facebook accounts in the wake of this scandal - what’s …
Jul 10, 2014: In a slapdash reply to an article I published at Slate, the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne provides just such a response. First, he pretends that …
Jul 10, 2014: Sky Comfort rogerwilkerson: DC 4 - Sky Comfort
Jul 10, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19190”] rogerwilkerson: DC 4 - Sky Comfort
Jul 10, 2014: And on the other hand, the material value is apt to undermine the manly character; so that it must be our work, in the issue, to examine what evidence …
Jul 9, 2014: working with Kubrick Stanley was extraordinarily logical, inclined to have everything seamless. Hollywood movies in general, nowadays especially, with the story or …
Jul 9, 2014: Stanley was extraordinarily logical, inclined to have everything seamless. Hollywood movies in general, nowadays especially, with the story or …
Jul 9, 2014: Brazil didn’t lose 7-1 because it is a nation on the verge of hysterical collapse. Despite the impression given by the TV pictures, Brazil was never …
Jul 9, 2014: the Trinity and sexuality This book is written in the fundamental conviction that no cogent answer to the contemporary Christian question of the trinitarian God can be given …
Jul 9, 2014: poverty and desire Thus the demand for ‘poverty’ or simplicity in the lifestyle of the Christian is inseparable from the vocation to peace-making. The beatitudes are all …
Jul 9, 2014: This book is written in the fundamental conviction that no cogent answer to the contemporary Christian question of the trinitarian God can be given …
Jul 9, 2014: Thus the demand for ‘poverty’ or simplicity in the lifestyle of the Christian is inseparable from the vocation to peace-making. The beatitudes are all …
Jul 9, 2014: The ‘return’ to the lost, the excluded, the failed or destroyed, is not an option for the saint, but the very heart of saintliness. And we might think …
Jul 8, 2014: fish mall Described here
Jul 8, 2014: the Milky Way envisioned design-is-fine: Thomas Wright, An original theory of the universe, 1750. London. Via Linda Hall Library 1 cross section of the model of the Milky Way …
Jul 8, 2014: Strange Devices robertogreco: Untitled [Strange Devices…], Ray Johnson, c. 1955-1960 (via MoMA) Stange devices resembling TV antennae are mounted on roofs in Tibet …
Jul 8, 2014: [gallery] design-is-fine: Thomas Wright, An original theory of the universe, 1750. London. Via Linda Hall Library 1 cross section of the model of the …
Jul 8, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19205”] robertogreco: Untitled [Strange Devices…], Ray Johnson, c. …
Jul 7, 2014: doodles erikkwakkel: Funny medieval doodles With their wild hair and frantic gaze, these doodled men look like fools. They are waving as if to seek contact …
Jul 7, 2014: [gallery] erikkwakkel: Funny medieval doodles With their wild hair and frantic gaze, these doodled men look like fools. They are waving as if to seek …
Jul 7, 2014: This becomes clear when we contrast Hobby Lobby to Little Sisters of the Poor. Whereas the owners of Hobby Lobby sued to avail themselves of the …
Jul 6, 2014: bug
Jul 6, 2014: Colossus
Jul 6, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19213”]
Jul 6, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19216”]
Jul 6, 2014: naughty “It is no doubt very wrong to long after a naughty thing. But nevertheless we all do so. One may say that hankering after naughty things is the very …
Jul 6, 2014: It is no doubt very wrong to long after a naughty thing. But nevertheless we all do so. One may say that hankering after naughty things is the very …
Jul 6, 2014: the Whig interpretation of the Reformation In regard to the Reformation it might be said that the whig fallacies of secular historians have had a greater effect over a wider field than any …
Jul 6, 2014: In regard to the Reformation it might be said that the whig fallacies of secular historians have had a greater effect over a wider field than any …
Jul 6, 2014: BETHESDA, MD—In a diabolical omission of the utmost cruelty, stone-hearted ice witch Leslie Schiller sent her friend a callous thank-you email devoid …
Jul 5, 2014: rum In Martinique, I had visited rustic and neglected rum-distilleries where the equipment and the methods used had not changed since the eighteenth …
Jul 5, 2014: In Martinique, I had visited rustic and neglected rum-distilleries where the equipment and the methods used had not changed since the eighteenth …
Jul 4, 2014: album covers by Josef Albers [album covers by Josef Albers](http://ift.tt/1ojoTB7) via tumblr ift.tt/1j6qjSd
Jul 4, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19223,19224”] album covers by Josef Albers
Jul 4, 2014: autism and human nature How did this situation occur? How did autism which, until quite recently, was an unusual diagnosis of little broader concern, come to hold a central …
Jul 4, 2014: How did this situation occur? How did autism which, until quite recently, was an unusual diagnosis of little broader concern, come to hold a central …
Jul 4, 2014: Jeremy Bentham on the Declaration of Independence “How this Declaration may strike others, I know not. To me, I own, it appears that it cannot fail — to use the words of a great Orator — “of …
Jul 4, 2014: suffer the little children.... The U.S. government estimates 60,000 immigrant children this year. There are over 300,000 churches in America, most of them hewing to a mission of …
Jul 4, 2014: How this Declaration may strike others, I know not. To me, I own, it appears that it cannot fail — to use the words of a great Orator — “of doing us …
Jul 4, 2014: The U.S. government estimates 60,000 immigrant children this year. There are over 300,000 churches in America, most of them hewing to a mission of …
Jul 3, 2014: architectural-review: Simi, Ideal City, Urban Design Project, ETSAUN
Jul 3, 2014: [gallery] architectural-review: Simi, Ideal City Urban Design Project, ETSAUN
Jul 3, 2014: Serafini chancepress: When it comes to collecting, I’m most persistent about tracking down artwork by Luigi Serafini. It has been a constant presence in my …
Jul 3, 2014: York Minster erikkwakkel: Up close and personal I made these images today and they are quite special. The expressive medieval faces - and a pair of hands - are …
Jul 3, 2014: Goethe, Chromatics goodmemory: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Chromatics, Goethe’s Farbenlehre, 1810. Published by Cotta, Tübingen. The complete book: Via Linda Hall …
Jul 3, 2014: [gallery] chancepress: When it comes to collecting, I’m most persistent about tracking down artwork by Luigi Serafini. It has been a constant …
Jul 3, 2014: [gallery] erikkwakkel: Up close and personal I made these images today and they are quite special. The expressive medieval faces - and a pair of …
Jul 3, 2014: [gallery] goodmemory: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Chromatics, Goethe’s Farbenlehre, 1810. Published by Cotta, Tübingen. The complete book: Via Linda …
Jul 2, 2014: The real story is that modern technology and social media make us a much more oral society than we once were. Naturally poetry will be delivered more …
Jul 2, 2014: the traveler and the woodsman “So long as the past and the present are outside one another, knowledge of the past is not of much use in the problems of the present. But suppose the …
Jul 2, 2014: So long as the past and the present are outside one another, knowledge of the past is not of much use in the problems of the present. But suppose the …
Jul 2, 2014: more on Facebook What we do know is that Facebook, like many social media platforms, is an experiment engine: a machine for making A/B tests and algorithmic …
Jul 2, 2014: What we do know is that Facebook, like many social media platforms, is an experiment engine: a machine for making A/B tests and algorithmic …
Jul 2, 2014: Edna Lewis and the Café Nicholson “I first glimpsed the image on a postcard I bought at a Memphis bookstore. In that rendition, the black woman in the background was left …
Jul 2, 2014: a world of books — but no modern ones I memorised Tennyson, and read Homer in prose and Dante in verse; I shed half my childhood tears at The Mill on the Floss. I slept with Sherlock …
Jul 2, 2014: space without the space xkcd
Jul 2, 2014: [gallery] “I first glimpsed the image on a postcard I bought at a Memphis bookstore. In that rendition, the black woman in the background was left …
Jul 2, 2014: I memorised Tennyson, and read Homer in prose and Dante in verse; I shed half my childhood tears at The Mill on the Floss. I slept with Sherlock …
Jul 2, 2014: [gallery] rollership: zombiegraycat: soviet-era sci fi art is one of the few things humans have done right. sources and more pictures here, here, …
Jul 2, 2014: [gallery] xkcd
Jul 1, 2014: more on the Facebook study Whether the study was ethically questionable is itself debatable, and there are no black-and-white answers. Those defending the study have pointed …
Jul 1, 2014: Whether the study was ethically questionable is itself debatable, and there are no black-and-white answers. Those defending the study have pointed …
Jul 1, 2014: But this case was never really about health policy. It isn’t really even about the ACA, except peripherally. This case is about the politics of …
Jul 1, 2014: Instagram and art theory Isn’t it striking that the most-typical and most-maligned genres of Instagram imagery happen to correspond to the primary genres of Western secular …
Jun 30, 2014: As Justice Alito’s opinion emphasizes: “The effect of the HHS-created accommodation on the women employed by Hobby Lobby and the other companies …
Jun 30, 2014: Love Stitching robertogreco: Love Stitching, Hillary Fayle (one of many photos, via notrare)
Jun 30, 2014: ALLEY 1, Miha Štrukelj robertogreco: ALLEY 1, Miha Štrukelj (via “Alleyway Appeal: Miha Štrukelj’s Explorations of West L.A.”)
Jun 30, 2014: "Send us your spirit, Lord" Send us your spirit, Lord, with the gifts of humility and understanding. Teach us that your Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, but even beyond …
Jun 30, 2014: [gallery] robertogreco: Love Stitching, Hillary Fayle (one of many photos, via notrare)
Jun 30, 2014: [gallery] robertogreco: ALLEY 1, Miha Štrukelj (via “Alleyway Appeal: Miha Štrukelj’s Explorations of West L.A.”)
Jun 30, 2014: Send us your spirit, Lord, with the gifts of humility and understanding. Teach us that your Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, but even beyond …
Jun 29, 2014: No Mass in Mosul “Last Sunday, for the first time in 1600 years, no mass was celebrated in Mosul. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) seized Iraq’s second …
Jun 29, 2014: Last Sunday, for the first time in 1600 years, no mass was celebrated in Mosul. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) seized Iraq’s second …
Jun 29, 2014: W. H. Auden, "The Unknown Citizen" [alternate title: “The Unknown Facebook User”] (To JS/07 M 378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State) He was found by the Bureau …
Jun 27, 2014: In The Gated City, Ryan Avent observed that high housing costs in America’s most productive cities had forced large numbers of middle- and low-income …
Jun 27, 2014: [gallery] Kayaköy, Turkey, an abandoned town
Jun 27, 2014: [gallery] biblipeacay: Engraved frontispiece from 2nd Edition of John Bulwer’s: ‘Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d, or the Artificial …
Jun 27, 2014: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Lost Destination, Britain’s concrete heritage by Dorothy
Jun 26, 2014: [vimeo 97945495 w=250 h=141] Urban Giants (Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
Jun 26, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“19302,19303,19304,19305,19306”] Not many publishers these days are doing …
Jun 26, 2014: [gallery] austinkleon: thenearsightedmonkey: Dear Students, Regard the notebooks of Paul Klee Sincerely, Professor Chewbacca design-is-fine: Paul …
Jun 26, 2014: acting and theory To “act” is to go through the motions of behaviour without really feeling it, lacking the appropriate experiences…. Amateur actors, like political …
Jun 26, 2014: It follows also that this new vision of ‘natural theology’ is equally concerned, let me also state at the start here, to be flexible in a variety of …
Jun 26, 2014: [gallery] 50watts: Birds by Chinese artist Huang Yao c. 1975
Jun 24, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19325,19326,19327,19328,19329,19330,19331,19332,19333,19334”] typeworship: …
Jun 23, 2014: [gallery] 60ansdevadrouille: Roms. Plongée sur le Geirangerfjord, ses cascades, et, depuis leNid d’Aigle, sur le Djupvatnet dans l’intérieur.
Jun 23, 2014: The New Testament never—not one time—applies the “Christian” label to a business or even a government. The tag is applied only to individuals. If the …
Jun 23, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19343”] Raphael, Head of a Young Apostle
Jun 23, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19346”] Raphael, Head of a Muse
Jun 23, 2014: [gallery] thingsmagazine: ‘Britain’s R 101 airship under construction at the Royal Airship Works, Cardington, c.1928, The National Archives
Jun 22, 2014: [gallery] biblipeacay: *Chemistry of Combustion and Illumination* from ‘Chemical Atlas or The Chemistry of Familiar Objects’ by Edward Livingston …
Jun 22, 2014: THE public outcry, Ms. Naumann later told me, was “getting more hostile as the day went on.” It became hard to ignore. At one point that Friday …
Jun 22, 2014: [gallery] David JP Hooker
Jun 22, 2014: [youtube …
Jun 22, 2014: [youtube …
Jun 22, 2014: As Doris and I made our way to the school I couldn’t shake the fear that we were, indeed, tricksters. Well meaning tricksters, but still tricksters. …
Jun 22, 2014: [gallery] Why use wallpaper when you can do this? From a cool story about record collectors.
Jun 22, 2014: [gallery] runofplay: Christ the Redeemer of the Streetlamps (Follow @runofplay on Instagram)
Jun 22, 2014: Superheroes [View the story “Superheroes” on Storify]
Jun 22, 2014: thoughts on superheroes [View the story "Superheroes" on Storify]
Jun 21, 2014: Luddites revisited Our current historical moment is one wherein a space is opening wider and wider in which a movement critical of technology (which is not the same as …
Jun 21, 2014: Our current historical moment is one wherein a space is opening wider and wider in which a movement critical of technology (which is not the same as …
Jun 21, 2014: Almost the whole of Christian theology could perhaps be deduced from the two facts (a) That men make coarse jokes, and (b) That they feel the dead to …
Jun 21, 2014: minutely articulated A Spirit and a Vision, are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing. They are organised and minutely articulated beyond …
Jun 21, 2014: A Spirit and a Vision, are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing. They are organised and minutely articulated beyond …
Jun 19, 2014: [gallery] This Google Doodle of a Brazilian favela was Twitter’s controversy du jour yesterday. One tweeter described himself as “choking on [his] own …
Jun 18, 2014: If Amazon’s Fire Phone could tell kale from Swiss chard, if it could recognize trees and birds, I think its polarity would flip entirely, and it would …
Jun 17, 2014: [gallery] andrei-tarkovsky: Offret, Andrei Tarkovski, 1986
Jun 16, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19381”] thingsmagazine: Gamma, 1963
Jun 16, 2014: And what does this mean for the habits of mind we cultivate? I return often to the ideas of Jack Miles in this essay—also about generalists and …
Jun 16, 2014: Typical rustic folk games involved hundreds of drunken men from rival villages rampaging through streets and fields, trying to drive, say, a casket of …
Jun 16, 2014: [gallery] Quasiquotes
Jun 16, 2014: [gallery] arthistory-blog: Interior of the Pantheon (ca.1506) by Raphael
Jun 16, 2014: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Richard J. Neutra, The Schick House, Salt Lake City, UT, 1952
Jun 15, 2014: Writing absorbs me, so I do it in the afternoons, maybe the evenings. But reading, as Parks writes, has to be planned for. I have to wrest my reading …
Jun 15, 2014: Chronic pain in particular often doesn’t have a discrete material location, or an identifiable cause. “That doesn’t fit into the rubric of what it …
Jun 15, 2014: Don't Today I am hearing on the internet that it is insensitive to celebrate Father’s Day because such celebrations could bring pain to those whose fathers …
Jun 15, 2014: For the most part, conservative groups on campuses simply wish to study the Bible together, pray and worship in ways that deepen their own sense of …
Jun 14, 2014: Becoming obsessed with a tiny detail in the landscape – the hoverfly – has given Sjöberg a broader perspective than many naturalists. “You realise …
Jun 13, 2014: [gallery] austinkleon: One of 164 collages created by special effects pioneer Norman Dawn Dawn was a relatively obscure yet historically significant …
Jun 13, 2014: I must also describe how those who are to be baptized at Easter are instructed. Whoever gives his name does so the day before Lent … and this is …
Jun 13, 2014: [gallery] thingsmagazine: The Golden Age of Audio
Jun 13, 2014: [gallery] thingsmagazine: It’s Quicker by Rail
Jun 13, 2014: You would never know, from reading Malik’s account, that the Renaissance was a time when belief in magic thrived at the highest levels of the state, …
Jun 12, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19412,19413,19414,19415”] thingsmagazine: Beautiful illustrations from the …
Jun 10, 2014: [gallery] natgeofound: Pedestrians walk on bustling Dotombori Street in Osaka, Japan, March 1970.Photograph by Thomas J. Abercrombie, National …
Jun 10, 2014: [gallery] Pele & co., Sweden, 1958. Via @BryanAGraham on Twitter.
Jun 10, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19424”] biblipeacay: Pablo Picasso etching for poetry book by Robert Desnos: …
Jun 10, 2014: Often, Wroe is stepping inside the mind of someone who was utterly obsessive about something, and briefly, their passion must become of great …
Jun 10, 2014: But Knausgaard gives us too many facts—or rather, he gives them at the wrong speed. It feels absurd to say as much, but his writing, far from being …
Jun 10, 2014: [gallery] andrei-tarkovsky: - Tarkovski, set of Offret - Offret, 1986 (scene)
Jun 9, 2014: [gallery] momalibrary: Scan of a page from Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage -ds
Jun 9, 2014: [gallery] eastmanhouse: Coaldock worker with cigarette, Havana Dockworker, Havana, 1932 Walker Evans, American, 1903 - 1975 Jim Dow, American, b. …
Jun 9, 2014: [gallery] ransomcenter: Two portraits of James Joyce etched on the Ransom Center’s windows show different sides of the writer.
Jun 9, 2014: Mind you, I am not in the least ashamed of my advancing age. I am rather proud of it, and I have thought about it with interest for years. I am a …
Jun 9, 2014: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Wrapped Opera House, Christo, 1991
Jun 8, 2014: [gallery] Kilian Schönberger
Jun 6, 2014: [gallery] smithsonianmag: These 1861 Photos Helped Convince Abraham Lincoln to Preserve Yosemite for the Public Stanford University celebrates the …
Jun 6, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19454,19455,19456,19457”] smithsonianlibraries: Mmm… Donuts! Our Galaxy of …
Jun 6, 2014: That Adler and Van Doren have these suspicions is indicated by their choice of the word entertainment—a dismissive word in comparison to ones I have …
Jun 6, 2014: [gallery] mediumaevum: Medieval Orthodox illuminations? Look closer. These are actually “Lord of the Rings” illustrations by an Ukrainian artist …
Jun 5, 2014: [gallery] Tableware for people suffering from Alzhemer’s, via Sara Hendren on Twitter.
Jun 5, 2014: I think it’s rather pernicious to inculcate into a child a view of the world which includes supernaturalism – we get enough of that anyway. Even fairy …
Jun 4, 2014: and so it goes, and so it goes, and so it goes, and so it goes Twitter: LOOK AT THIS AWESOME ARTICLE! Me: I read the article and didn’t like it at all. Twitter: How could you say that? You are so mean! …
Jun 3, 2014: Which is basically the root of my disagreement with the left’s writers on a lot of these issues. They look at the state of sex and gender, masculinity …
May 30, 2014: [gallery] momalibrary: Plastic People of the Universe just arrived in a red-flocked box hand-carried from Prague. Library and Museum Archives Director …
May 30, 2014: My fellow libertarians and I are often criticized for our opposition to policies like primary seat belt laws, helmet laws, aggressive enforcement of …
May 29, 2014: SH: Your writing style tends to be very lyrical in ways, tends to be very poetic in a lot of ways. TNC: Yes. SH: This piece was not that. It was …
May 28, 2014: The trouble with talking about right and wrong in the age of the internet is that our communicative systems are oriented towards communicating only …
May 28, 2014: “Privacy” doesn’t mean that no one in the world knows about your business. It means that you get to choose who knows about your business. Anyone who …
May 28, 2014: So here’s the thing. The other practice that we cherish as faculty that’s under assault nationwide is faculty governance. If your idea, as a faculty …
May 27, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19484,19482,19483”] 50watts: Helena Bochořáková-Dittrichová. I read about …
May 27, 2014: [gallery] mythologyofblue: Ma Yuan, Southern Song dynasty, part of a 12 piece painting describing the different moods of water + (via yama-bato)
May 25, 2014: "An Entangled Thing" An essay I published in The Oxford American 29 (Sept./Oct. 1999): An Entangled Thing
May 25, 2014: "What I Was Afraid Of" An essay I published in The Oxford American 20 (1998): What I Was Afraid Of
May 25, 2014: [youtube …
May 25, 2014: [gallery] Nathan Salsburg’s fine essay in the Oxford American about Paramount Records.
May 23, 2014: Extreme people doing things at an extreme level are, believe it or not, often a little extreme. And let’s face it, elite modern football is a deeply …
May 23, 2014: [gallery] thingsmagazine: RIP, the Glasgow School of Art: currently on fire
May 23, 2014: This issue also invites you to consider the unseen side of the city, the social infrastructure that undergirds it—the web of institutions and systems …
May 21, 2014: The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American …
May 21, 2014: Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still …
May 21, 2014: [gallery] More England 2011 photos (Grasmere, Holy Island, Rievaulx Abbey, Magdalen College Oxford)
May 21, 2014: [gallery] Pictures I took in England in 2011 (Tintagel, Oxford, Canterbury, London), posted today for no particular reason.
May 21, 2014: [gallery] houghtonlib: MacGregor, John, 1825-1892. The ascent of Mont Blanc, a series of four views, printed in oil colours by George Baxter, [1855?] …
May 21, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19522”] typetoy: www.typetoy.tumblr.com
May 21, 2014: The world which issued from the Renaissance and the Reformation has been ravaged since that time by powerful and truly monstrous energies, in which …
May 19, 2014: Many, many factors account for physician burnout and cynicism in different specialties, including lifestyle, geographic area of practice, private …
May 19, 2014: churches and self-sufficiency There’s a danger of complacency in the Catholic approach to the Church’s future. It’s very foolish indeed not to read deeply in Protestant theology …
May 14, 2014: [gallery]
May 12, 2014: [gallery] wonderfulambiguity: Premysel Koblic, View of a Village from Above, ca. 1930
May 12, 2014: [gallery] Léonard Misonne, Sur la glace, 1908
May 12, 2014: Léonard Misonne, Trees, 1923
May 10, 2014: [gallery] thespectraldimension: Ludwig Sievert, stage design for The Dead City, 1921.
May 10, 2014: For many years now — around thirty (!) — the Melodians have provided my go-to music for grading. It’s impossible to be sad or frustrated when …
May 10, 2014: [gallery] houghtonlib: Schedel, Hartmann, 1440-1514. Registrum huius operis Libri cronicarum [Nuremberg Chronicle], 1493. WKR 10.2.7 Houghton …
May 9, 2014: For the iPad to become just as good as the iPhone, it would need to be smaller, equipped with a better camera, and sold with carrier subsidies and …
May 9, 2014: [gallery] houghtonlib: Eluard, Paul, 1895-1952. Répétitions / Paul Eluard; dessins de Max Ernst, 1922. Typ 915.22.3605 Houghton Library, Harvard …
May 8, 2014: [gallery] 50watts: Details from my 50 Watts post of Janusz Stanny book covers
May 8, 2014: Items from an End-of-Year Report Books I’ve taught this academic year that I’d never taught before: Gundjevic and Zizek, God in Pain Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy selections …
May 6, 2014: [gallery] huntingtonlibrary: huntingtonlibrary: Of all of the spaces in the Library’s conservation lab, the “dirty room” is perhaps the most …
May 6, 2014: Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and …
May 6, 2014: [gallery] 50watts: Miguel Covarrubias illus. for Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, 1935 via Harry Ransom Center
May 5, 2014: Historians usually note the upsurge of religious enthusiasm that greeted the outbreak of war. German preachers, for instance, debated whether they …
May 4, 2014: [gallery] jonklassen: front porch
May 2, 2014: In 1979, she sought haven at her aunt Dorothy’s flat in Bournemouth, where again she looked for help from spiritualists – this time Charismatics and …
May 2, 2014: But now, in order finally to conclude, let the others decide what they wish to assume for themselves. I for my part do not arrogate to myself …
May 1, 2014: Here’s what Marx got right—profoundly, overwhelmingly, admirably right: capitalism is unforgiving to “conservatives,” those who care about …
May 1, 2014: The frequent and sloppy use of the qualifier “absolute” leads to a common confusion of “relativism” with sheer arbitrariness. So when someone …
May 1, 2014: [gallery] Photographs of North Brother Island, New York City, by Christopher Payne
Apr 30, 2014: Psychologist Mohsen Joshanloo and philosopher Dan Weijers of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, note that in Western culture, “happiness …
Apr 29, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19587,19588,19589,19590”] erikkwakkel: A colourful book I encountered this …
Apr 28, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19593”] Mahendra Singh, via Adam Roberts on Twitter
Apr 26, 2014: The camaraderie between theological antagonists has caused a firestorm in the blogosphere. On the right, critics see Mr. Baucum as soft on crime …
Apr 25, 2014: [gallery] Howl’s Moving Castle, 8-bit style
Apr 24, 2014: [gallery] biblipeacay: Scans from Modern Publicity annuals from the 1930s. Many more examples in blog post. (images above on Tumblr only)
Apr 24, 2014: [gallery] Two of John Vernon Lord’s illustrations from the new Folio Society edition of Finnegans Wake, plus two pages from the elaborate notebooks he …
Apr 23, 2014: [gallery] the beauties of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity
Apr 23, 2014: [vimeo 44735895 w=250 h=141] And just one more. (Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
Apr 23, 2014: [vimeo 44729431 w=250 h=141] And another. The app is fabulous, by the way. (Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
Apr 23, 2014: [vimeo 44793685 w=250 h=141] a birthday remembrance (Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
Apr 22, 2014: [gallery] thingsmagazine: TNA
Apr 22, 2014: The other day, we ran into an old man who is also an old fan. He loves the Roots and what we do. Someone mentioned the changing nature of the …
Apr 22, 2014: [gallery] How have you gotten by all these years without a detailed diagram of Maradona’s famous goal against England? Via @supriyan on Twitter.
Apr 22, 2014: [youtube …
Apr 21, 2014: I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has ‘the freeborn mind’. But I doubt whether he can have this without economic …
Apr 21, 2014: [gallery] thegetty: In anticipation of Earth Day, the wonder of looking up at ancient giants. These giant sequoias are in California’s Sierra Nevada …
Apr 21, 2014: [gallery] Tree #11, Myoung Ho Lee, 2005. The J. Paul Getty Museum, 84.XM.893.1. Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council. © Myoung Ho …
Apr 21, 2014: [gallery] Treehouse Freese Road, Varna, New York Rhea Garen American, Varna, New York, 1993 Chromogenic print 15 x 18 ½ in. Getty Museum
Apr 21, 2014: In Penn Station, I hardly garner a sideways glance. On the Acela train back to D.C., everyone in my car is so absorbed in their own …
Apr 21, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“19645”] “Wiltshire Landscape,” by Eric Ravilious
Apr 21, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“19648”] “Train Landscape” (1939), by Eric Ravilious
Apr 21, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“19651”] “Westbury Horse,” by Eric Ravilious (1903-42)
Apr 21, 2014: At the time of his death, he was a much admired dramatist. But Francis Beaumont, who passed away a few weeks before him, was equally admired, on the …
Apr 20, 2014: [George] Borrow was a walker of awesome stamina and a linguist of almost inconceivable talent, who is said to have been able to speak twelve languages …
Apr 20, 2014: I now wonder where the idea or of the ideology of creativity started. Shakespeare and company certainly stole from, copied each other’s writings. …
Apr 18, 2014: [gallery] XKCD. Sure. But everybody knows this, yes? And to make this point alone — it’s a pretty cheap and easy point, after all — is to avoid the …
Apr 18, 2014: Last Round on Oneness So, why am I going on and on this week about Christian unity? Because as a follower of Jesus I am commanded to seek it. And because such unity has …
Apr 18, 2014: You, Mr Wells, evidently start out with the assumption that all men are good. I, however, do not forget that there are many wicked men. I do not …
Apr 17, 2014: There: the Eucharist, a gold sun, hung in the air — an instant of splendour. Here nothing should be heard but the Greek syllables — the whole world …
Apr 17, 2014: [gallery] erikkwakkel: Happy owl Some images just hit the right spot. This cute owl in his best red coat is part of a decorated page in a Pontifical, …
Apr 17, 2014: In memoriam Margaret Spufford Her most personal book, Celebration, came out in 1989, shortly before Bridget died at 22. It is a tough, clear meditation on illness and suffering in …
Apr 17, 2014: On Denouncing "False Teachers" About this — @ayjay If someone believes Catholicism is a false Gospel, don’t they have a duty to say so? — PEG (@pegobry) April 17, 2014 — which …
Apr 17, 2014: [gallery] typeworship: This has already done the rounds, but I’m mesmerised by this brush so had to post: “All you down strokes are thick, all you up …
Apr 16, 2014: In my view, a genuine pro-life political position takes its commitment to human life seriously, and is therefore willing to commit to supporting the …
Apr 16, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19676,19677”] houghtonlib: Bible. Gospels. Selections. Latin. Gospel …
Apr 15, 2014: [gallery] danskjavlarna: Note the detail of who is behind the accident. From Monographien Zur Deutschen Kulturgeschichte by Georg Steinhausen, 1899. …
Apr 15, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19683”]
Apr 15, 2014: Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes …
Apr 15, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19687,19688,19689”] houghtonlib: Polot︠s︡kiĭ, Semen. Potop / S. Polot︠s︡kiĭ …
Apr 14, 2014: I suspect that people thrown into open plans might even miss their cubicles. And there are features of cubicles—such as the need to partition wide …
Apr 14, 2014: Parents are now the primary mode of transportation for teenagers, who are far less likely to walk to school or take the bus than any previous …
Apr 13, 2014: That They All May Be One PEG asks, I’m curious: what are some practical steps that you think we could take to move forward in what you see as the right direction? Well — since …
Apr 13, 2014: Thus the ‘decline of religion’ becomes a very ambiguous phenomenon. One way of putting the truth would be that the religion which has declined was not …
Apr 13, 2014: [gallery] smithsonianmag: Photo of the Day: Leopard Photography by Paolo Pescia (Sala Capriasca, Switzerland); Namibia
Apr 13, 2014: This past Sunday — Palm Sunday — the assembly was invited to put down their missalettes. The priest celebrant was escorted from the sanctuary and into …
Apr 12, 2014: [gallery] medieval: St. Luke The Book of Deer (Evangelia) is a Gospel Book written in a hand that was current in the period c. 850-1000 and …
Apr 12, 2014: fake pluralism I am (or try to be) a partisan of pluralism, which requires respecting Mozilla’s right to have a C.E.O. whose politics fit the climate of Silicon …
Apr 12, 2014: Neither the President nor any official in her government denied Madonna any attention or courtesy during her recent visit to Malawi because as far as …
Apr 12, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19705”] comparison to other covers here
Apr 12, 2014: [gallery] robertogreco: FOR HIRE practice run (draft one), quotes from Erin and Robin via Alan I’m trying to imagine an organization that wouldn’t …
Apr 11, 2014: When I saw University of Iowa English professor Adam Hooks bemoaning “relatable” on Twitter, I asked him what his experience had been with the word in …
Apr 11, 2014: Samuel Carter, an associate director at the Rockefeller Foundation, underscored that the very concept of regional planning is still a work in progress …
Apr 11, 2014: Once More Around the Block with PEG Three brief points in response to PEG, with thanks for his continued efforts to converse in good faith: First, insofar as I have failed to pay …
Apr 11, 2014: [gallery] houghtonlib: Wenceslaus Hollar, “Cia or Te Herbe” from Nieuhof, Johannes, 1618-1672. An embassy from the East-India Company of the United …
Apr 11, 2014: As the Yoderites and Hauerwasites have been telling us for some time, Christendom is dead. The religious right was its last, long susperation. Though …
Apr 11, 2014: A Response to PEG PEG responds graciously to my post from yesterday, but he misunderstands me, and in so doing partly confirms the point I make. He thinks I am asking …
Apr 10, 2014: [gallery] heat map of New Yorkers’ complaints
Apr 10, 2014: Auden was harsh on what he considered attention-seeking. Once when a friend referred to a public occasion when Robert Frost had forgotten his lines, …
Apr 10, 2014: Evangelicals and Catholics Apart Today I finished reading Jody Bottum’s An Anxious Age, and it’s a lovely book: smart and beautifully written. But it describes an America that I’m not …
Apr 10, 2014: Why Liberalism Needs Pluralism Why Liberalism Needs Pluralism A subtler and more detailed account by Ross Douthat of the issue I raised in my response to Andrew S.
Apr 10, 2014: My own instincts on the gay rights question have always been classically liberal/small-c conservative/libertarian. I think hate is an eternal part of …
Apr 10, 2014: [gallery] smithsonianmag: Photo of the Day: Surfing with Dolphins Photography by Matt Hutton (Wickham, Australia); Kalbarri, Australia
Apr 10, 2014: Earnest, Serious, Genuine Questions for People Who Support Brendan Eich's Ouster from Mozilla If Brendan Eich’s support for California’s Proposition 8 makes him unsuitable to be the CEO of Mozilla … Would you allow him to hold a VP position …
Apr 9, 2014: It is the easiest thing in the world to work all the time, compared to the incredible difficulty of spending one hour or one day of rest in a proper …
Apr 9, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19731”] erikkwakkel: Medieval John Lennon This familiar-looking face …
Apr 9, 2014: “Any reasonable ordering of the books must have The Last Battle as the final story, and must place Prince Caspian before The Voyage of the ‘Dawn …
Apr 9, 2014: [gallery] Another contest entry, an abandoned Presbyterian church in Detroit.
Apr 9, 2014: [gallery] WHOA
Apr 9, 2014: [gallery] houghtonlib: Bodoni printing house. Designs for ornaments and non-roman type, ca. 1800. TypTS 825.18.225 Houghton Library, Harvard …
Apr 9, 2014: [gallery] A lovely tribute to the Braun SK55
Apr 8, 2014: [gallery] See other aerial views of the U.K. by Jason Hawkes here
Apr 8, 2014: The distortion of words in secret to preserve hidden powers appears to be endemic to post–September 11 American governance…. In his essay, Orwell …
Apr 8, 2014: There’s plenty for the modern reader to choke on in distributist thinking. They were fiercely and unapologetically Catholic, and wanted to protect …
Apr 7, 2014: Thinking, for Hobbes, was not only conceived as movement, it was felt as movement. Mind is something agile, thoughts are darting, and the language of …
Apr 7, 2014: Search is what we call the action of knowing what you want and questing until you ultimately find it. Duckduckgo is a search engine that is mostly …
Apr 7, 2014: Just as we were all, potentially, in Adam when he fell, so we were all, potentially, in Jerusalem on that first Good Friday before there was an …
Apr 7, 2014: Cosmos, like most pop histories of science, teaches the false narrative that the history of science is that of a few, heroic, lone geniuses doing …
Apr 7, 2014: Something happened when I was 17 that shook my safely rationalist worldview and left me with a lifelong puzzle… I was sleep-deprived and probably …
Apr 1, 2014: [youtube …
Apr 1, 2014: We want a ground to which people may easily go after their day’s work is done, and where they may stroll for an hour, seeing, hearing, and feeling …
Apr 1, 2014: Anyone who has ever collaborated with [Daniel Kahneman] tells a version of this story: You go to sleep feeling that Danny and you had done important …
Mar 31, 2014: We can continue doing things the way we’ve always done them. We don’t have to change. The saddest part about this line of thought is this is not just …
Mar 31, 2014: I find myself focusing inward, drawn back to the moment when I returned to my adversary’s text for replenishment. I did so instinctively because I …
Mar 31, 2014: In this light, she refers to the work of the controversial physicist Paul Davies, who views science’s refusal to question the origin of physical laws …
Mar 31, 2014: There have been times in which men of letters looked, not to the public, but to the government, or to a few great men, for the reward of their …
Mar 31, 2014: Brendan, I grew up in a very conservative religious home and many of the people I love the most can still be described as very religious and very …
Mar 31, 2014: The sense of festivity, which corresponds to pity in tragedy, is always present at the end of a romantic comedy. This takes the part of a party, …
Mar 31, 2014: [gallery] houghtonlib: William James in Brazil after the attack of small-pox : portrait photograph, 1865. MS Am 1092 (1185) Houghton Library, Harvard …
Mar 31, 2014: The contested life of one of Britain’s best-loved poets has erupted into controversy once more, as the estate of Ted Hughes has stopped cooperating …
Mar 31, 2014: Four years after the original Nature paper was published, Nature News had sad tidings to convey: the latest flu outbreak had claimed an unexpected …
Mar 30, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19773,19774”] poetsorg: What did Auden check out from the library? (via …
Mar 30, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19777”] Auden’s handwritten draft of “Musee des Beaux Arts”. He rarely wrote …
Mar 30, 2014: [gallery] Thomas Aquinas’s handwriting.. See more at Language Log
Mar 29, 2014: [gallery] robertogreco: “Biochemist Takes Stunning Macro Photographs of Butterfly Wing“ (via Anne)
Mar 29, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19786,19787”] two ways of displaying Plain Words
Mar 29, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19790”] here
Mar 29, 2014: A new journalistic recipe is afoot: find once ubiquitous technology that is on the wane and write about its quirky history. The latest exhibit at the …
Mar 29, 2014: We have gone long enough without raising the question of whether reading makes you a better person. The short answer to that question is No. It …
Mar 26, 2014: [gallery] mudwerks: (via The Illustrators of Gente Menuda - 50 Watts) Felix Alonso, 1930
Mar 26, 2014: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Mount Adams ascension, a woodcut by Jim Flora (via things)
Mar 25, 2014: Just to relax, his poor tired limbs on a restful bed. Just to relax, his aching heart on a restful bed. For his head, above all, to be still. It goes …
Mar 25, 2014: It’s not just that a countercultural embrace of sleep bears witness to values higher than “the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and …
Mar 25, 2014: Published last year, Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep begins with the effect of digital culture on our sense of time. A …
Mar 25, 2014: [gallery] simongoode: Poster Poem (Le-Circus) Ian Hamilton Finlay, 1964
Mar 25, 2014: [gallery] ensalada-de-lengua-de-pajaritos: Jacques Tati ad nauseam (watch the original scene).
Mar 25, 2014: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Japanese book plates, 1970s
Mar 25, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19817”] thingsmagazine: Fantastic Mr Fox, 1970
Mar 25, 2014: [gallery] erikkwakkel: Charming This papyrus sheet contains two love charms. While over 1400 years old, the charms are, well, charming. The top part …
Mar 25, 2014: When Shakespeare lamented the “bare ruined choirs” of the destroyed monasteries in sonnet 73 he was not necessarily signalling his opposition to Henry …
Mar 22, 2014: [gallery] Centre for Material Texts: “At the centre of the exhibition were two truly extraordinary stitched texts … by a woman called Lorina Bulwer, …
Mar 22, 2014: Streamlining For the last few months I’ve been experimenting with various blog and blog-like options for online writing and linking. None of them are perfect, …
Mar 22, 2014: [youtube …
Mar 22, 2014: That fleeting bestseller designation is one that the pastors have embraced and trumpeted. Until last week, Mark Driscoll promoted himself as a #1 …
Mar 21, 2014: Ed Stetzer: What are the greatest differences that can emerge between older and newer churches? Philip Jenkins: There’s one word that I would come up …
Mar 21, 2014: In late 2008 I put myself through a crash course in the works of Willmoore Kendall, the “wild Yale don,” as Dwight Macdonald called him, who had been …
Mar 21, 2014: Technology comforts, surrounds, and confounds us. When we argue about MOOCs, hydraulic fracturing, NSA surveillance, or drone warfare, we’re arguing …
Mar 20, 2014: Montfort’s involuted, single-line programs give BASIC something of the tang of the Old English of Beowulf—sharp and shorn, barbed and battered by the …
Mar 19, 2014: [gallery] Any comment would be superfluous. Via Sonny Bunch on Twitter.
Mar 18, 2014: If history and comparative religion alike offer us perspective on world events from the “outside,” the study of theology offers us a chance to study …
Mar 17, 2014: Old technology dominates life much more than we think. We still sit on chairs and eat with utensils that the ancient Mesopotamians would recognize. …
Mar 17, 2014: If Google Glass should fail to catch on, if it ends up on the “meh” list in the Sunday Times Magazine, if most people decide they just don’t want this …
Mar 17, 2014: The game than which no funner can be conceived.
Mar 15, 2014: "when you see the amazing sight" Kim Dong-Kyu
Mar 13, 2014: online outrage As a result, when a politician utters a barely outdated cliché, or the slightest impolitic word, we no longer hear it as a faux pas or mere …
Mar 12, 2014: the Heidegger notebooks The notebooks also show that for Heidegger, antisemitism overlapped with a strong resentment of American and English culture, all of which he saw as …
Mar 12, 2014: collections Seeing the “collections” of Simone Capano I’m reminded of the work of Gregory Blackstock, which I once wrote about here. UPDATE: via …
Mar 12, 2014: adjunct intellectuals Writers and academics who fret over the fate of public intellectuals may think they are debating vital questions of the culture. But their discussions …
Mar 11, 2014: my one and only post on religious liberty I care very much about the future of religious liberty, and I don’t think, over the long run and in this country, there will be much of it. The …
Mar 11, 2014: a matter of fact In recent years, and in several states, the Catholic church has shut down its adoption services rather than comply with state laws mandating that gay …
Mar 10, 2014: the authorial POV I didn’t really know Walker Percy, but one day when I was in Maple Street Book Shop I spotted Walker coming up the walk. I said to Cutting Jahnke, who …
Mar 7, 2014: liberalism and pluralism But let me enter a suggestion as a conclusion. Liberalism should have the confidence to tolerate institutions, even large ones, that have competing …
Mar 7, 2014: Lenten Privations One might, as well, consider this Lenten period as a period of descent. For one, it can be a period of our more frequently descending with our minds …
Mar 7, 2014: great hope in Ash Wednesday I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: People who think I’m some crazy liberal are always so shocked about how much I love to talk about sin. I …
Mar 6, 2014: The Pantheon, Rome [caption id=“attachment_14081” align=“alignnone” width=“768”] Dehio, G. and von Bezold, G.: “Die Kirchliche …
Mar 5, 2014: Patrick Deneen on academic freedom What is particularly telling in Ms. Korn’s article is that she identifies perhaps the one conspicuous conservative professor on the Harvard campus for …
Mar 5, 2014: moon type [caption width=“1280” align=“aligncenter”]From this post, a pretty curious display typeface for a nineteenth-century …
Mar 4, 2014: GKC on Tolstoy In one sense, and that the deepest sense, the work of Tolstoy is, of course, a genuine and noble appeal to simplicity. The narrow notion that an …
Mar 4, 2014: [gallery] ransomcenter: In a time of food shortage during World War I, Russian propaganda posters portrayed food as evil. These images are part of the …
Mar 4, 2014: reading too little into it Do your students also love to say “reading too much into this”? I remember this remark as a buzz-kill that frequently deflated discussions in high …
Mar 4, 2014: Do your students also love to say “reading too much into this”? I remember this remark as a buzz-kill that frequently deflated discussions in high …
Mar 3, 2014: Auden in uniform Brian Doyle wrote recently about the strangeness of attempting to imagine W. H. Auden in the uniform he was issued when he was commissioned as a …
Mar 3, 2014: The protagonists of post-Enlightenment relativism and perspectivism claim that if the Enlightenment conceptions of truth and rationality cannot be …
Mar 3, 2014: In 2001, about to graduate from college, I turned down a programming position at a hedge fund. Instead, I chose to do bioinformatics at Cold Spring …
Mar 2, 2014: I remember at another election a sturdy old woman of Somerset, with a somewhat menacing and almost malevolent stare, who informed me on her own …
Mar 2, 2014: Here another great subject opens upon us, when I ought to be bringing these remarks to an end; I mean the endemic perennial fidget which possesses us …
Mar 2, 2014: One of the people I interviewed for the story was Rev. Robert Seymour, who had been Smith’s pastor at the Binkley Baptist Church since 1958, when he …
Mar 1, 2014: consequences of the Reformation (a preview) What I’m offering here is a mere outline of an an argument that I want to make in more detail later. It is inadequate on its own because of its dearth …
Mar 1, 2014: “The subway sounds quite brutal,” Murphy tells the Journal. “There’s a missing opportunity at the turnstile.” Rather than having the subway’s …
Mar 1, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19863”] houghtonlib: The young-mans victory over the power of the Devil. …
Feb 28, 2014: [gallery] Stained glass from Canterbury Cathedral on view at the Cloisters
Feb 27, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19869”] thingsmagazine: Gerald Murphy, Razor, 1924 (via)
Feb 27, 2014: Paine has won. But he has won largely because conservatives have lost heart. With some notable exceptions, most people who call themselves …
Feb 26, 2014: [gallery] “Sorry, kid. It’s your job now whether you like it or not. I’m outta here.”
Feb 26, 2014: [gallery] jonklassen: part of an unfinished thing from tonight
Feb 25, 2014: I told her that I was stunned by her grace after the verdict. I told her the verdict greatly angered me. I told her that the idea that someone on that …
Feb 25, 2014: The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the …
Feb 25, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19881”] philamuseum: When he wasn’t making groundbreaking sculptures, Rodin …
Feb 24, 2014: Despite the good intentions behind intergovernmental projects like the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and numerous development charities, …
Feb 23, 2014: We’re at our worst when it comes to politics. This helps explain why recent attacks on rationality have captured the imagination of the scientific …
Feb 23, 2014: A significant portion of what Whole Foods sells is based on simple pseudoscience. And sometimes that can spill over into outright anti-science (think …
Feb 23, 2014: I don’t buy this argument, in part because I agree with Furedi that something profound changes at birth: The woman’s bodily autonomy is no longer at …
Feb 22, 2014: [gallery] typeworship: dailyspecimen: Monotype Caslon Swashes Gorgeous. I’m sure these have inspired thousands of flourishes.
Feb 21, 2014: If what Paul intends to say here is that Christianity and libertarianism are amenable to one another because Christianity provides the moral compass …
Feb 21, 2014: [gallery] in response to Austin Kleon’s Miserable Artist Flowchart
Feb 21, 2014: Some time ago, I was invited to begin some reflections on beauty and conservatism in this forum, in hopes that years in the political wilderness might …
Feb 20, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19896”] poetrysociety: Time present and time past Are both perhaps present …
Feb 20, 2014: Faced with the cultural splendor of pre-Revolutionary France, a different President—John Adams—prophesied American art history majors to come: “I must …
Feb 20, 2014: After I broke my neck in a 1967 diving accident and learned I would be paralyzed for the rest of my life, I was convinced my life was not worth …
Feb 20, 2014: [gallery] houghtonlib: Bacon, Francis, 1561-1626. Novum organum scientiarum, 1645. *EC.B1328.620ib Houghton Library, Harvard University
Feb 20, 2014: rights Rights are normative social relationships; sociality is built into the essence of rights. A right is a right with regard to someone. In the limiting …
Feb 20, 2014: [gallery] uimapcoll: February 19, 1473: Nicolaus Copernicus was born in Royal Prussia in the Kingdom of Poland. In his 1543 text De revolvtionibvs …
Feb 19, 2014: YouTube has made little musicological quests like this one dangerously easy. Both in the sense that you can easily make mistakes, on the basis of …
Feb 19, 2014: [youtube …
Feb 18, 2014: [gallery] austinkleon: Hey friends! My book Show Your Work! is making its way out in the world early — it’s on sale at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, …
Feb 18, 2014: If a poet meets an illiterate peasant, they may not be able to say much to each other, but if they both meet a public official, they share the same …
Feb 18, 2014: [gallery] Rebecca Green, via Jamie Smith on Twitter
Feb 17, 2014: Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love. We …
Feb 16, 2014: It is one of humanity’s enduring mysteries why some individuals, such as ourselves, rise from unpromising origins to such dizzy heights when so many …
Feb 12, 2014: Experiments of light, Bacon insisted, were more important than experiments of fruit. He sought to restore to man something of his fallen dignity, to …
Feb 12, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19931”] wesleyhill: A Tale of Four Seats on the London Underground (here)
Feb 10, 2014: [gallery] via John Overholt on Twitter
Feb 9, 2014: "pro-straight" Evangelical theology cannot be ‘pro-gay’ – but neither can it be ‘pro-straight’. As I understand it evangelical theology is, or should be, opposed to …
Feb 9, 2014: Holy Land [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“19938”] via SlateVault
Feb 8, 2014: We lost our oldest child, our daughter Anna, suddenly in April 2008 at the age of 27; our other three daughters and three sons lost their beloved …
Feb 5, 2014: the artists of the cathedrals I willingly accept the ascendancy of the object which the artist has conceived and which he lays before my eyes; I then abandon myself unreservedly to …
Feb 4, 2014: surprises in the classroom Concurrently, behind the scenes, my teaching team was asked to create a list of "learning objectives". I confess to feeling less than inspired on such …
Feb 1, 2014: my struggle with TNC Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “If you truly believe that abortion is murder, than the killing of George Tiller must be viewed as a success.” Get that? If …
Jan 31, 2014: a small trick Here’s something I do in my research sometimes when I don’t own the books I’m looking into: If the book has a preview of relevant …
Jan 30, 2014: Jean-Jacques Rousseau as Walter White The sophistry that undid me is common to the majority of men, who deplore their lack of strength when it is already too late to make use of it. Virtue …
Jan 27, 2014: on John Bunyan (Another post from a class blog.) Bunyan’s emotional and spiritual turmoil is caused, primarily, by one core element of the Calvinist theology …
Jan 27, 2014: Erasmus and Machiavelli (What follows is a post I wrote this morning for one of my class blogs, which are private.) Erasmus is sometimes referred to as Erasmus of Rotterdam, …
Jan 20, 2014: sacrifice ‘Sacrifice’ is another word liable to misunderstanding. It is generally held to be noble and loving in proportion as its sacrificial nature is …
Jan 14, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“19944,19942,19943”] uimapcoll: January 10, 1946: The General Assembly of …
Jan 9, 2014: respect Ariane Sherine, who launched the Atheist Bus campaign in the UK a few years back, has written a piece for New Humanist magazine suggesting that the …
Jan 5, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“19948”] vruba: Snow in Kamigamo Shrine, Kyoto, by Fujishima Takeji, 1953.
Jan 5, 2014: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“19951”] houghtonlib: “Observations sur les Couleurs Newtonienne” from …
Jan 5, 2014: I must admit to going back and forth on the topic of the New Homophiles. Apostolic celibacy is a great good. The struggle to be faithful Catholics is …
Jan 4, 2014: How many wealthy young Americans have ever held a minimum-wage job, or had an internship that placed them amongst America’s poorer classes? Would such …
Jan 3, 2014: MACON, GA—Sources confirmed today that the brainwashed morons at First Baptist Assembly of Christ, all of whom blindly accept whatever simplistic …
Jan 3, 2014: loneliness and hospitality As a student of family life from the outside, I’ve come to a conclusion that family life, as opposed to celibacy, is a life of high highs and low …
Jan 2, 2014: This past October, just before the leaves changed, I went on a six-day hike through the mountains of Wakayama, in central Japan, tracing the path of …
Jan 1, 2014: genetic synecdoche Together with philosopher David Wasserman, Asch wrote in 2005 that using genetic tests to screen out a fetus with a known disability is evidence of …
Jan 1, 2014: If you want to understand how people will remember the Obama climate legacy, a few facts tell the tale: By the time Obama leaves office, the U.S. will …
Dec 31, 2013: Parlement of foules, every morning in the H-E-B parking lot. A cacophony of grackles. A raucous convocation.
Dec 29, 2013: the dangers of simplification I've written before about my love of Planetary, and this is its keynote. I like the varieties not just of religious experience — hat-tip to William …
Dec 28, 2013: help wanted again So I’m taking the advice of Austin Kleon and others to “own my own turf,” which means that I’m moving as much of my online stuff as possible to my own …
Dec 28, 2013: the Helgö Buddha Discovered while excavating a Viking site in southern Sweden; details here
Dec 27, 2013: The key to being creative, in any field, be it scientific, technical, or business, in the 21st century definitely requires a certain comfort level in …
Dec 26, 2013: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Pathfinder on Mars, September 29, 1997
Dec 26, 2013: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Michael Kenna, Long Wall, Berwick, Northumberland, England, 1991
Dec 25, 2013: Romans 1:1-7 houghtonlib: Bible in Greek, Romans 1:1-7, [Papyrus, ca. 300-ca. 350 AD]. Houghton Library, Harvard University
Dec 25, 2013: [gallery] houghtonlib: Bible in Greek, Romans 1:1-7, [Papyrus, ca. 300-ca. 350 AD]. MS Gr SM2218 Houghton Library, Harvard University
Dec 25, 2013: Malcolm, waiting
Dec 25, 2013: [gallery] Malcolm waiting
Dec 24, 2013: "now the Word can say nothing" In the beginning was the Word. But now the Word can say nothing; not a syllable of meaning. He who was with God before the beginning of the earth, …
Dec 24, 2013: In the beginning was the Word. But now the Word can say nothing; not a syllable of meaning. He who was with God before the beginning of the earth, …
Dec 24, 2013: the illusion of "the two cultures" It is fascinating to observe that, in the very dawn of science, Bacon, the spokesman for the empirical approach to nature, shared with Shakespeare, …
Dec 24, 2013: The Christmas story is not just about the birth of a very good man. As it’s been read and understood across the centuries, it’s a story about God …
Dec 24, 2013: It is fascinating to observe that, in the very dawn of science, Bacon, the spokesman for the empirical approach to nature, shared with Shakespeare, …
Dec 24, 2013: You know one of the things about that piece that I think readers might ignore, it ends with a discussion about the death of American cemeteries. Fewer …
Dec 24, 2013: Hilaire Belloc's Christmas card I pray good beef and I pray good beer This holy night of all the year, But I pray detestable drink to them That give no honour to Bethlehem. May all …
Dec 24, 2013: There is no more dangerous or disgusting habit than that of celebrating Christmas before it comes, as I am doing in this article. It is the very …
Dec 24, 2013: learning from Bilbo On his death-bed, the dwarf king, Thorin commends Bilbo's blend of courage and wisdom, adding, "if more of us valued food and cheer and song above …
Dec 23, 2013: peak and career value I think it was Bill James who introduced into sabermetrics the distinction between peak and career value in baseball players. The distinction can be …
Dec 23, 2013: autumn canopy [caption id=“attachment_13879” align=“aligncenter” width=“545”] Autumn at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, …
Dec 23, 2013: hello and welcome Following the advice of many wise people, I’m beginning to move my online writing away from prefabricated services and to my own turf. …
Dec 23, 2013: [gallery] I got five golden rings with this one weird trick
Dec 23, 2013: Here in this gospel note, that here was singing and rejoicing for the great and unspeakable goodness and mercy of Almighty God the Father, whom it …
Dec 23, 2013: [gallery] unapologetic-book: Advent calendar 22: Soyuz preparing for launch in the snow
Dec 21, 2013: Cultural criticism is a kind of reading. As we try to understand our times, discern where the Spirit is afoot, and identify what powers and …
Dec 19, 2013: [gallery] 50watts: Yury Annenkov, illustration for 1945 French Dostoyevsky edition. Previously: 50 Watts post of Annenkov’s illus. for Blok.
Dec 18, 2013: Another contentious area for Hill is religion. Much of his verse dramatises a passionate wrestling with faith. Is he a Christian poet? “Well, it’s a …
Dec 16, 2013: For thirteen years MGM had the great Tex Avery; after 1940 they also had Hanna and Barbera putting Tom and Jerry through their formulaic wars. Those …
Dec 16, 2013: It was markedly different from the sermon delivered by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on the eve of the previous conclave, in 2005, when he rallied the …
Dec 16, 2013: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Map of Middle Earth
Dec 15, 2013: GLADWELL: So suppose we channel our inner Nate Silver and come up with a universal celebrity misbehavior metric. We grade each public incident on …
Dec 15, 2013: He brought light out of darknesse, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the wayes …
Dec 14, 2013: [gallery] unapologetic-book: Advent calendar 14: cushion for the restoration of the Old Tower, Dover Castle, embroidered by prisoners serving life …
Dec 14, 2013: [gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“30166”] drawingdetail: John Ruskin, The Casa d’Oro, Venice, 1845. Pencil …
Dec 14, 2013: John Ruskin and John Wharlton Bunney, Palazzo Manzoni on the Grand Canal, Venice
Dec 14, 2013: And now, reader, look round this English room of yours, about which you have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good and strong, and …
Dec 13, 2013: I’m not an Episcopalian, or even particularly religious, so it’s a bit of a surprise to me that one of the books I most enjoyed this year was Alan …
Dec 10, 2013: There is no guarantee of redemption-through-love: redemption is merely given as possible. We are thereby at the very core of Christianity: it is God …
Dec 9, 2013: In general, it is extremely foolish … to suppose it should really be such an easy affair with faith and wisdom that they just arrive over the years as …
Dec 9, 2013: One can, of course, and perhaps even should, question Rorty’s account of the various ways in which people are socialized into assuming the existence …
Dec 6, 2013: When you’re homeless and you’re spending your days in the local park, sleeping off the previous night’s alcoholic binge, or just trying to get some …
Dec 5, 2013: Gjertrud Schnackenberg, "Supernatural Love" My father at the dictionary stand Touches the page to fully understand The lamplit answer, tilting in his hand His slowly scanning magnifying lens, A …
Dec 5, 2013: [gallery] If everyone still wrote like they did in college
Dec 5, 2013: [gallery] unapologetic-book: Advent calendar 5: Sinterklaasavond, ‘St Nicholas’ Eve’. In the Netherlands, Sinter Klaas arrives by steamboat from Spain …
Dec 4, 2013: [gallery] banning Milton, viaJohn Overholt on Twitter
Dec 4, 2013: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Thunderball, souvenir programme
Dec 4, 2013: James Wright, I am tired of renting my life, and of the leaves I do not rake on the lawn I do not own. Though I have a magic phone that knows how to …
Dec 3, 2013: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Instant Corbusier
Dec 2, 2013: hidden God is not hidden to us; He is revealed. But what and how we shall be in Christ, and what and how the World will be in Christ at the end of God’s …
Dec 2, 2013: [gallery] A misty morning on (and above) the Brazos and the Bosque
Dec 2, 2013: [gallery] coolest wood stove EVAR
Dec 1, 2013: [gallery] erikkwakkel: sexycodicology: Details from the rear cover of the Lindau Gospels. Gilt silver, enamel, and jeweled bookcover [Probably …
Nov 28, 2013: The 2012 Greendex survey found that people in poorer countries feel, on average, much guiltier about their impacts on the natural world than people in …
Nov 28, 2013: An extraordinary sight: raptor central this morning at Mother Neff State Park
Nov 28, 2013: [gallery] Thanksgiving morning walk at Mother Neff State Park
Nov 28, 2013: Our comments on life and affairs were bright and amusing, but brittle… because there was no solid diagnosis of human nature underlying them. Bertie …
Nov 27, 2013: [gallery] robertogreco: Abacus, Paul Rand, 1951 (via MID-CENTURIA: Mathematic Inspired Textiles)
Nov 27, 2013: The boys in the classroom were right to be scared of her irony. O’Connor’s was not the shifty, reactive, and merely local variety that passes for …
Nov 25, 2013: [gallery] erikkwakkel: The book that emerged from a bog after 1200 years This is the remarkable story of a medieval book that spent 1200 years in the …
Nov 25, 2013: But the event also demonstrated the seductiveness of digital elitism, which incorporates social consciousness and intellectual discussion. “If we’re …
Nov 25, 2013: [gallery] Tim Carmody gives you the structure of journalism today
Nov 25, 2013: [gallery] I don’t even have words to describe how cool grecolaborativo is — the Greco family work/play/endeavor — I don’t know what to call it except …
Nov 25, 2013: The Google message-automation service promises to at last close the realtime loop: A computer running personalization algorithms will generate your …
Nov 25, 2013: Just as eyeglasses have shed their medical identity and become wholly identified with fashion, other prosthetics are getting new design attention. …
Nov 25, 2013: Today, as you know, everything is “innovation.” We have problems, and people are looking for fairy-tale solutions—innovation like manna from heaven …
Nov 22, 2013: [gallery] At the end of every checkup, Erlewine puts on a new set of strings, strums the guitar, and marvels again at how sweet Trigger sounds. A …
Nov 22, 2013: Does everything need to be assigned a specific value, or are there radically different ways of exchanging goods and services? Can our digital …
Nov 22, 2013: But it is also important to recognize how much the themes of the Narnia books are interwoven with what he was thinking and writing in other contexts …
Nov 22, 2013: If the reader will suspend his disbelief and exercise his imagination upon it even for a few minutes, I think he will become aware of the vast …
Nov 21, 2013: In this sense, it seems to me that the malaise that afflicts our public universities is not really about about dollars and cents. If this country can …
Nov 18, 2013: We all tend to assume that young people are on the technological vanguard, that they somehow have got an inside scoop on what’s next. If today’s kids …
Nov 18, 2013: [gallery] Jacob Drachler’s illustrations of Finnegans Wake
Nov 18, 2013: [gallery] publiccollectors: A rubber stamp that I spotted inside a used book (Exploring the Film by William Kuhns and Robert Stanley) that I picked up …
Nov 18, 2013: [gallery] Cathedral Grove
Nov 18, 2013: [gallery] Cathedral Grove, Vancouver Island
Nov 18, 2013: [gallery] Cheakamus Lake, Mt. Garibaldi Provincial Park, British Columbia
Nov 18, 2013: [gallery] Brooks Lake, Wyoming
Nov 18, 2013: [gallery] Yellowstone Valley
Nov 17, 2013: The city that “willed the death of the president”? What the hell does that mean? That the city of Dallas used its eerie mental powers to direct a …
Nov 17, 2013: [gallery] Remnants of the supernova in Cassiopeia, whose appearance in the European skies in 1572 I recently wrote about here and here.
Nov 16, 2013: Psalm 104 Bless the LORD, O my soul. O LORD my God, thou art very great; thou art clothed with honour and majesty. Who coverest thyself with light as with a …
Nov 15, 2013: If string theory turns out to be right, string theorists will turn out to be the greatest heroes in the history of science. On the basis of a handful …
Nov 15, 2013: However, even if Lacan’s version [“If there is no God, then nothing is permitted”] appears an empty paradox, a quick look at our moral landscape …
Nov 14, 2013: [gallery] a cake in the shape of the OED
Nov 11, 2013: [gallery] Jan Tschichold’s instructions to the printer
Nov 8, 2013: religion Religion, opium for the people. To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in an afterlife. And now we are …
Nov 8, 2013: [gallery] rosswolfe: Lebbeus Woods, Early rendering (1970s) In memoriam: Lebbeus Woods one year after his death Reflections on the visionary …
Nov 8, 2013: [gallery] a dream embodied
Nov 8, 2013: [gallery] Do I want to see an illustrated version of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? I’m thinking it over.
Nov 6, 2013: In sum, there is only one type of young person, her parents are super-rich, and they reside in a great big house with expensive PJs and an awesome …
Nov 6, 2013: [gallery]
Nov 6, 2013: [gallery] marcedith: …David Freund’s Collection of Japanese Matchboxes…
Nov 6, 2013: Maybe even more than scientific thinking, scientists desperately want the public to appreciate and be engaged with science and technology. Which makes …
Nov 5, 2013: Anonymously calling someone a coward is the height of self-parody and the pit of self-awareness. Each of these [NFL] personnel men feel perfectly …
Nov 5, 2013: [gallery] Gregory and his scribes (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, 10th century).
Nov 5, 2013: The teacher is justified to lead students only if he is and remains a student. Josef Albers (via robertogreco)
Nov 5, 2013: Frankly, the quality of safety provision for students at Hogwarts is totally unacceptable. Despite having a highly qualified, capable and over-worked …
Nov 3, 2013: [gallery]
Nov 3, 2013: But more to the point, “The Circle” doesn’t read like a novel whose author immersed himself in the nitty-gritty of day-to-day life in Silicon Valley. …
Nov 1, 2013: apologetics and imagination Apologetics, after all, is a literature of the imagination. Its cousins are the memoir, the literary essay, even the travel book. Like the memoir it …
Oct 31, 2013: [gallery] Here, via Brendan Koerner on Twitter.
Oct 31, 2013: [gallery] uispeccoll: digitalproductionunit: (via Why Time is Running Out For Your Videotapes | WITNESS Blog) So important. The same goes for floppy …
Oct 30, 2013: What’s the German for a writer who resurrects a writer who would have hated him? Until a word is coined, I’m going to go with ‘Franzen’ — after the …
Oct 30, 2013: At the heart of these incredulous statements about the poor decisions poor people make is a belief that we would never be like them. We would know …
Oct 30, 2013: Book writing is the worst, and thus best, example of the agonies of writing. I’ve written four books and a short e-book, contributed signed and …
Oct 30, 2013: [gallery] architectureofdoom: Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979
Oct 30, 2013: [gallery] 50watts: “Une danse macabre,” 1919, from a portfolio by Edmond Bille. Tip from my pal Richard Sica.
Oct 30, 2013: We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we …
Oct 29, 2013: Social psychologists have demonstrated that rich people are likelier than poorer ones to lie, cheat, and disregard traffic rules and, more recently, …
Oct 29, 2013: When Silicon Valley executives start borrowing metaphors from “The Godfather” maybe we should start to pay closer attention. On Oct. 19, while laying …
Oct 29, 2013: In one sense, this dramatic effect of the encounter is not inappropriate to the sort of customer Jacob was. The shady supplanter — the trickster of …
Oct 28, 2013: There is a tacit contempt for those whose experience and beliefs don’t fit in to the modern world as neatly as they ought to. And that includes not …
Oct 28, 2013: [gallery] austinkleon: Woodcuts by Matsubara Naoko The distinguished woodcut print artist Naoko Matsubara was born on Shikoku Island into an old …
Oct 28, 2013: [gallery] anatomyofbibliomania: From: The book of knowledge : treating of the wisdom of the ancients … Lilly Erra Pater … Printed for R. Ware, 1745. …
Oct 28, 2013: I think there’s some semantic game-playing in how you chose to summarize our debate. My view of journalism absolutely requires both fairness and …
Oct 28, 2013: Gladwell then develops the Idea that dyslexia might be a “desirable difficulty”, a condition that is usually a liability but can also be the engine …
Oct 27, 2013: If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major …
Oct 23, 2013: David quietly tells me, ‘You know, I’ve had so much sex and drugs that I can’t believe I’m still alive,’ and I loudly tell him, 'You know, I’ve had SO …
Oct 23, 2013: [gallery] allthingseurope: Male Karpaty, Slovakia (by Pavol Gorog)
Oct 22, 2013: [gallery] natgeofound: A hand-tinted photograph of Jerusalem where the dome of the Mosque of Omar is visible, March 1914.Photograph by American Colony …
Oct 22, 2013: If there’s anything we philosophers really hate it’s an untenable dualism. Exposing untenable dualisms is a lot of what we do for a living. It’s no …
Oct 22, 2013: Paleofuture: If those prices look good to you, you haven’t adjusted for inflation
Oct 22, 2013: I wanted to get away from traditional comic-book covers, which I thought were very boring: usually a fight scene. By issue eight, Sandman was already …
Oct 21, 2013: It’s worthwhile to cover horrible things like the attacks on Sarkeesian and Penny Red and so many others because doing so can help uncommitted or …
Oct 18, 2013: I only read factual books. I can’t think of… I mean, novels are just a waste of f•••ing time. I can’t suspend belief in reality… I just end up …
Oct 18, 2013: Almighty and most wrathful God, who hate nothing You have made but sometimes repent of having made Man; we thank you this day for the life and work of …
Oct 18, 2013: After finishing my degree in philosophy, I needed a career. I have no regrets pursuing my MBA at Stanford and in the various experiences that followed …
Oct 17, 2013: According to the Pew Forum, between 2006 and 2010 Christians faced some form of discrimination, either de jure or de facto, in a staggering total of …
Oct 17, 2013: natgeofound: People gather on a roof terrace in the District of Columbia as lights come on in nearby buildings, April 1967.Photograph by Joe …
Oct 17, 2013: Mental Floss: Purely for trivia and posterity’s sake, if you could indulge some (even more) inane queries: One story that’s made the rounds is that a …
Oct 17, 2013: However you slice and dice the history, the strategery, and the underlying issues, the decision to live with a government shutdown for an extended …
Oct 17, 2013: oupacademic: Printing at Oxford University Press in the 1920s: Compositors The compositors arrange the type for printing. Here, they are compiling a …
Oct 17, 2013: A different illustration is found among the elves of Lorien, in their love of beauty and their love of nature. They are Sylvan Elves (East Elves) but …
Oct 16, 2013: Meanwhile standard-bearer lists like the AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Movies or Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films Poll are sorely underrepresented. None of …
Oct 16, 2013: thingsmagazine: Is Our Age Degenerate?. From the set Little Blue Books (via things)
Oct 16, 2013: On Twitter people mostly play nice because if you say something cutting about someone, they’re likely to know in about 15 seconds. Their front pocket …
Oct 16, 2013: unapologetic-book: Part of a series of quotes from the book, beautifully laid out by HarperOne.
Oct 15, 2013: Member of Congress who are refusing to raise the debt ceiling (or raise taxes) until their ancillary demands are met are acting immorally, since they …
Oct 15, 2013: thingsmagazine: UI design by Wang Lin
Oct 15, 2013: Something I find regrettable in contemporary Christianity is the degree to which it has abandoned its own heritage, in thought and art and literature. …
Oct 14, 2013: Jacques Maritain, from Art and Scholasticism: There is, as I noted earlier, a fundamental incompatibility between habitus and egalitarianism. The …
Oct 14, 2013: appealtoemulsion: “Sir, you must turn off all electronics.” “OK.” “Sir, please turn off the camera.” “Ma’am, it doesn’t turn off, and it doesn’t turn …
Oct 14, 2013: Sunlight is supposed to be the best disinfectant. But there’s something naïve about the new S.E.C. rule, which presumes that full disclosure will …
Oct 14, 2013: One of the delights of reading Auden is that however much his language is recognisable, his tone is mercurial. Auden tried on styles like hats, …
Oct 11, 2013: Is there a fair solution? And does it matter? Historically, musicians who weren’t among the top pop stars were never well-paid – isn’t that just the …
Oct 11, 2013: Half the point I want to make is that I have had a charmed life. I was whisked out of the way of the Nazis, bundled out of the way of the Japanese …
Oct 11, 2013: The youth, the upward dreams, the emphasis on life style over other status markers, the disdain for industrial hierarchy, the social benefits of good …
Oct 10, 2013: [gallery] thingsmagazine: Charles and Ray Eames, Elephant, Designed 1945, produced 2007
Oct 8, 2013: typetoy: www.typetoy.tumblr.com
Oct 8, 2013: erikkwakkel: Pocket watch This is the 17th-century equivalent of our watch. Made out of ivory, most of these so-called diptych dials were produced in …
Oct 8, 2013: What else? Oh yes: the swearing. Why do I swear so much, in what you are about to read? To make a tonal point: to suggest that religious sensibilities …
Oct 7, 2013: In the closing pages of Bleeding Edge, perspectives alter; all that had been in the forefront of the readerly consciousness moves strangely to the …
Oct 6, 2013: jonklassen: thing from today Can I buy this? Please?
Oct 6, 2013: modernilluminators: John 1:1-5 Illuminated by Makoto Fujimura In the Beginning by Makoto Fujimura “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was …
Oct 6, 2013: thingsmagazine: Bolsa Bass
Oct 6, 2013: All the Valley’s talk about transhumanism, human potential, life extension, and generally “changing the world” is a bunch of hooey. It’s a myth — in …
Oct 5, 2013: I was a gardener. Well, I am a gardener, but a sadly reduced one, in every sense. I have a small paved rectangle of London garden, full of pots, with …
Oct 4, 2013: The truth is that persecution against Christians, ideologically speaking, is an equal-opportunity enterprise. One thinks, for instance, of the famous …
Oct 4, 2013: We have this weird, romantic, fundamentally sensual idea of books, one that approaches fetishization in its own right. We experience them by touch, by …
Oct 4, 2013: With a Spartan rigour which never ceased to amaze his landlord-grocer, Nietzsche would get up every morning when the faintly dawning sky was still …
Oct 3, 2013: Dying in Svalbard is hard—being buried is, in a way, much harder. While survivors tried to give these men a decent Christian burial, sufficient to …
Oct 3, 2013: slimjimstudios: L.
Oct 3, 2013: minimalmac: minimaldesks: Workspace with a view. The chair makes it. Let’s see … uncomfortable chair, view promising maximal distractions, coffee …
Oct 3, 2013: Reading Chekhov for a few minutes makes you better at decoding what other people are feeling. But spending the same amount of time with a potboiler by …
Oct 3, 2013: typetoy: sugarmeows: Cover for Fortune magazine, July 1953 (via skandalon)
Oct 3, 2013: the sacred grove of Osun In 1991 I spent a summer teaching at a seminary in the town of Igbaja in Kwara State, Nigeria. One weekend we took a long drive to visit a complex …
Oct 3, 2013: I’ve had to make political peace with SSM because it is a cultural juggernaut that makes sense by the standards of the mainstream today. I’m doing …
Oct 3, 2013: What can you imagine Peyton Manning doing? Let’s build him an analogical world. You can imagine him wearing a short-sleeve button-down dress shirt. …
Oct 3, 2013: thingsmagazine: A Vintage Electric Data Time World Clock
Oct 3, 2013: thingsmagazine: Aeronautics
Oct 3, 2013: Interviewer: What attracted you so much to Dick? Carrére: For me, he’s the Dostoyevsky of the twentieth century, the guy who understood it all. …
Oct 2, 2013: For all criticism is based on that equation: KNOWLEDGE + TASTE = MEANINGFUL JUDGMENT. The key word here is meaningful. People who have strong …
Oct 1, 2013: I am so admiring and jealous of the fact that Greenwald can come up with new ways to say these things that are true and important and need to be said …
Oct 1, 2013: asymptotejournal: Recommended: Samuel Beckett. The Unnameable. 1953. Translated from the French by the author. Grove Press, 1958. “The tears stream …
Sep 30, 2013: Marriage is increasingly the big sociological divide in American life. Getting and staying married makes you part of a privileged elite. As Charles …
Sep 30, 2013: uispeccoll: Miniature Monday! This tiny shelf includes books from Borrower’s Press, Black Cat Press, Dawson’s Bookshop and Jack Levien. Each book is …
Sep 30, 2013: Furthermore, you say, science will teach men (although in my opinion this is a superfluity) that they have not, in fact, and never have had, either …
Sep 30, 2013: Yggdrasil and the churches of the North
Sep 29, 2013: erikkwakkel: maninthebottle: From archives of Prague castle, photo by M.Peterka (Source:Lost and Found in Prague) I love images from the past …
Sep 28, 2013: rosswolfe: german-expressionists: Wassily Kandinsky Drawing, 1926 This is awesome.
Sep 28, 2013: Doc was in the toilet pissing during a commercial break when he heard Sauncho screaming at the television set. He got back to find his attorney just …
Sep 23, 2013: erikkwakkel: Medieval pop-up book This book was printed in 1482, when printing was just invented - by Johannes Gutenberg, c. 1455. It is remarkable …
Sep 23, 2013: boundaries One must not, however, imagine the realm of culture as some sort of spatial whole, having boundaries but also having internal territory. The realm of …
Sep 23, 2013: grand narratives Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. …
Sep 23, 2013: I am not saying that children should stop learning stuff outside of school (although some days, when I see how overscheduled some children are, that’s …
Sep 23, 2013: hidden imagery in handwriting In handwriting the brain is mediated by the drawing hand, in typewriting by the fingers hitting the keyboard, in dictation by the idea of a vocal …
Sep 20, 2013: I feel that it’s necessary for me to request that my nomination for best male artist be withdrawn and furthermore any awards or nominations for such …
Sep 18, 2013: I’m a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of guy. I like to hit the open road, go where the wind takes me, and approach every day as an opportunity to …
Sep 17, 2013: smithsonianmag: Underwater Photography of Brian Skerry In celebration of the Sant Ocean Hall’s fifth anniversary, the National Museum of Natural …
Sep 17, 2013: The need for interpreting arises when a text with which we find ourselves concerned resists immediate absorption into the ongoing stream of our …
Sep 16, 2013: "poisoning your mind with novels" People talk of keeping au courant, and no doubt an intellectual cannot ignore the human race, nor be indifferent to what is written in his special …
Sep 16, 2013: When I think about songs that have made an actual difference to me — not really what I mean when I speak of “favorite” songs, necessarily, or the …
Sep 16, 2013: “To be honest, before Derek confessed his sins, repented, and sought my grace in pious supplication, I was really looking forward to sitting on my …
Sep 13, 2013: Quite simply, there is no formation without repetition. There is no habituation without being immersed in a practice over and over again… So it is …
Sep 7, 2013: A renewal of a classic typeface of the 1930s
Sep 5, 2013: Thomas Merton’s very tone conveyed a spiritual and intellectual authority which made his divagations into Orientalism sound rock solid; but Salinger …
Sep 5, 2013: Shields, of course, has written an entire testament, the manifesto-like book called “Reality Hunger,” in defense of the chop-shop approach to prose, …
Sep 5, 2013: After taking part in a poetry programme for BBC School Radio, Seamus Heaney and I repaired to the George pub, round the corner from the BBC, with the …
Sep 4, 2013: thingsmagazine: Grey-11, Avril, 2010
Sep 4, 2013: thingsmagazine: Square Montmartre, Corbasson, 2013
Sep 4, 2013: Whenever Doc needed to know anything touching on the world of property, Aunt Reet, with her phenomenal lot-by-lot grasp of land use from the desert to …
Sep 4, 2013: There’s some talk afterward, as there always is these days, about whether Federer should retire. This drives me crazy, so give me a second. Watching …
Sep 3, 2013: natgeofound: An ancient Roman bridge spans the Wadi al Murr in Mosul, Iraq, 1920.Photograph by M. V. Oppenheim, National Geographic
Sep 3, 2013: ‘I find a newsletter personal — more personal than a blog,’ Dougherty says. 'It is addressed to you. It’s also a ritual in a sense. I wanted it to …
Sep 2, 2013: Defenders of the humanities claim a special role in training citizens for a democratic society and often have deeply felt convictions about …
Sep 2, 2013: The pro-Dislike crowd, in addition to being on the wrong side of history, don’t really understand the nature and functioning of the Like button. They …
Sep 2, 2013: Schools as we know them today are a product of history, not of research into how children learn. The blueprint still used for today’s schools was …
Sep 2, 2013: But the truth is, his experiment with Google Glass made me realize how comparably social mobile phones are. As much as there’s a brief against phones …
Sep 2, 2013: Writers on the brain and the mind tend to divide into Spocks and Kirks, either embracing the idea that consciousness can be located in a web of brain …
Sep 1, 2013: Every meeting I’ve ever had since I began full-time advocacy, I have brought with me a book of Seamus Heaney’s poems. I always think if you’re asking …
Aug 31, 2013: I keep telling my students this. From Slate Vault.
Aug 30, 2013: oldbookillustrations: Take my bait, O king of fishes! Maria Louise Kirk, from The story of Hiawatha, adapted from H. W. Longfellow by Winston Stokes, …
Aug 30, 2013: At Burns’s birthplace they now have something called the Tam o’ Shanter Experience. There’s a café, a shop, a performance space and a place for …
Aug 30, 2013: [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“800”]David Jones by Mark Gerson (1965), in the National Portrait …
Aug 30, 2013: David Jones, Sanctus Christus [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1088”]David Jones, Sanctus Christus de Capel-y-ffin (1925)[/caption]
Aug 30, 2013: Exiit edictum [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1240”]“Exiit Edictum” (1949), by the great poet-painter-calligrapher David …
Aug 29, 2013: From a wonderful Bibliodyssey post about maps with sea-monsters on them
Aug 29, 2013: Obviously, the key question is whether John Coltrane is a saint or God incarnate
Aug 29, 2013: In the most perceptive part of his essay, Bottum argues that we lost the intellectual debate about same-sex marriage long ago, when we accepted …
Aug 29, 2013: houghtonlib: Apian, Peter, 1495-1552. Astronomicum Caesareum, 1540. *GC5.Ap34.540a Houghton Library, Harvard University
Aug 28, 2013: mpdrolet: Nigel Henderson, Chisenhale Road, 1951
Aug 28, 2013: A change which has been coming over historical opinion within my own lifetime … is temperately summed up by Professor Seznec in the words: “As the …
Aug 28, 2013: erikkwakkel: The world in your hand Meet the astrolabe: a two-dimensional model of a three-dimensional world - ours. The instrument was used to …
Aug 28, 2013: Via In Focus, a tidal wave hits a bank along the Qiantang River on August 22, 2013 in Haining, China (ChinaFotoPress/ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images). …
Aug 28, 2013: awesomepeoplereading: The Southern Humanist reminded me of this picture, that APR posted some time ago. But it is time to visit it again, I think. …
Aug 28, 2013: The lesson I would draw from my Goldilocks experience is that it is neither necessary nor desirable to dumb our projects down when writing for a …
Aug 28, 2013: For Thackeray and his contemporaries, literature is a public matter, a matter to be lectured upon before large audiences, a matter to be given …
Aug 26, 2013: Statute Forbidding Any One to Annoy or Unduly Injure the Freshmen. Each and every one attached to this university is forbidden to offend with insult, …
Aug 26, 2013: When Christians sell books and preach sermons encouraging non-married people to embrace their “singleness” as a blessing, we are promoting the …
Aug 26, 2013: Blessed are they that inanimate all their knowledge, consummate all in Christ Jesus. The university is a paradise, rivers of knowledge are there, arts …
Aug 26, 2013: If we contemplate the lives of the Teletubbies, questions start to pose themselves. These four creatures are evidently infantile beings, unable to …
Aug 25, 2013: If you read advertisements for books in eighteenth-century journals, you will be struck by the emphasis on the primary material of literature: …
Aug 25, 2013: To have one’s lectures put together from students’ notes years after they were given is a rare mark of distinction; offhand I can only think of …
Aug 24, 2013: What if you answered the question “What do you do all day?” with “Nothing”? It isn’t as if that could possibly be true. If you spent all day in bed …
Aug 24, 2013: In 2005, The Lancet published a comprehensive review of the literature on media violence to date. The bottom line: The weight of the studies supports …
Aug 23, 2013: Is sex the place in which that project of re-enchantment ought to begin? I just can’t see it—not after the nearly complete triumph of the sexual …
Aug 22, 2013: I met Elmore Leonard once, and spent an hour with him. He was courteous and soft-spoken, and I cherish the first edition of “Freaky Deaky” that he …
Aug 19, 2013: the intimidation of Glenn Greenwald And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian’s long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard …
Aug 17, 2013: All-Purpose Responses to Expressions of Puzzlement or Resentment on Twitter Here, let me google that for you. If you read a few other recent tweets of mine your confusion is likely to be remedied! I think you just tried to …
Aug 17, 2013: Shakespeare's handwriting erikkwakkel: Shakespeare’s handwriting - and why it matters Studying ancient handwriting is a fascinating thing. To know that the oddly-shaped …
Aug 16, 2013: My great-grandmother was born in Mississippi, in 1890, and lived in Mississippi for the whole of her long life. But her own grandparents, who died …
Aug 16, 2013: T. S. Eliot on persecution and discrimination Christians are still persecuted but nowadays not usually overtly on the ground that they are Christians. They are persecuted because they do not hold …
Aug 16, 2013: Nature is so uncomfortable CYRIL (coming in through the open window from the terrace). My dear Vivian, don’t coop yourself up all day in the library. It is a perfectly lovely …
Aug 16, 2013: “When you’ve had any contact with real persecuted minorities you learn to use the word very chastely,” [Rowan Williams] said. “Persecution is not …
Aug 15, 2013: the conspiracy against writers A friend of mine, a terrific writer, is convinced there is a conspiracy excluding him from certain rewards and publications. Surveying the field, he …
Aug 13, 2013: Aslan’s thesis requires us to believe that the Gospel writers were crafty enough to invent a Jesus who regularly called for humility, service and the …
Aug 13, 2013: Aslan’s entire book is, as it turns out, an ambitious and single-minded polemical counter-narrative to what he imagines is the New Testament’s …
Aug 12, 2013: It turns out that the NSA’s domestic and world-wide surveillance apparatus is even more extensive than we thought. Bluntly: The government has …
Aug 8, 2013: But this bombardment you’re talking about, that’s a choice you make. If you’re interested by a piece of music, you can miss the next twenty new pieces …
Aug 8, 2013: natgeofound: Cranes lift the face of a statue from the Abu Simbel Temples in Egypt, May 1966.Photograph by Georg Gerster, National Geographic
Aug 8, 2013: Kenner, corresponding Buckley, William F., 1925 Bunting, Basil Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 1908 Davenport, Guy DeWitt, Miriam Hapgood, 1906-1990 du Sautoy, Peter Eliot, T.S. …
Aug 8, 2013: These days, writing about video games feels more important than writing about politics. A new creature has been birthed and is in danger of giving in …
Aug 7, 2013: 50watts: Pelham Uno Dos Tres via Montague Projects
Aug 7, 2013: prostheticknowledge: Manga Generator Project lets participants create their own starring Manga, with the aid of a Kinect sensor. Finished piece can …
Aug 6, 2013: Lenny Berry, 59, has been wearing a bowler hat to play Bradford City’s City Gent mascot for 20 years. But after he lost weight for health reasons …
Aug 6, 2013: thingsmagazine: [N]on-line High street, a concept project Shang-Jen Victor Tung, published on FuturesPlus
Aug 6, 2013: It’s been less than a year, but what happened next is already the stuff of lore. “You have to understand,” noted foosball aficionado George F. Will …
Aug 6, 2013: thingsmagazine: Time Square, 1958, by Pete Turner
Aug 5, 2013: thingsmagazine: Illustration by Luciano Lozano
Aug 5, 2013: [youtube …
Aug 4, 2013: robertogreco: Merce Cunningham [at Black Mountain College], 1952, photo by Robert Rauschenberg (via MONDOBLOGO: the menfolk of black mountain college) …
Aug 4, 2013: robertogreco: WORK + STUDY, September 1945: “A two-sided graphic depiction of the farming program at Black Mountain College” [See inside.]
Aug 3, 2013: vruba: Hiroshi Yoshida: Kasuga sandô (Way to the Kasuga Shrine), 1938. Via John Resig’s ukiyo-e.org.
Aug 3, 2013: The photo that spawned a dumb tumblelog. But still my favorite Morrissey picture.
Aug 2, 2013: National Geographic cartographic typefaces, via Smithsonian.org
Aug 2, 2013: Close-up of typography by Phil Baines, via Eye magazine’s photo stream
Aug 2, 2013: typeworship: Talking type with Phil Baines I had the pleasure of meeting Phil Baines today for an 8 Faces interview. I’ve been a long time admirer of …
Aug 2, 2013: ‘Carpe diem’ doesn’t mean seize the day – it means something gentler and more sensible. 'Carpe diem’ means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day …
Aug 2, 2013: 60ansdevadrouille: Place Lope de Vega à Valence, remploi d’élément gothique dans une arcade murée de l’église Ste Catherine. juin 2013.
Aug 2, 2013: 60ansdevadrouille: L’Himalaya vu de Nagarkot, au-dessus de Katmandou, le matin. février 1988.
Aug 2, 2013: A 3D-printed tiny person
Aug 1, 2013: design-is-fine: Alpa Reflex Camera with printed manual, designed 1944. Switzerland. Photo: Hans Hansen, Hamburg
Jul 31, 2013: oldbookillustrations: And they pressed so hard on him that he was constrained to rest himself upon the towers of Notre-Dame. Louis Chalon, from Five …
Jul 31, 2013: Listen, I understand it must be tough to see someone you love break the circle of death and rebirth when you’re nowhere near accomplishing it. But the …
Jul 31, 2013: long-horned orb weaver; photo by Nicky Bay
Jul 29, 2013: A frightening and violent mob swept through the normally quiet seaside community of Huntington Beach last night following a surfing competition in the …
Jul 27, 2013: I took some apples out of a paper bag where they had been lying for a long time; I had to cut off and throw away half of many of them. Afterwards as I …
Jul 26, 2013: Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive with him. He …
Jul 26, 2013: It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself, as proper nourishment; and, from the …
Jul 23, 2013: And so, among Jews, Braun now becomes a familiar figure: a shanda fur die Goyim. The Yiddish phrase translates, roughly, to “a shame before the …
Jul 17, 2013: I see so much perdition in this world, that even if my writing has no other effect than to weary this hand that wields the pen, it brings me some …
Jul 17, 2013: So parenting has been hard in all times and places, and all times and places have put their unique (and imperfect) spin on it—parenting being hard …
Jul 17, 2013: credulous skeptics Of course, I can’t universalize my own experience – but that experience does give me pause when people talk about the immense power of religion to …
Jul 17, 2013: There’s the Hinton St Mary Mosaic – an early Romano-British representation of Christ, with the Chi-Ro symbol monogrammed behind his head, clearly …
Jul 17, 2013: The engagement of understanding is, then, a continuous, self-moved, critical enterprise of theorising. Its principle is: Never ask the end. Of the …
Jul 17, 2013: I would guess that if you hired a left-brainiac economist to analyze “the present situation of poetry,” he or she would find that the dynamics of the …
Jul 17, 2013: Because he came to faith dramatically, he has few prejudices about which tradition to inhabit. “I am a spiritual magpie,” he says. As well as speaking …
Jul 16, 2013: One of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever done in public was to appear—against all judgment—in a debate at the Hay Literary Festival in the …
Jul 14, 2013: newhousebooks: Cover, tourist brochure for Madurodam, a miniature city in The Hague. Undated.
Jul 14, 2013: There are many dying languages in the world. But at least one has recently been born, created by children living in a remote village in northern …
Jul 7, 2013: You ask me for my thoughts on the Cuban question. I regret they are at present unformed as I have spent the past month wrestling with the seating plan …
Jun 25, 2013: The problem Judaeo-Christianity is supposed to address is human shortcomings, the cost of which becomes more horrifying by the decade. But how can a …
Jun 25, 2013: But it is the concept which runs alongside the constant and essentially unconsented gathering of data which is most mendacious: the contention that …
Jun 25, 2013: One of my minor hobby horses is defending some of Shakespeare’s earlier plays that are frequently given short critical shrift, particularly two early …
Jun 23, 2013: There is a significant psychological price to being constantly aware of the variety of ways in which your activity might be tracked. To be blunt, it …
Jun 23, 2013: If debating the Enlightenment has become tedious, one reason is that it has produced so many exercises in what old-fashioned religious believers still …
Jun 23, 2013: But what was the actual impact of coffeehouses on productivity, education and innovation? Rather than enemies of industry, coffeehouses were in fact …
Jun 21, 2013: E-mail isn’t that different from mail. The real divide, historically, isn’t digital; it’s literary. The nineteenth century, in many parts of the West, …
Jun 20, 2013: ZXX, a typeface unreadable by computers. (Via @notjessewalker on Twitter.)
Jun 20, 2013: Once I heard a middle-aged lay preacher declare how uncomfortable she had always been with teachings about sin; now, she knew why: she had been …
Jun 19, 2013: [How can students improve as writers?] It’s hard to talk about something like that without sounding prescriptive, but I think that there’s a …
Jun 18, 2013: I just wish that we could talk about books as if they are for use, not as symbols of enduring knowledge that must be preserved against the ravages of …
Jun 15, 2013: Things magazine
Jun 15, 2013: Three-dimensional typography by Oded Ezer
Jun 14, 2013: MOOCs are a kind of entertainment media. We are living in an age of para-educationalism: TED Talks, “big idea” books, and the professional lecture …
Jun 14, 2013: To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to …
Jun 12, 2013: Dinner parties and cocktail parties dominated every Ann Arbor weekend. Women wore girdles; the jacket pockets of men’s gray suits showed the fangs of …
Jun 10, 2013: Rereading Krakauer’s Into Thin Air after finishing Hansen’s book, I was once again struck by the brutal selfishness and callous disregard for one’s …
Jun 10, 2013: In 1971, however, a keyboard with a vestigial @ symbol inherited from its typewriter ancestors found itself hooked up to an ARPANET terminal manned by …
Jun 8, 2013: Commentators often attempt to refute the nothing-to-hide argument by pointing to things people want to hide. But the problem with the nothing-to-hide …
Jun 8, 2013: How can we distinguish between better and worse surveillance states? Balkin identifies and contrasts two. The first is an authoritarian surveillance …
Jun 8, 2013: He’s a grown man. He doesn’t need any of you to tell him anything. He knows more than all of you put together. He understands the game. If he makes a …
Jun 8, 2013: Not everyone agreed that gout was a malady, or a bad thing. Some saw it as Nature’s warning, or as a deliverance from worse afflictions (it was better …
Jun 7, 2013: eastmanhouse: Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) Terrors and Pleasures of Levitation, No. 37, 1953 gelatin silver print, © Aaron Siskind Foundation, …
Jun 6, 2013: Japanese book-stacking
Jun 2, 2013: Brian Dettmer
Jun 1, 2013: At any rate, after one of my early columns had curtsied and left the stage, an indignant letter to the editor appeared, written by, as I recall, a …
Jun 1, 2013: bookshelfporn: May there be many a day spent reading in front of a fireplace this winter for our Australian and New Zealand bookshelf lovers.
Jun 1, 2013: ransomcenter: In case you missed it, learn all about Rene Belbenoit, prison escape artist, butterfly enthusiast, and storyteller. A recently cataloged …
Jun 1, 2013: Anton Tang
Jun 1, 2013: typetoy: www.typetoy.tumblr.com
May 31, 2013: Now, remember that according to [Richard] Dawkins the story is told so that we should admire not Thomas, but the other disciples, “whose faith was so …
May 31, 2013: Ruins of the Roman city of Leptis Magna in Libya, via In Focus
May 30, 2013: The kind of people adult, white, middle-class, liberal-artsy types hate the most are other adult, white, middle-class, liberal-artsy types. And that …
May 29, 2013: natgeofound: Alexander Graham Bell’s tetrahedral tower is unveiled in 1907 in Nova Scotia. Photograph courtesy the Bell Collection
May 29, 2013: We promote freedom of speech and expression precisely so that we can openly disagree about what our culture should be and should value. We vote by …
May 28, 2013: I dreamed that being in a house in the city, and with much company, looking towards the end of the room from the upper end of it, I descried a figure …
May 28, 2013: natgeofound: A large group of actors relax and talk on the lawn at Monticello in Virginia, December 1928. Photograph by Jacob J. Gayer, National …
May 28, 2013: The cheese-rolling pictures are always a highlight of my year.
May 28, 2013: ransomcenter: This week, “From the Outside In” shares the story of Samuel Beckett and his novel Watt. This doodle, featured as a window etching in …
May 28, 2013: The problem with Google’s vision is that it doesn’t acknowledge the vital role that disorder, chaos, and novelty play in shaping the urban experience. …
May 28, 2013: I’m always glad to see a null finding reported, so I liked this paper by Robert Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson about what happened when they gave …
May 28, 2013: jessnevins: “Smash Imperialist Invasion and March Forward for the building of Our Peaceful, Happy Life”
May 28, 2013: Loyau-Kennett is deeply concerned, she says, about the direction modern society is headed. “I prefer the values of the past than the non-values of …
May 27, 2013: The Internet, a plain whose grasses hide so many digital predators, can activate that same response in contemporary humans. It offers “fight” and …
May 27, 2013: If Obama commits to making responsible fatherhood a central theme of his second term, he could have a deep and durable effect on American culture. Any …
May 27, 2013: It was hard not to think of all this—of the Iliad with its grand funereal finale, of the Odyssey strangely pivoting around so many burials, and of …
May 27, 2013: Anthony Green, “Finishing the Portrait of Mary Green”, 1965/2007-09/2010
May 27, 2013: Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community. If they had …
May 27, 2013: Humility is one option here – the urge to kneel, or to sit very quietly, conscious of your microscopic brevity in relation to what is visiting you. …
May 27, 2013: Responding to the claim that not just reading but “high culture” in general is morally improving, Terry Eagleton points out that, during World War II, …
May 27, 2013: typeworship: Timeless Alphabets You can find a world of inspiration in any of Julia Trigg’s collected letters. These playful compositions make a …
May 27, 2013: Joan Miro’s ceramic art. My friend David Hooker called my attention to these.
May 26, 2013: “Creative People Say No” is an article has been making the rounds this week, about how creativity demands focus and time and suffers when it’s …
May 26, 2013: Liberal Christianity has two meanings: there are two traditions here. They are deeply intertwined, but they must be pulled apart – for one tradition …
May 23, 2013: The same problems bedevil the claim that we moderns reveal our essence in words we use more rather than less. Jean Twenge, W. Keith Campbell, and …
May 23, 2013: I think Wikipedia’s about over. To say, “some of this book’s footnotes are just links to Wikipedia articles” is universally understood to be …
May 22, 2013: natgeofound: A Royal Mail bus with armed guards heads out from Razmak to Jandola, April 1946. Photograph by Maynard Owen Williams, National Geographic …
May 22, 2013: newberrylibrary: Happy Birthday, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle! Doyle, a Scottish physician and writer, is best remembered as the creator of Sherlock …
May 22, 2013: The MOOCman cometh
May 21, 2013: Picasso, 1953
May 21, 2013: Bramantino, The Risen Christ, described here
May 21, 2013: natgeofound: Children attendants gather supplies for an Arab diner in Algeria, February 1928. Photograph by Jules Gervais Courtellemont, National …
May 21, 2013: An ex-neighbour of ours recalled (in an otherwise entirely kind and welcome comment) me telling him, years ago, that my SF novels effectively …
May 20, 2013: In the case of MOOCs (or other ways of chunking online instruction), Harvard could impose burdensome licensing rules in an effort to protect the …
May 17, 2013: anticipatedstranger: Many more here.
May 17, 2013: What email would be like if it had been invented in the Web 2.0 era
May 17, 2013: newberrylibrary: On May 17, 1792, the New York Stock Exchange was formed. Pictured here are two stock certificates, which can be found in the Newberry …
May 17, 2013: natgeofound: Parisians walk on the street past lottery and vermouth advertisements in 1935. Photograph by Maynard Owen Williams, National Geographic
May 17, 2013: natgeofound: Fifty-two stories high, city noises fade and vistas expand. Chicago, June 1967. Photograph by James L. Stanfield, National Geographic
May 17, 2013: “Governments are too focused on democracy and rule of law. On Google Island, we’ve found those things to be distractions. If democracy worked so well, …
May 17, 2013: My plan was to write a portrait of Phil Jackson after basketball: to capture the full mundanity of his post-N.B.A. existence. It became clear very …
May 17, 2013: ‘There is something deeply perverse,’ Hamilton writes, ‘in the demand that we construct an immense industrial infrastructure in order to deal with the …
May 17, 2013: From Susan Wise Bauer’s May farm report. I am an absolute sucker for donkey photos.
May 16, 2013: centuriespast: Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) Eugénie Grandet Autograph manuscript and corrected galley proofs signed, 1833 The Morgan Library
May 15, 2013: Map of New York by Jenni Sparks, from a slideshow of hand-drawn maps
May 13, 2013: In Nagy’s “brick-and-mortar” class, students write essays. But multiple-choice questions are almost as good as essays, Nagy said, because they …
May 12, 2013: Every poet, consciously or unconsciously, holds the following absolute presuppositions, as the dogmas of his art: (1) A historical world exists, a …
May 12, 2013: screenshotsofdespair: via earlboykins
May 10, 2013: “Hello agent John, it’s client Dan,” commented the pecunious scribbler. “I’m worried about new book Inferno. I think critics are going to say it’s …
May 10, 2013: What classic voyeurism is is espial, i.e. watching people who don’t know you’re there as those people go about the mundane but erotically charged …
May 10, 2013: So if we try to feel our way towards a general sense of what the contemporary fantasy world is telling us about violence and destruction, the result …
May 10, 2013: Following your bliss is useless. People are passionate about a lot of stupid things. It’s not a great mantra. Meaning, I think, comes from doing a …
May 9, 2013: Opening Willard’s book, I read: “The idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do …
May 7, 2013: I am in thoroughgoing disagreement with all of this. I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent; I think we …
May 6, 2013: If anyone has labored from the first hour, let them today receive the just reward. If anyone has come at the third hour, with thanksgiving let them …
May 6, 2013: The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to …
May 6, 2013: Here he is. The acquaintance is made, I am introduced to him. The instant I first lay eyes on him, I set him apart at once; I jump back, clap my …
May 5, 2013: The Code of the Streets, a term popularized by the hip-hop duo Gang Starr and the sociologist Elijah Anderson, is the code of men who have come to …
May 4, 2013: Along with all of the other rising inequalities we’ve become so familiar with – in income, in wealth, in access to politicians – we confront now a …
May 2, 2013: WHEN I LEARNED DR. AND MRS. JACOBS WERE MOVING AWAY ahouicestmoi:
Apr 30, 2013: Don’t expect any breadth or grandeur from the Empire’s Christian divines. Across the board, the imperial chaplains exhibit the most obsequious …
Apr 29, 2013: Home and Away are the poles of our being, each exerting a magnetic pull on the psyche. We vibrate between them. Home is comforting but constraining. …
Apr 28, 2013: The purpose of theology - the purpose of any thinking about God - is to make the silences clearer and starker to us, to make the unmeaning - by which …
Apr 28, 2013: What’s curious is that of all the ethical commitments that liberal-leaning consumers with discretionary income try to maintain today (dolphin-safe …
Apr 26, 2013: In my daydream College for Bards, the curriculum would be as follows: (1) In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or …
Apr 24, 2013: scientificillustration: The great sea-serpent. An historical and critical treatise. With the reports of 187 appearances…the suppositions and …
Apr 24, 2013: oldbookillustrations: Capital from the Luxor Temple, representing a papyrus flower. 1200 B.C. From Galería del arte decorativo (Gallery of Decorative …
Apr 24, 2013: newberrylibrary: Crown of Noble and Virtuous Women, page 21, Book 3. Cesare Vecellio, a Venetian engraver, first published this pattern-making book …
Apr 24, 2013: smithsonianmag: Photo of the Day: Red Fox Near Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada Photo by: Victor Liu (Calgary, Alberta, Canada); …
Apr 24, 2013: Dreher and Sullivan alike are Christians. I’m not. They assume that Jesus’s call to “turn the other cheek” means that Christianity has acted as a …
Apr 24, 2013: On World Gone Wrong Dylan did this astonishing cover of a 1930s song by the Mississippi Sheiks
Apr 24, 2013: My writing space has no desk or shelves. There’s no space for books, whether for reference or simply to distract me from the looming deadline in hand. …
Apr 23, 2013: When you combine this trend with the Republican Party’s sharp libertarian turn on economics and modest libertarian turn on civil liberties, you could …
Apr 23, 2013: ransomcenter: Learn how conservators at the Harry Ransom Center painstakingly repaired and framed a Norman Bel Geddes poster design for the 1926 …
Apr 23, 2013: Last week, one of my college friends, who now manages vast sums at a hedge fund, visited me. He’s the most rational person I know, so I asked him how …
Apr 23, 2013: Experience has taught me that the less satisfying the narrative of the day has been, the more likely I am to be unable to let it go. My body keeps me …
Apr 23, 2013: natgeofound: Two boys pose on a balcony with the Tenerife port in the background in Puerto Orotava, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, May …
Apr 22, 2013: Religious organizations are asking for permission to use this photo by Marac Andrev Kolodzinski
Apr 22, 2013: thxitsvintage: Hand-lettering by Edward Gorey, Anchor’s first art director, 1953-1960.
Apr 22, 2013: propaedeuticist: roof-streets of Masuleh, Iran
Apr 22, 2013: natgeofound: The interior of La Compania Church in Quito, Ecuador, January 1929.Photograph by Jacob J. Gayer, National Geographic
Apr 22, 2013: newberrylibrary: Treasures of Faith Preview Here’s a 1593 edition of Thomas Aquinas’s complete works. This engraved title page features an ornate …
Apr 22, 2013: newberrylibrary: It’s not quite relevant, but we couldn’t resist: In honor of Earth Day (April 22), here’s an issue of Mother Earth, printed in …
Apr 22, 2013: The machine’s interface—its outward representation of the numeric self—is no longer the cold, bureaucratic punchcard. It’s the avatar, the selfie: the …
Apr 22, 2013: thingsmagazine: A reproduction Frank Lloyd Wright tile made for Blade Runner
Apr 22, 2013: thingsmagazine: The Umbrellas (Project for Japan and Western USA), Christo, 1987
Apr 22, 2013: Twitter is a deliberate abstention. Somehow I hate the idea of there always being, in the back of my mind, this little voice saying: “Oh, I should …
Apr 21, 2013: Needless to say, Tsarnaev is probably the single most hated figure in America now. As a result, as Bazelon noted, not many people will care what is …
Apr 21, 2013: When she entered the room, her first gesture was to send the white-jacketed Chinese steward back for a larger glass of Scotch, gesturing with fingers …
Apr 20, 2013: A still from the 1964 Czech film Lemonade Joe
Apr 20, 2013: The United States has dealt with American citizens who had commit acts of terrorism before. We Mirandized them, we charged them, we ensured that they …
Apr 20, 2013: Anna Marie Johnson annotates Annie Dillard
Apr 20, 2013: I have to wonder if Sandberg does not realize that she is going to die someday. There is so little life and pleasure in her book outside of work. Even …
Apr 19, 2013: 60ansdevadrouille: Les daims hantent les sites sacrés du Japon, parmi les lanternes de pierre du parc de Nara ou sur le rivage de Miyajima. septembre …
Apr 19, 2013: Sketch for the madhouse scene from The Rake’s Progress (Stravinsky/Auden/Kallman), performed at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre, 1962; image courtesy …
Apr 19, 2013: thingsmagazine: A Leo Jaffe Dictograph handset
Apr 19, 2013: thingsmagazine: Milton Berle’s Joke File
Apr 19, 2013: natgeofound: Dogs help a Scottish gamekeeper keep watch in Aberfoyle, Scotland, March 1919.Photograph by William Reid, National Geographic
Apr 18, 2013: Ezra Klein: What should policymakers do in the aftermath of this kind of event? Bruce Schneier: Nothing. This is a singular event, and not something …
Apr 18, 2013: What I don’t understand though is why media outlets are so willing to run every MOOC provider’s press releases practically verbatim, while those …
Apr 18, 2013: What is music about? What, as Plato would say, does it imitate? Our experience of Time in its twofold aspect, natural or organic repetition, and …
Apr 16, 2013: Just as a lamp is not able to illuminate unless a fire is enkindled, so also a spiritual lamp does not illuminate unless he first burn and be inflamed …
Apr 14, 2013: Loving the UK cover
Apr 13, 2013: The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to confession to a priest: be brief, be blunt, be gone. Be brief, be blunt, forget. The scrupuland …
Apr 13, 2013: One week, Bob Evans, a project manager at Google, challenged a cliché in software development, “Good, fast or cheap — pick two,” meaning you can’t …
Apr 13, 2013: Summer, or rather the hint or promise of it, only arrives with the publication of Wisden. The cricketers’ almanack – the venerable almanack – …
Apr 12, 2013: eastmanhouse: Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976) Magnolia Bud, 1929, gelatin silver print, museum Purchase, © 1929, 2012 Imogen Cunningham Trust. …
Apr 12, 2013: thingsmagazine: Belmont Park Air Meet, New York, 1910
Apr 12, 2013: How has your decision to write affected your health? Has it had negative effects on your personal life? Pathos: Neal Pollack | Full Stop. Full Stop …
Apr 12, 2013: I was sitting in a grandstand seat behind the third-base-side lower boxes, pretty close to the field, there as a Giants fan of long standing but not …
Apr 12, 2013: Simon Russell Beale is fond of describing acting as three-dimensional literary criticism. And in my personal experience, the most mind-expanding …
Apr 12, 2013: No, they aren’t right about the Gosnell story. If you’ve never heard of the Gosnell story, it’s not because of a coverup by the liberal mainstream …
Apr 11, 2013: natgeofound: Landing signal officer and assistant wear experimental ear protection aboard the USS Midway, August 1955. Photograph by Luis Marden, …
Apr 11, 2013: Typically, I tell people not to go to grad school. That’s the advice I give, generally. And I do rather stridently. But when I do, I make it actual …
Apr 10, 2013: natgeofound: Fishing nets dry in the early morning sunlight in a Macao harbor around 1931, the year photographer W. Robert Moore began his career at …
Apr 10, 2013: The Medieval Latin word universitas has no reference to the scope of the curriculum of studies; it stands for the whole gathering, the whole body, of …
Apr 8, 2013: Dear Miss Kidd, Ursula K. Le Guin writes extremely well, but I’m sorry to have to say that on the basis of that one highly distinguishing quality …
Apr 7, 2013: typetoy: www.TypeToy.tumblr.com
Apr 7, 2013: Seminole men, Florida Everglades, 1910
Apr 7, 2013: James Sayers (1748-1823), The Comet, 18 February 1789. Etching and aquatint. Published by Thomas Cornell, London. Collection of Princeton University …
Apr 6, 2013: So if your phone doesn’t move from a single location between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. for say a week or so, Facebook can quickly deduce the …
Apr 6, 2013: A socialist typeface rediscovered and redesigned
Apr 6, 2013: All of which is to say that Kubrick, in his intellectual way, is offering us the experience of the mind breaking down, rather than telling a story …
Apr 6, 2013: Abigail Rines weighed in with a terrific post called “Feminist Housedude,” complete with a picture of her bearded, tattooed husband vacuuming with …
Apr 6, 2013: Nature and truth. Money and markets. Men and marriage. Faith and reason. They’ve all ended. Power ended in March, but that makes sense because …
Apr 5, 2013: But I also think culture and economics, ideas and incentives, are all entangled at a deep level, working in cycles and feedback loops rather than in …
Apr 5, 2013: Morozov’s essay eviscerates O’Reilly’s career in order to out him as a fake progressive who confuses entrepreneurialism with political freedom. In …
Apr 5, 2013: Some form of détente in the culture wars might once have been possible, recognizing that neither gays nor conservative Christians are going away …
Apr 4, 2013: So remember: 12:01 a.m., May 26. The schedule after that will be approximately as follows: the first animated GIFs from the first episode will appear …
Apr 4, 2013: I wish that I could be as charitable as you are and say that Morozov is raising good questions. He could be, but he works so hard to make dialogue …
Apr 3, 2013: The terrible news that Iain Banks is officially very poorly arrived today. Unlike others on these pages, I don’t know him personally, but his books …
Apr 3, 2013: poetrysociety: Baseball Season: Marianne Moore throwing out the first pitch 1968.
Apr 2, 2013: davidjphooker: (via No.9 | An Artist’s Journey)
Apr 1, 2013: As an alternative to National Poetry Month, I propose that we have an International Anti-Poetry month. As part of the activities, all verse in public …
Apr 1, 2013: On Core Beliefs Watching a Twitter conversation unfold today, I was reminded for the hundredth time that debates about same-sex marriage tend to be so fruitless …
Apr 1, 2013: Dream Vision (Apocalyptic Dream): Albrecht Dürer, 1525. Watercolour on paper, 30 x 43 cm. Text written by the artist beneath the watercolour: “In …
Mar 30, 2013: Unapologetic: Holy Week 6: Sabbath Unapologetic: Holy Week 6: Sabbath unapologetic-book: All day long, the next day, the city is quiet. The air above the city lacks the usual thousand …
Mar 30, 2013: There is, I believe, in the adventure of prayer, in our intimate relation with God, a point of breakthrough that takes us straight into the heart of …
Mar 28, 2013: unapologetic-book: Jesus before Pilate, from Sue Symons’ Bath Diptychs.
Mar 27, 2013: RAY: Tonight we’re talking to Darrel Dexter, the Komodo-dragon expert, from Upper Montclair, New Jersey. Say, doctor, would you tell us a little bit …
Mar 27, 2013: After two months of delays thanks to donations totalling $700, the Cowpocalypse finally arrives at 7:20 pm on September 7. At that moment, all the …
Mar 27, 2013: Who is smarter: a person or an ape? Well, it depends on the task. Consider Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University who, in a 2007 study, …
Mar 26, 2013: People like Nick Bilton over at The New York Times Bits blog argue that norms like thank-you messages can cost more in time and efficiency than they …
Mar 25, 2013: Bronfman’s Haggadah, which is illustrated with watercolors by his wife, Jan Aronson, includes quotations from such goyim as Franklin D. Roosevelt and …
Mar 25, 2013: I get a lot of mail from people who agree with me, but are impatient and want to propose methods of moving to a better situation very quickly – with …
Mar 25, 2013: The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the time. Google …
Mar 25, 2013: natgeofound: A milkman and his terrier pose at the back of a milk truck, May 1948. Photograph by Melville B. Grosvenor, National Geographic
Mar 25, 2013: For many — so, so many — of my Twitter friends.
Mar 25, 2013: Into the city they go, Yeshua and the nucleus of twenty or so men and women who have been following him about. The narrow stone streets are packed …
Mar 25, 2013: unapologetic-book: Palm Sunday, from Sue Symon’s Bath Diptychs, a mixed media life of Christ on permanent exhibition in the nave of Bath Abbey. The …
Mar 23, 2013: Albums reimagined as book covers
Mar 23, 2013: If you have the biggest computer and the biggest data, you can calculate how to target people with a political message, and have almost a guaranteed …
Mar 22, 2013: When Norenzayan became a student of psychology in 1994, four years after his family had moved from Lebanon to America, he was excited to study the …
Mar 22, 2013: On every campus we need large, highly visible vegetable gardens that are tended by everyone who likes to eat; cafeterias that provide, insofar as they …
Mar 22, 2013: Achebe can only fulfill his cultural responsibility by recounting as faithfully as he can the collapse of Igbo tradition — and, as a part of that …
Mar 22, 2013: The sounding of the battle-drum is important; the fierce waging of the war itself is important; and the telling of the story afterwards — each is …
Mar 21, 2013: [Richard] Florida himself, in his role as an editor at The Atlantic, admitted last month what his critics, including myself, have said for a decade: …
Mar 21, 2013: Privately, however, De Quincey often gave accounts of his addiction that were no doubt designed in part to elicit the sympathy of friends or buy more …
Mar 21, 2013: Arnold Newman’s portrait of Stravinsky, “published” version
Mar 21, 2013: ransomcenter: “There’s a reason so many of Newman’s portraits have become the iconic images of artists such as Stravinsky and Picasso. Entering their …
Mar 21, 2013: To understand why female lawyers, doctors, bankers, academics, high-tech executives and other, often expensively pedigreed, professionals quit work to …
Mar 21, 2013: philamuseum: Happy Birthday to abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann! Born March, 21, 1880, Hofmann would have been 133 today.
Mar 20, 2013: How can this be? If Christian numbers are exploding, how can they be left so far behind Muslims in the rate of expansion? The answer lies in …
Mar 20, 2013: It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can. When you took the problem to a …
Mar 20, 2013: Reviewing the bipartisan justifications for war in Iraq should serve as a stark reminder to brash liberals, confident conservatives, and …
Mar 19, 2013: The Vatican has an annual operating budget of under $300 million, while Harvard University, arguably the Vatican of elite secular opinion, has a …
Mar 19, 2013: Arrested Development is exploring the more playful, outré structural possibilities offered by the new platform on Netflix. Each episode will cover …
Mar 19, 2013: Worst book cover ever?
Mar 18, 2013: I am writing to apply for the position of Pope. I recently received my Bachelor of Arts, or “artium baccalaureus,” from Dartmouth College, with a …
Mar 18, 2013: What are terms of service? Remember the last time you signed up for a Web site and clicked through several pages of fine print? Yep, that was it. …
Mar 18, 2013: natgeofound: Pilgrims bathe in the Narmada’s 160-foot-tall Kadil Dhara waterfall in India, November 1988. Photograph by James P. Blair, National …
Mar 18, 2013: A decade-plus past its prime, The Simpsons has a stronger presence in American life than Cheers, Seinfeld, Community, or any other sitcom you can …
Mar 18, 2013: icancauseaconstellation: European exhibition of arts & crafts, Leipzig, Herbert Bayer (1927)
Mar 17, 2013: Religion without renunciation has obvious appeal. But its cultural consequences are not all self-evidently positive. Absent ideals of chastity, people …
Mar 16, 2013: Russian movie posters, via Brendan Koerner on Twitter
Mar 16, 2013: For decades the prospect of a pope from outside Europe has both excited and alarmed observers of the Roman Catholic Church. As the number of Catholics …
Mar 15, 2013: Me, if I have a really good meal, al fresco, say, followed by an espresso and an eau de vie and someone offers me a cigarette? I’m going to have it. I …
Mar 15, 2013: the world’s smallest book?
Mar 15, 2013: austinkleon: U B U W E B has a couple PDF scans of 1921 books by the amazing George Grosz.
Mar 14, 2013: Let me propose the following neo-Stoical attitude to the problem, which will no doubt ease the psychic pain of the next …
Mar 14, 2013: A reader of Williams’s biography is likely to come to the conclusion that he was rather creepy. His “romantic theology” – which understands erotic …
Mar 14, 2013: [youtube …
Mar 14, 2013: The fashionable international world attended en masse this afternoon at the wedding of the chevalier Jean Wyse de Neaulan, grand high chief ranger of …
Mar 14, 2013: I do almost nothing in clubs now. It demands a constant effort to keep up a schedule of gigs, and I have so many readings and events that I just …
Mar 14, 2013: When I asked Carson what appealed to her so much as a teenager about Greek, she answered, “It just seemed to me the best language.” I asked her to …
Mar 14, 2013: Motorola modernity, 1961, via Paleofuture
Mar 14, 2013: Map from John Hunt, “The Ceremonies of the Conclave and Print Culture in Baroque Rome”, via The Collation
Mar 14, 2013: RSS is a good tool. It gives you a simple way to shape and filter the web’s content to suit your own needs. It lends you its power when you need it …
Mar 14, 2013: Then other things started to come out. EA released statements to the effect that the game would be nigh-impossible to reengineer to run offline, …
Mar 14, 2013: thingsmagazine: From A Map of the World
Mar 13, 2013: Ironically, I think the reason Google always wanted to pull the Reader team off to build these other social products was that the Reader team actually …
Mar 13, 2013: When rich people present the idea that they’ve learned to live lightly as a paradoxical insight, they have the idea of wealth backwards. You can only …
Mar 13, 2013: amusiclibrary: The Rite of Spring: Igor Stravinsky’s own hand-written manuscripts are published for the first time in 2013
Mar 13, 2013: Is there anything better than walking into a library for the first time, the wonder and joy of having so much knowledge and history and entertainment …
Mar 13, 2013: thingsmagazine: Drug Store in the Pennsylvania Station, New York (via things)
Mar 12, 2013: Despite evidence that anger is routinely expressed over the Internet via weblogs, social networking Web sites, and other venues, no published research …
Mar 12, 2013: From one of Mark Changizi’s research notebooks. I love stuff like this, immoderately.
Mar 12, 2013: Queries on professional authorship today bring back anecdotes of small advances and the impossibility of being a writer without grants, …
Mar 12, 2013: The future of writing in America—or, at least, the future of making a living by writing—seems in doubt as rarely before. Thanks to the Internet, the …
Mar 11, 2013: Faulkner is no thinker — his occasional reflections on politics or the race question do not illuminate their subjects; he is no poet — his purple …
Mar 11, 2013: “I have decreasing amounts of tolerance for unnecessary communication because it is a burden and a cost,” said Baratunde Thurston, co-founder of …
Mar 10, 2013: We don’t know if Facebook has some kind of Paedophile-o-Meter. But, given the extensive user analysis it already does, it probably wouldn’t be very …
Mar 10, 2013: So why am I recommending the word [naches] to my gentile brethren? Because we’re all Jews now, in that respect. There are no hereditary places …
Mar 9, 2013: Wealthy musician Amanda Palmer, who last year raised $1.2 million on Kickstarter to produce and release a record, recently used a TED talk to expand …
Mar 9, 2013: newhousebooks: Lights on for safety. From Seven Is Magic, 1969
Mar 9, 2013: philamuseum: Great and Mighty Artist of the Day: Bruno Del Favero Born Princeton, Michigan, 1910; died Greenwich, Conneticut, 1995 Bruno Del Favero …
Mar 9, 2013: preciseandtowering: allthingseurope: The Dark Hedges, Northern Ireland (by Maximilian Pilz)
Mar 9, 2013: [vimeo 57525543 w=250 h=141] The future of bookstores (Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
Mar 9, 2013: more on mediation Another comment from the same thread: Mike, thanks for the thoughtful reply! I continue to think, contra mundum, that both Nathan and Nick are making …
Mar 9, 2013: on mediation Here’s part of one of my comments on a debate between Nathan Jurgenson and Nick Carr, here: I would say that all our experience is indeed mediated, …
Mar 8, 2013: Nobody loves snow as much as Malcolm loves snow.
Mar 8, 2013: It is surely no accident that the idea of sincerity, of the own self and the difficulty of knowing and showing it, should have arisen to vex men’s …
Mar 8, 2013: Picture the tragic scenes in Crouch End, north London, early this year. The patrons of Harris Hoole, a local coffee shop, had just learned to their …
Mar 8, 2013: jonklassen: A spread from ‘The Dark’, written by Lemony Snicket. Comes out April 2nd!
Mar 8, 2013: And so scientists are busily animadverting on Nagel’s account of science. They like to note condescendingly that he calls himself a “layman.” Yet too …
Mar 7, 2013: The sad truth is that most families who stretched their finances to the limit for the sake of a set of encyclopædias would have been better off …
Mar 7, 2013: beingblog: laughingsquid: Fahrenheit 451 Book Cover With a Match and Striking Paper This is just plain brilliant. Love the type too. ~Trent …
Mar 7, 2013: The history of literature is replete with folly but the news that Sebastian Faulks is writing a novel featuring Reginald Jeeves and Bertram Wooster …
Mar 7, 2013: typeworship: Funky Flyer Reminiscent of a woodblock print, this intricately composed flyer is for an event at the Baby Jupiter club, Leeds, UK. I …
Mar 6, 2013: SIR: I am grateful for the review which my book Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England received from the Provost of Kings (Mr Bernard …
Mar 5, 2013: So, so, SO wrong
Mar 5, 2013: Ms. Kenney described the blog’s strengths. “When there was an overriding issue or event, the blog was a locus and a magnet, attracting tens of …
Mar 5, 2013: typeworship: A Special Specimen This wonderful and colourful type specimen once belonged to Paul Rand. It was given to JP Williams, who had become …
Mar 5, 2013: Celibacy is not only an ancient tradition of asceticism, but more important, it is an ancient tradition of love. Celibacy is, in short, about loving …
Mar 5, 2013: Not so long ago, I was on the usual type of panel discussion at a literary festival, far from home and the people whose hands I prefer to be holding. …
Mar 3, 2013: mental gluttony Again, while it is a great blessing that a man no longer has to be rich in order to enjoy the masterpieces of the past, for paperbacks, first-rate …
Mar 3, 2013: Whenever you hear someone explain that a concept is so foreign to this or that culture that people cannot even use their language to describe it, it …
Mar 3, 2013: The popular interest in the brain means that we increasingly have a “folk neuroscience” that is strongly linked to personal identity and subjective …
Mar 2, 2013: In any political conflict between extremists and non-extremists, the non-extremists start with one serious disadvantage. They tend to be …
Mar 2, 2013: Modern economics bases much of its analysis on the idea that people “maximise their utility”. The idea is that everything we do makes sense in some …
Mar 1, 2013: 60ansdevadrouille: Temple de Banteay Srei ( groupe d’Angkor, 967). 1.Tour- sanctuaire centrale avec ses gardiens de porte. Chef d’oeuvre en grès …
Mar 1, 2013: That’s what I do now: I lace up my boots and head into the hills, then do the same again the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. …
Mar 1, 2013: Kodachrome achieved for National Geographic what its writers seldom could, capturing America as a dreamspace, where the most familiar sights become …
Feb 28, 2013: unapologetic-book: Gaudi’s cracked-pottery mosaics in the Parc Guell, Barcelona
Feb 28, 2013: jonklassen: This is an honest to goodness rug I got to design for a project called Node run by Chris Haughton. There are some pretty great other rugs …
Feb 28, 2013: unapologetic-book: The British paperback of Unapologetic has arrived. An exceptionally beautiful book.
Feb 28, 2013: buzz: Taco Map of Mexico (via Burrito Justice) Now I want tacos SO BAD.
Feb 28, 2013: seeing Ice Age Scotland from the air
Feb 28, 2013: thingsmagazine: Prefab house concept for Alcoa by Charles W. Moore and William Turnbill (via Mid-Centuria)
Feb 28, 2013: Why not build an airport that floats in the Thames Estuary?
Feb 27, 2013: After his acceptance speech TED curator Chris Anderson turned the auditoriums in Long Beach and La Quinta into a synergistic Baptist revival-style …
Feb 26, 2013: But avoiding the words that people didn’t use back then is ultimately just a mechanical problem. A Princeton history graduate student, Ben Schmidt, …
Feb 26, 2013: East Lake Park, Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1920s. I grew up right next to East Lake but can’t quite figure out where this is — maybe down at the …
Feb 25, 2013: And here we have arrived deep in the belly of the neoliberal whale, just in time to watch the experts and technocrats hand out machetes to we, the …
Feb 25, 2013: As nations become wealthier, it is harder for them to sustain high rates of growth. That doesn’t mean that the United States is in decline, or even …
Feb 25, 2013: Food is molecules, not bits—which also means it can’t be digitally copied, shared, pirated, or sent across the Web. And that may be the secret of its …
Feb 25, 2013: Though Benedict XVI traveled widely and tried to promote the growth of Catholicism outside the West, he was nevertheless in many ways a deeply …
Feb 25, 2013: Medieval Batman, via Adam Roberts on Twitter
Feb 24, 2013: oldhollywood: Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Fritz Lang (upper right), & crew on the set of Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang) (via)
Feb 24, 2013: thingsmagazine: U.S.S. Tiger Shark
Feb 24, 2013: robertogreco: Liyuan Library, Li Xiaodong Atelier
Feb 24, 2013: Here the decline in work-force participation is of a piece with the broader turn away from community in America — from family breakdown and declining …
Feb 23, 2013: vintageanchor: “Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world’s longest, most thrilling conversation.” — Richard Russo …
Feb 23, 2013: Philip Jenkins: “As an intact book from this era, the Faddan More Psalter is an amazing enough find in its own right. Even so, its story became even …
Feb 23, 2013: [youtube …
Feb 23, 2013: And grossly inaccurate. But, you know, never mind.
Feb 23, 2013: I am one of those who believe that a human being is not an autonomous construction with no given structure, order, status, or role. I believe that the …
Feb 22, 2013: Amazing photos of coral reef life by Felix Salazar — please click through for the rest
Feb 22, 2013: beingblog: A society which disregards those who are weak and non-productive risks exaggerating the development of reason, organization, aggression and …
Feb 22, 2013: typetoy: www.typetoy.tumblr.com
Feb 22, 2013: typetoy: www.typetoy.tumblr.com
Feb 21, 2013: Beautiful photos of the Russian meteorite
Feb 21, 2013: Preview of coming attractions
Feb 21, 2013: ransomcenter: In this Q&A, experts (including Harry Ransom Center Senior Research Curator of Photography Roy Flukinger) discuss the changing …
Feb 21, 2013: typeworship: Barcelona bites: Five design studios have been picked to represent the best design talent from Spain’s cultural headquarters, …
Feb 21, 2013: But if Jane Austen could see that a world of frantic change was about to supplant the world of peaceful fixity she knew, why then does she allow the …
Feb 21, 2013: The Confessions warned some early readers off opium, as De Quincey claimed he intended. “Better, a thousand times better, die than have anything to do …
Feb 21, 2013: Gray argues that it is not consciousness or language that distinguishes us from other animals. They are conscious, too, and they communicate with each …
Feb 20, 2013: newberrylibrary: The Newberry—you may be surprised to learn—has a remarkable collection of musical scores and ephemera. Above, you’ll find three of …
Feb 20, 2013: newberrylibrary: On this day in 1564, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni—the Renaissance painter and sculptor, best known for his frescoes in …
Feb 20, 2013: The South still attracts the most domestic migrants of any U.S. region. Last year, it boasted six of the top eight states in terms of net domestic …
Feb 20, 2013: What might dolphins be saying with all those clicks and squeaks? Each others’ names, suggests a new study of the so-called signature whistles that …
Feb 20, 2013: The history of reading is littered with extreme emotions, especially during times of technological change. At the end of the eighteenth century, a …
Feb 19, 2013: In fact the MOOC is not a disruptive form but a fundamentally conservative one, flattening academic practice into the playing back of fixed lectures …
Feb 19, 2013: Recognizing the continuity of evolution also makes clear the futility of selecting any particular time period for human harmony. Why would we be any …
Feb 19, 2013: I think Jacobs is right when he argues that Watchmen’s characters are simplistically sketched and have backgrounds/origin stories based on the tritest …
Feb 19, 2013: And yet, in spite of the Black Keys’ indie roots, the band’s victory had hardly anything to do with indie rock. Just as they sidestepped the …
Feb 19, 2013: Mantel’s piece is about violation. It is about intrusion, spectacle, about a kind of eerie return of the sacrificial monarch who has to die so the …
Feb 18, 2013: jonklassen2: sketch from today
Feb 18, 2013: The emphasis on his royalty meant that [Richard II] cared deeply for ceremony and for spectacle. He enjoyed dressing up. On one occasion he wore a …
Feb 18, 2013: This month’s A Good Day to Die Hard is the fifth Die Hard movie. The night before it opened, it had a 10 percent critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes …
Feb 18, 2013: Remembering Kowloon Walled City
Feb 18, 2013: typeworship: Bodoni pop-up book. Beautiful. cukri: Bodoni Bedlam Pop-Up Book by Victoria Macey Very talented illustrator and designer Victoria …
Feb 17, 2013: Here’s how Shepherd would later describe the difference between Night and Day People—more than a half-century later, you’ll still recognize the types. …
Feb 16, 2013: Objections to Christianity… are phrased in words, but that does not mean they are really a matter of language and analysis and argument. Words are …
Feb 15, 2013: typetoy: www.typetoy.tumblr.com
Feb 14, 2013: Emmylou Harris Pitchfork: You’ve been associated with a lot of very inspired but also very hard living guys. How have you managed to move in the same circles …
Feb 14, 2013: Carol Anne Duffy, "Chaucer's Valentine" (for N.) The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne… but be my valentine and I’ll one candle burn, love’s light a fluent tongue, old habit young, …
Feb 13, 2013: There’s one example in particular that comes close to summing up the entire argument of What Money Can’t Buy. It concerns an Israeli daycare centre, …
Feb 13, 2013: There exists a very strong, but one-sided and thus untrustworthy, idea that in order to understand a foreign culture, one must enter into it, …
Feb 13, 2013: The dialogic nature of consciousness, the dialogic nature of human life itself. The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human …
Feb 13, 2013: thingsmagazine: Print by Jonathan Green
Feb 13, 2013: T. S. Eliot forgot what he wrote and what he meant.
Feb 12, 2013: Near the forks of the Grand River in present-day Perkins County, in August 1823, while scouting alone for game for the expedition’s larder, Glass …
Feb 12, 2013: All of these approaches can help achieve Lahey’s aim of giving shy students the confidence to speak up for themselves. But none of this necessarily …
Feb 12, 2013: You don’t have to look very hard for the determinism in Dan Slater’s Love in the Time of Algorithms. It’s right in the subtitle: “What Technology Does …
Feb 11, 2013: newyorker: Teju Cole on the civilizing function of literature, and the disparity between Obama’s bookshelf and his use of targeted killings: How on …
Feb 10, 2013: No deus ex machina waits in the wings; no man behind the curtain. We have no Maxwell’s demon to help us filter and search. “We want the Demon, you …
Feb 9, 2013: Fables de Florian, on Bibliodyssey
Feb 8, 2013: Partly, I use [the word beauty] politically because it’s a taboo word for architects – it makes them twitchy, and I quite enjoy that. I think they are …
Feb 8, 2013: The disaster unfolded slowly. The professors and students were diplomatic, but a pall of boredom fell over the seminar table when my work was under …
Feb 8, 2013: typetoy: www.typetoy.com
Feb 8, 2013: In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and though no book was ever spared …
Feb 8, 2013: We saw the Coronation on television. I thought it needed work and should have been fixed up in New Haven. They ought to have cut at least half an hour …
Feb 7, 2013: unapologetic-book: Not the right place for it, but too good not to post somewhere - Red Plenty recreated by the fabulous Pulp-o-Mizer. Red Plenty is …
Feb 7, 2013: What I lack that the poets and novelists have, the really good ones, is not finally sight or insight, talent or memory—things you’re either born with …
Feb 6, 2013: Window-washers dress as superheroes as they work at a children’s hospital
Feb 1, 2013: I think it’s important to realize that what happened in the Swartz case happens it lots and lots of federal criminal cases. Yes, the prosecutors tried …
Feb 1, 2013: typetoy: http://static.designspiration.net/data/l/867280298178_dlxZql7i_l.jpg
Feb 1, 2013: I kept writing through the summer, and in August the baby was born and I’d cradle him in my left arm while writing melodies at the piano with my …
Feb 1, 2013: Best postage stamp that ever will be, obvsly.
Jan 31, 2013: Pace Roger Kimball, my patron, my host, my colleague in literature: political stand-off, not some conspiracy against civilization, was and is …
Jan 31, 2013: Photo by Marcin Ryczek, via @brainpicker on Twitter.
Jan 30, 2013: Academy of American Poets. A lovely poster, though the Rilke quote is the surest recipe I can think of for really bad verse.
Jan 30, 2013: So the argument about the adaptiveness of stories, in Pinker, Gottschall, and Boyd alike, goes something like this: we are evolutionarily wired to be …
Jan 29, 2013: mediumaevum: Lindisfarne Gospels This is one of the very few pages on which Eadfrith’s original 7th century script can be admired almost entirely …
Jan 29, 2013: typetoy: http://letterology.blogspot.com/2012/05/alexander-girards-influence-on-modern.html
Jan 29, 2013: This overachiever’s mentality has also determined campus attitudes toward sex. Few notice the connection, because the end result—sexual …
Jan 29, 2013: thingsmagazine: Imaginary View, landscapes by Rachel Thomas and Dan Tobin Smith (via things)
Jan 29, 2013: [youtube …
Jan 28, 2013: typetoy: www.typetoy.tumblr.com
Jan 28, 2013: thenearsightedmonkey: Dear Unthinkable Mind students, Why memorize poetry? “The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with …
Jan 28, 2013: Mondo movie posters
Jan 28, 2013: wwnorton: From Rhizome’s review of Alessandro Ludovico’s Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing since 1864.
Jan 27, 2013: thingsmagazine: Tessa Newcomb, a painted four-drawer chest (via Bonhams)
Jan 23, 2013: We put out the fire but there were, um, side-effects.
Jan 23, 2013: On Erasmus and his reed pen, via Anne Trubek on Twitter.
Jan 23, 2013: Mary the Modest was met in the lane By Someone or Something she couldn’t explain. Joseph the Honest looked up and God’s eye Was winking at him through …
Jan 23, 2013: typetoy: www.typetoy.tumblr.com
Jan 23, 2013: thingsmagazine: Portrety, 1922, from Russian Literature and Works on Paper
Jan 23, 2013: thingsmagazine: The Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms, 1931, Chernikov, from Russian Literature and Works on Paper
Jan 22, 2013: A page from the Odyssey, as printed by Aldus Manutius in Venice, courtesy of Sarah Werner. Amazing how beautiful Aldus’s books still are: those …
Jan 22, 2013: “E” is for Existential Crisis
Jan 21, 2013: The phrase that came to mind when I first saw the indictment against Swartz was Alexander Pope’s famous rhetorical question: “Who breaks a butterfly …
Jan 21, 2013: At the end of the 19th century, the French Army emerged as the leading proponent of the slouchy, somewhat slovenly “bent-knee” method of …
Jan 21, 2013: thingsmagazine: Bendix 526C, 1946, from The Richard Balsbaugh Collection of Vintage Radios
Jan 19, 2013: Duane Allman was a great genius. That’s all I really want to say.
Jan 19, 2013: It may seem kind of strange for a company to build a search engine — a pretty costly undertaking — using criteria that it knows to be corrupted. But …
Jan 17, 2013: typeworship: Happy Birthday Johnston and the London Underground This week London sees the 150th anniversary of the London Underground. To commemorate …
Jan 15, 2013: typetoy: www.typetoy.tumblr.com
Jan 15, 2013: typetoy: www.typetoy.tumblr.com
Jan 14, 2013: The Book of Common Prayer has its very own tumblelog! It doesn’t get more exciting than that, does it, folks? I’ve started a tumblelog devoted to the Book of Common Prayer, of which I am writing a …
Jan 12, 2013: I instantly and irreversibly block based on @replies I find annoying. Yes, it’s selfish. Yes, it’s about me. That’s the whole point….You could very …
Jan 12, 2013: In short, Aaron Swartz was not the super hacker breathlessly described in the Government’s indictment and forensic reports, and his actions did not …
Jan 12, 2013: Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS …
Jan 12, 2013: “How was The Hobbit?” my wife asks. “It was actually OK,” the youngest one says. “Are you kidding?” I say. “It was awesome.” “Seriously?” says the …
Jan 11, 2013: [Lionel Trilling’s] last book, Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), is a battlefield report from the conflict between his private and public selves, in …
Jan 11, 2013: But when it comes to the style of a great man’s discourse, I can speak with a great deal less prejudice, and maybe with somewhat more competence, for …
Jan 9, 2013: Apted has said that the subject with whom he most closely identifies is Nick, the precocious farm boy who goes to Oxford and thereafter moves to …
Jan 9, 2013: Can you imagine if our clothes were Internet-enabled? Can you imagine if you lost a sock? You could send out a search and sock No. 3117 would respond …
Jan 9, 2013: When I first saw Gibbons’ work in close quarters … I nearly came out in hives. I was so astonished by the flamboyance of his modelling, and by the …
Jan 8, 2013: Even today, the archetype is so fixed and commonplace as to be thunderously obvious: Long-haired men in tight pants, playing crushingly loud music on …
Jan 8, 2013: poetsorg: “The way Hope builds his House” by Emily Dickinson. Amherst Library recently made her complete manuscripts available online.
Jan 8, 2013: Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes is a truly remarkable book.
Jan 8, 2013: This point is really only a symptom of a deeper and even more common problem Wurtzel displays. She consistently writes as if the joy and happiness of …
Jan 4, 2013: When the famous Beachy Head lighthouse on the Sussex coast was being constructed, in 1901, workers were taken to and from it by cable car.
Jan 4, 2013: “The Long-Winded Speech,” at the British Museum
Jan 3, 2013: I do feel that some people may be called to unbelief—or what looks like unbelief—in order that faith may take new forms. Emily Dickinson is a good …
Jan 3, 2013: gilliflower: mark greer, poster design for the art directors club of houston
Jan 3, 2013: 60ansdevadrouille: Agra, le palais de Shah Jahan dans le Fort Rouge. C’est là qu’il termina ses jours, face au Tadj Mahal, emprisonné par son fils …
Jan 3, 2013: The publications from The School of Life imprint further the same basic project: bring brisk, philosophically inflected practicality to universal …
Jan 3, 2013: Maybe Brodie got a raw deal, maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. It doesn’t count. He’s a lout with language. I can’t help somebody who thinks, or thinks …
Jan 2, 2013: It’s pretty hard to have a “career” doing any single creative thing nowadays. If you really make a stir as a “science fiction writer” nowadays, you’re …
Jan 2, 2013: Whenever I find myself in small towns like Spring Green, I remember how it felt to grow up in Smalltown, U.S.A., where the “myth” of community is in …
Jan 2, 2013: Where are the Hittites? Why does no one find it remarkable that in most world cities today there are Jews but not one single Hittite, even though the …
Jan 1, 2013: If there is anything more boring than the questions asked about the South, it is the answers Southerners give. If I hear one more Northerner ask about …
Jan 1, 2013: Amblyopia is a visual disorder in which the two eyes don’t properly align; sometimes it’s called “lazy eye.” The standard medical advice is to treat …
Dec 31, 2012: It may seem peculiar that a persuasive theology of parenthood should be embedded in a 20th-century novel set in 14th-century Norway. Yet the power of …
Dec 31, 2012: I recently saw a 70mm print of The Master and I realized that, other than my own films, it’s the first photochemically finished film I’ve seen in many …
Dec 31, 2012: BLDGBlog
Dec 31, 2012: oldhollywood: Katharine Hepburn in Mary of Scotland (1936, dir. John Ford) (via)
Dec 30, 2012: I don’t think Gates and Zuckerberg are good role models for young people. And not just because they dropped out. It’s more subtle. Most kids who try …
Dec 29, 2012: But here I also have a bit of megalomania. I almost conceive of myself as a Christ figure. OK! Kill me! I’m ready to sacrifice myself. But the cause …
Dec 29, 2012: How does your approach to writing fiction and non-fiction vary? I write non-fiction quicker and I write it on a computer. Fiction I write longhand and …
Dec 29, 2012: Every historical period has its own presiding powers and principalities on high. Ours, for what it is worth, seem to want to make us happy, even if …
Dec 29, 2012: I have to admit that I have never been an admirer of Jung’s writings, even on those rare occasions when I have fleetingly spied what looked like a …
Dec 28, 2012: Plenty of adults say racist things, revert into ungrateful brats during the holidays, and demonstrate a tenuous grasp on world history. And yet these …
Dec 28, 2012: 60ansdevadrouille: Chameau pâturant dans la plaine de Dzoungarie (près d’Ouroumchi), au pied Nord des Tian Shan - ici les glaciers du Bogda Shan …
Dec 28, 2012: I do think it’s a cultural catharsis, and it’s a cinematic catharsis. Even — it can even be good for the soul, actually. I mean, not to sound like a …
Dec 28, 2012: If you’re so used to evolution that you fail to see how weird it is, you’ll be in a poor position to explain why it isn’t as crazy as it at first …
Dec 28, 2012: Less is not necessarily more. Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised …
Dec 27, 2012: There is inevitably something absurd about our priesthood, because what we stand for is so infinitely greater than our poor little selves. But there’s …
Dec 27, 2012: The point here is not to suggest that the NRA and its allies are a threat to American democracy itself. Rather, it’s that they’re a threat to the …
Dec 26, 2012: I actually wouldn’t wish I had a gun. I’ve shot a rifle at camp once, but that’s about it. If I had a gun, there is a good chance I would shoot …
Dec 26, 2012: oldhollywood: Dwight Frye in Frankenstein (1931, dir. James Whale) Set design by Herman Rosse & Charles D. Hall (via)
Dec 26, 2012: What has happened in one industry after another is that it has become standard practice to tell people who create anything of aesthetic or …
Dec 26, 2012: U. A. Fanthorpe, "Bird Psalm" The Swallow said, He comes like me, Longed for; unexpectedly. The superficial eye Will pass him by, Said the Wren. The best singer ever heard. No one …
Dec 26, 2012: Laypeople also had an active role in announcing the reassurance of God’s forgiveness to one another. When a Christian was suffering spiritually over a …
Dec 26, 2012: I must confess to considerable irritation on this score. When people tell me that “Story” does this or that for us, I always want to throw up my hands …
Dec 26, 2012: The reason for the crawl and slither of these later scenes is plain: the director is coiling himself, as is his wont, for an apocalypse of blood. Dr. …
Dec 26, 2012: For alcohol and firearms alike, there’s room for sensible restrictions in a non-prohibitionist world. I don’t think the Assault Weapons Ban was …
Dec 26, 2012: On his death-bed, the dwarf king, Thorin commends Bilbo’s blend of courage and wisdom, adding, “if more of us valued food and cheer and song above …
Dec 26, 2012: At a concert in New York, he instructed his bandmates to walk onstage and begin the set by destroying their instruments, since “everybody’s breaking …
Dec 25, 2012: Xc Wise Men are busy being computer literate. There should be a law against confusing Religion with mathematics. There was a baby. Born where? And when? …
Dec 24, 2012: The aire is not so full of Moats, of Atomes, as the Church is of Mercies; and as we can suck in no part of aire, but we take in those Moats, those …
Dec 24, 2012: Malcolm receives an early Christmas present. Emphasis on receives.
Dec 24, 2012: c86: Taken from Woman’s Day Best Ideas For Christmas, 1974 via CheshireCat666
Dec 24, 2012: U. A. Fanthorpe, "BC - AD" This was the moment when Before Turned into After, and the future’s Uninvented timekeepers presented arms. This was the moment when nothing Happened. …
Dec 23, 2012: People use guns. But in a sense guns use people, too. When we have the technology for violence easily to hand, our choices are skewed and we are more …
Dec 23, 2012: U. A. Fanthorpe, "What the Donkey Saw" No room in the inn, of course, And not that much in the stable, What with the shepherds, Magi, Mary, Joseph, the heavenly host — Not to mention the …
Dec 22, 2012: U. A. Fanthorpe, "The Wicked Fairy at the Manger" My gift for the child: No wife, kids, home; No money sense. Unemployable. Friends, yes. But the wrong sort – The workshy, women, wogs, Petty …
Dec 21, 2012: Saturn backlit by the sun. Gasp.
Dec 21, 2012: A page from William Sutherland’s The Practical Guide to Sign Writing and Gilding, and Ornamenting on Glass (1860), via All About Lettering.
Dec 20, 2012: In the case of Crave, adding computer memory to a sex toy is just the beginning of the innovation. “Next year, we’ll be introducing products with …
Dec 20, 2012: paleofuture: Santa Claus Builds A Flying Machine
Dec 20, 2012: cariosus: Folded Hedgehog Book (by clara maffei)
Dec 20, 2012: Introducing the Beetbox, which “turns vegetables into a drum kit thanks to a Raspberry Pi edible circuitry project. Beetbox uses the tiny Raspberry Pi …
Dec 19, 2012: “I had this realization that every individual language does at least one thing better than every other language,” he said. For example, the Australian …
Dec 18, 2012: Sure, my photos aren’t the greatest or the prettiest or the most original. But they’re mine. And if you want to do something with them, just ask me, …
Dec 18, 2012: Many years ago we did an animated Nativity for Macy’s. We put it in the window, and we had baby Jesus moving, and Mary and Joseph. Very discreet. …
Dec 18, 2012: Meet the Squander Bug
Dec 18, 2012: Concept cover art by Nick Caro. My thoughts on Adam Lanza, Minority Report, and Malcolm Gladwell on Israel intelligence are here.
Dec 18, 2012: A spider building a fake spider
Dec 18, 2012: J. R. R. Tolkien helping the OED define ‘walrus’
Dec 17, 2012: The latest and in this case particularly heart–rending mass killing has re-ignited the gun control debate. Though I own a shotgun and enjoy …
Dec 16, 2012: typetoy: TypeToy.tumblr.com
Dec 16, 2012: typetoy: TypeToy.tumblr.com
Dec 16, 2012: typetoy: TypeToy.tumblr.com
Dec 16, 2012: typetoy: TypeToy.tumblr.com
Dec 16, 2012: Tumblr is a weird social network. Like Twitter its content is (very largely) public, and yet like Facebook it’s opaque to social analysis. Follower …
Dec 15, 2012: It’s telling that Dostoyevsky, himself a Christian, offered no direct theological rebuttal to his character’s speech. The counterpoint to Ivan in “The …
Dec 15, 2012: Hiding beneath all the CGI Sturm und Drang is a powerful story about what it means to have a home and, conversely, what it means to be lost. Bilbo, as …
Dec 14, 2012: Coding Challenge! Well, okay, not really a challenge, but a longstanding wish. My friend Matt Frost and I periodically taunt one another with reminiscences of Stikkit, …
Dec 14, 2012: How should the church respond to congregational decline, financial deficits, and vocational shrinkage? The answer is obvious: make ministerial …
Dec 14, 2012: the year in volcanic activity
Dec 14, 2012: I used to find my sleeplessness – I usually fall off for a few hours, wake for maybe two, then sleep until morning – a cause of distress, and I have …
Dec 14, 2012: Invaluable.
Dec 14, 2012: some assembly required
Dec 13, 2012: Not being able to share photos seamlessly from one social network to another may be the epitome of a “first world problem;” getting lost in the …
Dec 13, 2012: Another purported quality of Coursera is that it is “open”, as everything must now be. The cyber-credo of “open” sounds so liberal and friendly that …
Dec 13, 2012: There was a time – long ago to most of you, though it seems recent to me – when Rosemary, our children, and I were living from paycheck to paycheck …
Dec 12, 2012: neverstopreading: A lovely piece of ephemera: Charles Dickens Reading Ticket circa 1867. Source: Print Cave
Dec 12, 2012: According to one person there, the ground conditions at the actual Equator are not stable enough to hold a monument nor to welcome the huge crowds …
Dec 12, 2012: I wish I could say that in my online writing I have managed to resist the temptation to label others and thus turn them into discredited, ghostly …
Dec 11, 2012: Via Typophile
Dec 10, 2012: ransomcenter: Read the accompanying article, “Sangorski & Sutcliffe: The Rolls Royce of Bookbinding” on the Ransom Center’s blog, Cultural …
Dec 10, 2012: [youtube …
Dec 10, 2012: typetoy: www.typetoy.tumblr.com
Dec 7, 2012: supersonicelectronic: Jaehyo Lee. Wooden sculptures by Jaehyo Lee. Read More
Dec 7, 2012: 60ansdevadrouille: Ellora, Narasimha - avatar de Visnu qui s’est incarné en sanglier pour sauver le Terre engloutie au fond d el’Océan Cosmique. …
Dec 7, 2012: Thomas de Quincey and the Ratcliffe Highway Murders
Dec 6, 2012: Another Michael Nichols photo from California’s redwood forests.
Dec 6, 2012: photograph by Michael Nichols of The President, the second most massive tree on earth, and the scientists who are studying it.
Dec 6, 2012: This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct …
Dec 6, 2012: Of course, at their best, universities and academic societies tend … train students and faculty alike in the art of giving credit, not the pseudo-art …
Dec 5, 2012: RIP Oscar Niemeyer
Dec 5, 2012: But although my deceased father of happy memory, Grangousier, had bent his best endeavours to make me profit in all perfection and political …
Dec 5, 2012: If Harvard wishes to retain its primary existence as a gigantic profit-maximizing hedge fund, that is well and good, but meanwhile perhaps it should …
Dec 2, 2012: wwnorton: wwnorton: Before there was Pinterest or Mixel or any of the many online applications devoted to the art of virtual collage, Joseph Cornell …
Dec 2, 2012: Psychiatrists had a seat-of-the pants definition of a PD: “If your first impression of your patient is that he is an asshole, then he probably has a …
Nov 30, 2012: [youtube …
Nov 30, 2012: Books, I think, are dead. You cannot fight the zeitgeist and you cannot fight corporations. The genius of corporations is that they force you to make …
Nov 30, 2012: mwfrost: Elektroschutz in 132 Bildern (Electrical Protection in 132 Pictures) by Viennese physician Stefan Jellinek (1878-1968). (via 30 Ways to Die …
Nov 30, 2012: Google searches and reception history A while back the Atlantic Tech Channel’s Megan Garber was entertaining us with adventures in Google’s search-autocompletion features: what she called …
Nov 30, 2012: davidjphooker: (via Chicago Architecture Blog - Architecture Tours of Chicago)
Nov 30, 2012: If one listens to academics, one might make the mistake of thinking they would like their complaints to be remedied; but in fact the complaints of …
Nov 30, 2012: The mystery book sculptor of Scotland strikes again!
Nov 29, 2012: 'As a non-Christian, indeed a committed atheist, I was worried about how I’d feel about this book but it pulled off a rare feat: making Christianity seem appealing to those who have no interest in ever being Christians.' - Alain De Botton, choosing ‘As a non-Christian, indeed a committed atheist, I was worried about how I’d feel about this book but it pulled off a rare feat: making …
Nov 29, 2012: You can find him in the café down the street, the one that serves fair-trade coffee and takes a dollar off if you donate a canned good at Christmas. …
Nov 29, 2012: Jacobs thinks we're stuck with mediocre Bible translations because the divorce between belletrist and philologist will remain, given our …
Nov 28, 2012: thingsmagazine: Found in this hefty steampunk portfolio, a compilation of (mostly imagined) cityscapes
Nov 28, 2012: I was scheduled to fly to Bahrain on Saturday, Dec. 1st, 2012. We received our official itinerary from the State Dept. at 5:58am, on Monday, November …
Nov 28, 2012: For the beautiful in Mozart seems to stand apart, untouched by human hands. Which is to say that Mozart’s music often seems effortless, an aes-thetic …
Nov 27, 2012: So we have a right-wing and a left-wing party. But we do not have a conservative party – nor could we. Parties are organized around coalitions of …
Nov 27, 2012: Wittgenstein’s intellectual asceticism had a great influence on the philosophers of the English-speaking world. It narrowed the scope of philosophy by …
Nov 26, 2012: On September 13 of this year, a private company named Ocean Renewable Power Company in collaboration with the Maine Public Utilities Commission, …
Nov 26, 2012: Thomas James, “Mummy of a Lady Named Jumtesonekh” XXI Dynasty My body holds its shape. The genius is intact. Will I return to Thebes? In that lost country The eucalyptus trees have turned to stone. …
Nov 26, 2012: Next June Princeton University Press has a very special present for y’all. Don’t forget!
Nov 26, 2012: thingsmagazine: The Acme Catalogue
Nov 26, 2012: "Machines," by Michael Donaghy Dearest, note how these two are alike: This harpsicord pavane by Purcell And the racer’s twelve-speed bike. The machinery of grace is always simple. …
Nov 26, 2012: A murmuration of starlings. More photos here. Thanks to @markchangizi on Twitter.
Nov 26, 2012: W. H. Auden, "Fleet Visit" The sailors come ashore Out of their hollow ships, Mild-looking middle-class boys Who read the comic strips; One baseball game is more To them than …
Nov 26, 2012: thingsmagazine: Harrier, by Fiona Banner (via things)
Nov 23, 2012: Paris 1929, in color. Via @ellouis on Twitter. (Source: http://albert-kahn.hauts-de-seine.net/)
Nov 23, 2012: We were woken by bright sunlight, needling through the cracks in the bamboo wall, and the sound of children’s voices. I pushed open the door of our …
Nov 23, 2012: So what we have created in the past twenty years is a theological anomaly which has insidiously been made to seem normal: a whole cadre of priests - a …
Nov 23, 2012: Martian dunes. Supposedly. Not sure what this looks like.
Nov 22, 2012: Growing up, assimilating the wisdom of the past, is in great part learning how to organize the sensorium productively for intellectual purposes. Man’s …
Nov 22, 2012: Main concourse of the old Penn Station in 1962
Nov 22, 2012: From A Telegraph story on how rubbish from Everest is being turned into art. The caption reads, “Edmund Hillary, Mount Everest, Nepal.” Probably it’s …
Nov 22, 2012: The waiting room of New York’s old Penn Station, demolished in 1964. In 1924 the English writer Rebecca West, traveling by train across America, …
Nov 22, 2012: Jess Nevins on pulp science fiction in Nazi Germany
Nov 22, 2012: If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were uneducated. But, as it is, a cultural life will exist outside the Church …
Nov 22, 2012: A map from an anime site I can’t read
Nov 22, 2012: thingsmagazine: Memoires Of A Suburban Utopia, illustrations by Anton Van hertbruggen (via Coudal)
Nov 21, 2012: My wife Teri found this lovely version of “Every Day I Write the Book” with Elvis and Ron Sexsmith (with harmonies from Jesse Winchester)
Nov 21, 2012: mwfrost: Another page from The Sun Princess and Her Deliverer.
Nov 21, 2012: I think I’d like to try playing a Guitaret.
Nov 21, 2012: A 16th-century urine wheel. Where can I buy one of those?
Nov 21, 2012: vintagebooksdesign: VINTAGE BURGESS Isidro Ferrer was commissioned to create a series of stark graphic illustrations, where several images combine …
Nov 20, 2012: oldhollywood: The Unholy Three (1930, dir. Jack Conway) (via)
Nov 20, 2012: That simply reminds us that evangelization is always an overflow of something else - the disciple’s journey to maturity in Christ, a journey not …
Nov 20, 2012: What’s needed on climate change, ultimately, is a wholesale, society-wide commitment to remaking energy, agricultural, and land-use systems along …
Nov 19, 2012: In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid …
Nov 19, 2012: Jacques Maritain
Nov 19, 2012: mwfrost: Dancing On and Beneath the Great Wall - 50 Watts Click through. You won’t regret it. Matt is right. I didn’t regret it!
Nov 19, 2012: via wwnorton
Nov 19, 2012: thingsmagazine: From ‘88 Maps’ by Matt Mullican
Nov 19, 2012: Autopilots on the other hand, unless integrated to your wind instruments, will force you to sail a direct course but autopilots are idiots and, since …
Nov 19, 2012: thenearsightedmonkey: Poster for Lynda Barry’s class, “The Unthinkable Mind”, Spring 2013 at The University of Wisconsin-Madison
Nov 19, 2012: thingsmagazine: I’m Trending, a publication by Ryan Gander
Nov 18, 2012: With the launch this weekend of Nintendo’s dual-screen Wii U, we seem to be crossing some new Rubicon of Virtuality. It’s not that the ability to …
Nov 17, 2012: unapologetic-book: The soldiers’ resurrection: altar wall of Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere, Hampshire by Stanley Spencer (painted 1926-32)
Nov 16, 2012: wwnorton: “He, Satan, feels foolish and angry now seeing Mrs. McPherson welcomed with open arms in New York, the city referred to in small citied as …
Nov 16, 2012: The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less …
Nov 16, 2012: thingsmagazine: ‘Christian popsicles’ by Sebastian Errazuriz
Nov 16, 2012: Seeing Oppenheimer whole is as hard as it gets. Rabi thought the key was that Oppenheimer constantly worked to convince himself and others that he …
Nov 16, 2012: Cranmer himself was married twice: first as a young scholar, to a woman he was willing to give up his Oxford fellowship to marry. But alas, she died …
Nov 16, 2012: For Augustine, the book’s closedness—that it could be grasped as a totality—was integral to its success in generating transformative reading …
Nov 15, 2012: By the way, we’ve always known that my son Matthew has extraordinary hearing. He told me the other day that when we were in France, he took a hearing …
Nov 15, 2012: poetrysociety: Marianne Moore born today in 1887.
Nov 15, 2012: If you come to a parish church in England after the service, what you will see is a (small) crowd of elderly people, middle-aged people and young …
Nov 15, 2012: This summer I learned how to get into, well, everything. With two minutes and $4 to spend at a sketchy foreign website, I could report back with your …
Nov 15, 2012: Nagel’s central idea is that there are things that science, as it is presently conceived, cannot possibly explain. The current conception is that, …
Nov 15, 2012: thingsmagazine: The Kalinin K-7 heavy bomber
Nov 15, 2012: robertogreco: Inuit Genealogy (via @vruba), explained by John Fass: The diagram above is a genealogical diagram made in the mid 1950s by …
Nov 14, 2012: Some Thoughts on Work and Dignity Some Thoughts on Work and Dignity
Nov 14, 2012: FREE will build the Miami Chapel.
Nov 14, 2012: For the young man, the voices came on the wings of other sound. When he was driving, he would hear voices from the other cars. When he stood on the …
Nov 14, 2012: If being a Digital Cultural Entrepreneur doesn’t work out, there are non-digital possibilities
Nov 14, 2012: As will be seen in the above article, my friend Clive Bell is a fathead and a voluptuary. This a very comfortable sort of person to be, and very …
Nov 14, 2012: As for Spotify, since it is not considered radio, either of this world or any other, they have a different additional royalty to pay. Like any …
Nov 14, 2012: xkcd. I have always secretly thought this, but never dared confess it.
Nov 13, 2012: I think the premise from which I start is this idea that … relentless positivity and optimism is exactly the same thing as happiness; that the only …
Nov 13, 2012: robertogreco: One item from Retronaut’s collection of “Maps Before Maps” (via Robin)
Nov 13, 2012: Starbucks has probably improved your coffee-drinking life even if you never step foot inside a Starbucks shop. Because, again, what chains do is set a …
Nov 13, 2012: Oh right, like I’m not going to link to this
Nov 12, 2012: “The common good” also serves as a valuable reference point for personal choices. Most of my fellow American Christians’ choices about career, …
Nov 12, 2012: So shame, which rightly belongs to the rebellious human will, gets deflected to the genitals, and every fig leaf so strategically placed reinforces …
Nov 12, 2012: Memrise is built to discourage cramming. It’s easy to spend five minutes learning vocabulary with the app, but hard to spend 50. That is by design. …
Nov 11, 2012: Robbie first contacted me in 2005. He telephoned me out of the blue from a hotel in Blackpool where he was filming the video for his song “Advertising …
Nov 10, 2012: [vimeo 52193413 w=250 h=106] Mako Fujimura, “Golden Sea” (Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
Nov 10, 2012: A woman who has sex with multiple partners (maybe hooking up a lot if she’s at a more elite college), contracepting throughout and having at least one …
Nov 10, 2012: Designers design the feedback they get from clients. Bless their hearts. (Via Adam Roberts on Twitter)
Nov 9, 2012: Roth told Les inRocks that when he turned seventy-four he reread his favorite authors—Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Turgenev, Hemingway. Then, he said, “When I …
Nov 9, 2012: A “Vade-Mecum Memorial Manual of Muses, or Compleate Compendious Complexe and Companion, of Learned Languages and Sciences.” The Folger Library
Nov 9, 2012: davidjphooker: Shiho Kanzaki (via עבודות חדשות - ארז | פורום קרמיקה)
Nov 9, 2012: Here’s the cover of Ian Sansom’s book, quoted in the previous post.
Nov 9, 2012: Harley Jessup, a production designer at Pixar Studios, who worked on Monsters, Inc and Ratatouille, has described a culture of paper drawing and …
Nov 8, 2012: buzz: pheezy: David Lynch + Vincent Price Awesomely creepy people hanging out together.
Nov 8, 2012: Generally speaking, it’s important to remember that ‘openness’ is less often a virtue or even an activity than it is a declaration, a rhetorical …
Nov 8, 2012: In the original [Star Wars] trilogy, though, and in Casablanca, all the mixed-up old elements are turned inward. Grand Moff Tarkin may be a …
Nov 8, 2012: At colleges across the land, panel discussions organized on the economic crisis have bemoaned such things as the absence of oversight, a lax …
Nov 7, 2012: Sometimes it is easy to draw quick lessons from a defeat — but this is not one of those times. Frankly, the scope of this defeat, not just for the …
Nov 7, 2012: It is easy to close oneself off inside a conservative echo chamber. And right-leaning outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh’s show are far more …
Nov 7, 2012: CLT never faileth: but whether there be speculations, they shall fail; whether there be talking heads, they shall cease; whether there be punditry, it …
Nov 6, 2012: jessnevins: In an effort to provide distraction on election day, I’ve mounted on my site the full text of the 1892 proto-steampunk dime novel, “Tom …
Nov 6, 2012: Tyler Schnoebelen, who recently completed his PhD in linguistics at Stanford University, told the NWAV crowd how he and his colleagues plumbed Twitter …
Nov 6, 2012: Yet even in the moment of triumph, things started to crumble. Roger Williams challenged the biblical basis for the Christendom assumptions of the …
Nov 6, 2012: A thought widely shared in my Twitter feed. Source.
Nov 6, 2012: Britain may once have had an empire on which the sun never set – but a study shows its true global reach was far more extensive than maps would …
Nov 5, 2012: Jonathan Edwards made his own notebooks. The cover of “History of Redemption,” book 1, made from wallpaper (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, …
Nov 5, 2012: “Dove Descending #2”, by Randall Tiedman
Nov 5, 2012: “Limbus Patrum # 4”, by Randall Tiedman, who died yesterday
Nov 5, 2012: No matter which hollow man occupies the bunker at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the evidence from 225 years points to an inescapable conclusion: the …
Nov 5, 2012: Systems biology did not rise without skepticism. The great geneticist and Nobel-prize winning biologist Sydney Brenner once defined the field as “low …
Nov 5, 2012: Inside League of Legends developer Riot Games is a team of more than 30 staffers trying to make the experience of playing their game kinder, gentler, …
Nov 5, 2012: At present, there is no experimental evidence of any significant concentration of antimatter in our observable universe. In other words, the universe …
Nov 4, 2012: Deploying the fruits of years of research — as well as a wealth of observations and interviews — [Kevin] Dutton makes the argument that psychopaths …
Nov 2, 2012: From James Joyce, The Cats of Copenhagen, shared by Brain Pickings
Nov 2, 2012: This past year Michael Murray brought out Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind, tracking his subject’s astonishing life from a French boyhood in which …
Oct 31, 2012: oldhollywood: The Three Witches in Macbeth (1948, dir. Orson Welles) (via)
Oct 31, 2012: oldhollywood: Boris Karloff presides over an art deco Black Mass in The Black Cat (1934, dir. Edgar Ulmer) (via)
Oct 30, 2012: If you pay careful attention to the way Ikarians have lived their lives, it appears that a dozen subtly powerful, mutually enhancing and pervasive …
Oct 30, 2012: CMYK
Oct 28, 2012: If news as [W. H. Russell, the great Victorian journalist] knew it, and as the last reporters in Fleet Street in the 1980s understood it, is now …
Oct 28, 2012: [A] new branch of the neuroscience explains everything genre may be created at any time by the simple expedient of adding the prefix “neuro” to …
Oct 27, 2012: Why are the Adam and (to a lesser extent) the Eve of Venus, or Perelandra, tan from the shoulders up? Also, enormous? And can some extraterrestrial …
Oct 27, 2012: A surprisingly, and disconcertingly, accurate cover for the first installment of C. S. Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy
Oct 27, 2012: Another superb example
Oct 27, 2012: what religion is The term “religion” now delimits a particular, limited sphere of activity, a form of life like golf or novel-writing in scope and meaning. The precise …
Oct 27, 2012: Suppose you wanted to go live at a luxury resort for four years. You’d expect that to cost, wouldn’t you? (No one is going to write an editorial …
Oct 26, 2012: How do you measure a spirit, or dissect a phantom? For many, ghosts are beyond the frontier of what science can interest itself in, one boundary for …
Oct 26, 2012: The Online State of Nature Back in 2010 I published this column for the Big Questions Online website. That site has changed a good deal since, and my columns have been taken …
Oct 26, 2012: reading-as-breathing: Ceramic book building in Amsterdam. By Sanja Medic, Melle Hammer and Susanne Laws. Photo by Barbro Norman
Oct 26, 2012: Jimmy Cross married letters from a girl named Martha. They were not love letters, but Jimmy hoped that one day they would be. The things they married …
Oct 26, 2012: After Benito Mussolini’s execution in 1945, his people, brutalized and bankrupted by five years of war, might have been more united in hatred for the …
Oct 26, 2012: Biden-laughs and Ryan-abs, Big Birds and binders and bayonets: There is something fascinating when an event as stodgily ceremonial as the presidential …
Oct 26, 2012: I want to write: “I would rather be devastated by the truth than comforted by a lie” and be able to believe it. But that’s easy to say when you’re …
Oct 26, 2012: justin-singer: Historical NYC subway maps from the NY Transit Museum.
Oct 26, 2012: Unapologetic: Bread and wine Unapologetic: Bread and wine unapologetic-book: He is most specifically of all here, we believe, when we follow the instructions he gave at dinner …
Oct 26, 2012: thingsmagazine: Action cards from The London Game, designed to be played around the capital’s underground network (at things)
Oct 26, 2012: Cover of Graphics World magazine (Nov/Dec 1988), designed by Phil Baines; via All About Lettering
Oct 25, 2012: Alan Jacobs, almost certainly Wheaton College’s most public public intellectual, will be at Wheaton College no more, he announced on Twitter last …
Oct 25, 2012: Well, I think, personally — and I’m sticking my neck out here — that we should stop having a department of pastoral theology or ministry that is …
Oct 25, 2012: I have no reason to think that Coursera, or any other MOOC, has anything but noble intentions when it comes to data collection and data mining. I …
Oct 25, 2012: Ask yourself: Why is it so vital that I be smoothened? There’s no functional advantage to eliminating clothing wrinkles—unless you are competing in a …
Oct 25, 2012: When mass-produced cars appeared, they had an impact on the whole of society. What might be the equivalent social implications of driverless cars? And …
Oct 25, 2012: wwnorton: What ho? The primary decree of the fisticuffs guild! h/t our friends at San Diego’s Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore.
Oct 25, 2012: thingsmagazine: The Pininfarina workshop, c.1960, from Turin European Metropolis
Oct 24, 2012: details here
Oct 24, 2012: Even feminist writers seem to react somewhat more harshly to women who disagree with them than to men. The men are sexist doofs. The women are …
Oct 24, 2012: Lord of the Rings demography in infographics. If you’re into that kind of thing.
Oct 23, 2012: Most people don’t appreciate the beauty and aesthetics in science. Consider mathematics. There are infinitely many theorems “out there” that a …
Oct 23, 2012: Yet another photo-essay, this one on the history of the London Underground
Oct 23, 2012: A young lion sleeps, indifferent to the thunderstorm rolling in behind him; from a collection of wildlife photographs of the year
Oct 23, 2012: From a photo essay on the disappearing old neighborhoods of Shanghai
Oct 21, 2012: The study was done on land owned by Iowa State University called the Marsden Farm. On 22 acres of it, beginning in 2003, researchers set up three …
Oct 21, 2012: For expert writers like Bellow, Woolf, Carter and Nabokov, excess, somewhat paradoxically, is of the essence – so that excess might not even be the …
Oct 21, 2012: At last, having been (always attended by the cat) all over the house and having seen the whole stock of miscellaneous lumber, which was certainly …
Oct 21, 2012: mwfrost: If you’re like me, and enjoy giggling at the stuff stupid people say in public, you should see all the google results that discuss the …
Oct 21, 2012: [youtube …
Oct 21, 2012: Joseph Conrad, who had seen a revolution or two, put it this way: ‘A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of …
Oct 19, 2012: Why I Resigned the Paterno Chair - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education Why I Resigned the Paterno Chair - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education A very long, thoughtful, and often interesting essay in …
Oct 19, 2012: Via @pinboard on Twitter, the Nunavut coat of arms
Oct 19, 2012: I’m friends with our subject librarian, and I had talked to her about the visit. She had mentioned that there were some shelves of discards that …
Oct 19, 2012: A knife on a bottle A fork on a glass Chalk on a blackboard A ruler on a bottle Nails on a blackboard A female scream An anglegrinder (a power …
Oct 19, 2012: The New Economy illustrated. Via Twitter
Oct 19, 2012: Cassiodorus College: A Proposal | The American Conservative Cassiodorus College: A Proposal | The American Conservative
Oct 19, 2012: “Numerous academic studies have found no truth in the stereotype about men being better map readers than women. But some conclude that men design maps …
Oct 19, 2012: Consider forest fires. Until late in the twentieth century we were told by Smokey Bear that “only you can prevent forest fires,” which by implication …
Oct 19, 2012: On to a transport map of Tokyo, a newspaper has superimposed the impact of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1 September 1923. The red area denotes the …
Oct 19, 2012: Emily Carr’s typeface specimen posters are neat.
Oct 19, 2012: Shadow sculptures: portraits of the artists. Via @buffigibbons on Twitter
Oct 19, 2012: Reading the Bible out loud is a profoundly theological act. After all, it is no accident that the Christian tradition considered the Word to be first …
Oct 18, 2012: So can divestment, I asked, be an effective strategy? Can it generate enough economic leverage to make a difference? “I think it’s a way to a get a …
Oct 18, 2012: At its root, our mission is both medical and moral. It is based on solidarity, rather than charity alone. When a person in Peru, or Siberia, or rural …
Oct 18, 2012: It’s probably also true that climate change is far too complex an issue to write a definitive novel about. But is it too complex an issue for fiction …
Oct 18, 2012: Yes, some mouth-breathing upskirt enthusiasts actually are ardent defenders of free speech in a constitutional context, just as some couch-surfing …
Oct 17, 2012: There would be no haggling. The man spat a dry white circle in the dirt. Eleven fifty. And it was over. Carmax McCarthy (via mwfrost)
Oct 17, 2012: Prezi, You and Me Is Quits: A Rant I have tried, Prezi — you can’t say I haven’t tried. But I’m done with you now. The core idea of Prezi is a terrific one: allow people to create …
Oct 17, 2012: Moses, the orphaned baby elephant being raised by a human
Oct 17, 2012: A Google data center, courtesy of Nick Carr
Oct 17, 2012: Why shouldn’t newspapers around the world, or at least in the most internet-saturated parts of the world, just stop the presses — especially if they …
Oct 17, 2012: My thesis is that the academic novel stems from the rise of mass higher education in the United States. It follows the demographics; the fact that two …
Oct 17, 2012: In a late essay, Arnold argued that the prayer book “has created sentiments deeper than we can see or measure. Our feeling does not connect itself …
Oct 16, 2012: The “free speech” aspect of this is largely nonsense. Reddit is not a public utility or a public square; it’s a privately owned space on the Internet. …
Oct 16, 2012: dust jacket, 1937
Oct 16, 2012: via All About Lettering
Oct 16, 2012: Many critics lay the blame on the College Board itself, a huge “non-profit” organization that operates like a big business. The College Board earns …
Oct 16, 2012: Let me put it this way: I would not let the moderators and fans of the Reddit creeper forums around my daughters; I’d worry they would sexually …
Oct 16, 2012: Consider trolls’ deeply contentious but ultimately homologous relationship with sensationalist corporate media. For example, when trolls court …
Oct 15, 2012: Christianity and the Future of the Book Last year I led a seminar on this topic for some faculty colleagues here at Wheaton. Just before our last meeting I sent to the group a list of Theses …
Oct 15, 2012: Nonsense, Skepticism, and TED Talks | The American Conservative Nonsense, Skepticism, and TED Talks | The American Conservative
Oct 15, 2012: Has Twitter Become Too Big for High-Quality Conversation? - Alan Jacobs - The Atlantic Has Twitter Become Too Big for High-Quality Conversation? - Alan Jacobs - The Atlantic
Oct 15, 2012: Zombies are supposed to be dead but still walking around. The horror is, among other things, an existential one: that our dead are coming for us, …
Oct 15, 2012: Robot dog of 1995
Oct 15, 2012: paleofuture: The robot dog of 1923 Featuring Demon Boy.
Oct 15, 2012: attnmgmtblog: Jeff Atwood, answering the question, “What’s your best time-saving shortcut/life hack?”: Do not under any circumstances keep to-do lists …
Oct 14, 2012: Ramsay’s one weak spot, the chink in his mental armature? Silence. He can’t bear it. Chefs must always be badgering, exhorting, browbeating, …
Oct 14, 2012: Universities and their libraries have a special place in copyright law because they have a special place in society. Courts and even Congress have …
Oct 14, 2012: But the faithful imagination can’t praise, can’t give thanks to a God who doesn’t judge, because our faith rests on the premise that God wrests …
Oct 14, 2012: Even with regards to the leakers, however, the situation is far more complex than Greenberg lets on. He draws elaborate comparisons between the cases …
Oct 13, 2012: (thanks to Reihan Salam on Twitter)
Oct 13, 2012: [youtube …
Oct 13, 2012: Roger Federer not as religious experience but as terracotta warrior
Oct 12, 2012: F. T. Prince, "Epistle to A Patron" My lord, hearing lately of your opulence in promises and your house Busy with parasites, of your hands full of favours, your statutes Admirable as …
Oct 11, 2012: thingsmagazine: Photography by Matthias Heiderich (via things)
Oct 11, 2012: davidjphooker: (via fall firing 2012 - Rough Ideas)
Oct 11, 2012: What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection? It is as though I play with the thought. – If he did not rise from the dead, then he …
Oct 11, 2012: Avian carriers can provide high delay, low throughput, and low altitude service. The connection topology is limited to a single point-to-point path …
Oct 11, 2012: ransomcenter: Read the full article “In the Galleries: Norman Bel Geddes’s diagram for ‘Highways and Horizons’” on the Harry Ransom Center’s blog …
Oct 11, 2012: ransomcenter: Are authors still writing letters? The Daily Beast shares “Letter Writing in the Digital Age: Emails and Correspondence of Russell Banks …
Oct 11, 2012: I grant that the president has significant influence over international affairs, although less than [David] Goldman seems to be believe. The president …
Oct 10, 2012: As I type this, I am looking out my window at the flying buttresses of a church, admiring their beauty, and thinking of the unknown medieval craftsmen …
Oct 9, 2012: This is one of the most fundamental differences between an individualist and a personalist perspective. Human dignity, the unconditional requirement …
Oct 9, 2012: The Web's Elusive Promise of a DIY Career in the Arts - Alan Jacobs - The Atlantic The Web’s Elusive Promise of a DIY Career in the Arts - Alan Jacobs - The Atlantic In which I coin an initialism.
Oct 9, 2012: I find myself lately pretty continually dismayed by the frequency with which I have to acknowledge that I’ve lost my good habits. I’ve gotten out of …
Oct 8, 2012: I suspect — I can only guess — that Price’s environment is one in which the narrow-minded anti-intellectualism of Christianity is just part of the …
Oct 8, 2012: Meet the Beatles (Again) | The American Conservative Meet the Beatles (Again) | The American Conservative
Oct 8, 2012: mudwerks: (via MAKE | Paperback Book Color Wheel) Jonathan Whitfill
Oct 8, 2012: So sad that this isn’t actually a movie.
Oct 8, 2012: thingsmagazine: Boris Pasternak, My sister-life, with etchings by Yuri Kuper
Oct 8, 2012: As the authors were offering their final points at the end of the Q&A, [Steven] Johnson hit on a metaphor that, for once, everyone could agree on: …
Oct 8, 2012: With the iPhone, Apple is building products at a level of quality that may be unprecedented in the history of mass manufacturing. But the only way to …
Oct 7, 2012: The emphasis in early Christian writings was not on complexity, irreducible or otherwise, but on the beauty, order, lawfulness, and harmony found in …
Oct 7, 2012: arpeggia: Anamorphic art by Georges Rousse | More posts
Oct 7, 2012: thingsmagazine: Swedish scrap book, c.1890
Oct 7, 2012: Rune Guneriussen, via here
Oct 7, 2012: In text, where the impact of digital technology came first and most fully, desktop-publishing programs have generated tens of thousands of new …
Oct 7, 2012: Sometimes, when I’m talking books, people will say, “You’re so well read.” I wish this were true. I was on my way to becoming well read, gobbling up …
Oct 7, 2012: This same dynamic repeats itself in other crucial realms. President Obama’s dramatically escalated drone attacks in numerous countries have generated …
Oct 6, 2012: We have surrendered our handwriting for something more mechanical, less distinctively human, less telling about ourselves and less present in our …
Oct 6, 2012: As Politico reported, “Most Americans think public broadcasting receives a much larger share of the federal budget than it actually does,” according …
Oct 6, 2012: For the arts to revive in the U.S., young artists must be rescued from their sanitized middle-class backgrounds. We need a revalorization of the …
Oct 6, 2012: The Elements of Euclid, via the Ministry of Type
Oct 5, 2012: Many years later, he heard some of Inigo’s last words in the film again — “I have been in the revenge business so long, now that’s over, I do not know …
Oct 5, 2012: Louis-Léopold Boilly
Oct 5, 2012: I can personally attest that, despite the liberal bias, I was happy in academe. Another Republican-leaning faculty colleague liked to point out that a …
Oct 4, 2012: futurejournalismproject: Finding the ‘Beautiful Evidence’ of Science New York-based artist Thomas Allen’s upcoming exhibition, Beautiful Evidence, is …
Oct 4, 2012: On a Saturday morning in November 1966, Tom Phillips picked a book at random from a pile of novels at a house-clearance sale in Peckham Rye. Phillips …
Oct 3, 2012: thingsmagazine: The English Empire in America, N. Crouch, 1685
Oct 3, 2012: thingsmagazine: The New Yorker (Now Using Apple Maps) (via magCulture)
Oct 3, 2012: Frank Lloyd Wright’s drawing for a house be built for his son, a house that may soon be demolished
Oct 2, 2012: Cell Phones as Meeting Points in a Featureless Landscape - Alan Jacobs - The Atlantic Cell Phones as Meeting Points in a Featureless Landscape - Alan Jacobs - The Atlantic
Oct 2, 2012: Switching to Dvorak was hard – far harder, in my experience, than switching to a standing desk, or to Linux, or even to Vim. For a few weeks, I spent …
Oct 2, 2012: The old pre-industrial community and culture are gone and cannot be brought back. Nor is it desirable that they should be. They were too unjust, too …
Oct 2, 2012: mwfrost: From From Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia
Oct 2, 2012: This time of year it’s at its best. I open the bamboo blinds in the morning to let the warming sunshine in, though later in the day I close them …
Oct 2, 2012: What I’d like to add to Nick’s list is one observation: none of those predictions was completely unreasonable at the time. Heck, I might have made one …
Oct 2, 2012: the history of Bond posters
Oct 2, 2012: Effective defenders of Christianity must sound like ordinary citizens. They must be fluent in the sceptical, irreverent vernacular of mainstream …
Oct 2, 2012: thenearsightedmonkey: What role will our hands play in the future? Will we still write by hand? via monstercrazy:
Oct 2, 2012: thingsmagazine: Church in Cassone (Landscape with Cypresses), 1913, from Gustav Klimt: The Complete Paintings (Taschen)
Oct 1, 2012: And if you are seated in your high chair, or in a chair such as a greater person might use, keep your legs and feet below you as they were. Neither …
Oct 1, 2012: Auden's Syllabus W. H. Auden taught at the University of Michigan during the 1941-42 academic year. Here’s a syllabus from one of his classes. Hey teachers: next time …
Oct 1, 2012: http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1 Calligraphic images, via the Atlantic (Source: http://c.brightcove.com/)
Oct 1, 2012: But then, across the room, I saw this beautiful guy with gorgeous flowing hair, wearing a simple white linen tunic and swaying gently to the music …
Sep 30, 2012: Labour was treated to a 45-minute lecture on the moral limits of markets by Harvard University professor Michael Sandel in one of the more …
Sep 30, 2012: In the United States the notion that bike helmets promote health and safety by preventing head injuries is taken as pretty near God’s truth. …
Sep 30, 2012: If you plucked an average American (mean, median, or modal) out of Kansas City or Aurora, and plopped them down in the middle of Gothenburg, the …
Sep 30, 2012: It was already possible, by the early ’90s and actually long before them, to trace the terms of the current partisan divide in America. Conservatives …
Sep 30, 2012: Boise State University is seeking a specialist in precisely your area of study. Additional specializations in all of the other things you’ve studied, …
Sep 28, 2012: thingsmagazine: Russ Stutler’s 221B Baker Street illustration (via things).
Sep 28, 2012: thingsmagazine: Gluttony, from The 9 circles of hell from Dante’s Inferno recreated in Lego, at Monoscope
Sep 28, 2012: oldhollywood: Art deco lobby set for Grand Hotel (1932, dir. Edmund Goulding) Set design by Cedric Gibbons.
Sep 28, 2012: thingsmagazine: Alexander Performance Scale Test kit, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1946-1950 (see things for more)
Sep 28, 2012: The culture that inhabits us - and by us, I mean Christians - is a subtle and seductive one. It tempts us to believe we are free of place. It tempts …
Sep 28, 2012: In the first place, it is true that I turned 40 this year, and it is equally true that, for the 40th time, my writing did not make it into the New …
Sep 28, 2012: Members of the Family | The American Conservative Members of the Family | The American Conservative
Sep 27, 2012: There are more Linux distros on a single Linux Format disc than Microsoft has versions of Windows. But they’re all pretty much the same thing warmed …
Sep 27, 2012: When I see diversity-casting in commercials—two bland Caucasians waving beer cans at a TV, or at a driving up to a Taco Bell window, accompanied, …
Sep 26, 2012: We have become accustomed to thinking of educational failure as a function of a teacher’s lack of effort, talent, or training. But sometimes the …
Sep 26, 2012: The typical Romanian driver is a man of faith. He sees the road as it is — a densely congested, shattered series of uneven concrete blocks — but does …
Sep 26, 2012: theatlantic: livelymorgue: Dec. 21, 1933: From the Mid-Week Pictorial. Americans visiting Paris celebrated the end of Prohibition in the United …
Sep 26, 2012: If the Berlin Wall could fall, so can the N.F.L. Alex Koppelman on the replacement referees and the N.F.L. dictatorship: http://nyr.kr/RfNVTa (via …
Sep 26, 2012: mwfrost: (via Otto’s Dance of Death - 50 Watts) Any time the 50 Watts blog mentions “the collection of Richard Sica,” you know you’re in for some …
Sep 26, 2012: thingsmagazine: Poster relating to smoking, London, England, c. 1965-1970
Sep 25, 2012: Christaraksha May the cross of the Son of God, which is mightier than all the hosts of Satan and more glorious than all the hosts of heaven, abide with you in your …
Sep 25, 2012: poetrysociety: “Mad Libs” of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 from the Brooklyn Book Festival.
Sep 24, 2012: mwfrost: Got bored with the view in my mirror, swiped down to refresh. Since the iOS 6 ungrade, swipe-to-refresh doesn’t work on my rear-view mirrors …
Sep 24, 2012: In Mental Exercise, Variety Matters - Alan Jacobs - The Atlantic In Mental Exercise, Variety Matters - Alan Jacobs - The Atlantic
Sep 24, 2012: Learning to Write is Painful (And Maybe Has to Be) | The American Conservative Learning to Write is Painful (And Maybe Has to Be) | The American Conservative
Sep 24, 2012: “Where Shall a Man Find Sweetness to Surpass His Own Home?” | The American Conservative “Where Shall a Man Find Sweetness to Surpass His Own Home?” | The American Conservative
Sep 23, 2012: buzz: Mapping America’s Fast Food Regions I’m pretty sure this is the least informative infographic ever created.
Sep 23, 2012: a few too many words (from me) on Mikhail Bakhtin a few too many words (from me) on Mikhail Bakhtin
Sep 23, 2012: Minimalistic Posters Of Famous Painters thetinhouse: Are you able to guess the famous painters in every poster? From Graphic design duo Eurydyka Kata and Rafal Szczawinski. More here.
Sep 21, 2012: The absence of credible alternative sources severely limits the options for claiming that the “real Jesus” was significantly different from the Jesus …
Sep 21, 2012: Trolling the Homeschoolers | The American Conservative Trolling the Homeschoolers | The American Conservative
Sep 20, 2012: The other day I realized that “interactive” anything is the wrong word. Interactive makes you imagine people sitting with their hands on controls, …
Sep 20, 2012: James Wright, "Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me" Relieved, I let the book fall behind a stone. I climb a slight rise of grass. I do not want to disturb the ants Who are walking single file up the …
Sep 20, 2012: James Wright, "Arrangements with the Earth for Three Dead Friends" Sweet earth, he ran and changed his shoes to go Outside with other children through the fields. He panted up the hills and swung from trees Wild as a …
Sep 20, 2012: Apple urged patience. “Customers around the world are upgrading to iOS 6 with over 200 new features including Apple Maps, our first map service,” said …
Sep 20, 2012: poetrysociety: Robert Creeley’s Was That A Real Poem Or Did You Just Make It Up Yourself.
Sep 20, 2012: Just Sayin’ is to radio what Twitter is to newsprint,” said Gervais. “Making the human voice a natural part of any social web experience is the next …
Sep 20, 2012: Cecilia Giménez, the Spanish woman who really messed up when she tried to restore a 19th-century fresco of Jesus, now wants a piece of the action from …
Sep 20, 2012: I think elegy is an inevitable outcome of utopia. I do think I have a sense of belatedness, of always having arrived a little too late. I think it’s a …
Sep 20, 2012: On Having Roots in More than One Place | The American Conservative On Having Roots in More than One Place | The American Conservative
Sep 20, 2012: What Salman Rushdie Didn’t Say | The American Conservative What Salman Rushdie Didn’t Say | The American Conservative
Sep 19, 2012: Thomas Nagel is Admirably Fair-Minded | The American Conservative Thomas Nagel is Admirably Fair-Minded | The American Conservative
Sep 19, 2012: Introducing … myself | The American Conservative Introducing … myself | The American Conservative
Sep 19, 2012: a new bloggy home The good folks at The American Conservative have been kind enough, and unwise enough, to give me a place to blog. I am very grateful. I will continue …
Sep 19, 2012: Unfortunately, these few niceties can’t make up for the fact that Twitter took nearly everything that was original or innovative about the app and …
Sep 19, 2012: This naturally invites questions about the practical value of Mr. Rorty’s own ideas. He thinks they will free us from the worship of science and from …
Sep 18, 2012: Pretty Things & Monsters: A soldier and his squirrel. Pretty Things & Monsters: A soldier and his squirrel. batfullobelfries: Soldiers in Belarus found a little squirrel and brought it to the Warrant …
Sep 16, 2012: Bradbury insisted he was not a hard science fiction author, but instead a writer of fantasy. Ultimately, I’d argue the Anthropocene needs a …
Sep 16, 2012: Nothing tests one’s intellectual honesty and ability to apply principles consistently more than free speech controversies. It is exceedingly easy to …
Sep 16, 2012: I am usually collaborating with the interesting dead… Rilke or Cicero or Shakespeare or Dante or Conrad or Verdi… these are the living dead with whom …
Sep 16, 2012: Martin SImpson, my favorite guitarist, playing “She Slips Away.” I’d love to own one of those gorgeous Stefan Sobell guitars, but even if I could …
Sep 14, 2012: oldhollywood: Sylvia Sidney & Henry Fonda in You Only Live Once (1937, dir. Fritz Lang) (via)
Sep 14, 2012: What about the other writers, editors, and presenters at the Register and EWTN media? How are they supposed to know how to do their jobs now? If a man …
Sep 12, 2012: Might be good to have the occasional sliver of cricket on that right-hand column.
Sep 12, 2012: Can the Lascaux paintings be saved?
Sep 12, 2012: I wish I had this radio
Sep 11, 2012: Imaging the caves of Nottingham
Sep 11, 2012: Indefensibly cruel
Sep 11, 2012: What was the response you received to Race Against the Machine? People accepted that technology was really accelerating and that there were going to …
Sep 11, 2012: Temperamental conservatism understands that in order to preserve anything, it must be kept within certain limits in order to be sustainable. It …
Sep 11, 2012: Charlie Kaufman and Dan Harmon (the creator of NBC’s show Community) have set a record for fundraising on Kickstarter. By that, I don’t mean that …
Sep 6, 2012: [The Smiths’] career prospects were always held in check by a problem that grew worse as their success increased: Morrissey’s refusal to employ a …
Sep 6, 2012: We may swear simply because it makes us feel better. In a 2011 study led by Keele University’s Richard Stephens, researchers measured how long …
Sep 6, 2012: DFW and belief Since his death, there seems to be an emerging interest in Wallace’s religious views, and to cast him as more religious and spiritual than he was. …
Sep 5, 2012: For most of us, being hit by lightning and kicked out of the circus would be an extraordinary turn of events. For [Edward Payson] Weston, it was a …
Sep 5, 2012: The Digital Age: Reading, Writing, and Research (Spring 2013) Experimental course • ENGL 380 How is the rise of digital technologies changing some of the fundamental practices of the intellectual life: reading, …
Sep 5, 2012: The other thing for which I am grateful to philosophy is that, at least in the world in which I first sought to make a name for myself, one was …
Sep 4, 2012: [This] is our movement. We will not consider you a part of it, we will not work with you, we will not befriend you. We will heretofore denounce you as …
Sep 4, 2012: "Man Carrying Thing," by Wallace Stevens The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully. Illustration: A brune figure in winter evening resists Identity. The thing he carries …
Sep 3, 2012: So decrepit and so abused is the language of the Judeo-Christian religions that it takes an effort to salvage them, the very words, from the husks and …
Sep 3, 2012: rapture and routine Early on in this I compared beginning to believe to falling in love, and the way that faith settles down in a life is also very like the way that the …
Sep 3, 2012: Die, heretic! Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?” He …
Sep 3, 2012: The marvelous part is the way [Michael] Joyce’s face looks when he talks about what tennis means to him. He loves it; you can see this in his face …
Sep 2, 2012: The larger issue is that both campaigns have decided that deceptiveness carries no penalty. I know from conversations I’ve had that both campaigns do …
Sep 2, 2012: One of the great questions is: who is this new Data Driven world going to be for and what is it going to look like? People ask if this just for the …
Sep 2, 2012: “I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” That is how John Galt …
Sep 2, 2012: This assimilation of American Catholics to Protestant attitudes about governance has, of course, facilitated religious-right coalition building, and …
Sep 1, 2012: I was teaching an MA seminar on children’s literature when a rather severe Latvian student dived into a discussion about Charlie and the Chocolate …
Sep 1, 2012: belief and illusion The funny thing is that, to me, it’s belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable. Belief …
Aug 31, 2012: Christianity and Fantasy, Fall 2012 Schedule 8.30 Introduction to course Progenitors 9.4 George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin 9.6 9.11 G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday …
Aug 31, 2012: I, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., that is, do hereby swear that I will be faithful to the commitments hereunder listed: I. With the agreement that my wife will …
Aug 31, 2012: davidjphooker: View Tower of Babel Detail: Outside The Gallery)
Aug 30, 2012: Our moral shortcomings are preventing our political institutions from acting effectively. Enhancing our moral motivation would enable us to act better …
Aug 30, 2012: Practically no writer exists now who does not intersect as some point with the university system—this is unquestionably the chief sociological fact of …
Aug 30, 2012: Internet addiction is real, researchers out of the University of Bonn say, and its source can be explained at the molecular level. Researchers from …
Aug 29, 2012: Much as many would like to believe that the medium determines the message, a modern politician is never unmediated. Not in a pie shop in Pennsylvania, …
Aug 29, 2012: In the past couple of years, Patrick Deneen and Jeremy Beer have observed that the supposed conservative revolution of the past thirty years foundered …
Aug 29, 2012: After the 2008 collapse, the worst since the Great Depression, the rich, rather than having the modesty to temper their demands, this time have made …
Aug 28, 2012: First and foremost, the notion of “privacy” is about having a sense of control over how and when information flows to who. Given the structures of …
Aug 28, 2012: Today, many of the most high-status jobs for the well-educated make a virtue of intensity and commitment. Investment banking boasts 80-hour work …
Aug 27, 2012: Tending your own garden does not, for example, confront the problem of Monsanto. The corporation that developed genetically modified organisms as a …
Aug 26, 2012: Official professions to the contrary, many self-described American intellectual conservatives have a thinly veiled disdain for philosophy and the …
Aug 26, 2012: To be a writer in this market requires not only money, but a concept of “work” that is most easily gained from privilege. It requires a sense of …
Aug 25, 2012: For some reason, tonight I’m remembering this, my favorite moment from the Olympics.
Aug 25, 2012: why I hate Mountain Lion Since the update from Lion: The Finder intermittently (i.e. several times a day) and inexplicably runs at 100% CPU. I can’t show the time in the …
Aug 23, 2012: So Philology: to preserve, monitor, investigate, and augment our cultural inheritance, including the various material means by which it has been …
Aug 23, 2012: For some writers, reading the copy-edits is like going to the dentist. You know you have to, and you’ll be happy, long-term, that you did, but the …
Aug 23, 2012: “We created the civil forums to promote civility and personal respect between people with major differences,” Warren said. “The forums are meant to be …
Aug 23, 2012: American linguistic diversity as a whole isn’t dying—it’s thriving. Despite our gut-level hunch about the direction of the language; despite the fact …
Aug 23, 2012: mwfrost: portraitoftheartistasayoungman: A jellyfish I saw last week while having breakfast on the pier outside my house in Lofoten. David J. …
Aug 22, 2012: This magazine, as I understand it, is devoted to a project of redefining what Americans think it means to be a conservative, specifically arguing that …
Aug 22, 2012: Surely it’s impossible, I think, that the devils will forget to drag me down to their place with their hooks when I die. And then I think: hooks? …
Aug 22, 2012: newyorker: Cartoon of the night by Benjamin Schwartz. For more: http://nyr.kr/QT7qx9
Aug 22, 2012: bluedollar: THIS WINS THE INTERNET. FOR THE ENTIRE YEAR.
Aug 21, 2012: ‘Is he – quite safe?’ asks Susan in Chapter 7 of The Lion. ‘Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe,’ says Mr Beaver; ‘But he’s good.’ …
Aug 21, 2012: When the rich are highly concentrated in wealthy enclaves, they’re less likely to give as compared with the rich living in more economically diverse …
Aug 21, 2012: YUM!
Aug 20, 2012: Imani Perry: One of my favorite cultural critics, Albert Murray, began publishing his writing at age 46. I imagine him during his 19-year career in …
Aug 20, 2012: Your side stirs up hate against the people on my side. The horrible signs your people hold up at their protests, the venom your spokesmen spew on …
Aug 20, 2012: Curious perspectives, from Bibliodyssey
Aug 20, 2012: New Statesman: Are you writing anything at the moment? Diana Athill: I’m not. I do a bit of book reviewing and write the odd article, but I haven’t …
Aug 18, 2012: It’s shameful that Apple has asked its users to put so much trust in its cloud services, and not put better security mechanisms in place to protect …
Aug 18, 2012: All Cambridge editions of the Book of Common Prayer made sure that the Communion of the Sick finished at the foot of a right hand-hand page, so that …
Aug 18, 2012: crazyasslibrarystuff: I’m not the least bit surprised that a cat would be proofreading the secrets of the Bible. theartofgooglebooks: Inky cat …
Aug 18, 2012: I was in a diner the other day and picked up a printed newspaper. To be precise, I picked up the comics section. The thought that occurred to me was: …
Aug 17, 2012: Look, it’s a 20-foot-high cardboard baby in the desert! Via @karlsteel on Twitter.
Aug 17, 2012: The Family Research Council’s president, Tony Perkins, said Thursday that “Corkins was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by organizations like …
Aug 16, 2012: In a few short years, we have gone from anonymous experts to having all of our most distant acquaintances monitor our guilty pleasures and blind …
Aug 16, 2012: Mrs. Rowling, I read your statement that the wizarding gene is dominant. I have heard criticism that this does not explain muggle-borns, squibs, or …
Aug 16, 2012: It used to be that paper was made from rags, a shortage of which gripped the Western world in the early nineteenth century. In Nova Scotia, a young …
Aug 16, 2012: I wish, often, that we cared as deeply about other things here in my native South as we do football. “It has become,” Rable says, “what’s important,” …
Aug 16, 2012: thingsmagazine: iTypewriter by Austin Yang (via things)
Aug 16, 2012: The view from the airplane of the future
Aug 16, 2012: Back at the hotel afterward, Dylan looks about as satisfied as a man with his restless creative spirit can be. It’s nearly 2 a.m. by now and another …
Aug 16, 2012: That being said, I can only confess to being repeatedly humbled and reconverted by Lewis in a way that is true of few other modern Christian writers. …
Aug 15, 2012: We have three minds, I reckon, one of which is the body, while the other two are forms of mentation: daylight consciousness and dreaming …
Aug 12, 2012: After all, the relationship between human reader and “animated” book has been forged over centuries. The Bible, perhaps the first book to be …
Aug 12, 2012: The press loves inspirational stories about Kindle prospectors like Hocking or crime writer John Locke striking it rich, but unfortunately this has …
Aug 12, 2012: Consumerism now wants you to be single, so it sells this as sexy. The irony is that it’s now more radical to attempt to be in a long-term relationship …
Aug 10, 2012: Readers would be rightly insulted if they felt I’d assumed they were less smart or less sophisticated than I am. That would be unbearably …
Aug 10, 2012: Saturday, July 28, was the final day of a remarkable three-day process to reinvent Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, Calif. Some 80 booksellers, community …
Aug 10, 2012: I have plenty of friends in and from California, but I don’t think California is fundamentally a friendly place. It’s open – it’s easy to become part …
Aug 9, 2012: Old Swiss farmhouse-turned-office
Aug 9, 2012: That said, many of these film adaptations have something in common—they’re based not on full-length novels but on short stories or novellas, which …
Aug 7, 2012: Social science in many ways depends on moral philosophy. In deciding how to measure causation and what to control for you’re making judgments about …
Aug 6, 2012: But what happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple’s and Amazon’s. Apple tech support gave …
Aug 6, 2012: Reinventing medical care could produce hundreds of innovations. Some may be as simple as giving patients greater e-mail and online support from their …
Aug 6, 2012: Then again, almost every American religion sooner or later becomes a Gospel of Wealth. Forced into a corner by the Feds, Young’s followers put down …
Aug 6, 2012: mwfrost: The story I mentioned the other day about my daughter at the TSA checkpoint? It ended with the officers scanning a plastic sack of her vomit. …
Aug 6, 2012: here
Aug 6, 2012: There is this weird assumption on the part of the media that if a candidate can be hurt if their comments are misconstrued then it is the solemn duty …
Aug 6, 2012: Mohawk scientist dude
Aug 5, 2012: Attendance is not a direct index of anything vital to the church. Sometimes high attendance correlates to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on a …
Aug 5, 2012: Does anything say so much about the times we live in as the fact that the word sharing has almost everything to do with personal information and …
Aug 5, 2012: I have the legitimate authority to allocate those 160 minutes [per week] of my students’ and my time to the teaching of economics. Within those limits …
Aug 5, 2012: It wasn’t their opinions, left or right, right or wrong, that impressed American readers so much as what was acclaimed as their effortless erudition. …
Aug 5, 2012: A teenager wearing disconcerting, plastic earlobe-stretchers wanders through the food court, carrying a half-empty bottle of purple Vitamin Water and …
Aug 5, 2012: Space colonies. That’s the latest thing you hear, from the heralds of the future. President Gingrich is going to set up a state on the moon. The Dutch …
Aug 5, 2012: Consider the technique of positive visualization, a staple not only of Robbins-style seminars but also of corporate team-building retreats and …
Aug 4, 2012: My conclusion? When you see a passage in quotation marks in a New Yorker article, you should not expect it to be a truthful representation of anything …
Aug 4, 2012: But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive …
Aug 3, 2012: We discovered that 92% of Americans preferred the distribution of “Equalden” to America’s. And if one were to assume that the 8% who preferred …
Aug 3, 2012: A few years after the idiot in Aspen, I was in Berlin giving a talk when the Marxist writer Tariq Ali invited me out to a dinner that included a male …
Aug 2, 2012: Boycotts and procotts are by now commonplace and predictable, the skirmishes involving a certain fast-food chain being only the latest prominent …
Aug 2, 2012: What a face. Afghanistan: Faces of Hope.
Aug 2, 2012: The world’s tallest sandcastle. Explanation of the physics here.
Aug 1, 2012: Orson Welles was always embarrassed by Rosebud. “It’s a gimmick, really,” he told interviewers, “and rather dollar book Freud.” The mystery of “the …
Aug 1, 2012: Where does it come from? How does a nation of 632,000 people — roughly a quarter the size of the borough of Queens — produce an anthem that … I mean, …
Aug 1, 2012: Question. Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep. Thought …
Aug 1, 2012: Domosławski lists many other veracity problems. Kapuściński’s agency stuff is fairly straightforward reporting, salted only with analysis and opinion. …
Aug 1, 2012: Absent further revelations, though, I find it an unfair double-standard that something Lehrer falsely attributed to Bob Dylan—which is essentially …
Aug 1, 2012: Why won’t companies that provide online services take my money? As a mere consumer of such services, and someone not privy to any of the discussions …
Jul 31, 2012: If you’ve been watching NBC in prime time the past few nights, you’ve probably noticed how, night in, night out, we’ve been wrecking the Olympics for …
Jul 31, 2012: To the Hebrew Congregation in Newport Rhode Island. Gentlemen, While I receive, with much satisfaction, your Address replete with expressions of …
Jul 31, 2012: 60ansdevadrouille: Lanzhou, jardin des Cinq Sources. vérire oasis dans la ville la plus occidentale le long du Fleuve Jaune. commandant le couloir du …
Jul 31, 2012: We are especially nostalgic for the mechanical. We miss the weight of objects, the sounds of gears and levers, the clicks and thumps, the ringing …
Jul 31, 2012: If the language of war tends to centralize power, does the rhetoric of “culture war” tend in some way to deform or even centralize culture? Modern …
Jul 31, 2012: A few years ago, newspapers and nonprofits set up fact-checking squads, rating campaign statements with Pinocchios and such. The hope was that if …
Jul 31, 2012: a small thought about Jonah Lehrer If things go a certain way, this fall from grace could be the best thing that ever happened to Jonah Lehrer. In spending the past decade striving to …
Jul 31, 2012: The point at issue—whether homosexuality, capitalism, colonial slavery, or something else—is never the whole of what is at stake. Nobody has to make a …
Jul 30, 2012: Are you one of those English professors who writes garbage in his books but just so much of it that other godless leftists I mean people think it must …
Jul 30, 2012: The good news for [Jonah] Lehrer is that rehabilitation isn’t far off. Remember the Doris Kearns Goodwin plagiarism scandal? Probably not, but you may …
Jul 30, 2012: There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless …
Jul 30, 2012: a publishing story This may be of no interest to anyone, but it involves a key moment in my own career, and I’ve never mentioned it in print before, so… . Like many …
Jul 30, 2012: When people ask, “How are you not exploding with stress with everything on your plate?”, I know they only mean it in the best, most compassionate way. …
Jul 30, 2012: Such was the case with Daniels, the Massachusetts gentleman — his pet spaniel bit him. Curiously, Daniels’ wife, also bitten, survived. The case …
Jul 29, 2012: If digital cryptography isn’t enough to hide a book for ever, physical inks still might. Argentinian independent publishers Eterna Cadencia recently …
Jul 29, 2012: oldhollywood: Son of Frankenstein (1939, dir. Rowland V. Lee) Expressionistic set design by art director Jack Otterson. (via)
Jul 29, 2012: It may seem strange that anyone could look around the pornography-saturated, fertility-challenged, family-breakdown-plagued West and see a society …
Jul 28, 2012: Oh, what the hell. Let’s go for it. Let us speak about great writing — not brilliant writing or clever writing or, most tempting of all, exquisite …
Jul 28, 2012: One fine summer night in June 1933 I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues, two women and one man. We liked each other well enough …
Jul 28, 2012: Rule No. 4: Never use three words when one will do. Be concise. Don’t fall in love with the gentle trilling of your mellifluous sentences. Learn how …
Jul 28, 2012: Finally this uncertainty drives Kandel, no less than Boyd and Pagel, back to the first principles of Darwinism, which are remorselessly utilitarian. …
Jul 27, 2012: mwfrost: (via Galileo Galilei, Drawings of the Moon) Can I opt to only trust empirical claims from scientists who can do this with pen and ink?
Jul 27, 2012: Yesterday 2 lectures, re-drafting findings of Committee on Emergency Exams …. and then a great event: an evening Inklings. I reached the Mitre at 8 …
Jul 27, 2012: Is fantasy intrinsically hostile to technology? That is, was Tolkien simply drawing out what is already there in the genre? Or has he limited it in …
Jul 26, 2012: What I think we lack sometimes is confidence that in the long run of things, a certain kind of homespun wisdom wins out in culture. When you look at …
Jul 26, 2012: The structure here is not easy for the lay viewer to decode. [Rhythmic gymnastics] has its own language, which non-RG initiates mostly perceive as a …
Jul 26, 2012: The market economy must find its place in a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition. It must be …
Jul 26, 2012: Chick-fil-A should not be prevented from opening business because of the views of its leaders, or his donations to anti-gay causes. But gays and …
Jul 26, 2012: Some people — in comments, on Twitter and elsewhere — are defending what Emanuel and Menino are doing on the ground that the Chick-fil-A is not being …
Jul 26, 2012: But liberals should recognize the parallels between even this stronger argument and the (once successful, but ultimately failed) public health …
Jul 26, 2012: A team led by artificial intelligence specialist Joan Serra at the Spanish National Research Council ran music from the last 50 years through some …
Jul 25, 2012: But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but …
Jul 25, 2012: I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgment for not agreeing with me in that from which, …
Jul 25, 2012: ‘I don’t teach writing classes anymore,’ says Le Guin, 'and I’m really glad I don’t, because I would feel very strange about telling people, “Go out …
Jul 24, 2012: The museum has not been redefined so much as it has been disassembled, its coherence shattered as curators, administrators, and trustees grapple with …
Jul 24, 2012: One result of the crisis, then, is the catastrophic weakening of the nation’s wealthiest religious body. At first sight, few people would probably …
Jul 24, 2012: SIR – You mentioned research which revealed that shoppers often prefer “50% extra free” to a notionally more generous 30% reduction in price, and you …
Jul 24, 2012: New Penn State trustee Anthony Lubrano said he was “deeply disappointed” in the sanctions and the fact that board members had no input. “I have a …
Jul 24, 2012: A writer like Stephen King, in contrast, is less interested in illuminating the everyday than in placing his characters in extraordinary and …
Jul 24, 2012: These killers are primarily the product of psychological derangements, not sociological ones. Yet, after every rampage, there are always people who …
Jul 24, 2012: on the Cappadocian church When I think about what the Christian church can be at its very best, I think back to Cappadocia in late Roman times. The central figure in that world …
Jul 23, 2012: via
Jul 23, 2012: Paul Klee, Ancient Sound
Jul 23, 2012: People at the extremes are happier than political moderates. Correcting for income, education, age, race, family situation and religion, the happiest …
Jul 23, 2012: Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car …
Jul 23, 2012: Representing China to Europe in the 1670s
Jul 23, 2012: oldhollywood: Vampyr (1932, dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer) (via)
Jul 23, 2012: ‘Bilbo knew no more than he told you, I am sure,’ said Gandalf. ‘He would certainly never have passed on to you anything that he thought would be a …
Jul 23, 2012: Our online experience (and this is particularly true for specific ones, such as gaming or digital photography) seems to proceed in four stages. The …
Jul 22, 2012: Elizabeth Anscombe, for no reason except that I love this photo and think that she’s one of the most fascinating people of the 20th century.
Jul 22, 2012: I’m pretty sure this is where Dasein goes when he’s feeling down.
Jul 22, 2012: The latest Colorado shooter – like Jared Loughner of Tucson, Seung-Hui Cho of Virginia Tech, and the countless others whose names we forget after they …
Jul 22, 2012: Two men waiting, for another whom they know only by an implausible name which may not be his real name. A ravaged and blasted landscape. A world that …
Jul 22, 2012: I went to bed at night looking forward to my nineses and then, as soon as I woke up, I stumbled out of bed, dressed and went to Delectica before I was …
Jul 22, 2012: Robert Gifford, a psychologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who studies the behavioral barriers to combating climate change, …
Jul 22, 2012: The great allure of the superhero, of course, is that he has the tools necessary not only to fight the more elemental forms of evil, but also to …
Jul 22, 2012: Fifty years ago, in The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx drew widespread attention to the complex role of technology in the construction of the …
Jul 22, 2012: What’s most interesting is that he totally blew the call on where the battle-lines would be drawn. In Gibson’s universe, corporations are fighting …
Jul 22, 2012: The day, of course, is ubiquitous as a unit of organization, regulated by our cycles of waking and sleep. But when we think about work, the dominant …
Jul 21, 2012: It is difficult to believe today, as Chatwin’s contemporaries did, that he was simply an extraordinary man to whom extraordinary things happened. …
Jul 21, 2012: Again, pundits, let’s talk. MOOCs are damn interesting, you betcha, but seriously, if you think they’re about to solve the labor-intensivity of higher …
Jul 21, 2012: But for all their supposed obsolescence, libraries remain vital places, and many of them are more crowded than ever. Printed material, however, is not …
Jul 20, 2012: Grammar signifies more than just a person’s ability to remember high school English. I’ve found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test …
Jul 20, 2012: As Anthony Burgess once commented, there is no better reason for not reading a book than having it, but an exception should be made for Jacques …
Jul 20, 2012: Online education is a one-size-fits-all endeavor. It tends to be a monologue and not a real dialogue. The Internet teacher, even one who responds to …
Jul 20, 2012: My filmmaking education consisted of finding out what filmmakers I liked were watching, then seeing those films. I learned the technical stuff from …
Jul 20, 2012: La Règle du Jeu The other day I was urging some friends on Twitter to watch Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, which I believe to be one of the greatest films yet …
Jul 20, 2012: One final thought, about the shooting in Colorado: It’s terrible, of course. Really and truly evil. But what next? Will we have magnatometers at the …
Jul 19, 2012: Readflow In our exciting and information-rich Internet Age, everyone needs a readflow: a way to get to the things you want or need to read, and then a way to …
Jul 19, 2012: These new tactics go beyond Islam as a religion. They are intended to make Muslims or Arabs in government who are often far less senior than Abedin, …
Jul 18, 2012: thingsmagazine: Fender guitar catalogue, 1969
Jul 18, 2012: Continuing a long, proud tradition of saying crazy shit, Rush Limbaugh is now claiming that Bane, the TDKR villain played by Tom Hardy, is so named as …
Jul 18, 2012: And then there was the year without prayer. Or was it two years? Three? Or five? I guess I lost count. Anyway, all that time I could not pray. Don’t …
Jul 18, 2012: The suburbanization of American Christianity has had a huge impact on institutional and denominational structures. Automobile-shaped development has …
Jul 18, 2012: the contraceptive mandate and Gnostic religion Our organizations, and we ourselves, do not all share the same view of the moral acceptability of the contraceptive drugs and services that comprise …
Jul 18, 2012: Reblogging does not necessarily indicate agreement with the underlying sentiment. But this is great.
Jul 18, 2012: Aquaman is one of the fastest swimmers in the ocean. He chases German U-boats, out-swims dolphins, can even catch up to a torpedo. The Justice League …
Jul 17, 2012: It was even more startling to arrive in Morocco during preproduction on Cleopatra, the $30 million epic I wrote for the great Robert Halmi, Sr., the …
Jul 17, 2012: The problem with the moral molecule idea is that it turns science—messy, complex, frustrating as it is—into a tidy fable. It’s a bit too … well … …
Jul 17, 2012: [youtube …
Jul 17, 2012: Some years ago Stewart Brand, of The Whole Earth Catalog fame, wrote a fascinating book called How Buildings Learn, which was later made into a BBC …
Jul 17, 2012: Alexander Woollcott’s 1939 portrait of [Alice in Wonderland] as a “gay tapestry” and of Dodgson as a “shy, retreating man who left so much bubbling …
Jul 17, 2012: There will be disagreement about which is [Frank] Kermode’s best book. His most Kermodian is The Classic, first delivered as the Eliot lectures at …
Jul 17, 2012: I remember telling myself little fantasies as a child and a young man, that my home, peaceful and harmonious if strapped, was probably better than the …
Jul 16, 2012: Joe Paterno’s family on Monday vowed their own investigation of the Jerry Sandusky scandal, rejecting the findings of a special investigator who …
Jul 16, 2012: Over the course of his 29-bout professional career, Amir Khan has vacillated wildly between clairvoyance and a thudding, dull-headed myopia. He has …
Jul 16, 2012: More than 50 percent of the United States is under drought conditions right now, putting 2012 in the same category with some of the worst droughts in …
Jul 16, 2012: What if the Singularity means being absorbed into a hivemind? What if the Singularity means being absorbed into a hivemind?
Jul 15, 2012: The “upper class,” as defined by the study, were more likely to break the law while driving, take candy from children, lie in negotiation, cheat to …
Jul 15, 2012: But the city has, to its credit, lavished money on parks in all boroughs, not just Manhattan and Brooklyn. One of its most ambitious projects is the …
Jul 15, 2012: How squirrels land at Stan Lee’s house
Jul 15, 2012: But if liberals need to come to terms with these failures, religious conservatives should not be smug about them. The defining idea of liberal …
Jul 15, 2012: It is a generational thing, of course. The worst offenders are teenagers – in terms of the group who are the most distracted because this is the …
Jul 15, 2012: Auden as Dalgleish I have just learned from this interview with P. D. James that her first editor at Faber, Charles Monteith, wanted to get W. H. Auden to become Adam …
Jul 14, 2012: By the end it’s clear that one form of bravery the film celebrates is affective: It’s the bravery to see and name our mistakes, to apologize, and to …
Jul 14, 2012: heracliteanfire: Illustrations from Living Lights: A Popular Account of Phosphorescent Animals and Vegetables by Charles Frederick Holder (1887) (via …
Jul 13, 2012: The Daily’s business model combines two limiting factors that make it worse than your average, run-of-the-mill website. Its business model purposely …
Jul 13, 2012: Twitter has figured out what it wants to be when it grows up. It wants to be The New Media. Twitter doesn’t want to come to you. It wants you to come …
Jul 13, 2012: Article 18 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) provides: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and …
Jul 13, 2012: a prediction Here’s my prediction of what will happen as a result of the exposure of the profound corruption at the heart of the Penn State football program and …
Jul 12, 2012: “The Family Christian Edifi tablet, which came out last month, comes with earphones, a wall charger, a removable stand, a protective cover, a stylus …
Jul 12, 2012: This is Wes a few years later, but I don’t have a date. He was maybe six? I’m not sure. Love this photo, though.
Jul 12, 2012: Sebastiano Cantalupo, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his colleagues may have become the first people ever to spot “dark galaxies”, …
Jul 11, 2012: In 1988, the U.N. cultural organization UNESCO named three mosques and 16 mausoleums in Timbuktu to its World Heritage list, making the city the rock …
Jul 11, 2012: Since I don’t “use the internet,” according to my dial-up definition, I’m frequently longing for my friends to “disconnect” from it and spend more …
Jul 11, 2012: Tunnelling through the mountain was not just an intellectual and creative challenge; Joyce was beset by more earthly troubles – the continuing threat …
Jul 11, 2012: Whatever the reasons behind the collapse of handwriting, college students no longer think it is their responsibility to write legibly. Give a regular …
Jul 11, 2012: Lehrer … isn’t an artist or scientist, but a skillful journalist, and while he’s never pretended otherwise, there’s often a secondhand feel to much of …
Jul 11, 2012: So what about those of us—especially, but not only, women—who want to dig into contentious topics like Sarkeesian’s, especially when we know damn well …
Jul 10, 2012: “There must be a great deal of good in a man who could love a child so much,” is what the Atlanta biddies said, forgivingly, of Rhett Butler when he …
Jul 10, 2012: People will often cite hard work and a high degree of motivation as the secret to success in these areas. And while I certainly won’t disagree with …
Jul 10, 2012: Keeping drugs, and particularly vaccines, potent in tropical climes is a challenge. Heat tends to damage them. Such medicines have therefore to be …
Jul 10, 2012: thingsmagazine: Below Piccadilly Circus
Jul 9, 2012: In May 2007 a small group of religious leaders met, in the EU headquarters in Brussels, with the three most significant leaders of Europe: Angela …
Jul 9, 2012: There’s an asteroid the size of Montana heading toward Earth and if it hits us, the planet is over. But we’ve got one last-ditch plan. We need a team …
Jul 8, 2012: Finally, a bridge you can trust
Jul 8, 2012: In what is perhaps a sign of the growing Islamic extremism in the country, Pakistan’s only Nobel laureate, who helped develop the theoretical …
Jul 8, 2012: Photo by James Charlick of the library in an abandoned house, via BoingBoing
Jul 8, 2012: There is another wild card to take into account in history: the way that something which once seemed so important to everyone can suddenly seem of no …
Jul 8, 2012: Smart developers will not just conclude that Twitter is unsafe to build on, but also any company that is operating in the Twitter model. If they are …
Jul 8, 2012: Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens, Penn Jillette, Richard Dawkins, etc, specialize—not in philosophical thought—but in ridicule. And that means the new …
Jul 8, 2012: It was a Wal-Mart, now it’s a public library
Jul 7, 2012: These girlfriends are married to executives and small business owners, two of whom are in the insurance business. All of them, I believe, vigorously …
Jul 7, 2012: One of Colombia’s mini-libraries, via Good
Jul 7, 2012: With Aerotropolis: How We’ll Live Next, John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay have given us a sprawling parable of efficiency that begins with the true story …
Jul 7, 2012: But the New York Public Library has since its founding been democratic in a more than simply numeric sense. In 1911, the first request to be filled …
Jul 7, 2012: In New York, I ran into a roadblock. My previous libraries either had incredibly long hours, like the University of Washington, or had incredibly long …
Jul 7, 2012: Nothing changed for me immediately. I’d still vote for George W. Bush later that fall; still accuse democrats of being secret communists. But the …
Jul 7, 2012: CDs always felt like cassettes to me — partially because the industry decided to put them in basically a cassette box even though they had a perfectly …
Jul 7, 2012: I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy – people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be …
Jul 6, 2012: If the Beatles represent one end of the spectrum of business models for music (all efforts support the sale of the recording), on the other end is the …
Jul 5, 2012: theatlantic: Last Night, San Diego Accidentally Set Off All Its Fourth Of July Fireworks at Once [Image: Ben Baller/Instagram] Either that or the …
Jul 5, 2012: In Defense of Cursive In Defense of Cursive newyorker: “A knowledge of cursive may not be “relevant” to the modern world, but it is essential to a visceral sense of the …
Jul 4, 2012: “Great Changes After the Liberation”, 1950
Jul 4, 2012: Andy Griffith People are going to think this is maudlin or just plain silly, but I think I need to say it: I learned a lot about being a father from Andy Griffith. …
Jul 4, 2012: And it’s not just Henry who receives the Reverend’s fossil-fuelled justice. Sodor experiences its own miniature version of the cold war with the …
Jul 3, 2012: It’s a long stretch, but it seems to me that “ease of access” and the quite miraculous enquiry-request-delivery systems now available to the scholar …
Jul 3, 2012: I was on a train with my earphones shoved in my ears completely ignoring my fellow commuters (as is my want early in the morning) while reading inane …
Jul 3, 2012: With a search engine, you type in a keyword and try to find the best matches. It’s like walking into a library and being handed the ten best books …
Jul 3, 2012: There is no greater dishonor when reflecting on the death of a young journalist than by referring to them as “aspiring.” It happened on Monday when …
Jul 3, 2012: oldhollywood: Joseph Cotten in The Third Man (1949, dir. Carol Reed)
Jul 2, 2012: “We stand for a free and open Internet,” the statement reads. “We support transparent and participatory processes for making Internet policy and the …
Jul 2, 2012: Where I lose Krieder, however, is in his suggested speed-bump for our “endless frenetic hustle.” Instead of offering realistic solutions like, say, …
Jul 1, 2012: As Richard King, author of How Soon is Now?, a history of UK independent music, has said, it’s a surprise that remix culture has yet to enter the …
Jul 1, 2012: The church also has to use new media in ways that highlight the local, the particular, and the personal. For example, on a recent trip across …
Jul 1, 2012: When I first began to take antidepressants, I understood that doing so meant I had a chemical imbalance in my brain. I knew that, arguably, I should …
Jul 1, 2012: In the past, maples were tapped from Virginia to Northern Canada, though currently only a few US states, Ontario, and Quebec produce meaningful …
Jul 1, 2012: Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired …
Jun 30, 2012: Part of finding your own voice as a writer is finding your own grammar. Don’t spend your career lost in a sea of copycats when you can establish your …
Jun 30, 2012: There’s always an evil person. But that doesn’t mean everyone’s evil. Most governments, even autocratic governments, can be embarrassed. Technology - …
Jun 29, 2012: So, then. Is literature the serious stuff you have to read in college, and after that you read for pleasure, which is guilty? Mr Krystal doesn’t say …
Jun 29, 2012: First, I’m disappointed that “The Art of Video Games” seems to focus on video games as a phenomenon of the home console or PC to the exclusion of …
Jun 29, 2012: Few students are as frustrating to a teacher as those who are bright, literate, and interested—but who don’t utter a word in class. I was such a …
Jun 29, 2012: Individuals don’t transfer values from one generation to the next. Individuals are biologically incapable of producing a next generation except in the …
Jun 29, 2012: Kay Ryan’s poetry, and her public – if you can call it that – persona defy almost every stereotype that a reader outside the United States might bring …
Jun 28, 2012: paleofuture: CCTV of the retrofuture
Jun 27, 2012: Negative theology is not dressed up Buddhism. It is the necessary anesthesia of Christian theological work - quieting the mind so that God can get on …
Jun 27, 2012: So let’s just suppose that Alan Turing is just the same personally: he’s a mathematician, an early computer scientist, a metaphysician, a war hero — …
Jun 27, 2012: [youtube …
Jun 27, 2012: The U. S. Air Force Academy in the foreground
Jun 26, 2012: The cataloging of vocabulary and pronunciation and syntax that field linguists do in remote outposts helps keep a language alive. But saving a …
Jun 26, 2012: Ochs and Izquierdo noted, in their paper on the differences between the family lives of the Matsigenka and the Angelenos, how early the Matsigenka …
Jun 26, 2012: To offer underinformed speculation, one wonders if Facebook faces the same dynamic as Craigslist: users might be turning to more specialized services …
Jun 26, 2012: In the absence of any meaningful regulations and restrictions, IVF has also brought with it precisely the kind of consequences that many people caught …
Jun 26, 2012: What if the upgrade cycle no longer defines digital innovation? What if certain technologies and methods are mature? It makes more sense to interpret …
Jun 26, 2012: Salman Rushdie was the target of a notorious fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic republic of Iran, 23 years ago. Now, the …
Jun 26, 2012: When did it happen that the experience of going to a sporting event became less coherent than the experience of watching one on TV? Was that Super …
Jun 26, 2012: Presented with 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos, what did Google’s brain do? What millions of humans do with YouTube: looked for …
Jun 26, 2012: “Active” video games distributed to homes with children do not produce the increase in physical activity that naïve parents (like me) expected. That’s …
Jun 26, 2012: I had been interviewing her for the book I wrote about the Holocaust, and by the time I had the brief conversation I am about to tell you about, I …
Jun 26, 2012: When the rector of the Board, Helen Dragas, declared late last week that she was unsatisfied by the fact that she saw the University of Virginia …
Jun 26, 2012: Like a kindergartner, Slaughter seems to think that she – and women in general – should somehow be exempt from universal realities that have nothing …
Jun 22, 2012: from Kevin Huizenga’s Gloriana
Jun 21, 2012: The UVA fiasco also illustrates how blithely states take the task of governing their public universities. No other area of major public expenditure …
Jun 21, 2012: The man who more than anyone else brought about the solution to the teen-age problem was Eric Liddell. It is rare indeed that a person has the good …
Jun 20, 2012: If anyone is the patron saint of modern science – of the whole scientific outlook as we know it – Isaac Newton would surely be that man. As James …
Jun 20, 2012: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Universities are endowed by their Donors with certain unalienable Goals, that among these are …
Jun 20, 2012: The hideous cloud of productivity now looms over all our lives. It seems that actual writers use productivity apps to get on with their articles and …
Jun 20, 2012: Technology reveals us to ourselves as we always in fact were: networked, distributed, laced with code. I use the laptop for everything. I’m not even …
Jun 19, 2012: A subject that seems dead is just waiting for the right person to bring it to life. Or the right curricular design: more than a few departments in …
Jun 19, 2012: Opposition to the growth juggernaut has gathered pace in recent years. Growth, say critics, is not only failing to make us happier; it is also …
Jun 19, 2012: A few weeks ago, an important document was discovered after more than a century of neglect. It was a medical report on President Lincoln, sent to the …
Jun 19, 2012: curiositycounts: If photographer Stephen Wilkes couldn’t decide what time of day NYC was most beautiful, we understand. See his photographic series …
Jun 19, 2012: When I feel I am not performing up to my capabilities at work, I review a list of quote [sic] for inspiration. Op/ed by Paul Tudor Jones endorsing …
Jun 19, 2012: Unfortunately, Teresa Sullivan falls into the trap of describing her collaborative method as incremental and conservative. This kind of rhetoric …
Jun 18, 2012: Let’s look at other things you (or your parents) might pay for each month and compare. Smart phone with data plan: $40-100 a month. High speed …
Jun 18, 2012: Rally on the UVA Lawn as Teresa Sullivan arrives; this photo and others by Tom Daly
Jun 18, 2012: A dramatic top-down reallocation in our general fund, simply to show that we are “changing,” or that we are not “incremental,” seems to me fiscally …
Jun 18, 2012: Famous writers, drunk-texting
Jun 18, 2012: I am not a programmer often means Go easy on me. Ask yourself: Why would someone go out of their way to ask for empathy in this way? Sometimes it’s a …
Jun 17, 2012: Recording the percentage of people who say they are happy will tell you something, to be sure, about how people use words. It’s worth learning. We …
Jun 17, 2012: Austen published anonymously (as “A Lady”); in her own lifetime she had no public life as a writer among writers. She had a generous critic-champion …
Jun 17, 2012: In the domain of religion and science, decisions, actions, attitudes, practices, and conflicts of the present moment require careful assessment for …
Jun 15, 2012: All it takes is actually bothering to meet a teenager or three and you’ll see what I know to be true from meeting hundreds upon hundreds every year: …
Jun 15, 2012: Pews and pew-holders at St. Margaret’s Church
Jun 15, 2012: If art is a mirror, dreams are the back of the head. A work of art derives its effects from light, sound, and movement, but dreams unfurl in darkness, …
Jun 15, 2012: it is become a custom after chapel to repair to one or other of the coffee houses (for there are divers), where hours are spent in talking, and less …
Jun 13, 2012: Well, I’m basically a literary and philosophical humanist myself, not a journalist or scholar or expert of any kind, so I do personally regret that …
Jun 13, 2012: A young man in a small town in Patagonia or in Kansas reads an ancient Chinese poet in a book he borrowed from the library and falls in love with a …
Jun 13, 2012: There is of course a written literature that predates and underlies all these movies, which could hardly have found their form without the help of …
Jun 13, 2012: In the Mines of Moria
Jun 13, 2012: Publishing books is itself a strange experience. Your relationship with a book in progress is intensely intimate while you’re writing it–it’s …
Jun 13, 2012: A scholar’s business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. …
Jun 12, 2012: Amid the tiny din of two-hundred micturating rodents, Ralph X. Bumblefutz goggled in disbelief at a discovery that would forever lay waste to the …
Jun 12, 2012: thingsmagazine: From The Teletype Story
Jun 12, 2012: A well-off, very successful, and very well-known science fiction novelist raising $500,000 to build a video game engine seems very far from the …
Jun 12, 2012: paleofuture: The Rise and Fall of Ken-chan, the Robot Waiter
Jun 12, 2012: excellence-proofed The fact that I didn't think I heard a single interesting bar of music from the forty or so acts I caught or overheard at Creation shouldn't be read …
Jun 12, 2012: Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible to thinking errors, a tendency known as the “bias …
Jun 12, 2012: I love my flip phone paradoxically because I don’t actually love it. Like many things I don’t love, I don’t look at it often. Sure, I excitedly talk …
Jun 12, 2012: Of a surfing expert with Asperger’s, Lehrer writes, “Clay’s ability to innovate in surfing is rooted in a defining feature of his mental disorder.” Is …
Jun 11, 2012: It’s because we love it. We love grinding. We cannot get enough of it. Why? Because there’s something enormously comforting about grinding. It offers …
Jun 11, 2012: My students, like Allan Bloom’s, live inside music. Their musical lives may well be their spiritual lives. It is hard to say, because they don’t talk …
Jun 11, 2012: goodbye, Flickr Probably the best story about what went wrong with Flickr is this one at Gizmodo, but I’m not sure the Yahoo purchase is related to my own situation. …
Jun 11, 2012: Chomsky: And here comes Bilbo Baggins. Now, this is, to my mind, where the story begins to reveal its deeper truths. In the books we learn that …
Jun 11, 2012: And so, after exchanging a few emails, I found myself at the home of the man who owns and operates the only functional Monotype caster in the country. …
Jun 11, 2012: Most of all, [Žižek] can’t stand students. “Absolutely. I was shocked, for example, once, a student approached me in the US, when I was still teaching …
Jun 11, 2012: Malcolm turned five years old yesterday. Here he is on the day we brought him home. Seems like about a year ago.
Jun 11, 2012: I thought the piece Rod Dreher linked to about a gay Mormon man happily married to a woman very engaging. It behooves all of us – on whatever side of …
Jun 10, 2012: 60ansdevadrouille: La Gorge du Dragon sur la rivière Daning, avant de rejoindre le Yangzi. Août 1998.
Jun 9, 2012: Beginning in the 1930s and ’40s, Christian teenagers and youth leaders staged a quiet revolution in American church life that led to what can properly …
Jun 9, 2012: What is implied in the conventional wisdom that religion is prone to violence is that Christianity, Islam, and other faiths are more inclined toward …
Jun 9, 2012: Frank Reader of the Trashcan Sinatras, performing at Schuba’s in 2009. If there were any justice in the world, which there obviously isn’t, TCS would …
Jun 9, 2012: A thoughtful little essay about Caravaggio’s “Denial of St. Peter.” What I find especially interesting about this painting is the way the left side of …
Jun 8, 2012: wesleyhill: Rene Fijten’s illustration of China Miéville’s remarkable novel The City and The City
Jun 8, 2012: “Why have we not been reliably able to improve on C?” Rabkin asks. Part of the problem, he says, is that language designers don’t always have …
Jun 8, 2012: Richard Wilbur, "She" What was her beauty in our first estate When Adam’s will was whole, and the least thing Appeared the gift and creature of his king, How should we …
Jun 8, 2012: I find it almost impossible to read Faulkner now, except for a handful of things, chief among them “The Old People” — one of the best short stories …
Jun 8, 2012: Is this Jane Austen as a girl?
Jun 8, 2012: Variable-focus eyeglasses — ideal for distribution to poor people around the world.
Jun 7, 2012: All translation is interpretation, since it is a choice among meanings; but translation is not the same activity as interpretation. A good translation …
Jun 7, 2012: As someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I remember calculating that I would be thirty-nine in the magic year 2000 …
Jun 7, 2012: What did Halberstam think he was going to get from Jordan that Jordan hadn’t said a thousand times already? I don’t think there is any way to be …
Jun 7, 2012: what is your Eden like? W. H. Auden used to say that he could only evaluate someone’s thinking — and especially their critical judgments — if he knew what their imaginary …
Jun 7, 2012: Fidelity matters less for popular music than for books. This seems counterintuitive, but it’s true. I was happy with my copy of Abbey Road despite its …
Jun 7, 2012: The overwhelming emphasis on materials and process inherent to fine printing is a tremendous obstacle to the act of reading and the ritual of sitting …
Jun 6, 2012: You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is …
Jun 6, 2012: thingsmagazine: Build a paper Volvo 240 (via things)
Jun 4, 2012: I’ve got a book coming out called something banal like How To Study Literature because I fear that literary criticism, at least as I knew it and was …
Jun 4, 2012: austinkleon: Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction A wonderful read about reading. Would make a great companion or gift set …
Jun 2, 2012: Twilight is a book that has been written dozens of times before. It’s part of a great tradition of American writing, the rangy, pop diagnostic manual …
Jun 2, 2012: Jonathan Puckey’s Typographic Rhythm idea is cool, but I think it ought to work exactly the opposite of the way it does: the faster you type the …
Jun 2, 2012: The Superior Formatting Publishing version isn’t a Barnes and Noble book, so this isn’t the work of a rogue Nook marketer from B&N. Rather, it’s …
Jun 2, 2012: The other key disruptor is empathy. Probably every company would say they try to understand their customer — and that they’ve done the market research …
Jun 2, 2012: Stott sees crowds as the opposite of ruleless, and crowd violence as the opposite of senseless: What seems like anarchic behavior is in fact governed …
Jun 2, 2012: As a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot, I think I’m fairly well positioned to say that you folks with your blog and your Tumblr …
Jun 1, 2012: I rest my case.
May 30, 2012: a few thoughts on academic time management Having received some interesting feedback on my previous post about academic life, I’m going to say a few more things about academic time-management, …
May 30, 2012: Facebook appears to be deliberately and systematically making it harder and harder for people to vary their self-presentations according to audience. …
May 30, 2012: Apple meanwhile has a P/E ratio of 14. The S&P 500 has a ratio of 21. According to finance 101, P/E is a measure of expected growth. What it means …
May 30, 2012: Bad spellers are a breed apart from good ones. A writer with a mind that doesn’t register how words are spelled tends to see through the words he …
May 30, 2012: paleofuture: In the 1930s some had hopes that TV would be a great new tool for universities.
May 30, 2012: At 9 o'clock (the Opera began at 8) a lady came in and sat down very conspicuously in my line of sight. She remained there until the beginning of the …
May 30, 2012: The men in the workshops told me stories about the master craftsmen who once worked in Hatton Garden. “We had one old Jewish chap I used to sit next …
May 30, 2012: Great Comics That Never Happened — YET.
May 30, 2012: I’ve long suspected, based on observations of myself as well as observations of society, that, beyond the psychological and cognitive strains produced …
May 30, 2012: The Love Song of Mario Balotelli I think I am a genius, but not a rebel. I have my life, my world, I do what I want, without annoying anyone. I believe I am more intelligent than the …
May 30, 2012: Doc Watson, “Down in the Valley to Pray”
May 30, 2012: mwfrost: countryandwestern: Folklore Productions reports that Doc Watson has passed. R.I.P. Link updated in reblog. Sad, sad news. What a man Doc …
May 29, 2012: Acocella misunderstood my essay on usage in the American Heritage Dictionary. It never declares that “there are no rules” but, rather, begins from the …
May 29, 2012: 60ansdevadrouille: Au Temple du Ciel à Pékin : voûte du temple des Saisons (Prières pour de bonnes moissons), prouesse de l’architecture de bois. aout …
May 29, 2012: Valve has no formal management or hierarchy at all. Now, I can tell you that, deep down, you don’t really believe that last sentence. I certainly …
May 29, 2012: So here’s a prediction: long before the Berkshire Hathaway warrants expire, many of the papers Buffett has invested in will have reduced both print …
May 29, 2012: And when you think Google, think… well, think long-term. I feel like Facebook is probably an easier place to work than Google these days. Facebook is …
May 29, 2012: bad naturalism The big problem with this post by Will Wilkinson is not that he makes the Christian interlocutor a rather dim strawman — though he does that — but …
May 28, 2012: another photo from the same collection
May 28, 2012: thingsmagazine: Chicago, from the BPL’s Travel Poster Collection
May 28, 2012: The famous white horse of the first FA Cup Final at Wembley Stadium, 1923. In fact the horse, whose name was Billy, was not white but rather gray, and …
May 28, 2012: Yet another problem solved by XKCD
May 27, 2012: You might thus assume that superhero comics, the original properties on which these franchises are built, are in flush times. They aren’t. The upper …
May 26, 2012: Orion
May 26, 2012: [vimeo 23657302 w=250 h=141] Damien Jurado recording (Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
May 25, 2012: Explanation here
May 25, 2012: Collaboration … is not quite the same as open, unattributed, dynamically generated poetry. The question as we move forward is, can true, open source …
May 24, 2012: Maps, [Tom Koch] cogently explains, “make arguments about disease, their pattern of incidence, and their method of diffusion. They are workbenches on …
May 24, 2012: The idea that the Baby Boom generation, of all generations, would willingly hasten their own exit from this mortal coil in order to save someone else …
May 24, 2012: When somebody says what sounds like “it’s only religion that keeps us from behaving like savages” I think: that person is afraid he will behave like a …
May 23, 2012: The more central claim—that stories increase our empathy, and “make societies work better by encouraging us to behave ethically”—seems too absurd even …
May 23, 2012: The various durations of government around the world are linked to the various durations and productivities of farming that was the prerequisite for …
May 23, 2012: Last night I went on another mini-rant about the state of non-fiction on twitter. My complaint centers on a certain myopia I see in books of that …
May 23, 2012: There’s more than escapism going on here. Why do we seek out these hard places for our fantasy vacations? Because on some level, we recognize and …
May 23, 2012: In November 2003, Skrbina mailed a letter to Kaczynski, then as now in a supermax prison in Colorado, asking those and other questions designed “to …
May 23, 2012: It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, …
May 23, 2012: We used to read SF to get the heady high of a big vision, the “eyeball kick” as Rudy Rucker describes it, of seeing something brain-warpingly …
May 23, 2012: While we’re on the subject of handwriting, I did an American Scene post some years ago about A. Wainwright’s handwritten and handdrawn guides to …
May 23, 2012: mwfrost: This post by Austin Kleon about copying handwriting reminds me of my favorite script to copy: Galileo’s “Theoria speculi concavi sphaerici,” …
May 23, 2012: austinkleon: Philip K. Dick’s notes for Exegesis (from this NYTimes series) Speaking of handwriting, holy moly, that fella could CLUSTER! (Anybody …
May 23, 2012: Paleofuture on scientific mating
May 23, 2012: I had forgotten about this sweet moment, so it’s good to be reminded. Thanks to Yoni Appelbaum on Twitter for the link.
May 23, 2012: thingsmagazine: Fallout Shelter Handbook, 1962, at The Ward-O-Matic
May 22, 2012: The author suggests Tesla, not Edison, is the “father of the electric age” and buoys this claim by pointing out that alternating current (Tesla’s …
May 22, 2012: At what point is the triumph of comic-book culture sufficient? I don’t ask this rhetorically. Grievance, even imagined or exaggerated grievance, …
May 22, 2012: If your congregation sings only Hillsong choruses, then their emotional repertoire will be limited to about two different feelings …
May 22, 2012: 60ansdevadrouille: Méharée au Hoggar, avril 1964. Dans le lit de l’Oued Ilamane, sous les énormes chaos granitiques de ce massif au coeur du Sahara.
May 22, 2012: If you want to climb Mount Everest, get in line. And be prepared to die. Via Nick Jackson on Twitter.
May 21, 2012: I recommend the Betting Books which All Souls [College, Oxford] has privately published now and then, and which enable one almost to sniff the cigar …
May 21, 2012: The whole story has a tragicomic, Nathaniel Hawthorne meets “Curb Your Enthusiasm” feel. It’s easy to imagine [elizabeth] Warren originally checking a …
May 21, 2012: She was not an unshockable blue-stocking; If shades remain the characters they were, No doubt she still considers you as shocking. But tell Jane …
May 21, 2012: Dick was a consummate autodidact. He survived for less than one semester at college, at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1949, taking and …
May 18, 2012: paleofuture: Tripping Through the Cold War: Drug Warfare of the Retrofuture
May 18, 2012: This redesign is a response to ebooks, to web type, to mobile, and to wonderful applications like Instapaper and Readability that address the problem …
May 18, 2012: Well, that’s the coolest thing of the day. Don’t know why I had never noticed the very close resemblance between the iPhone and 2001’s monolith. Via …
May 18, 2012: “Daytona 500” is the greatest hip-hop song ever–not merely my favorite, but “the greatest.” This is true because I have declared it as such. One of …
May 18, 2012: I acknowledge that I have used four-letter words familiarly all my life, and have put them into books with some sense that I was insisting on the …
May 18, 2012: Andrew [Sullivan’s] writing is not and never has been much about making sense in this way. Andrew is a man of enormous feeling capable of reacting to …
May 17, 2012: It’s taken time for the magazine industry to catch up to the new iPad—only in the last few weeks have some of my favorite magazines, including the New …
May 17, 2012: This day, his Majesty, Charles the Second came to London, after a sad and long exile and calamitous suffering both of the King and Church, being …
May 17, 2012: academics and families For the last couple of days I’ve been thinking about this post from my buddy Rod Dreher’s blog, quoting an essay claiming that academic life is a bad …
May 17, 2012: The theory of machinery is that it saves time, but Stanford himself noted of such machinery that “if you could limit man’s wants it might be called …
May 16, 2012: What makes Facebook such an important company is that it forces us to acknowledge the frivolity of our entire way of life, by showing us that much of …
May 16, 2012: To those who argue programming is an essential skill we should be teaching our children, right up there with reading, writing, and arithmetic: can you …
May 16, 2012: In English we speak about science in the singular, but both French and German wisely retain the plural. The enterprises that we lump together are …
May 16, 2012: Conservatives have found Haidt’s conclusions congenial, free of the condescension and tendentious research that characterize so much of this Science. …
May 16, 2012: This presents a dilemma for Christians on opposite sides of political issues, who need to both remain faithful to their theological/moral/political …
May 16, 2012: About all I can do is confess that while I myself devoured classics in my teens and 20s – even 30s, come to think of it – I now read contemporary …
May 16, 2012: To sever our experience of wilderness from our use of technology now seems to me an unnatural act, shortsighted and unimaginative. No one appreciates …
May 16, 2012: Perhaps the most incisive part of Michael Lewis’ book “Boomerang” is when he observes that Americans have become obsessed with getting something for …
May 16, 2012: In a recent paper published in Psychological Science, a team of psychologists led by Boaz Keysar at the University of Chicago found that forcing …
May 15, 2012: In 2005, Flickr had far and away the best social connection and discovery tools on the Internet. Remember, back then Facebook was still very much a …
May 15, 2012: [youtube …
May 14, 2012: Brogrammer culture celebrates frat house values, youth over experience and men over women. In the war for hiring great talent, the companies that …
May 13, 2012: If I understand the teaching of the New Testament on this matter, I understand the role of the Christian as that of being neither a conservative nor …
May 13, 2012: Until now, the American Psychiatric Association seemed the entity best equipped to monitor the diagnostic system. Unfortunately, this is no longer …
May 13, 2012: Yet “iDisorder” is a pleasant surprise — lean, thoughtful, clearly written and full of ideas and data you’ll want to throw into dinner-party …
May 13, 2012: Despite its ability to solve an array of problems, the slime mold was designed by evolution to solve just one problem: how to build an optimal …
May 12, 2012: Before the Internet, news orgs had a natural paywall, the distribution system. If you wanted to read the paper you had to buy the paper. And the ink, …
May 12, 2012: Better WiFi security could soon be just a few rolls of wallpaper away. French researchers at Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble, in cooperation with …
May 12, 2012: What I discovered in my researches about this part of the country was a vigorous civic idealism and a deep commitment to education. In its early …
May 11, 2012: Much of what we think we know about Anne melts away on close inspection. We can’t say for certain what year she was born, and there are many things we …
May 11, 2012: nomington: Yes. I think the internet has now been officially won, has it not?
May 11, 2012: W. H. Auden, "Song of the Master and Boatswain" At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s We drank our liquor straight, Some went upstairs with Margery, And some, alas, with Kate; And two by two like cat and …
May 11, 2012: The Heavenly Aeroplane Oh, one of these days around twelve o’clock The whole wide world will reel and rock The sinner will tremble and cry for pain And the Lord will …
May 11, 2012: You’ve got to love Leica: who else would offer an eight-thousand-dollar camera that shoots only black-and-white photos. If I were rich I’d buy one. …
May 10, 2012: Robert Altman’s 1973 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye was criticized, at the time, as an unfocused, ironic put-down of classic …
May 10, 2012: It works like this: My agent sells my book IDEA to a publishing house. The house pays an “advance”: a sum of money upfront that I can live on while I …
May 10, 2012: So when digital evangelists prognosticate about the future of publishing, as they love to do, and about what “needs” to go away, serious nonfiction is …
May 10, 2012: In my time working [at Apple], I must personally have seen years-worth, probably decades-worth (and, from afar perhaps even centuries-worth) of work …
May 9, 2012: the road not taken If you’re part of the editorial leadership at the Chronicle of Higher Education, you have a problem. You know that the American academy regularly …
May 9, 2012: Now for what’s disturbing about Specter’s piece (beyond the subject itself!): it essentially bypasses all of the decidedly sane responses to the …
May 9, 2012: keeping a tidy mind These are separate questions: Whether Naomi Schaefer Riley should have dismissed as “claptrap” dissertations she hasn’t read; Whether Riley is a …
May 9, 2012: So for [furniture maker Harrison] Higgins, there is no simplistic opposition between nature and culture, between a pristine creation and human …
May 9, 2012: theatlantic: Abraham Lincoln Did Not Invent Facebook: How a Guy and His Blog Fooled the Whole Wide Internet The fun/chaos started, as it so often …
May 9, 2012: Scores of critics on the site complained that I had not read the dissertations in full before daring to write about them—an absurd standard for a …
May 8, 2012: In 1086 William the Conqueror completed a comprehensive survey of England and Wales. “The Domesday Book”, as it came to be called, contained details …
May 8, 2012: Read it and weep. Or laugh.
May 8, 2012: A Tragedy of Homeric Proportions millmans-shakesblog: And now for something completely different: Macbeth acted out by the voices of “The Simpsons.” No, really. [youtube …
May 7, 2012: In retrospect, the GI Bill, as the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act is called, was one of the greatest democratizing forces in American history. …
May 7, 2012: So what’s the problem? Antoine Dodson possibly said it best when he famously told Good Morning America that he had a “hit on iTunes” but was still “in …
May 7, 2012: Here, the recent history of the Financial Times is instructive. Last June, the company pulled its iPad and iPhone app from iTunes and launched a new …
May 7, 2012: Here, via Warren Ellis.
May 7, 2012: Whoa.
May 7, 2012: Finally, since this is a blog about academia and not journalism, I’ll forgive the commenters for not understanding that it is not my job to read …
May 7, 2012: ‘Most of all what Apple did was they charged $400 to $1,000 for the hardware that was necessary to get a differentiated user experience on data that …
May 7, 2012: oldhollywood: Colin Clive & Boris Karloff on the set of Bride of Frankenstein (1935, dir. James Whale) (via)
May 7, 2012: Is fiction good for us? We spend huge chunks of our lives immersed in novels, films, TV shows, and other forms of fiction. Some see this as a positive …
May 7, 2012: Strangely, and somewhat unexpectedly, James Bridle unilaterally closed the New Aesthetic Tumblr blog today, 6 May 2012, announcing ‘The New Aesthetic …
May 7, 2012: At Princeton, [Cornel] West regularly taught an undergraduate philosophy course with Robert George, a prominent conservative and an architect of the …
May 7, 2012: Jeff Bezos once famously declared that, in the service of innovation and its long-term success, Amazon is “willing to be misunderstood for long …
May 6, 2012: There is a slippage from “is” to “ought” in nearly all evolutionary theorizing, with arguments about natural behavior sliding into claims about the …
May 6, 2012: At the same time, the slide show’s vision of the individual’s relationship to the state seems designed to vindicate every conservative critique of the …
May 5, 2012: Maybe the reason we can’t do anything about the existential crisis of climate change — or, indeed, any of the other existential crises we’re facing at …
May 5, 2012: If the type and volume of criticism we find online were experienced in person, we’d probably think we were witnessing some kind of est/Maoist …
May 5, 2012: oldhollywood: Kuroneko (1968, dir. Kaneto Shindô)
May 4, 2012: W. W. Norton: An Early Afterlife W. W. Norton: An Early Afterlife wwnorton: “…a wise man in time of peace, shall make the necessary preparations for war.” –Horace Why don’t we say …
May 4, 2012: One of the failings of Marvel—as of other franchises, like the “Superman” series—is the vulgarity that comes of thinking big. As a rule, be wary of …
May 4, 2012: The gods descend over Chicagoland last night. Via @yayitsrob on Twitter.
May 4, 2012: placeholder for a book-to-be-written When I am done with my biography of the Book of Common Prayer, I will — God willing — write a rather large book about certain vital cultural events …
May 3, 2012: They already guide blind and disabled people; now dogs are to be trained to help people with dementia. The duties of these “guide dogs for the mind” …
May 3, 2012: With conventional software that runs on your PC, forced upgrades are nearly impossible. Millions of people choose to run Windows XP, a decade-old, …
May 3, 2012: modernity, as explained in a single poem by W. H. Auden So an age ended, and its last deliverer died In bed, grown idle and unhappy; they were safe: The sudden shadow of a giant’s enormous calf Would fall …
May 3, 2012: I’ve been struck recently by how many of my clients are ashamed to go to their friends for help: both material or financial help, and emotional …
May 2, 2012: Slate: Have you seen the research connecting football to brain injury? Green: Yes. From what I’ve gathered, it’s all anecdotal. No one has come up …
May 2, 2012: And so Turkle’s piece and others like it resonate despite the theoretical shortcoming that make certain scholars cringe. What difference does it make …
May 2, 2012: Millennials were also less likely to say they did things in their daily lives to conserve energy and help the environment, and less likely to agree …
May 2, 2012: Malcolm Gladwell puts the responsibility right where it belongs: Slate: Should the NFL be banned too? Gladwell: As long as the risks are explicit, the …
May 2, 2012: The Cromwell conjured by Mantel is deeply drawn to Tyndale’s Bible and Tyndale’s Lutheran theology—on the deaths of his wife and daughters, he reaches …
May 2, 2012: [James] Wood praises [Hilary] Mantel for her “cunning universalism”, a slicker version of CS Lewis’s unchanging human heart. But there are great …
May 1, 2012: For the last two decades, we’ve been gratified, bamboozled, astonished and sometimes alarmed by the surprises [the internet] has sprung. The …
May 1, 2012: The Kansas City Central Library parking garage. More photos here
May 1, 2012: Around 2005 things start making the transition to HD – and then we get to today, and a weird new trend is emerging. I first noticed it some time …
Apr 30, 2012: You Should Go To Graduate School If: You Love to Read…. You Love to Talk (And You Talk To Win)…. You Love to Write…. You Are Strongly Self-Motivated…. …
Apr 30, 2012: Yes, of course, everything about us, from the simplest sensation to the most elaborately constructed sense of self, requires a brain in some kind of …
Apr 30, 2012: At midnight tonight I will leave the internet. I’m abandoning one of my “top 5” technological innovations of all time for a little peace and quiet. If …
Apr 30, 2012: Goodman D——: Adventures in New Testament Greek: Nous Goodman D——: Adventures in New Testament Greek: Nous gmd: By Scott Cairns You could almost think the word synonymous with mind, given our so far …
Apr 30, 2012: In our culture, we have all accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and unlimited. The gossip column is one side of the medal; the …
Apr 30, 2012: 60ansdevadrouille: Maharastra - Au-dessus de Bombay, Karli, caverne Bouddhique aménagée vers le IIè siècle.
Apr 30, 2012: See?
Apr 30, 2012: All of these are awesome. Thanks to Luke Neff.
Apr 29, 2012: If we could use digital tools to estrange ourselves from our books, to defamiliarize what we think we know, we might learn something new about how …
Apr 29, 2012: The smartypants of old used the obelus to call out chunks of text that might be somehow wrong, whether as a result of translation errors or info that …
Apr 29, 2012: Exploring the secret history of the approval curl
Apr 29, 2012: But Stanford’s entrepreneurial culture has also turned it into a place where many faculty and students have a gold-rush mentality and where the …
Apr 29, 2012: The internet has changed who the gatekeepers are. For much of recent American history, gatekeepers had to get voted in by the gatekeeper guild—usually …
Apr 29, 2012: Indeed, what Thomas Kuhn called “the paradigm effect” will make it hard for Balmer and his ilk to properly appreciate what concerns Douthat. The depth …
Apr 28, 2012: Basically, we have three options for these kinds of words: “cooperate,” “co-operate,” and “coöperate.” Back when the magazine was just getting …
Apr 27, 2012: After the End runofplay: Cue the End-of-an-Era music: Pep Guardiola has resigned. But from this vantage point what seems clear is that Pep’s departure, and all the …
Apr 26, 2012: I am living proof that conservatives’ and liberals’ values are worlds apart. … I don’t believe that the Ten Commandments were delivered to Moses on …
Apr 26, 2012: thingsmagazine: Balloon event from 1900 Paris Olympics (via things)
Apr 26, 2012: And why is competition important? Because it drives not just lower prices, but better products. And let’s face it, the products we have are ho-hum. …
Apr 26, 2012: The principal large mammals in Białowieża are the bison, moose, wolf, boar, bobcat, and graduate student. The last spends a lengthy juvenile period …
Apr 26, 2012: We can have what Turkle terms a “big gulp of real conversation” — through a chat window that keeps us connected, all day, to a best friend on the …
Apr 26, 2012: Nothing inspires fear like the end of the world, and ever since Y2K, the media’s tendency toward overwrought speculation has been increasingly married …
Apr 26, 2012: In the last 50 years, the sheer density of the information environment has reached and surpassed the point at which privacy might be maintained by …
Apr 26, 2012: I would not speak of this dilemma if it were only mine, but I watch many others race again and again through the cycle of widening concern, frenzied …
Apr 26, 2012: Many web workers, having tasted of the A/B apple, can no longer imagine operating in any other environment. Indeed, they begin to look with pity on …
Apr 25, 2012: We also know why optimists do better than pessimists. The answer lies in the differences between the coping strategies they use. Optimists are not …
Apr 25, 2012: If anything, social media is a counterweight to the ongoing devaluation of human lives. Social media’s rapid rise is a loud, desperate, emerging …
Apr 25, 2012: oldhollywood: Louise Brooks & Gustav Diessl in Pandora’s Box (1929, dir. G.W. Pabst) (via)
Apr 25, 2012: more on bad religion I want to go back to say a few more words about Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion, a book for which I wrote a commendatory blurb, and some of the critiques …
Apr 25, 2012: This is a picture of Billy Graham with Cardinal Cushing of Boston in 1964. They were old friends by this time. When Graham held his first crusade in …
Apr 23, 2012: This past Tuesday night I took a bunch of Vicodin and went to see Wrath of the Titans, partly because I had fallen down a flight of stairs a few days …
Apr 23, 2012: They called Jimmy Rushing “Mister Five-By-Five.” What a voice.
Apr 22, 2012: buzz: MacPaint illustrations by Burt Monroy.
Apr 22, 2012: If you ask on what grounds do I accuse rapists of having done wrong, then the authentic answer is that a world with rape displeases me and this is a …
Apr 22, 2012: Mild surprise; slight disagreement
Apr 22, 2012: Lizzie Thomas’s Hidden Forest
Apr 21, 2012: I will state this as clearly as possible: You cannot buy Japanese Kobe beef in this country. Not in stores, not by mail, and certainly not in …
Apr 21, 2012: A couple of years ago, I spent three months playing World of Warcraft – partly as research for a short story I was writing, mostly because I became …
Apr 21, 2012: During the past few years, I have come to fear that the United Kingdom and China may be bookends on the most spectacular burst of development ever …
Apr 20, 2012: Just like Amazon Web Services have enabled thousands of scaleable web startups and has made thousands of established companies more efficient, I …
Apr 20, 2012: oldhollywood: Christopher Lee & Carol Marsh in Horror of Dracula (1958, dir. Terence Fisher) (via)
Apr 20, 2012: “Potato Head Blues” (1927). The song is great, the band is great, but there is nothing in 20th-century music better than Armstrong’s stop-time solo …
Apr 20, 2012: But the aspect that boomed out most loudly was his relentless pursuit of secular humanism in the face of ignorant religion. That came across even when …
Apr 19, 2012: What really motivates elementary particle physicists is a sense of how the world is ordered—it is, they believe, a world governed by simple universal …
Apr 19, 2012: There’s a theory that technology eventually subverts whatever rational ends it’s supposed to promote. Grad Cafe seems to have been created to relieve …
Apr 19, 2012: theatlantic: laphamsquarterly: Are any of these fonts your favorite? Please don’t say it’s Papyrus. Five hundred years of fonts, good and bad. We …
Apr 19, 2012: Over the past few decades it seems football has gone out of its way to alienate the paunchy, middle-aged fan. Modern players are so lean and fit they …
Apr 18, 2012: This, however, is not the most remarkable character of the sound of bells. This sound has a thousand secret relations with man. How oft, amid the …
Apr 18, 2012: A supreme author of critically gifted prose, [Dwight] Macdonald at his dazzling best was just as open: anything produced by anyone, he would examine …
Apr 17, 2012: Why worry about what’s covered in newspapers and television when it’s possible to read firsthand accounts from Syria or Sierra Leone? Research …
Apr 17, 2012: From what I’ve witnessed—in the Bible, in my own life, and in the lives of those around me—an encounter with God elicits a desire to share the good …
Apr 17, 2012: The magnification of minor fluctuations and amplification of sub-acoustic distortions is what the media does best these days. It uses many new tools. …
Apr 17, 2012: E-books and poetry just don’t get along as well as e-books and prose. It’s those line breaks, poetry’s defining feature. The problem is a simple …
Apr 17, 2012: We are a traditional department in most ways, and I want to continue to be so, but it is vital to remember Jaroslav Pelikan’s aphorism: ‘Tradition is …
Apr 17, 2012: The first thing I didn’t write about quitting Facebook was a status update to my friends saying, I’m quitting Facebook. I also did not write a …
Apr 17, 2012: The real issue, it seems to me, is not whether Facebook makes us lonely, but whether Facebook is reconfiguring our notions of loneliness, sociability, …
Apr 17, 2012: Facebook has created presumptive, default closeness among casual acquaintances where we once had presumptive, default formality, and I don’t know that …
Apr 17, 2012: Since the 1980s, quantum computing has given a practical technological arena in which computation and quantum physics interact excitingly, but it has …
Apr 16, 2012: So what makes a tool “convivial?” For Illich, “tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as …
Apr 16, 2012: The Pulitzer Board consists of working journalists and journalism professors, most with a deep respect for literature but relatively little …
Apr 16, 2012: via Bibliodyssey
Apr 16, 2012: I also think that Christians need to feel comfortable being critical of the wealthy even when this criticism doesn’t come with ready-made public …
Apr 15, 2012: Many people are drawn to academic life because they expect it will provide a refuge from the social demands of other careers: They believe one can be …
Apr 15, 2012: Still, we can justifiably say that human beings are naturally religious—as a matter of real, natural potentiality, capacity, and tendency—while at the …
Apr 15, 2012: Me: The Lost World of Benzedrine Me: The Lost World of Benzedrine
Apr 15, 2012: It doesn’t matter whether Macmillan wins the price-fixing lawsuit bought by the Department of Justice. The point is, the big six publishers’ Plan B …
Apr 15, 2012: Caro had a further epiphany about power in the early ’60s. He had moved on to Newsday by then, where he discovered that he had a knack for …
Apr 15, 2012: Sol
Apr 14, 2012: It turns out that the act of summoning the past to the surface actually changes the memory itself. Although we’ve long imagined our memories as a …
Apr 14, 2012: One who will not allow any occurrence whatever to deprive him of his responsibility for the course of history—because he knows that it has been laid …
Apr 13, 2012: Oh my goodness. Some genius has built Lego versions of things from 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you want to do this yourself the instructions are here.
Apr 13, 2012: Charles Marsh is speaking at the Wheaton College chapel this morning about one of the great Christian witnesses of the past century, Fannie Lou Hamer …
Apr 13, 2012: I’ve always thought that conservatives should simply bite the bullet and admit that there are racists among self-described conservatives, and …
Apr 13, 2012: thenearsightedmonkey: magnolius: one of the many astounding collages by Meg Hitchock made by cutting letters from various books, including the Koran …
Apr 12, 2012: When a reviewer starts explaining how the preparation of a quiche Lorraine at the restaurant he has visited differs from the way one prepared a true …
Apr 12, 2012: jessnevins: ah, for the golden age of comics, when murderous zombies could be the good guys and carry a strip for two years straight. But who knew …
Apr 12, 2012: onthestrand: Oh. Maa. God. Things just got literally (maybe notliterally literally)beyond exciting here at Penguin Books UK, 80 Strand, London, …
Apr 12, 2012: Me on outsourcing charisma in the classroom Me on outsourcing charisma in the classroom
Apr 12, 2012: If both Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman had been wearing Google glasses, with their visual fields streaming to the cloud and being recorded there, …
Apr 12, 2012: A writer who attempts in the nineteenth century to rehabilitate the ancient legends of the were-wolf and the vampire has set himself a formidable …
Apr 12, 2012: Those of us working today in scholarly communications are surrounded by skeuomorphs on one side, truly new things on the other. We have the skeuomorph …
Apr 12, 2012: What is the labour encoded in Instagram? It’s easy to see. Every “user” of Instagram is a worker. There are some people who produce photos — this is …
Apr 11, 2012: newyorker: Listening Booth: The Alabama Shakes and More Lately, it seems like everyone is talking about the Alabama Shakes, and with good reason—the …
Apr 11, 2012: On Throw-Ins runofplay: Why are soccer players so bad at throw-ins? In any given soccer match the rate of throw-in failure is shockingly high. The problems come …
Apr 11, 2012: I propose to give here, in a few words, an outline refutation of historicism. The argument may be summed up in five statements, as follows. The …
Apr 11, 2012: oldhollywood: The Gorgon (1964, dir. Terence Fisher) (via)
Apr 11, 2012: Imagined air-raid shelters carved into the New Jersey Palisades, 1942
Apr 10, 2012: moral guidance for book reviewers Say only what you believe. Be aware of your reader; don’t talk down to her, and don’t yearn for love from him. Keep in mind what he or she knows …
Apr 9, 2012: Yes, sometimes I still offer strong criticisms of published work, both by academics and other writers. Sometimes I say critical things in classes …
Apr 9, 2012: When I re-engaged with higher education after a 20-year absence in the private sector, I felt like Rip Van Winkle: The generations were different, but …
Apr 9, 2012: This insistence that machines don’t care and won’t care about what we see, or about what seeing certain things does to us as organisms, is a deep—and …
Apr 8, 2012: Nelson’s hatred of conventional structure made him difficult to educate. Bored and disgusted by school, he once plotted to stab his seventh-grade …
Apr 8, 2012: The good news is that the human mind has a surprising natural ability to assess the kind of creativity we need. Researchers call these intuitions …
Apr 8, 2012: And so: Azealia Banks is the rapper who appeals to Pitchfork readers; A$AP Rocky is the rapper who isn’t homophobic; Lana Del Rey is the lovely waif …
Apr 8, 2012: Keeping a racist on your masthead long after you know he’s a racist goes a long way toward undermining all that hypersensitivity about conservatives …
Apr 7, 2012: here
Apr 7, 2012: If a randy 80-something Don Draper were looking to get laid in the 21st century, he’d find himself moodily attracted to a raven-haired lady columnist …
Apr 7, 2012: 60ansdevadrouille: Madère, Eira do Cerrado, 1989
Apr 7, 2012: scritic: (Forecasting via Chris Blattman)
Apr 5, 2012: Lucas Cranach explains that it’s all about the Gesetz and the Gnade
Apr 5, 2012: "that ultimate subversion of all human power and authority" [Peter’s horrified reaction at Jesus’ washing of his feet] is the reaction of normal human nature. That the disciple should wash his master’s feet is …
Apr 4, 2012: Through browser extensions, Privly allows you to post to social networks and send email without letting those services see “into” your text. Instead, …
Apr 4, 2012: For too long, publishers have been worrying about the wrong thing, chasing pie-in-the-sky DRM that has never worked at stopping piracy, and will never …
Apr 4, 2012: Nowadays, we love monsters; and Fantasy as a mode loves monsters to the exclusion of almost everything else. Writers have made whole careers finding …
Apr 4, 2012: But the Internet-in-a-suitcase doesn’t work. In a test at the Occupy D.C. protests last fall, activists found that even when their routers were …
Apr 3, 2012: While readers familiar with Wallace’s Kenyon speech will find that most of the content has maintained intact, This is Water does include a single, but …
Apr 2, 2012: The bandwidth is available, the images are there, and the robots and digital devices get plenty of look-in. Where did the people go? Where is the …
Apr 2, 2012: The New Aesthetic is comprehensible. It’s easier to perceive than, for instance, the “surrealism” of a fur-covered teacup. Your Mom could get it. It’s …
Apr 2, 2012: At some point when I was reading a long note—I think, given the tweet I sent out, it must have been note 110—I actually became so confused by how long …
Apr 2, 2012: Text lasts. It’s not platform-dependant, you don’t just get it from one source, read it in one place, understand it in one way. It is not dependent on …
Apr 2, 2012: Will the new Firestone, with its massive ranks of dead-tree media, attract student readers who have always read on screens? Will the new NYPL keep up …
Apr 2, 2012: In 1984, American breadwinners who were sixty-five and over made ten times as much as those under thirty-five. The year Obama took office, older …
Apr 2, 2012: My ability to select the best candidates for our positions has been irreparably compromised by looking into their private lives. I’ve been “tainted” …
Apr 2, 2012: “It is clear that the need for innovation has never been greater,” my old Economist colleague (and friend) Vijay Vaitheeswaran writes in his new book …
Apr 2, 2012: As Anil Dash pointed out this weekend, arguments about the ethics and functionality of save-for-later apps like Instapaper and Readability have …
Apr 2, 2012: Run of Play: The Vermaelen Problem Run of Play: The Vermaelen Problem runofplay: Thomas Vermaelen seems to think that he’s a basketball player. His constant dream is to steal the ball …
Apr 2, 2012: The fact is that the real world is much weirder than parody these days. Compare Google’s driverless NASCAR to some of the news items we have seen over …
Mar 31, 2012: thenearsightedmonkey: Drawings by Bill Traylor April 1, 1854 – October 23, 1949 Read about him….
Mar 31, 2012: Researchers at Wellesley College and the University of Kansas investigated friendships at that 25,000-student institution and at four smaller colleges …
Mar 31, 2012: [vimeo 38681202 w=250 h=141] bookshelfporn: Birth of a Book Beautiful video of traditional pre-press, offset print to produce hand-bound books. Glen …
Mar 31, 2012: 60ansdevadrouille: Sri Lanka - Polonnaruva (capitale du Royaume Singhalais au XIKIè siècle): entrée de la salle du Conseil de Parakrambahu. 1991.
Mar 30, 2012: I’m going to tell you something that my Republican friends are loath to admit out loud: climate change is real. I am a moderate Republican, fiscally …
Mar 30, 2012: On Thursday, the flood of bad reports continued, with the independent Fair Labor Association releasing the results of its probe of Foxconn, outlining …
Mar 30, 2012: “With a physical sit-in, people are putting their lives on the line standing in front of a building. It’s limited in scope and requires a physical …
Mar 30, 2012: Richard Dawkins and other New Atheists are often criticised for failing to understand that being religious is not about beliefs – but about cultural …
Mar 30, 2012: From 1999-2001, while living in London, I would go on epic, overambitious book-buying sprees, telling myself I was heading into town to “write in a …
Mar 30, 2012: In the midst of a spring practice that, by all accounts, is going well, Nick Saban received a contract extension with an immediate bump in salary to …
Mar 30, 2012: Exactly two things have made air travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door, and convincing passengers that they need to fight back. …
Mar 29, 2012: oldhollywood: Scenes from The Golden Beetle (1907, dir. Segundo de Chomón), a 3-minute fantasy trick film notable for its spectacular use of color, …
Mar 29, 2012: My dear Francesco, I have lately kept praising the age in which we live, because of the great, indeed divine gift of the new kind of writing which was …
Mar 29, 2012: Some people argue that Damien Hirst is a great artist. Some say he is an execrable artist, and others put him somewhere more boring in between. They …
Mar 29, 2012: You cannot hide what you’re listening to from your friends on Rdio. You cannot have a private pinboard on Pinterest. You cannot hide your favorites on …
Mar 29, 2012: oldhollywood: Ann Dvorak vs. the feds in Scarface (1932, dir. Howard Hawks) (via)
Mar 29, 2012: sexartandpolitics: I love this macro more than most macros.
Mar 29, 2012: Nándor Hidegkuti runofplay: Harry Johnston was an outstanding defender who played nearly twenty years for Blackpool, mostly as a center-back. He was so good that in …
Mar 28, 2012: Things have now changed so radically in the rare book world – dragged along limply in the wake of the IT revolution – that, today, neither integer of …
Mar 28, 2012: screenshotsofdespair: via theblacklabrador
Mar 27, 2012: To most people, … theatre at Oxford means the theatre outdoors, beside the lake at Worcester, on the great shabby lawn at Trinity, or beneath the …
Mar 27, 2012: Can any of us claim seriously to feel at all confident of sharing the feelings of a poor Roman Jew — or a Roman senator’s well-heeled wife — as they …
Mar 27, 2012: It began with a girl who was loved by God. The first sentence of Reynolds Price’s Gospel narrative, “An Honest Account of a Memorable Life,” in Three …
Mar 27, 2012: The takedown Yesterday I posted a little piece over at The Run of Play on the inexplicably lousy season Inter Milan is having. The analogy that struck me was that …
Mar 27, 2012: thingsmagazine: Cherry blossom by Terada Mokei (via things mag)
Mar 26, 2012: oldhollywood: Manslaughter (1922, dir. Cecil B. DeMille) (via)
Mar 26, 2012: Do we actually need this intensification of self that novels provide? Do we need it more than ever before? I suspect not. If we asked the question of, …
Mar 26, 2012: Dr Jonathan Smallwood, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science in Leipzig, Germany, said: “What this study seems to suggest …
Mar 26, 2012: Why worry that we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale? For two reasons. One is about inequality, the other about …
Mar 26, 2012: Our version of Big Brother, unlike Orwell’s, is the product of the free choice of both its viewers and participants. It wasn’t created by corporate …
Mar 25, 2012: Main reading room, New York Public Library (before 1924)
Mar 25, 2012: I sat cringing before M-G-M’s Technicolor production of The Wizard of Oz, which displays no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity… I don’t …
Mar 25, 2012: 60ansdevadrouille: Nepal, Badgaon, palais et Darbar Batsala Durga. 1988.
Mar 25, 2012: “Virtually all young people are familiar with electronic games and social networking and might be considered as ‘digital natives’, but they are not …
Mar 23, 2012: Without nonfiction writers dedicated to producing factually accurate accounts that convey the horrific particulars of our world, we end up living a …
Mar 23, 2012: Twitter is often mislabeled as a social network when it’s actually more of a real-time information network. Yes, people make connections, but they …
Mar 23, 2012: Enter Facebook. The site began as a free but closed system. It required not just registration but an acceptable email address (from a university, or …
Mar 23, 2012: Pulp Modernism I think for a lot of people who don’t read pulp growing up, there’s a real surprise that the particular kind of Pulp Modernism of a certain kind of …
Mar 23, 2012: In Havel’s analysis, in other words, the basis of Communist power was consumerism. The Communist regimes were not different in kind from the West; …
Mar 23, 2012: Books are attention machines. In web metrics, we look at average length of visit per use. I certainly remember when I was running Red Lemonade, I was …
Mar 22, 2012: Apple should take a big chunk of that money and put it into broad-reaching research and development. It should create something like DARPA, which has …
Mar 22, 2012: Margaret Wertheim’s book discusses her encounters with the natural philosophers. She is interested in them as characters in a human tragedy, with the …
Mar 21, 2012: Let us begin our activism right here: with the money-driven villainy at the heart of American foreign policy. To do this would be to give up the …
Mar 20, 2012: And that is what I try to do on the stage. I try to tell the truth. Not with facts, always, but informed by the facts, which are vital and necessary. …
Mar 20, 2012: The problem, however, isn’t that we’ve grown complacent about the nature of knowledge, but that the nature of knowledge is changing in the context of …
Mar 20, 2012: The advent of Sarah Palin, however, seemed to usher in a genuine madness that affected every inch of the political spectrum, and it brought about the …
Mar 19, 2012: When we say that the word of God is not bound, we say that death itself can be the living speech of God, as the Word was uttered once and for all in …
Mar 19, 2012: Narrative Science is one of several companies developing automated journalism software. These startups work primarily in niche fields—sports, finance, …
Mar 19, 2012: Since I'm late to this: What Is Pinterest and Why Should I Care? Since I’m late to this: What Is Pinterest and Why Should I Care? scritic: The most interesting thing is their revenue model: Unlike other social …
Mar 19, 2012: Shocks there have been. Nobody in 2002 saw what was coming. That’s why many of us, courteously disagreeing on some issues, have remained convinced …
Mar 19, 2012: It’s that decision not to press charges that makes Stand Your Ground laws, which a bunch of other states have adopted, a crazy departure from the …
Mar 19, 2012: The second major flaw in the Goldbergs is how jolly they are. Joy is the default mode of the work, hand in hand with G major. Just look at the bouncy, …
Mar 19, 2012: Overall I think the general trend, as exemplified by social networks and the evolution of Google, is towards ever smaller bits of information …
Mar 19, 2012: here
Mar 18, 2012: A group of psychiatrists have spearheaded a movement to include ongoing grief as a disorder, to be labeled “complicated” or “prolonged grief.” Others …
Mar 18, 2012: If you rehearse a prewritten speech enough, you can get asymptotically close to the sort of engagement you get when speaking ad lib. Actors do. But …
Mar 18, 2012: Apple is not the main worker-safety problem in China. Nor even Foxconn. Not even close. Internationally owned factories are at the better end of the …
Mar 17, 2012: Daisey’s fiction was predicated on the notion that China is essentially unknowable, that reporters never go to factory gates, that highways exit to …
Mar 17, 2012: Merckx’s style of racing could be summed up in two rules: 1. accelerate; 2. keep going and don’t look back. Expert analysis of the Merckxian …
Mar 16, 2012: Mixed-race blacks have an ethical obligation to identify as black — and interracial couples share a similar moral imperative to inculcate certain …
Mar 16, 2012: Two things have happened more or less simultaneously. The world passed through a historic transformation associated with the computer and the …
Mar 16, 2012: from Marketplace.org Rob Schmitz: Cathy says you did not talk to workers who were poisoned with hexane. Mike Daisey: That’s correct. RS: So you lied about that? That …
Mar 16, 2012: They’re handsome things [volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica], somehow managing to be imposing and inviting at the same time. But the best part is …
Mar 16, 2012: The study into the frequency and type of offenses, and the faculty policies and responses, surveyed more than 2,000 students and 600 instructors on …
Mar 16, 2012: Her more visible role in the public square (or the religious marketplace, if you will) came about almost accidentally. In 2002, customers noticed the …
Mar 16, 2012: Lovely images from the National Gallery of Art
Mar 16, 2012: I’m not naive. I do believe that in the long run I am damaged by piracy more than I am helped by it. I also know that my publisher, on whom I depend …
Mar 16, 2012: At the onset of the recession, newsstand sales [of Harper’s] dropped sharply. Revenues from print ads, already flagging, continued to diminish. So did …
Mar 16, 2012: Finally, when travelers actually disembark, they are too often subjected to inaccurate lessons in American manners and common sense. Americans may be …
Mar 16, 2012: mwfrost: (via Mattias Inks: the Soane museum) It really looks like this. A strange and wonderful place to visit.
Mar 16, 2012: 60ansdevadrouille: Rapa Nui (Ile de Pâques), le moai Tukuriti. Statue isolée au flanc du volcan qui servait de carrière. 2001.
Mar 16, 2012: If we had to visualise this [literary] establishment, it would resemble an Edwardian board of aesthetic censors presided over by a stern TS Eliot–type …
Mar 15, 2012: Certainly, when England concede twice as many penalties as France and score triple the number of tries then it is the sort of tampering with the …
Mar 15, 2012: There is another significant layer, which complicates the ethics of data and power. The data all of these firms collect is proprietary and closed. …
Mar 15, 2012: The founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, modeled their revolutionary search engine on the citational logic of the footnote and thus …
Mar 15, 2012: There will be no new print editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica—Wikipedia will have to carry us from here on—and one of the losses that came with …
Mar 15, 2012: theatlantic: The E-Reader of 1935
Mar 15, 2012: Ask yourself: do you really need to check your RSS newsfeed before you get home, or reply to that email before you can think about your answer? Is …
Mar 15, 2012: The growth of sociable robotics is one thing that changed my mind. People are so vulnerable and so willing to accept substitutes for human …
Mar 15, 2012: There are no shinpads like Puskás shinpads.
Mar 15, 2012: These once-isolated people, a tiny group, have no system of numbers; their sentences cannot accommodate subordinate clauses or other forms of …
Mar 14, 2012: Brittanica went bankrupt in 1996, long before Wikipedia was a crowdsourced gleam in Jimmy Wales’ open-access eye. In 1990, the company had $650 …
Mar 14, 2012: It takes discipline to say, “let’s take care of the customer, and think of the long term” when you’re talking about normal amounts of money. When the …
Mar 14, 2012: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here: Dante’s medieval classic the Divine Comedy has been condemned as racist, antisemitic and Islamophobic by a group …
Mar 14, 2012: preciseandtowering: 1,000 words, right here. (via Telegraph)
Mar 14, 2012: I don’t believe that individual people are objective. They bring their biases, conscious and unconscious, to pretty much everything they think about. …
Mar 14, 2012: To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making …
Mar 14, 2012: Larry Page himself assumed command to right this wrong. Social became state-owned, a corporate mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name invoking …
Mar 14, 2012: The problem is that having spent most of the book showing how hard it is to get us to think rationally about morality, Haidt then tries to get us to …
Mar 13, 2012: As ‘After-birth Abortion’ spread around the world and gained wide publicity — that damned Internet — non-ethicists greeted it with derision or …
Mar 12, 2012: Malte Koeditz: “I researched the Golden Section and its use in design extensively for my dissertation earlier this year. Its proportions are believed …
Mar 12, 2012: In 2009 the United States graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math, and chemical engineering …
Mar 11, 2012: Best book jackets EVAR
Mar 11, 2012: One thing that struck me about the 9/11 footage shown during last year’s anniversary was that in 2001, the people on New York City’s sidewalks had no …
Mar 11, 2012: Casey Stengel's testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, 1958 Senator Estes Kefauver: Mr. Stengel, will you give us very briefly your background and your views about this legislation? Stengel: Well, I started in …
Mar 10, 2012: It would be great to get rid of Kony. He and his forces have left a path of abductions and mass murder in their wake for over 20 years. But let’s get …
Mar 10, 2012: Steve Shanabruch’s logos for Chicago neighborhoods
Mar 9, 2012: Lately when using Google search I’ve found myself nostalgic for the old days, when Google was true to its own slightly aspy self. Google used to give …
Mar 9, 2012: In Digital Willpower World, the problem of fragmented selves doesn’t appear to be an issue. After all, inhabitants are constantly plugged in to …
Mar 9, 2012: The Queen Mary Psalter, London, 14th century
Mar 8, 2012: In an open Q&A with one company’s chief operating officer, an employee asked about the morale problem and got this answer: “There is no morale …
Mar 8, 2012: [youtube …
Mar 6, 2012: The landmark birthdays of heroes always serve to underline our own mortality and with Wednesday’s three-score anniversary comes the stark personal …
Mar 6, 2012: A TED talk, at this point, is the cultural equivalent of a patent: a private claim to a public concept. With the speaker, himself, becoming the …
Mar 5, 2012: A number of science fiction novels were published in the 19th century which hold up today and can genuinely be considered as good literature: Walter …
Mar 5, 2012: Last week one of my Twitter followers replied in this way to one of my soccer tweets: “Why do you like soccer? Sports need to have a balance btw …
Mar 5, 2012: What looks like decline is also in some sense a return to normalcy for the United States. What we think of as the “old media” era — the years from the …
Mar 5, 2012: thingsmagazine: Marian Stachurski -The Bad Omen
Mar 4, 2012: I feel most of the time like Kevin Durant is a birthday present from the god of basketball to me personally, so please don’t take this as criticism. …
Mar 4, 2012: Stanley Spencer, The Scorpion (1939). My more-or-less official Lenten image. Offered for your contemplation.
Mar 4, 2012: thingsmagazine: Cover deisgn by Carlo Vivarelli
Mar 4, 2012: brain-food: Star Wars Yoga by Rob Osborne This is the only Yoga I ever want to do in my life.
Mar 4, 2012: bookshelfporn: LiteraTrain by HerrDrayer A brilliant and fun new way to transport books to shelves.
Mar 2, 2012: I have heard it said by some fellow liberals that Breitbart was in fact a good person, that his public persona was not the same as his private. This …
Mar 2, 2012: If all this seems the act of a nouveau royal family desperate to create an impression, this is precisely what it was. The “Lancastrian” red rose was …
Mar 2, 2012: Horizon Houses (2000) by Lebbeus Woods, via BLDGBLOG.
Mar 2, 2012: The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer …
Mar 2, 2012: Our period is not so unlike the age of Augustine: the planned society, caesarism of thugs or bureaucracies, paideia, scientia, religious persecution, …
Mar 2, 2012: To have a chance at a Guggenheim you must of course have good references.
Mar 2, 2012: To be clear, then: Packer believes that forcing Catholic colleges and hospitals to buy health insurance plans that pay for sterilization and …
Mar 2, 2012: This brings us back to the Black Rubric. The 1552 book had eliminated the term “Mass,” and Cranmer had changed the wording of certain passages that …
Mar 1, 2012: More and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. …
Mar 1, 2012: Bookchair/pushcart!
Feb 29, 2012: After running Collusion for a few days, I wanted to see if there was an easy method to stop data collection. Naively, I went to the self-regulatory …
Feb 29, 2012: One of Jean François Rauzier’s imaginary libraries. Click on the image for a much larger version.
Feb 29, 2012: Just yesterday, Slate’s Hanna Rosin, my own beloved editor, wrote: “The world today brings news that Jan Berenstain, co-author with her husband Stan, …
Feb 28, 2012: A few years ago, when I was beginning to work on my book about the American college, I came across a manuscript diary kept in the early 1850s by a …
Feb 28, 2012: What can we do with this information? Gutman offers suggestions. Smile. Smile at strangers. Smile at yourself. Smile the first thing on waking. Smile …
Feb 28, 2012: More than at any point in our history, the smartest people generally go to high school and certainly to college with one another, move en masse to …
Feb 28, 2012: For some, the typewriter can be about yearning for a simpler time, a younger self, a lost integrity, a relation to the text that seems as authentic as …
Feb 28, 2012: my career-change (conversation with Tim Carmody) my career-change (conversation with Tim Carmody)
Feb 28, 2012: lovecraft:xwidep: Elephant on the Underground Click the image to link to a menagerie of animals on the London Underground
Feb 28, 2012: But there’s another, more self-serving reason that a particular type of superannuated rocker likes to put out an album of standards. These …
Feb 27, 2012: How many times have you written something, published it, and then realized in retrospect that what you thought you said was not in fact what came …
Feb 27, 2012: Via Matt Milliner on Twitter, sandwich art.
Feb 27, 2012: Now that’s what I call an infographic. From a terrific new project, “the newest member of Smithsonian’s digital family,” Design Decoded.
Feb 27, 2012: (A possible fourth variety, in development)
Feb 27, 2012: The Three Varieties of Red Cards, 3: More in Sorrow Than In Anger
Feb 27, 2012: The Three Varieties of Red Cards, 2: The Implacable Agent of Cosmic Justice
Feb 27, 2012: The Three Varieties of Red Cards, 1: The Executioner
Feb 27, 2012: The international mission in Afghanistan has done some terrible things – locking up innocent people without due process, accidentally bombing …
Feb 27, 2012: Right now, it’s a loser’s game to try to find a more ethical smartphone. Everything and everyone is compromised. But it’s a winner’s game to figure …
Feb 24, 2012: In talking to audiences outside universities (some of whom may be graduates), I am struck by the level of curiosity about, and enthusiasm for, ideas …
Feb 24, 2012: Being a broken man himself, Greene knew how to probe the pain and romance of faith and its failed practitioners better than anyone else. Even those of …
Feb 24, 2012: A Wrinkle in Time condensed. And altered. A good bit.
Feb 24, 2012: thingsmagazine: Hidden house in London by Jack Woolley (at Dezeen)
Feb 24, 2012: In our offices, we have been seeing more and more young people seeking evaluation and treatment of chief complaints consisting of headaches, neck …
Feb 24, 2012: A keen Morris dancer with a countryman’s voice, [Roy Dommett] was largely responsible for Chevaline, the naval update of Polaris in the 1970s. As I …
Feb 23, 2012: Standing back and getting out of the way and letting things take on a life of their own is not a variety of moral reflection, though it makes sense as …
Feb 23, 2012: Much has been made of the Internet’s ability to resist such control. The network’s technological origins, we are sometimes told, lie in the cold …
Feb 23, 2012: It’s the opportunity to engage with these issues and many others that excites me about taking up my new position of professor of contemporary thought …
Feb 23, 2012: The thinker who has done most to expose the theological aspirations of secular politics, and especially its infatuation with some version of …
Feb 23, 2012: One of the difficulties with targeting religion, as some secularists do, is that as a concept it’s incredibly fluid. What do we mean by “religion”? …
Feb 23, 2012: This last detail, though, brings me to Goldstein’s fundamental problem with progressive homeschoolers. She argues that by keeping their kids at home, …
Feb 22, 2012: Next month I will be giving a couple of lectures in which I will try to articulate the relationship between my Theology of Reading book and my …
Feb 22, 2012: “Associations with night before the 17th Century were not good,” [Craig Koslovsky] says. The night was a place populated by people of disrepute - …
Feb 22, 2012: None of this offers even a start to the question of why people keep buying and presumably reading an interminably long, frequently repetitive and …
Feb 22, 2012: For Vedantam and Inskeep, the local nature of Twitter is not only notable, but somehow fails to be “democratic,” an analysis that seems unhinged from …
Feb 22, 2012: Jesus’s decision in the desert led him into several years of working with and speaking out for the people his society – and ours – thought …
Feb 21, 2012: Participating in cultural life is not something out of ordinary to us: global culture is the fundamental building block of our identity, more …
Feb 21, 2012: Though my heart leaps up when I hear the gorgeous music of 17th-century prose (Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, Jeremy Taylor), such organ-concert …
Feb 21, 2012: Making reading social? Making reading social?
Feb 20, 2012: yugodrom: Nikolai Lutohin - Dijalektički materijalizam
Feb 18, 2012: The startled glutton glared gruesomely, grinned like a greyhound with grisly fangs then groaned and glowered with a menacing grimace, growling at the …
Feb 18, 2012: thingsmagazine: Soviet-era postage stamps, a collection
Feb 17, 2012: Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive. Forget trying to form grass roots political activism by creating a society of computer users, …
Feb 17, 2012: OK, the idea that kids these days are “digital natives” is a nice, self-serving fairy tale. It makes tech-lovers feel good, because they feel like …
Feb 17, 2012: We live in a time when many religious people feel fiercely threatened by science. O ye of little faith. Let them subscribe to Scientific American for …
Feb 17, 2012: To see just how our wires are rewiring us, a group of four neuroscientists at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) recently recruited 24 …
Feb 17, 2012: Waging Guerilla War Against Distraction Waging Guerilla War Against Distraction
Feb 17, 2012: Invasion of the Space Invaders, then, is the madwoman in the attic of Amis’ house of nonfiction; many have heard rumors of its shameful presence, but …
Feb 17, 2012: A man, then, who portrays human beings excessively and extravagantly. A man who portrays human beings in hell. And yet when we read [Dickens], it does …
Feb 17, 2012: The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our …
Feb 15, 2012: W. W. Norton: Slate Reviews 'The Lifespan of a Fact', Then Fact-Checks Review W. W. Norton: Slate Reviews ‘The Lifespan of a Fact’, Then Fact-Checks Review wwnorton: “Whether you will be delighted or disgusted by …
Feb 14, 2012: some uses of words Last week, here at Wheaton College, we had a chapel service led largely by African-American students. In the last year or so it’s become common for …
Feb 14, 2012:
fiction recomplicates itself
To reformulate reading at thirteen, you jump to adult books. One entrypoint is via the classics. Amid the baffling profusion of grown-up …
Feb 14, 2012: I’m obsessed with why our heroes are not making it past 50. I already gave my whole band the speech. We gotta live different. Lack of sleep, not …
Feb 13, 2012: To my astonishment over 560,000 people have put me in their Google circles. That is over half a million strangers who want to hear what I say on …
Feb 13, 2012: It is not, as it turns out, necessary to be a micromanaging psychopath with narcissistic personality disorder (or even to pretend to be one) if you …
Feb 13, 2012: Jessica Martin on Paradise Lost Regular readers of this tumblelog will know that I’ve linked to several recent essays in the Guardian of London about Milton’s Paradise Lost. The …
Feb 11, 2012: In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke published a collection of prophetic writings called Profiles of the Future. His intent, he wrote in an introduction, was not …
Feb 10, 2012: Seventeenth-century calligraphic exercise, via Bibliodyssey, of course.
Feb 10, 2012: From the point of view of the rural Irish themselves, however, this may look very different. The greenness of Ireland is a false greenness, after all. …
Feb 10, 2012: [Rabbi Jeffrey] Fox believes that e-readers - like other electrical appliances that don’t generate light and heat - are technically permissible on the …
Feb 10, 2012: On Bible translation and mobile tech On Bible translation and mobile tech
Feb 10, 2012: But the book does not exist to restore humanity to an ‘undercity’ (Boo’s word) that others simply haven’t yet noticed. It is also, symptomatically, a …
Feb 9, 2012: Interestingly, when smart people feel less alienated, they seem to buy different sorts of books. Instead of condemning American society for not …
Feb 9, 2012: The sheer horror of Cicero’s murder and mutilation contributed to its mythic status in later Roman literature and culture. His death was a popular …
Feb 9, 2012: Dinehart, an assistant professor at the Florida International University School of Education, was examining data collected on 1,000 second-graders and …
Feb 9, 2012: Apple’s dramatic 1984 Super Bowl ad notwithstanding, in reality the interests and loyalties of corporations are divided. On the one hand are the …
Feb 9, 2012: the raw appeal to power That ‘something else’ has a lot to do with the complexities of religious loyalty, as I’ve said. But it also has to do with a basic commitment to the …
Feb 9, 2012: “Fail better” is now experimental literature’s equivalent of that famous Che Guevara photo, flayed completely of meaning and turned into a successful …
Feb 9, 2012: I’ve increasingly felt that digital journalism and digital humanities are kindred spirits, and that more commerce between the two could be mutually …
Feb 9, 2012: I love electronic books, and I think they’re a huge plus in terms of convenience and accessibility. I still think we have a long, long way to go in …
Feb 9, 2012: mwfrost: Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, is snow-covered in its Google satellite images.
Feb 9, 2012: A couple of days ago, Victor Mair wrote about some provocative behavior on the part of “Kŏng Qìngdōng 孔庆东, associate professor in the Chinese …
Feb 9, 2012: bestiaries
Feb 8, 2012: Labor Activist Li Qiang wants you to know that the iPhone 4 in his pocket is not an endorsement of Apple’s policies, just an acknowledgement that the …
Feb 8, 2012: The “Socratic method,” so to speak, was conversational, and its results hugely time-consuming and inconclusive. The conversation in the Republic takes …
Feb 8, 2012: From election to election, politics is mostly about jobs and the economy and the state of the public purse — which is as it should be. But the …
Feb 8, 2012: Random P. G. Wodehouse Quotation Generator Random P. G. Wodehouse Quotation Generator
Feb 8, 2012: The fact that Udacity offers no formal credentialing puts a very interesting twist on some age-old questions about the deepest purposes of education: …
Feb 8, 2012: The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author’s words. He may put up …
Feb 8, 2012: On the value of cognitive friction in reading On the value of cognitive friction in reading
Feb 8, 2012: This should be the official Presidential portrait. Awesome.
Feb 7, 2012: A rolling press, explained here, wonderfully.
Feb 7, 2012: Whatever startup you’re working on right now probably won’t exist in ten years. Probably not even in five. It’s important to maintain a perspective of …
Feb 6, 2012: In Focus is always wonderful, but today it’s super-wonderful
Feb 6, 2012: The effect of beauty, therefore, is good to the degree that, through its analogies, the goodness of created existence, the historical fall into …
Feb 6, 2012: Well before John Stuart Mill, Spinoza had the acuity to recognize that the unfettered freedom of expression is in the state’s own best interest. In …
Feb 6, 2012: Lessig’s right: the really significant thing about the internet is that it’s an enabler of “permissionless innovation”. And this is no accident: it’s …
Feb 5, 2012: The Legacy of Alan Lomax (by me) The Legacy of Alan Lomax (by me)
Feb 5, 2012: By 1915, Dawson’s dawn-man had become established scientific fact. The painting, A Discussion of the Piltdown Skull, by John Cooke, presents its …
Feb 5, 2012: In May 1896, on returning from a trip to Cairo, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson — Scottish twin sisters and self-taught maverick scholars — brought …
Feb 4, 2012: Something sounded familiar last week when I heard U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski make a huge pitch for …
Feb 4, 2012: [youtube …
Feb 3, 2012: The suit of books
Feb 3, 2012: Even more extraordinary than the ape of the Tura Pieta is the one we encounter in a Crucifixion by the unknown Dutch painter of the last years of the …
Feb 3, 2012: Investors are already placing their bets on who the winners of the new Internet will be: Over the past five years Amazon’s shares, despite their …
Feb 3, 2012: A Prayer for Persons Troubled in Mind or Conscience O Blessed Lord, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comforts: We beseech thee, took down in pity and compassion upon this thy afflicted servant. …
Feb 3, 2012: thingsmagazine: Which? Magazine, May 1959
Feb 2, 2012: Ezra Pound’s beautiful translation of a poem by Li Po, from Pound’s great early book Cathay, is a compendium of all his many gifts. Somewhere Pound …
Feb 2, 2012: Why it's sad that Leopold Bloom didn't have the Internet Why it’s sad that Leopold Bloom didn’t have the Internet
Feb 2, 2012: Drum asks us to envision a Muslim-run hospital that required its employees to bind themselves to Shariah law. But the analogy is hopelessly flawed, …
Feb 1, 2012: There’s also a question for Twitter that’s still pending: Will it enter countries where it will likely be forced to censor? It can stay out—not …
Feb 1, 2012: Hence reading is self-mastery, because the self (and its affirmations) are held in check while the author (and his structures of thought) are fully …
Feb 1, 2012: Studying philosophy could ruin one’s ability to write poetry if the poet were an idiot savant, and poetry the result of some version of “inspiration” …
Feb 1, 2012: A restored liberal education would not be a liberation from “the ancestral” or from nature, but rather an education in the limits that culture and …
Feb 1, 2012: I’m now at a point where (as far as I know), all of my online activity is linked to my real name. I’ve taken a whole-person approach to my …
Feb 1, 2012: Graphic designers, who favor an uncluttered aesthetic, dislike hyphens. They are also partly responsible for the disappearance of the apostrophe. This …
Feb 1, 2012: The great mystery of memory is how it endures. The typical neural protein only lasts for a few weeks, the cortex in a constant state of reincarnation. …
Feb 1, 2012: Reader comments at the Washington Post website have shot up 142 percent since the paper switched to the Echo platform in March 2011, according to Jon …
Feb 1, 2012: A gentlemanly riposte to email is being launched by the literary world as Dave Eggers heads a group of authors who are turning instead to the …
Feb 1, 2012: thingsmagazine: A Clock for an Architect, by Daniel Weil
Jan 31, 2012: A doctor treating many of the students is confident that they are suffering not from poisoning, but from mass hysteria, also called mass psychogenic …
Jan 31, 2012: Google’s new business tactics are creatively inelegant, and insupportable to geeks: many of the things friendly to the open internet that Google could …
Jan 31, 2012: Nobody is forcing anybody who is uncomfortable with the terms of service to use Facebook. Executives point out that Internet users have choices on the …
Jan 31, 2012: As the laureate says, poetry is condensed. Text is not condensed, it is truncated. What is more it is normally an affectation of brevity; to express …
Jan 31, 2012: Indeed, it may be that the question, “what is an algorithm?” is the wrong one to ask — or, at least, the wrong one to ask, first. Through what …
Jan 30, 2012: Over the course of 16 years, researchers have developed a rich dataset related to research in the urban center and agricultural territory of …
Jan 30, 2012: In other words, contemporary liberalism offers religious groups a choice. They can try to serve the widest possible population, in which case a …
Jan 30, 2012: On (Not) Learning to Code On (Not) Learning to Code My newest post for the Atlantic Tech channel
Jan 30, 2012: I used to buy a lot of MP3s. I don’t anymore. That’s not to say I don’t listen to MP3s. I have about 10,000 of the little guys squeezed like vienna …
Jan 30, 2012: Nadal, though? He plays like he’s fighting giants. It’s not just the sneer, or the muscles, or the hair, or that forehand — you know, the one where he …
Jan 30, 2012: Such people are strictly amateur compared to, say, Harold Williams, a New Zealander who attended the League of Nations and is said to have spoken …
Jan 30, 2012: But what if you could re-define books’ value proposition? What if book-buying became less about one-off salesmanship, and more about ongoing …
Jan 28, 2012: Religious ideas are usually said to be an argument against what is called “relativism,” or the idea that nothing in particular should be regarded as …
Jan 28, 2012: janmorris: “Ai, ai, ai” Several times during my stay in Rome I came across a couple of countrymen who seemed, in their quaint fustian clothes and …
Jan 27, 2012: ‘Listen,’ said Bernie Krause. He rolled down his car window, and we sat silently for a moment. It was an hour before dawn, still dark and foggy in the …
Jan 27, 2012: Craig Thompson on the making of Habibi
Jan 27, 2012: When I’m at the computer I feel as if I’m plugged straight into the story, instead of having to telegraph it in from somewhere else. I don’t write …
Jan 26, 2012: If you have read several books by Don DeLillo, sooner or later you will have a Don DeLillo moment. Mine occurred in May 2010, in the Museum of Modern …
Jan 26, 2012: In a companion survey of 500 of Africa’s most active Twitter users, the Portland-Tweetminster team found that the vast majority of those users — …
Jan 26, 2012: The university exchange programme Erasmus is barely mentioned in the business sections of newspapers, yet Erasmus has created the first generation of …
Jan 26, 2012: Desperate for help [with his failing vision], Huxley was persuaded to pursue the Bates Method, a controversial theory (now largely debunked) …
Jan 26, 2012: Why are creative people so deeply sceptical of Britain’s honours system? Previously top secret details revealed today show that artists including …
Jan 26, 2012: On December 10, 1810, in a muddy field around 25 miles from London, a fight took place that was so dramatic, controversial, and ferocious that it …
Jan 26, 2012: The real question, John [of the Cross] suggests, is about what you are really after: Do you want ‘spirituality’, mystical experience, inner peace, or …
Jan 26, 2012: Vladimir Putin has laid out his plans to compile a canon of 100 Russian books “that every Russian school leaver will be required to read” in an …
Jan 26, 2012: [youtube …
Jan 25, 2012: for anyone who might be interested. . . . My posts at the Atlantic’s Technology Channel are listed here.
Jan 24, 2012: Why Is the Subtitle Font in 'Mission Impossible 4' So Lame? - Alan Jacobs - Entertainment - The Atlantic Why Is the Subtitle Font in ‘Mission Impossible 4’ So Lame? - Alan Jacobs - Entertainment - The Atlantic
Jan 24, 2012: Internet executives like Mark Zuckerberg like to argue that “privacy” is an outdated concern. But when people talk about privacy, what they’re really …
Jan 24, 2012: On March 29, 1962, the Village Voice ran a full-page ad touting the merits of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions—a book which had been published a good …
Jan 24, 2012: Television is a very different experience in the age of video on demand. Even if we’re watching the same kind of content — say, 30 to 60 minute …
Jan 24, 2012: I thought they probably did. Explanation here.
Jan 24, 2012: The home schooling movement, by contrast, has no access to funding nor any decision-making structure – but it has the advantage of having a much …
Jan 24, 2012: Books, I fancy, may be conveniently divided into three classes: — (1) Books to read, such as Cicero’s Letters, Suetonius, Vasari’s Lives of the …
Jan 24, 2012: • Those that belong to the emperor • Embalmed ones • Those that are trained • Suckling pigs • Mermaids (or Sirens) • Fabulous ones • Stray dogs • …
Jan 24, 2012: Richard Wilbur, "To the Etruscan Poets" Dream fluently, still brothers, who when young Took with your mother’s milk the mother tongue, In which pure matrix, joining world and mind, You …
Jan 24, 2012: In the west portal of Chartres Cathedral, a scribe at work.
Jan 23, 2012: The Giants’ win over the 49ers in a magnificent throwback conference championship game at Candlestick Park yesterday turned on two fumbles by 49ers …
Jan 23, 2012: Justice Sonia Sotomayor then writes, agreeing with Scalia’s trespass approach, but adding in a separate concurrence for herself alone, that actually …
Jan 23, 2012: There have been three major changes to 21st century writing: (1) writing is more informal, or “looser”, as @wynkenhimself puts it; (2) writing is more …
Jan 23, 2012: Blogging demonstrates the persistence of a key truth in the history of reading, an insight as obvious to Tocqueville as it should be to most bloggers …
Jan 23, 2012: In the early 19th century Lord Byron was the most-quoted author, the most referred-to, the one who loomed largest in the collective consciousness of …
Jan 22, 2012: Now that’s a noir image. From The Big Combo (1955). I saw a version of it here.
Jan 20, 2012: As Schiller ticked down the list, for feature after feature — portability, durability, interactivity, searchability, and currency — the book earned a …
Jan 20, 2012: The publishers’ dream of creating content once and having it run everywhere is just that, a dream. We will all be nostalgic for Microsoft soon, which …
Jan 20, 2012: His strong point is that religion never lost faith in using culture to improve vulnerable, childlike souls. It understands, he contends, human …
Jan 20, 2012: Jobs didn’t just use pseudo-asceticism for marketing. He wielded purist fanaticism so as to have power in the world of nerds. This is how it came to …
Jan 20, 2012: Christopher Nolan views anarchy with dread, and human behavior in the absence of state-imposed stability is the central theme of his trilogy. Batman’s …
Jan 19, 2012: Now both individual authors and trade and textbook presses can be drawn into a development and publishing ecosystem that begins and ends with Apple. …
Jan 19, 2012: What people haven’t seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the …
Jan 19, 2012: The book as such isn’t obsolete; inherently, it’s less immediate and raw, going as it does through the old-fashioned labyrinth of the publishing …
Jan 19, 2012: Czeslaw Milosz, from "From the Rising of the Sun" My generation was lost. Cities too. And nations. But all this a little later. Meanwhile, in the window, a swallow Performs its rite of the second. …
Jan 19, 2012: see more here
Jan 18, 2012: There are two reasons, basically, why soccer lends itself to spectatorial boredom. One is that the game is mercilessly hard to play at a high level. …
Jan 18, 2012: I doubt that humility is among the first traits most people think of when they think of scientists. And indeed, some scientists (like some academics …
Jan 18, 2012: the Athelstan Psalter
Jan 18, 2012: This is the Shoal Creek Valley in northern Alabama, a few hundred yards from my sister’s house, eight months after a massive tornado cut through the …
Jan 17, 2012: The system the judges upheld had its roots in feudalism. Edward I, one of England’s most barbarous kings, introduced the crime of scandalum magnatum …
Jan 17, 2012: These are the kinds of issues publishers of electronic textbooks have to address. These are the reasons the barriers to entry are so large. How will …
Jan 17, 2012: Stressing out too much about opposition often leads you to miss out on allies who substantively agree with everything you have to say but who work on …
Jan 17, 2012: When you have just been told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb …
Jan 13, 2012: Reverting to Type: a Reader's Story Since the publication of my book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, a number of people have asked me about my history as a reader: …
Jan 12, 2012: When [Graham] Greene died, his heirs and trustees were faced with the conundrum of what to do about his library, an archive of some 3,000 volumes. …
Jan 12, 2012: When there began to be such a thing as books written for children, in the mid-19th century, fiction was dominated by the realistic novel. Romance and …
Jan 12, 2012: [Novelist and husband of Diane Ackerman] Paul West was also driven by similar [linguistic] pleasures, devoting sprawling acres of neural real estate …
Jan 11, 2012: For more than a decade, Google search wasn’t “social” in any way. When I searched for a new car or a European hotel or the best way to plunge a …
Jan 11, 2012: Iceland never had any bookshops between the sixteenth century and the mid-nineteenth. It also had no schools. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century …
Jan 11, 2012: This is pretty close to my favorite xkcd ever.
Jan 10, 2012: Ultimately Joan Didion’s crime—artistic and personal—is the one of which all of us will eventually be convicted: she got old. Her writing got old, her …
Jan 10, 2012: [youtube …
Jan 10, 2012: Mysterious paper sculptures in Edinburgh, via @jamesbridle.
Jan 10, 2012: [youtube …
Jan 9, 2012: here
Jan 9, 2012: On All Saints Day 1522 Master John Browne of the parish of Theydon-Garnon in Essex, having kissed the paxbread at the parish Mass, smashed it over the …
Jan 7, 2012: Fortunately for us, our hospital’s nurses were trained to deal with infant death. They washed the baby, wrapped him in a blanket and put a little …
Jan 6, 2012: The commentators excoriating today’s students for studying the wrong subjects are pursuing certainty where none exists. Like the health fanatics …
Jan 6, 2012: On his Facebook page, created by his publisher, Jeffrey Eugenides recently expressed similar sentiments. In “A Note From Jeffrey Eugenides to …
Jan 6, 2012: But one underlying thing that Cerf misses, is how vital universal network access is to civilization and democracy. When we look at the history of …
Jan 5, 2012: Over the past few years, courts and parliaments in countries like France and Estonia have pronounced Internet access a human right. But that argument, …
Jan 5, 2012: Before he gets stuck into the lives and masterpieces of 10 great authors (the book began as a commission from Redbook in the early 50s), Maugham gives …
Jan 4, 2012: I recently started a performance again when its hushed opening was interrupted by a mobile-phone. Judging by the public’s supportive reaction they …
Jan 1, 2012: In “Window of Opportunity,” Gingrich introduced himself as a futurist, a role he has played off and on throughout his career. There are problems …
Jan 1, 2012: Growing up, assimilating the wisdom of the past, is in great part learning how to organize the sensorium productively for intellectual purposes. Man’s …
Jan 1, 2012: Calendar pages for January from the Hours of Joanna of Castile
Dec 31, 2011: moving Fort Moore Hill High School
Dec 30, 2011: Modern liberalism is a mixture of two elements. One is a support of Federal power – what came out of the late 1930s, World War II, and the civil …
Dec 30, 2011: www.youtube.com/watch thenearsightedmonkey: Saigon Soul, late 60’s, early 70’s reminding us somehow of Alex Chilton. Find it playing on juke box RIGHT …
Dec 30, 2011: The largest house in the East Riding of Yorkshire, Burton Constable is a romantic compendium, substantially Elizabethan but remodelled in the 18th …
Dec 30, 2011: The class is conducted very simply. You turn in stories, and I read them aloud — I don’t identify the author. One of the nice things about having a …
Dec 30, 2011: What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and …
Dec 30, 2011: HTML5 offers a glimpse of the freedom to define the Web publication the way it should have been defined fifteen years ago: as a more functional …
Dec 30, 2011: A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead …
Dec 30, 2011: Hamleys, which is London’s 251-year-old version of F.A.O. Schwarz, recently dismantled its pink “girls” and blue “boys” sections in favor of a …
Dec 29, 2011: Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, …
Dec 28, 2011: What English speakers call ‘computer science’ Europeans have known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik. Now even biology has become an …
Dec 28, 2011: Scalasaig, Colonsay
Dec 28, 2011: In a sense, every house, hill, barn, and byre [on Colonsay] is a center of gossip, but there are several principal ones—The Shop, the post office, the …
Dec 28, 2011: I believe that we ought so to love and trust God in our lives, and in all the good things that he sends us, that when the time comes (but not before!) …
Dec 28, 2011: Weizsäcker’s book The World-View of Physics is still keeping me very busy. It has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God as …
Dec 28, 2011: Ahh, Firing Line! If I leave a TV studio these days with what Diderot termed l'esprit de l'escalier, I don’t always blame myself. If I wish that I had …
Dec 28, 2011: pegobry: the-bitterist: harrietsdaughter: hamburgerjack: OMG, TELL IT LIKE IT IS KITTY. It’s never fun. And then I can’t even enjoy the food …
Dec 28, 2011: Call this a leftover 2012 prediction: like a forest getting older, our social network usage will continue to diversify. And that’s a good thing. The …
Dec 28, 2011: While researchers have known for decades that the body undergoes various metabolic and hormonal changes while it’s losing weight, the Australian team …
Dec 28, 2011: Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The …
Dec 28, 2011: I happen to think copyright does induce creation and that creators and consumers as classes would worse off without it. And I think returning creative …
Dec 28, 2011: Proponents of ever stronger and longer copyrights, supported by ever more draconian enforcement mechanisms, like to throw around terms like “piracy” …
Dec 28, 2011: It’s a safe bet that in the history of state funerals, no former president has been sent off to the Absolute Horizon by not one but at least three …
Dec 27, 2011: For students who are not talented with words and numbers but who are talented with mentally rotating figures and shapes in their minds, there is often …
Dec 27, 2011: In Madrid, a freeway turned into a park
Dec 26, 2011: Because of piety’s penchant for taking itself too seriously, theology does well to nurture a modest, unguarded sense of comedy. Some droll sensibility …
Dec 26, 2011: I called it! I think one of the odder locutions currently in use is this: “I call bullshit.” “I’m calling bullshit on that.” Aren’t you really just saying, “I …
Dec 25, 2011: Truly wondrous is the whole chronicle of the incarnation. From the time Christ came, the ancient slavery is ended, the devil is confounded, demons …
Dec 25, 2011: British Library
Dec 25, 2011: For some years now, it has been a Christmas Eve tradition in my family for my mother and my sister Ruthie to go to the Starhill Cemetery, the country …
Dec 24, 2011: I pray good beef and I pray good beer This holy night of all the year, But I pray detestable drink to them That give no honour to Bethlehem. May all …
Dec 23, 2011: The story told by the book – epicureanism flourished at Rome, was lost, and then was suddenly rediscovered and transformed the world – reflects the …
Dec 23, 2011: dilapidated Lego house, via someone on Twitter I can’t find at the moment
Dec 23, 2011: how to draw a dragon. UPDATE: But according to @m_e_frost on Twitter, one of our wisest figures provides better instructions.
Dec 23, 2011: xkcd
Dec 23, 2011: The first radio telescope in the world was built a few blocks from my house. Thanks to Nate Barksdale.
Dec 23, 2011: [John Jeremiah Sullivan] seems to have in abundance the storyteller’s gifts: he is a fierce noticer, is undauntedly curious, is porous to gossip, and …
Dec 23, 2011: via @GarethAveyard, a Lego model of a large hadron collider. Best Christmas present EVAR.
Dec 22, 2011: The weird, accidental material conditions of the practice of software development have an impact on the sort of practice it facilitates. For example, …
Dec 22, 2011: There are intimations of the abyss: wars and rumors of war, our television and our politics, the expression that’s always on Donald Trump’s face, the …
Dec 22, 2011: In our strange cultural moment it is necessary to make a distinction between religious propaganda and religious thought, the second of these being an …
Dec 22, 2011: Writers of all kinds, from the nakedly commercial to the wilfully abstruse, look for two things: love and money. The traditional publisher, to a …
Dec 22, 2011: Welcome to the world, @micheleherold!
Dec 22, 2011: Should driver-less cars become a commonplace way of getting from here to there - Google is already sending them out on public roads - Koushik Dutta …
Dec 22, 2011: Volunteers in white lab coats, surgical gloves and masks stood on the back of a pickup truck along the banks of the Nile in Cairo, rummaging through …
Dec 21, 2011: People just get things wrong. They read them wrong, or remember them wrong or the way they want to, or the information they read right was wrong in …
Dec 21, 2011: Lucia Etxebarria has every right to feel furious. The Spanish prize-winning author recently learned that her most recent novel has been downloaded …
Dec 20, 2011: We invite you to celebrate New Year’s Eve 2012 at The Aviary. Doors will open at 9pm on Saturday, December 31st. The evening’s festivities will …
Dec 19, 2011: When I was young I thought cops were cool. They had a respectable and honorable job to keep people safe and fight crime. Now, I think their tactics …
Dec 19, 2011: It’s true that Germans and Greeks work very different amounts, but not in the way you expect. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation …
Dec 19, 2011: what one thing Ah, so big a question! That is the whole question of theology, you see! I should say, I hope that during your studies you have visited yourself …
Dec 19, 2011: Mark Bernstein: Christianity and The Future Of The Book Mark Bernstein: Christianity and The Future Of The Book First of all, I want to thank Mark for reading and responding to my essay. There’s a good deal …
Dec 19, 2011: My real criticism of [The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe] relates to a different matter. It is that it ends just when it is getting interesting. …
Dec 19, 2011: some things I published this year First of all, two books, both of which are linked to on the right side of your screen: my little essay The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of …
Dec 19, 2011: Let me start my own speculations [about life-prolongation] with what might seem a frivolous topic: pet dogs. For those who love their dogs, the …
Dec 19, 2011: Christopher Hitchens, by common consent the greatest man of the last century and probably in the entire history of the world, has just died. But this …
Dec 19, 2011: Fear of Apple is about losing control over the software on our computers. Fear of Google is about losing control over our privacy. Gruber
Dec 19, 2011: preciseandtowering: Fold out maps! “‘Liber Floridus’ (Book of Flowers), a Medieval encyclopædia produced some 900 years ago by Lambert, Canon of St …
Dec 19, 2011: The orthodox view among online pundits has been that paywalls and subscription fees won’t work for general-interest newspapers, that people simply …
Dec 19, 2011: What would “ethical browsing” or “ethical social networking” entail? Never using sites that exploit facial-recognition technology? Refusing to do …
Dec 18, 2011: [vimeo 31179423 w=250 h=141] (Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
Dec 18, 2011: But embracing this mystery comes at a price. If, like the archbishop of Canterbury, your faith is a kind of “silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting …
Dec 18, 2011: I used to play chess expecting to win, but this game [politics] was not about winning or losing. It was about losing. From the beginning the position …
Dec 18, 2011: “From my interactions with Dick, I know that many of these musings were written while he stayed up all night, sometimes in an alcoholic haze, while …
Dec 17, 2011: The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will …
Dec 17, 2011: [McDonald’s] had by now, according to their sign, sold the same original burger fifty billion times. He wondered if it was to the same person. Life in …
Dec 17, 2011: The meaning of marriage begins in the giving of words. We cannot join ourselves to one another without giving our word. And this must be an …
Dec 17, 2011: Garry Wills, in a rather passionate review [of All Thngs Shining] in the New York Review of Books, has registered complaints about various points of …
Dec 16, 2011: Saint Peter: Next! Man [defiant]: Christopher Hitchens. St Peter [a half-beat late]: Personal account? Hitchens: Do you know who I am? Of course you …
Dec 16, 2011: In a number of interviews during the course of his cancer treatments, he discussed the prospect of a “death bed” conversion, and it was clear that he …
Dec 16, 2011: Lorna said to me, ‘You know Riddley theres some thing in us it dont have no name.’ I said, ‘What thing is that?’ She said, ‘Its some kind of thing it …
Dec 16, 2011: “Captain Najork,” said Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong, “is seven feet tall, with eyes like fire, a voice like thunder, and a handlebar moustache. His …
Dec 16, 2011: Mark Jarman, "Psalm: First Forgive the Silence" First forgive the silence That answers prayer, Then forgive the prayer That stains the silence. Excuse the absence That feels like presence, Then …
Dec 16, 2011: Here’s a thing I will say now without hesitation, unqualified and important. The one word that comes to mind when I think of my brother is ‘courage’. …
Dec 15, 2011: By the time Milton reaches Book VII he has come to a kind of accord with his own frustration. All right, he says: I can’t get up to heaven, and if I …
Dec 15, 2011: Pour la skieuse Lindsay Vonn, le tebowing prend encore une autre signification. Elle a imité la pose du footballeur américain après sa victoire à …
Dec 15, 2011: But while the Web and related telecommunications portals are, as Pagel says, explosively expanding the universe of “docile copiers,” these same …
Dec 15, 2011: Amazon’s Dec. 10 Price Check promotion specifically excludes books. That’s right. You can use the price check app to shop for books, and maybe save …
Dec 15, 2011: With more and more work using nanotechnology create clothing and other materials that are resistant to water and staining, it may not be too long …
Dec 15, 2011: This year’s big news stories in Lego
Dec 15, 2011: Just a reminder that things are always happening, though slowly, at The Gospel of the Trees.
Dec 15, 2011: What I want to suggest is that any process of evolution that relies on exploring an unknown space, such as genes or such as our neurons exploring the …
Dec 15, 2011: Apple would have never shipped a device like the Fire. It’s got way too many rough edges (sluggish touchscreen, magazine apps that don’t really fit …
Dec 15, 2011: Hospitals and doctors’ offices, hoping to curb medical error, have invested heavily to put computers, smartphones and other devices into the hands of …
Dec 15, 2011: mwfrost: David Ryan’s boat-building shed looks like a great place to spend a winter.
Dec 15, 2011: The Gospel came to the Greeks and the Greeks turned it into a philosophy. The Gospel came to the Romans and the Romans turned it into a system. The …
Dec 14, 2011: It is comforting to believe that we, through our sheer will, could transcend these bindings – to believe that if we were slaves, our indomitable …
Dec 14, 2011: It’s so damn interesting though to be doing this. I feel like I have a front seat to a really cool … thing. I don’t even know what it is. I think it’s …
Dec 14, 2011: For every invention we make, from mobile phones to online shopping, self-checkout tills, and driverless cars, we eliminate hundreds of thousands of …
Dec 13, 2011: One of the biggest complaints about tablets is that they are used to consume, not create. If you give your kid a computer, she can program, write, …
Dec 13, 2011: The most remarkable attribute Krugman has brought to the Times is rudeness. The social niceties that accompany his exalted position are utterly lost …
Dec 13, 2011: As I see it, the problem with Amazon stems from the fact that though it started out as a bookseller, it isn’t anymore, not really. It sells everything …
Dec 13, 2011: Now that Toronto’s penguin couple, Buddy and Pedro, have moved on to courting females, it seems their platonic relationship was more of a bromance …
Dec 13, 2011: thingsmagazine: The natural history of many curious and uncommon zoophytes… systematically arranged and described by Daniel Solander
Dec 13, 2011: We also hugely underestimate the role of chance in life (this is System 1’s work). Analysis of the performance of fund managers over the longer term …
Dec 12, 2011: I think the worst consequences [of the literary bas against genre fiction] are: Wonderful, serious, sophisticated writers who would appeal to a …
Dec 12, 2011: Defaulting (even in so-called non-recourse states) is still a lot of trouble, and to most people it’s scary. In addition, homeowners are slow to …
Dec 11, 2011: Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and …
Dec 11, 2011: At a time when there were no driver’s licenses, speed limits or clear lane demarcations, the notion of a stop sign was revolutionary. In fact, aside …
Dec 10, 2011: Starbucks is about to unveil a new store in suburban Seattle built primarily of four used shipping containers — the large steel boxes used to store …
Dec 8, 2011: For the near future, though, it seems like the trade-off is going to be worth it. Web email, for example, has so many advantages that I, for one, …
Dec 6, 2011: Think of the 18th–century artist Piranesi, for example, whose engravings of picturesquely decaying Rome are certainly fantastic in some respects—he …
Dec 6, 2011: The programmers of the commercial web have always seen their goal as the elimination of distance and friction from transactions, and that objective …
Dec 6, 2011: What I’m kind of hoping is that this is just kind of a pause, while we assimilate this gigantic new thing, ubiquitous computing and the Internet. And …
Dec 6, 2011: thingsmagazine: Book art by Su Blackwell
Dec 5, 2011: You left the cocoon of Princeton when you were 16. Why? I was a rebellious adolescent. It was the ’60s. Everyone was rebellious. I hated high school. …
Dec 5, 2011: ‘We love [Meryl Streep’s] work,’ Callista Gingrich said. 'We love “Mama Mia.” We’ve seen it several times. Newt’s ring-tone is “Dancing Queen.”’ …
Dec 5, 2011: The sense of festivity, which corresponds to pity in tragedy, is always present at the end of a romantic comedy. This takes the part of a party, …
Dec 5, 2011: To [Milton’s Satan] belongs the journeys, the politics, the battles, a growing insupportable self-knowledge that will, eventually, diminish him to …
Dec 5, 2011: I’ve spent the last couple of weeks living in a monastery, largely to complete a book chapter (now uncompleted) but also to commune with God in the …
Dec 5, 2011: [W]e are in a sense living through a cultural war in which some who’ve chosen, say, more leisure and prestige are waging a symbolic struggle against …
Dec 5, 2011: Writer’s block — or, maybe more accurately, a writer’s expressive frustration — has many presenting symptoms and many causes, but it is at root …
Dec 4, 2011: Comedy … is not only possible within a Christian society, but capable of a much greater breadth and depth than classical comedy. Greater in breadth …
Dec 2, 2011: Another theme of Kahneman’s book, proclaimed in the title, is the existence in our brains of two independent sytems for organizing knowledge. Kahneman …
Dec 1, 2011: But the problem, according to those campaigning for change, begins at school with ICT [Information and communications technology] - a subject seen by …
Dec 1, 2011: There’s now an App Store for the Mac to match that of the iPhone and iPad, and it carries the same battery of restrictions. Some restrictions, …
Dec 1, 2011: I really enjoyed doing this interview with Sarah Green at Harvard Business Review for their podcasting series. The title “The Myth of Monotasking” is …
Dec 1, 2011: Modernist ambiguity, or realist emotional ambivalence, is unknown to Tolkien—the good people are very good, the bad people very bad, and though …
Nov 30, 2011: One of the two Republican senators to vote for the Udall Amendment yesterday was Sen. Rand Paul, who quoted Thomas Jefferson: “The means of defense …
Nov 30, 2011: why I returned my Kindle Fire Biggest reason: I couldn’t find a comfortable way to hold the darn thing. The narrow bezel requires you to hold the device at its edges, or else …
Nov 30, 2011: Legislation is helpless against the wild prayer of longing that rises, day in, day out, from all these households under my protection: “O God, put …
Nov 29, 2011: Penn State lost a university president, a legendary head football coach, an athletic director, and a school administrator because they heard …
Nov 29, 2011: The enigmatic Voynich manuscript, now online.
Nov 28, 2011: At bottom, he says, the Germans were blind to the possibility that the Americans were playing the game by something other than the official rules. The …
Nov 28, 2011: What is notable about these would-be writers is how crest-fallen they are when their first writing efforts emerge from the editors’ hands. A typical …
Nov 27, 2011: Nevertheless, Les Dorr, a spokesman for the F.A.A., said the agency would rather err on the side of caution when it comes to digital devices on …
Nov 27, 2011: Hollywood uses copyright law to shut down pirate movie theaters. Apple uses copyright law to shut down unauthorized clones of its hardware products. …
Nov 27, 2011: kids on a plane So I (and several others) had a debate on Twitter today with Megan McArdle about children on airplanes. Megan’s basic argument, as expressed in this …
Nov 27, 2011: While I think one has to be careful about giving the poor a pass for immoral behavior because they are poor — a tendency the religious left tends to …
Nov 27, 2011: Kahneman never grapples philosophically with the nature of rationality. He does, however, supply a fascinating account of what might be taken to be …
Nov 27, 2011: This last example suggests why the J.F.K. cult matters — because its myths still shape how we interpret politics today. We confuse charisma with …
Nov 27, 2011: We shall see where this goes, but in the meantime the Via Meadia advice to investment banks, hedge funds, government officials and others trying to …
Nov 26, 2011: It was said of Socrates, that he brought philosophy down from heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have …
Nov 25, 2011: As a writer of science fiction — a label he tried strenuously to shed, not wanting his books to be shelved in the genre ghetto — [Vonnegut] was …
Nov 24, 2011: This song does my soul good. The great Martin Simpson, “Pretty Crowing Chicken.”
Nov 24, 2011: Bodhidharma’s alleged interview with the Emperor Wu of Liang is typical of his abrupt and direct manner. For the Emperor described all that he had …
Nov 24, 2011: It is likely that one day we will know much more about how economies work (or fail to work) by understanding better the physical structures that …
Nov 22, 2011: Today, however, a new breed of young intellectual historian is aiming to integrate the spirit of “history from below” with an approach that doesn’t …
Nov 22, 2011: Now the pathos involved in the triumph of the therapeutic is this: One reason to throw over the spiritual perspective evil/holiness was to reject the …
Nov 22, 2011: If we think of the three levels of human linguistic-communicative activity in its broadest sense: one of bodily habitus and mimicry, one of symbolic …
Nov 22, 2011: At the moment of their earliest adulthood, Gen Xers were entering an economy that was inimical to ambition, and they behaved accordingly. Then, fairly …
Nov 20, 2011: [youtube …
Nov 18, 2011: CERN Gets Closer to Proving It Broke the Light Speed Barrier CERN Gets Closer to Proving It Broke the Light Speed Barrier New tests at the European science facility CERN yet again confirm the results of their …
Nov 18, 2011: Saturnine storms
Nov 16, 2011: Remember too that the battle for full equality will be won in the political center. Liberals are with us already; homophobes will never come around. …
Nov 16, 2011: So to celebrate the Bible of 1611 is not to genuflect before a timeless masterpiece, to salute a perfect translation; the translators would have been …
Nov 16, 2011: The college sports myth machine definitely needs a new gear. Because even cranked all the way up to max for Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski’s …
Nov 16, 2011: When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather …
Nov 15, 2011: This is what happened with Assassin of Secrets, or Spy Safari. It started out as something fun and just for me. A much sillier, more parodic kind of …
Nov 14, 2011: At about 11:30 a.m. yesterday, a police officer told me and about eight other students that, and I quote, “the grass is closed.” We were going to sit …
Nov 14, 2011: I firmly believe that one of the pressing unsolved technological problems of the modern age is getting safely away from people you don’t like, without …
Nov 14, 2011: So, does neuroscience mean the death of free will? Well, it could if it somehow demonstrated that conscious deliberation and rational self-control did …
Nov 14, 2011: Note that there is a group of people with a vested interest in pushing the agenda that too many people go to college, especially borrowing money for …
Nov 14, 2011: High school and college students may be “digital natives,” but they’re wretched at searching. In a recent experiment at Northwestern, when 102 …
Nov 14, 2011: images from The Art of Pixar
Nov 13, 2011: [Erik Brynjolfsson] and his co-author Andrew McAfee took their analysis to its logical conclusion with their most recent book, “Race Against the …
Nov 13, 2011: Indeed, Bezos doesn’t consider the Fire a mere device, preferring to call it a “media service.” While he takes pride in the Fire, he really sees it as …
Nov 13, 2011: Last week, some mediocre California mayoress announced that she wasn’t going to attend a Veterans Day event in her city of Richmond. Gayle McLaughlin, …
Nov 13, 2011: Nashville might seem like an archetype of the death-of-the-bookstore-everywhere narrative, but its story turns out to be different. The cashier who …
Nov 12, 2011: I fixed college sports. You're welcome. I fixed college sports. You’re welcome.
Nov 12, 2011: Hoops on the U. S. S. Carl Vinson
Nov 11, 2011: [youtube …
Nov 11, 2011: In the 1950s I was an athlete. Those were the days before joggers clogged the highway, so it was unusual for me to see another runner when I was …
Nov 11, 2011: When cars entered the fray, the fact that their owners were usually rich added an element of class war. After Charles Gates, a broker, was caught in …
Nov 10, 2011: Before the crisis years of the AIDS epidemic I had that sense that one does of a long, expansive living ahead of me. When my friends and my partner …
Nov 10, 2011: I’ve got a good bit of student-loan debt myself, acquired studying philosophy in grad school. And then I dropped out before finishing my Ph.D.! Well, …
Nov 10, 2011: The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”
Nov 10, 2011: theatlantic: canisfamiliaris: The Evolution of Deceit Robert Trivers, a professor of anthropology and biological sciences, probably knows more about …
Nov 10, 2011: At least one sports columnist has made the point that Joe Paterno, the 40 year coach of Penn State, who was fired last night (along with the …
Nov 10, 2011: To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It’s …
Nov 10, 2011: Rowan wouldn’t be the only writer in recent years—the era of redefining what is meant by “intellectual property”—to use plagiarism to make a …
Nov 8, 2011: The funny thing is, no one’s really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to …
Nov 8, 2011: O captain, my captain For me, the question that looms largest about the Penn State sexual-abuse scandal is this: How could someone see a man raping a child and fail to …
Nov 8, 2011: Although Google seems determined to keep adding new features, I suspect there’s little it can do to prevent Google from becoming a ghost town. Google …
Nov 8, 2011: I may as well admit that I haven’t read all of Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, but quite enough of it to see that the …
Nov 8, 2011: The fiberoptic cables running through the streets of San Francisco and New York are not a commons, they are corporate-owned. The ISPs through which we …
Nov 8, 2011: We enjoy caricatures of our friends because we do not want to think of their changing, above all, of their dying; we enjoy caricatures of our enemies …
Nov 8, 2011: thingsmagazine: Soviet Constructivist models, courtesy of the University of Western Australia
Nov 7, 2011: I am intrigued that so many of the high-profile geekocracy (who ought to know better but are apparently dim-brained slaves to digital fashion) seem …
Nov 7, 2011: They’re building Babbage’s Analytical Engine!
Nov 7, 2011: Terremark’s building in Miami is the physical meeting point for more than 160 networks from around the world. They meet there because of the …
Nov 7, 2011: Strangely enough, another misrepresentation, made passingly, stuck worse in my craw. Wood complained of the book’s protagonist: “We never see him …
Nov 7, 2011: A random Saul Bass thing, since everybody’s talking about him now — and rightly so.
Nov 6, 2011: Ecce Homo, by Jacob Epstein; in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral
Nov 6, 2011: Euler’s bridge problem
Nov 5, 2011: This time, Dr Pelzer took one of those plastic models you always see in medical offices and measured a length of mandible a few inches long. This, he …
Nov 4, 2011: Most students can’t rely on a combination of natural aptitude, writing skills and diploma prestige to land a good job. If you’re at Arizona State, …
Nov 4, 2011: Specifically, Pan wanted to know how skillful young folks are at online search. His team gathered a group of college students and asked them to look …
Nov 4, 2011: Paradoxically, then, `Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive’. Shakespeare was …
Nov 4, 2011: Sometimes we do find the words to express an idea, and only then realize what a stupid idea it is. This experience would suggest that our thoughts are …
Nov 4, 2011: Liking art that is misogynist, racist, sexist, or homophobic doesn’t necessarily make you those things, and indictment of that art doesn’t have to be …
Nov 2, 2011: Google is known for making decisions informed by data, often very large sets of it. That’s a great practice, and one that undoubtedly often leads to …
Nov 2, 2011: When we actually start to look at the fundamentals, it seems children learn by exploring—by experimenting, playing, drawing inferences—and there’s …
Nov 2, 2011: The Kylescu Bridge. Talk about the beauty of proper proportions. Via this slideshow.
Nov 2, 2011: In the Year of Our Lord 2001, Iain Sinclair walked around the city of London in an attempt to undo a great curse laid upon the city. He walked …
Nov 2, 2011: If you then factor in cops who are not necessarily crooked, but think it’s appropriate to pepper-spray people for fun, or leave people in detention …
Nov 2, 2011: Music was one of the first businesses to get hit hard. What happened there? Was it all piracy? This is one of those questions that is hard to answer. …
Nov 2, 2011: Go to send for. Have you say that? Have you understand that he says? At what purpose have say so? At what o'clock dine him? Apply you at the study …
Nov 1, 2011: Clay Johnson, author of the soon-to-be-released The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption, answering the question, “Does going on an …
Nov 1, 2011: Manners also helped create the South’s famous “bless your heart” culture — a powerful way of seeming to be polite without being genuine. Southern …
Nov 1, 2011: Contrary to popular thought, everyone is not a publisher. When you hear a publisher say it, it’s even sadder. Publishing is a complex and well …
Oct 31, 2011: Consider patients with anterograde amnesia, who cannot consciously recall new experiences in their lives. If you spend an afternoon trying to teach …
Oct 31, 2011: It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, …
Oct 31, 2011: After six months, my editor finally wrote me. Not surprisingly, he no longer liked my book. Too complicated for the average trade reader. He advised …
Oct 31, 2011: There is no evidence that Shakespeare was illiterate. But Cutler is also misguided in calling him a “brilliant scholar.” His contemporaries certainly …
Oct 31, 2011: The loss of a left worth engaging hurts the country, not because that left will answer the questions of the moment, but because the country needs the …
Oct 31, 2011: Twitter is all about slang and abbreviations, but it’s just not eroding the English language. In fact, University of Pennsylvania linguistics …
Oct 31, 2011: Averia, the average typeface
Oct 31, 2011: In Wittgensteinian fashion, I shouldn’t advance any thesis—but there is food for thought here. With some clever technology built by some clever …
Oct 30, 2011: Son of Dracula
Oct 29, 2011: These fears, however, seem to have been largely isolated; mass panics over genital retraction were not recorded until 1874. This was the year that, on …
Oct 29, 2011: Since I’m the old-fashioned sort of person who clings to the belief that words, whatever their length, ought to mean something, I thought I’d check …
Oct 29, 2011: tastefullyoffensive: Shakesbear
Oct 28, 2011: That bright ideas, far from guaranteeing against blunders, are often their cause is illustrated by the fate of the “D. D.” (i.e., dual drive) tanks …
Oct 28, 2011: Now he trod carefully across the carpet to the bed and stood silently looking down at the body of Berowne. Even as a fifteen-year-old boy, standing at …
Oct 28, 2011: a likely story “Is it likely,” the anti-Stratfordians often say, “that these greatest of plays could be written by a half-educated glover’s son from the provinces?” …
Oct 28, 2011: Amazon is investing (and hiring) while many other American corporations are milking incumbent businesses, under-investing in research and development, …
Oct 27, 2011: Wary Meyers, Floating Type
Oct 27, 2011: Wary Meyers, The Basement Stacks
Oct 27, 2011: SF has changed over the span of time I am talking about — from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, …
Oct 27, 2011: Santa Fe complexity theorist Geoffrey West has done some fascinating recent work that shows that cities actually get more creative and productive as …
Oct 26, 2011: The locus of the infantilist aesthetic seemed to be Steve Jobs himself, if his pronouncements at keynote presentations were an accurate …
Oct 26, 2011: Ras Prince Monolulu was born this day in 1881. Here he is at The Derby, Epsom, 1923.
Oct 25, 2011: Why is mass online collaboration useful in solving mathematical problems? Part of the answer is that even the best mathematicians can learn a great …
Oct 25, 2011: Over the past several years, our quest to extract meaning from information has taken us more and more towards the realm of visual storytelling — we’ve …
Oct 24, 2011: I also told her I thought it was a gift to be forced to choose your priorities, because there is no way in hell you can do everything. When teaching I …
Oct 24, 2011: We’re not the only church called Mars Hill, and occasionally there arises confusion between us and other churches that share the “Mars Hill” name, …
Oct 24, 2011: I remember sitting in his back yard in his garden one day, and he started talking about God. He said, ‘Sometimes I don’t. It’s 50-50. But ever since …
Oct 24, 2011: If you really want complete freedom of choice, complete openness of information, where nobody is spying on you, no one is selling your presence to …
Oct 24, 2011: Bang & Olufsen stuff is cool in its retro-futuristic way, but this is more my style. Though, alas, not my budget.
Oct 24, 2011: But the genuinely impressive moments in a journey through B&O’s world come from peeking at its process. You expect a company that sells incredibly …
Oct 23, 2011: When you have eliminated the impossible, as Sherlock Holmes told Watson, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. This rule holds …
Oct 22, 2011: Making his own choice of the best time to have been alive, Edward Gibbon, author of “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (1776-89), didn’t have much …
Oct 22, 2011: science-fiction IKEA manuals
Oct 22, 2011: We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that …
Oct 22, 2011: For Bohr, physics was not about finding out what nature is, but about what can be said about it. Quantum mechanics was a complete theory of the …
Oct 22, 2011: Physics at the moment is again very muddled; in any case, for me it is too complicated, and I wish I were a film comedian or something of that sort …
Oct 22, 2011: Nor can Oxfordians provide any explanation for the manifest stylistic differences between Shakespeare’s Elizabethan and his Jacobean plays, or the …
Oct 22, 2011: For the time present, in case I should be prevented by death to propound and reveal this new light as I purpose, yet I may at the least give some …
Oct 21, 2011: There is enormous cross-cultural variation in the way people behave when they drink alcohol. There are some societies (such as the UK, the US, …
Oct 21, 2011: Besides, no argument could ever possibly sway the Oxfordian crowd. They are the prophets of truthiness. “It couldn’t have been Shakespeare,” they say. …
Oct 21, 2011: Mr Gumpy’s Outing is one of my favorite books ever. Here’s a slideshow/interview with the great John Burningham.
Oct 21, 2011: So. The love of God teaches us to see; it teaches us to see God in the face of Jesus Christ. It teaches us to see ourselves in the light of that love; …
Oct 20, 2011: All I can say for sure is that in all my days, I have never seen a more fitting living metaphor for the state of American culture at the present …
Oct 20, 2011: vimeo.com/30704658 (Source: http://vimeo.com/)
Oct 19, 2011: You can divide all soccer players — maybe all athletes — into two groups: the rational and the irrational. Rational players do what they look like …
Oct 19, 2011: Dubai fog
Oct 19, 2011: The question that haunts every Dickens biography, Tomalin’s included, is this one: was Dickens an asshole? It’s to Tomalin’s credit that her book only …
Oct 18, 2011: mwfrost: Shortcuts
Oct 18, 2011: Oh, Minos, or Rhadamanthus, or Persephone, or by whatever name you are called, I am to blame for most of this, and I should bear the punishment. I …
Oct 18, 2011: questions to ask your local anti-Stratfordian You argue that William of Stratford couldn’t have written The Plays because he was too poorly educated, while The Plays demonstrate great learning. …
Oct 18, 2011: newyorker: James Casebere’s photographs of handmade, spare environments speak to a preoccupation with suburban architecture and domestic interiors. …
Oct 18, 2011: The rejection of science seems to be part of a politically monolithic red-state fundamentalism, textbook evidence of an unyielding ignorance on the …
Oct 18, 2011: The poster has a genealogy, and it’s instructive. Two years ago, the same theatre’s production of Romeo and Juliet was advertised as Shakespeare’s. …
Oct 17, 2011: The most troubling thing about “Anonymous” is not that it turns Shakespeare into an illiterate money-grubber. It’s not even that England’s virgin …
Oct 17, 2011: “So we aren’t any closer to unification than we were in Einstein’s time?” the historian asked. Feynman grew angry. “It’s a crazy question! … We’re …
Oct 14, 2011: I love infographics like this as much as the next guy, maybe more than the next guy, but let’s face it: they’re posters. The only way they really work …
Oct 14, 2011: Writers are defined, in large measure, by what they can’t do. The mass of things that lie beyond their abilities force them to concentrate on the …
Oct 14, 2011: All this proved a bit too much for Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, who was moved to make an impassioned …
Oct 13, 2011: Why such narratives are in demand by the general public is more mysterious. It could be that ordinary people find the surreal perplexity of the …
Oct 13, 2011: thingsmagazine: ‘The Mariner on the Deck of the Ship’, by Mervyn Peake
Oct 13, 2011: For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be …
Oct 13, 2011: One of the things I noticed in the obits and letters to the editor about Jobs was the recurrent notion that he enhanced our connectivity. This is …
Oct 13, 2011: I’m endlessly fascinated by watching children play with technology. It all started when I saw a 4-year-old child swipe her hand across a television …
Oct 13, 2011: Many worthy thinkers fear that “the life of the mind” is being crowded out by the current explosion of scientific information and technological …
Oct 13, 2011: great expectations How many times am I going to get suckered by technological promises? I was so excited when I heard that iOS 5 was going to have wireless syncing for …
Oct 13, 2011: I am buying this book just for the cover.
Oct 13, 2011: There was a divide between the grad student crowd gathered to hear Zizek and the more rough-looking youth in the western part of the park who were …
Oct 13, 2011: The problem is always that, at the end of the day, I can sit on my butt and make things up and write them down, and get paid for it, so it’s hard to …
Oct 13, 2011: justinrampage: The Angry Birds have been captured and illustrated out in the wild by artist Mohamed Raoof. With help with actual photographers (proper …
Oct 12, 2011: Something is missing from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child. He’s left out the explicit sex scenes that were a signature feature of his four …
Oct 11, 2011: sweatervestboy: I can’t imagine this was the poem Will expected when he asked for one, but I’m committed to the idea that most of these postcard poems …
Oct 11, 2011: The aforementioned Harold Davidson in the lion’s den.
Oct 11, 2011: One of the other things that a producer can do is to think of ways to get people out of their habits. Any group of people who has worked together for …
Oct 11, 2011: [The] protestations [of Harold Davidson, the “Prostitute’s Padre”] that he had been ‘entrapped’ by two press photographers were in all likelihood …
Oct 11, 2011: We knew instantly that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” signaled the dawn of a new era in pop music; it expressed our joys and fears, and pointed the way to …
Oct 11, 2011: Fact 1: Enthusiasm for football has never been higher – not just for the NFL, but with young boys and teens. Participation in prep football has …
Oct 11, 2011: A group that divides the world between the pure 99 percent and the evil 1 percent will have nothing to say about education reform, Medicare reform, …
Oct 11, 2011: I haven’t met a single person who uses social media heavily who isn’t struggling to define what the constant, low-level publicness does to him or her. …
Oct 11, 2011: Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get …
Oct 11, 2011: The average height of native-born American males has not significantly changed since the middle of the twentieth century. This plateau contrasts with …
Oct 10, 2011: Aside from a yearly ceremonial peek inside its vault, which can be unlocked only with three keys held by three different officials, the [kilogram] …
Oct 9, 2011: “I’ve always felt, with The Iliad, a real frustration that it’s read wrong,” Oswald says. “That it’s turned into this public school poem, which I …
Oct 9, 2011: I deeply deplore the equation of popular writing with pap and distortion for two main reasons. First, such a designation imposes a crushing …
Oct 8, 2011: eden ahbez in the 1940s
Oct 7, 2011: The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and his bombed-out house
Oct 7, 2011: Using an operating system of unadorned bodily witness, backed by a headlong courage that often tested the grace of his God, Mr. Shuttlesworth was the …
Oct 7, 2011: Neal Stephenson’s new novel begins with a family reunion in the Idaho panhandle, near the Canadian border, during which the “reserved, even …
Oct 7, 2011: Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s …
Oct 7, 2011: If Stallman had to make a statement emphasizing his dislike of Jobs’ influence, he could still have done so respectfully. Consider this; “I didn’t …
Oct 7, 2011: Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died. As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington …
Oct 7, 2011: While Pinker makes a great show of relying on evidence—the 700-odd pages of this bulky treatise are stuffed with impressive-looking graphs and …
Oct 7, 2011: In one sense, X-Ray expands a feature that has been common in early ebook readers: the ability to call up a dictionary definition of a word. But X-Ray …
Oct 5, 2011: Steve Jobs I didn’t expect this news so soon. It would be disingenuous for me to pretend that this isn’t sobering news. I never thought Steve Jobs was a likable …
Oct 5, 2011: The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has …
Oct 4, 2011: Perhaps you were expecting a purely historical account as one might give of the battle of Waterloo, whereas I was trying to treat it as a religious …
Oct 3, 2011: The idea that a doctorate in history prepares one only, or primarily, to teach in a college or university is as contingent as any other, not only …
Oct 3, 2011: Amazon has targeted a certain type of consumer: one who is already a loyal Amazon customer and wants a best-in-class e-reader that also has limited …
Oct 2, 2011: More than just an engrossing yarn, Mr. Glenny’s book takes an anthropological approach to the DarkMarket community, elucidating its conflicting …
Oct 2, 2011: As Twitter’s message traffic has grown explosively, so has the scientific appetite for the insights the data can yield. Dozens of new scholarly …
Oct 2, 2011: portraitoftheartistasayoungman: Harold N. Fisk’s 1944 maps of the Mississippi River’s path over time. (via Flavorwire via Benjamin)
Oct 2, 2011: In sum, the NYT screwed up. Lindstrom appears to have a habit of making overblown claims about neuroimaging evidence, so it’s not surprising he would …
Oct 1, 2011: I don’t think this has the effect that Facebook wants. I don’t think a frog-boiling style of slow erosion of privacy means people just continue to …
Oct 1, 2011: Nobody is against empathy. Nonetheless, it’s insufficient. These days empathy has become a shortcut. It has become a way to experience delicious moral …
Sep 30, 2011: [youtube …
Sep 30, 2011: One person whose work on these matters has received considerable attention lately is the British Professor of Psychopathology, Simon Baron-Cohen. …
Sep 30, 2011: “Bruegel suggests a chart of emotions as intricate as the map-making of Ortelius. The sloped back of the kneeling Christ echoes the shape of a cliff …
Sep 30, 2011: The act of writing allows me to feel truly alive. Knowing that I have sold 140 million books worldwide (and given an average of three readers per …
Sep 29, 2011: Adiaphora: As a Theologian One Can Never Be Great Adiaphora: As a Theologian One Can Never Be Great preciseandtowering: “With horror I read [a] statement that I was the greatest theologian of the …
Sep 29, 2011: A new study in the journal Science examined the contents of more than 500 million Twitter messages sent in 84 countries over the course of two years, …
Sep 29, 2011: Most professors are not going to go out of their way to provide career counseling: you have to ask for it, and then you risk seeming more interested …
Sep 29, 2011: Hilobrow is great.
Sep 28, 2011: The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web …
Sep 28, 2011: Why is e-mail volume getting ever worse? I believe it’s because of a simple fact: E-mail is easier to create than to respond to. This seems …
Sep 25, 2011: Among the many astonishing claims that Barack Obama made in his recent speech opposing the Palestinian bid for statehood was that ‘peace will not come …
Sep 24, 2011: That future which only yesterday was the future now today is the present. Just like we mark eras using BC and AD, now we will have BF811 and AF811. …
Sep 24, 2011: I am sure we ought to love God in our lives and in all the blessings he sends us. We should trust him in our lives, so that when our time comes, but …
Sep 23, 2011: I believe the novel is a moral form. We turn to novels in pursuit of virtue. Through the tales fashioned by thoughtful writers we discover or reaffirm …
Sep 23, 2011: [youtube …
Sep 23, 2011: thenearsightedmonkey: Gospel singer, R. H. Harris, b. 1909, called “The Father of Them All” From the original editions of “The Good Times Are Killing …
Sep 23, 2011: Many younger readers will have trouble believing that anybody older than Andrew Sullivan exists, but I am not only a good bit older than Mr. Sullivan, …
Sep 22, 2011: It has been a fascinating phenomenon in the discussion around publishing how adversarial people get around other people’s choices. So if someone says …
Sep 22, 2011: In 1988, Shoshana Zuboff wrote the prescient book In the Age of the Smart Machine, in which she argued that we face two roads with information …
Sep 22, 2011: The longtime goal of Facebook, and of founder Mark Zuckerberg—who was memorably profiled here by Jose Antonio Vargas as “an over-sharer in the age of …
Sep 22, 2011: Specimen sheet
Sep 22, 2011: maps from Geographicus
Sep 22, 2011: Again, it seems to me that the increasing focus on the neurological aspects of reading leads researchers and cultural critics to fetishize the act of …
Sep 22, 2011: Life A long time ago an extraordinary family lived in Cappadocia. They were orthodox Christians during a period when it could be hard to be a Christian at …
Sep 21, 2011: Basically, then, Europe doesn’t have the death penalty because its political systems are less democratic, or at least more insulated from populist …
Sep 21, 2011: Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise …
Sep 21, 2011: He [Derek Parfit] decided to study philosophy. He attended a lecture by a Continental philosopher that addressed some important subject such as …
Sep 21, 2011: Why did a figure such as Leibniz fail to use his own tools? Perhaps messiness was the source of his creativity. This is a fact of intellectual …
Sep 21, 2011: Everyone but the Tea Partiers supports green technology — Republican, Democrat and independent alike. But Americans need to be leveled with. Green …
Sep 21, 2011: For proof, he points to results from a survey prepared for CEOs for Cities, a Chicago-based U.S. network of urban leaders. The survey involved 1,000 …
Sep 19, 2011: Among the books he packed for his European journey in 1933 was a volume of Horace. To pass the time while marching, he recited aloud “a great deal of …
Sep 19, 2011: In 2001 three young people from Moscow – Arkady Shlykov, student of Moscow theological seminary, Alexander Shumskih, IT manager of Ferrero company …
Sep 19, 2011: In short, Blackboard sucks. Blackboard supporters might claim that some, or even most, of the criticisms leveled above are false, or that they apply …
Sep 19, 2011: David Leigh and Luke Harding’s history of WikiLeaks describes how journalists took Assange to Moro’s, a classy Spanish restaurant in central London. A …
Sep 19, 2011: Remembering the advice the mayor of Bruchsal had given me, the moment I had arrived in this little village, I had sought out the Bürgermeister. I …
Sep 18, 2011: When I asked Randolph to explain just what he thought Riverdale students were missing out on, he told me the story of his own scholastic career. He …
Sep 17, 2011: This story got me thinking about covers I’ve seen for Lord of the Flies.
Sep 17, 2011: thenearsightedmonkey: You don’t need a sketchbook to make a sketchbook. Any piece of paper that you can play around with will do. Any kind of pen will …
Sep 17, 2011: Jobs is ahead of his time in other ways too: He has taught his entire organization to play in the span of product generations rather than product …
Sep 17, 2011: dpstyles: tedr: laughingsquid: The Relative Sizes of the World’s Largest Photo Libraries tedr: I wonder how smugmug, imageshack/yfrog, and twitpic …
Sep 17, 2011: papercraft devices
Sep 16, 2011: I haven’t experienced anything that dramatic, aside from that feedback-induced near-emesis. But I have to lean in, far in, to hear people in noisy …
Sep 16, 2011: There’s no pressing need for me to write about this, I guess, save that blogging is most often a means of expressing frustration or unhappiness or …
Sep 16, 2011: Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the …
Sep 16, 2011: Course registration versus niceness; success versus compassion; “attainment” versus kindness. Something is missing from all these dichotomies, and …
Sep 16, 2011: “Language is no barrier to writing a novel,” author Animesh Verma told the Indian Express newspaper in a 2010 interview, a statement that caused many …
Sep 16, 2011: There’s something more to this feral quality than the savor we find in stories. For what are we in the midst of networked, global, postmodern culture, …
Sep 16, 2011: Every generation gets the fantasy it deserves. Victorians had the stark realities of life and death depicted in George McDonald’s At The Back of the …
Sep 16, 2011: Melbourn Village College – not far from Cambridge – has decided to ditch its Latin motto: “Nisi dominus frustra”. And I guess you can see why. It’s a …
Sep 15, 2011: It was once thought that paywalls would work only for business-oriented papers like the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, but smartly …
Sep 15, 2011: Is the technology industry finished? Is engineering finished? Is the military finished? I haven’t even mentioned that men hold the lion’s share of …
Sep 15, 2011: I know Michael Moore and Bill Maher think this is a great line: “I went into the polls voting for the black guy, and what I got was the white guy…” …
Sep 15, 2011: So take a look at your bookshelves. Do you have all—better make that any—of the books on the Columbia University undergraduate core curriculum? It’s …
Sep 14, 2011: But offering words of apology is not enough. Christopher Hitchens once wrote: ‘If you don’t want to sound like the Pope, who apologises for everything …
Sep 13, 2011: wwnorton: William Faulkner’s second novel, Mosquitoes, was written during the summer of 1926 and first published in the spring of 1927. It was …
Sep 13, 2011: Have you ever noticed that while small businesses wish they were bigger, big businesses dream about being more agile and flexible? And remember, once …
Sep 13, 2011: Lawrence Lindsey, who was head of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, warned a few months ago that if the interest the Treasury pays to borrow money …
Sep 13, 2011: Why not have on-air real-time fact checking during presidential debates? Perhaps the worst aspect of political debates is candidates’ self-flattering …
Sep 13, 2011: The moral logic is hard to fathom: the NCAA bans personal messages on the bodies of the players, and penalizes players for trading their celebrity …
Sep 13, 2011: One way to think about losing a tennis match, and specifically to think about the pain and disappointment of losing a great, tense, five-set tennis …
Sep 13, 2011: YRM has recently completed Telehouse West, a flagship facility at Telehouse’s data campus in Docklands, East London. Nine storeys high, with 19,000 …
Sep 12, 2011: Sometime in the last year I was reading yet another article preaching give-it-away-for-free (the it being your book, your record, your film – your …
Sep 11, 2011: In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of …
Sep 11, 2011: The clever code is the handiwork of Narrative Science, a start-up in Evanston, Ill., that offers proof of the progress of artificial intelligence — …
Sep 9, 2011: The “credible but unconfirmed” terrorism plot announced late Thursday is a perfect example of two destructive, mutually reinforcing trends that have …
Sep 9, 2011: I was probably the sixth person to get an iPad. We got two of them flown out. The criteria was that we had to have a room with no windows. They …
Sep 9, 2011: Why does it seem like some languages are spoken faster than others? The answer is that speed depends on the average amount of information packed in a …
Sep 8, 2011: A 7-Eleven clerk in San Diego was more confused than frightened on Monday when a would-be criminal dressed as Gumby entered the store and—apparently …
Sep 8, 2011: Most of these biological facts don’t matter, at least for Brooks’s purposes. What of our view of humanity changes if, when parents achieve an …
Sep 8, 2011: Once again, the Wheaton College food service has been named best in the country by the Princeton Review. I never can quite get over the quality and …
Sep 8, 2011: W. H. Auden, "Fugal-Chorus" (from For the Time Being) Great is Caesar: He has conquered Seven Kingdoms. The First was the Kingdom of Abstract Idea: Last night it was Tom, Dick and Harry: to-night it is …
Sep 8, 2011: “The kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these,” Jesus said of little children. But computer hackers might give the kids some competition, according …
Sep 8, 2011: Kurt Gray of the University of Maryland, and Annie Knickman and Dan Wegner of Harvard University, conducted an experiment designed to ascertain just …
Sep 8, 2011: Logically, the video revolution and television news should thrive together. But just as the rest of the world is alive with video information about a …
Sep 8, 2011: One of the strange powers of the logic of debt, which pervaded first North Atlantic societies and then almost the rest of the world under the …
Sep 7, 2011: Who doesn’t love buying online? It offers a bigger selection for less money, ordered from the privacy of your home and delivered there too. But if …
Sep 7, 2011: I think the reason fiction but not non-fiction has the effect of improving empathy is because fiction is primarily about selves interacting with other …
Sep 7, 2011: One of the little-talked-about dynamics of the mobile phone industry is the huge proportion of profits that come from the 2-3 per cent of people with …
Sep 6, 2011: In the 1950s, a long-past GM CEO who had been appointed secretary of defense said that “for years, I thought what was good for our country was good …
Sep 6, 2011: In Newton’s second year [at Cambridge], having filled the beginning and end of his notebook with Aristotle, he started a new section deep inside: …
Sep 6, 2011: What government a nation can bear depends on the condition of the general mind; if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was …
Sep 6, 2011: A friend called a few weeks ago to tell me about a skyscraper that had to be evacuated after an earthquake in Seoul. For ten minutes the building made …
Sep 6, 2011: theatlantic: A Jobs Plan for the Post-Cubicle Economy About 150 years ago, American workers began a profound shift from farms to factories. After …
Sep 4, 2011: C’est pourtant le grand défi de l’Occident, s’adapter au monde qu’il a créé. Un beau sujet philosophique. — Michel Serres. The concluding sentences of …
Sep 4, 2011: A la génération précédente, un professeur de sciences à la Sorbonne transmettait presque 70% de ce qu’il avait appris sur les mêmes bancs vingt ou …
Sep 4, 2011: Railroad work demanded a bodily knowledge that could register the connections between machines and the physical world around them. In a story he told …
Sep 3, 2011: We need to remember that the great imaginative invention we now call the hospital was the result of a people, monks, who thought that even amidst the …
Sep 3, 2011: To many education experts, something is not adding up — here and across the country. In a nutshell: schools are spending billions on technology, even …
Sep 3, 2011: I predict that in 2050, we’ll look back at the first 20 years of the web and shake our heads. The craptacular design! The hallucinogenic business …
Sep 3, 2011: My short answer is “Learn code.” My long answer, I suppose, would be that one should learn to code (specifically HTML and CSS), because it’s the …
Sep 3, 2011: Paris, as much as I love Paris, feels to me as though it’s long since been ‘cooked.’ Its brand consists of what it is, and that can be embellished but …
Sep 3, 2011: There are three extraordinary paintings at the centre of this book. One is Flight Out of Egypt (1849-50). Then there is Contradiction: Oberon and …
Sep 3, 2011: Discovering the evolution of words is a constant pleasure. I once asked Magnus Magnusson, the late television quizmaster, if he’d managed to retain …
Sep 2, 2011: The accompanying article by Lev Grossman says nothing new, though it says it nicely enough. I kinda like the image, though it significantly …
Sep 2, 2011: First you call for an unnamed disciplinary sovereign to safeguard the traditions of the disciplinary nation. Or you harrumph that changes have taken …
Sep 2, 2011: The Quest Hero often encounters an old beggar or an animal who offers him advice: if, too proud to imagine that such an apparently inferior creature …
Sep 2, 2011: W. H. Auden, "Voltaire at Ferney" Perfectly happy now, he looked at his estate. An exile making watches glanced up as he passed And went on working; where a hospital was rising fast, A …
Sep 2, 2011: Sprave is so into slingshots that in 2009 he created the Slingshot Channel on YouTube. He now spends his weekends building new wrist-rocket …
Sep 1, 2011: Steig’s drawings seem to flow effortlessly from his mind to his pen and onto the paper. I doubt he ever looked at a blank sheet and thought, “I have …
Sep 1, 2011: I’m told that the cliché du jour in financial markets involves reference to ‘uncharted territory’. It’s things like the GDP figures which are …
Aug 31, 2011: Another example that is quite astonishing, one that will be recognized by future historians as an extraordinary phenomenon in the 21st century, is …
Aug 31, 2011: mwfrost: I know very little about this extremely popular bold truth-teller Louis C. K. But I know enough about him to know that if there’s a nascent …
Aug 31, 2011: mwfrost: (via Wayne Coyne’s Oklahoma Compound - NYTimes.com) Yeah, that’s about what I imagined the inside of Wayne Coyne’s house compound to look …
Aug 31, 2011: To grow up in the South is to be fed a steady diet of grits and ghost stories. Ask any household in Alabama, and they’ll tell you about a friend or …
Aug 30, 2011: In contemporary life, many people claim to spend extreme lengths of time at the office, such assertions being a form of self-flattery. In her engaging …
Aug 30, 2011: The savage ritual of the whipping-block would remind a batch of whimpering children that, though sins against man and God might be forgiven them, a …
Aug 30, 2011: PEG 2.0: Mini-pseudo-théologie de l'"usure" et de l'économie financiarisée PEG 2.0: Mini-pseudo-théologie de l'“usure” et de l’économie financiarisée I don’t read French very well at all, but I had no …
Aug 30, 2011: The Castle of Perseverance. Perhaps the earliest stage diagram in English theater, from the wonderful Collation at the Folger Library, curated by the …
Aug 30, 2011: Conventional wisdom sets up two distinct experiences of Shakespeare’s plays: readers encountering a text, and audiences encountering a performance. …
Aug 29, 2011: always on NYT: What’s the solution for being on our phones too much? Brian Chen: I think that people need to recognize that they do have a problem. They need to …
Aug 29, 2011: The larger story here is about the surprising benefits of negative moods. While sad subjects in this new study underperformed on the creative …
Aug 29, 2011: Hey forces of evil — here’s what’s in store for you! (There’s much that’s wonderful at Coventry Cathedral, but this is near the top of my list.)
Aug 29, 2011: The New Yorker and Francis Schaeffer - NYTimes.com The New Yorker and Francis Schaeffer - NYTimes.com Ross is bringing some crucial facts to the table here, but when considering the fearsome topic of …
Aug 29, 2011: Tim Cook is not a media guy. He’s not a humanities and liberal arts guy. He’s an engineer, and a businessman, and extraordinarily talented at both. …
Aug 29, 2011: Or maybe we could just throw our garbage in here!
Aug 29, 2011: It’s in State Department memos, vintage pages of Woman’s Home Companion and your inbox: Times New Roman, the most widely used typeface in the world — …
Aug 29, 2011: Chas Freeman … is a former diplomat who served as Richard Nixon’s interpreter during his visit to China in 1972. Because Freeman was working during …
Aug 29, 2011: If you feel that Catholicism or Christianity or religion is not represented, by detractors or defenders, in ways that honor its profundity and beauty, …
Aug 28, 2011: Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve is some kind of great movie. And yet, like most of the best Hollywood movies of its time, its emotional range is narrow, …
Aug 27, 2011: What is strangest in the recent waves of young arrivals in Silicon Valley is that they tend no longer to be downtrodden geniuses rejected in the …
Aug 26, 2011: I was just struck by this in recent discussions about instituting a no laptop policy in the classroom. It was so self-evident that maybe it’s just …
Aug 26, 2011: Part of the weakness of current theological warfare is that it is premised on stable, lifelong belief – each side congealed into its rival (but …
Aug 26, 2011: Dylan’s refusal to be known is not simply a celebrity’s ploy, but a passion that has shaped his work. As his songs have become more introspective, the …
Aug 25, 2011: The act of translating what for me are the mysterious symbols of communication into actual comprehension has always been a hardship to me. I often …
Aug 25, 2011: The Incarnation, the coming of Christ in the form of a servant who cannot be recognized by the eye of flesh and blood, but only by the eye of faith, …
Aug 25, 2011: Humanists can be private educators and public spies. But the latter role is far too rare, because humanist intellectuals do not see themselves as …
Aug 25, 2011: here
Aug 25, 2011: here
Aug 25, 2011: I turned off comments in the last redesign of powazek.com because I needed a place online that was just for me. With comments on, when I sat down to …
Aug 25, 2011: I think we’re witnessing a fascinating shift in online culture. The era of hacker handles is over. We’ve grown out of it the same way I grew out of …
Aug 25, 2011: The theologian T. F. Torrance tells about an incident that happened in 1944 after an assault on San Martino-Sogliano. Torrance was serving as a …
Aug 25, 2011: The past is not another country; it is another life. The texture of daily living is different now than in the past, more different the further back we …
Aug 24, 2011: The rapidly changing practice of personal curation only serves to highlight how difficult the job of museum curators is. The British Museum has over …
Aug 24, 2011: Edwards begins his book with an anecdote about a meeting he had with Page back in 2002. Bruised by the founder’s tendency to dismiss or ignore his …
Aug 24, 2011: In other words, you did finally understand America.
Aug 24, 2011: mwfrost: (via Byrhtferth’s Diagram; Computus Diagrams | Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages)
Aug 23, 2011: The band’s manager, Jason, contacted me through his brother Michael (with whom I went to college) and asked me to direct a video they were planning …
Aug 23, 2011: Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park
Aug 22, 2011: Trying to peer inside a crumpled ball by simulating the process in three dimensions is “mathematically nasty,” a problem that quickly pushes lab-grade …
Aug 22, 2011: Lanier’s mother [before her death in an automobile accident] had recently bought the family a new house, in El Paso. But it burned down before Lanier …
Aug 22, 2011: If the connection between publishers and writers splits completely, if they fail to support and defend each other, then both will separately be …
Aug 22, 2011: It goes like this: Friedman wants to establish new sovereign nations built on oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters—free from the …
Aug 21, 2011: ‘America needs heroes,’ it is sometimes said, a phrase that’s often uttered in a wistful tone, almost cooingly, as if we were talking about a lonely …
Aug 20, 2011: Every generation must lose its innocence, must see the brightly painted nursery wall smashed away by the wrecking ball of betrayal to reveal a …
Aug 20, 2011: why Gandalf and Elrond were wrong I’m sure this has been said before, but … I don’t think much of the advice given by Gandalf and Elrond during the great Council at Rivendell. …
Aug 19, 2011: The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, …
Aug 19, 2011: For my poetry students, there is a process I commend — take a poem that finds you, I will tell them, read it to yourself, then go to a quiet place, to …
Aug 19, 2011: Qualifications are necessary sometimes. Anticipating and defusing opposing arguments has been a vital rhetorical strategy since at least the days of …
Aug 19, 2011: I’ll tell you a weird thing about me: My mother was Lucy Pevensie. Or OK, obviously my mom was not Lucy Pevensie, since Lucy Pevensie is a fictional …
Aug 19, 2011: The Lord of the Rings was the perfect fantasy for WWII-era Europe, the story of an external evil defeated by a courageous alliance. The Conan stories …
Aug 19, 2011: Philip guides you like an eager kid at his own personal science fair, pausing to scratch into the earth where Iron Age settlers once built a forge. He …
Aug 19, 2011: The Moomin canon, by contrast, has been well-tended in America with not only the children’s novels but picture books published by Farrar, Straus & …
Aug 18, 2011: It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself. Anthony …
Aug 17, 2011: The liberal camp includes many thinkers I admire, and it has produced some of the more eloquent reflections on biotechnology’s implications for human …
Aug 17, 2011: As the political philosopher Robert P. George has argued, the proper role of government is to protect public health, safety, and morals, and to …
Aug 17, 2011: But there’s a lot of potential once and if students do share hardware, particularly when it comes to e-readers and e-books. As we noted in our recent …
Aug 17, 2011: Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the …
Aug 17, 2011: Critics also seem uncomfortable with the fact that the film includes comedy. Non-black critics, too, are regularly exhibiting the same supposedly wise …
Aug 17, 2011: Starting from the idea of historical uniqueness, Auden developed an elaborate vocabulary for different kinds of social order and for the analogous …
Aug 17, 2011: I suppose what I do in the simplest sense, which is also perhaps the most important sense, is to write clear, interesting sentences. This is where it …
Aug 17, 2011: The creation of a post-imperial America is the most urgent—and potentially most liberating—adventure for Americans in the 21st century. What will …
Aug 17, 2011: Modernist studies is a vibrant and exciting area of study, and many new postgraduates are being drawn to the field. The future is likely to mean more …
Aug 17, 2011: (via Kill Shakespeare). So you decide to put Shakespeare and his characters in a comic, and the only plan you can come up with is to have everybody …
Aug 16, 2011: (via Calculating the Size of Apple’s Spaceship HQ | Analysis | The Mac Observer)
Aug 16, 2011: landscapelifescape: Mountain Ash trees, Alfred Nichols Gardens, Victoria, Australia Forest Mist by Dee-T
Aug 15, 2011: I just finished reading Logicomix, and while I enjoyed it very much, I’m not sure I learned anything. It’s the kind of book that makes you feel …
Aug 15, 2011: Article XXXI: Whether I stole Laurie’s apple juice during nap time? Objection I: It would seem that I stole Laurie’s apple juice during nap time. For …
Aug 15, 2011: endings and renewals So I promised the other day that I would explain my resumption of this commonplace book. I am ending my Text Patterns blog and will be posting here …
Aug 15, 2011: The land of the dawn-lit mountains, Arunachal Pradesh, is a disputed territory lying between two super-powers with nuclear weapons, India and China. …
Aug 15, 2011: A lot of what Gabler describes as Big Ideas turn out to have been actively wrong or at least misleading in the wrong hands, and one of the reasons is …
Aug 15, 2011: In short, this book is among the worst entries in what I sometimes call “the leadershit” (say “leadership literature” five times fast). Take a …
Aug 15, 2011: mwfrost: Philip Rieff, first in (maybe) a series of unpopular TED talks. Also, this one will last seven hours, with no breaks and no opportunity for …
Aug 15, 2011: But the emerging prevalence—anecdotally, at least—of the gadget death wish suggests an intriguing possibility: where electronic gizmos are concerned, …
Aug 15, 2011: It’s true that the boundaries of the collective create problems for the individual – problems that should be confronted and wrestled with. But this a …
Aug 14, 2011: a public-service announcement Yes, I am back on Tumblr. An explanation and a plan will be forthcoming soon.
Aug 14, 2011: The search-and-rescue dogs of 9/11. God bless them.
Aug 14, 2011: Social networking sites are the primary form of communication among young people, and they are supplanting print, which is where ideas have typically …
Aug 14, 2011: Only when the humanities can earn their own keep will they be respected in modern America. And that will only happen when you convince the majority of …
Aug 14, 2011: Those Southern boys are all boys, and they are all white. And having tackled Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the world they would have plunged the whole …
Aug 13, 2011: Sometimes one feels that the center might be a little too serene. The emphasis on “joy” and “fullness” inevitably asks secularism to provide what …
Aug 13, 2011: Throughout much of history, at the heart of every village, town, and city in Europe, there lay a dead body. This was not the mystical body of Christ, …
Jul 16, 2011: Iain Sinclair's struggles with the city of London | Books | The Guardian Iain Sinclair’s struggles with the city of London | Books | The Guardian
Jul 9, 2011: reading as therapy by timothy aubry - bookforum.com / daily review reading as therapy by timothy aubry - bookforum.com / daily review
Jul 5, 2011: Augustine di Noia on mystery Augustine di Noia on mystery
Jun 6, 2011: It's been said that The New World doesn't have fans: it has disciples and partisans and fanatics. I'm one of them, and my fanaticism burns undimmed 30 …
Jun 2, 2011: Debating the Value of College in America : The New Yorker Debating the Value of College in America : The New Yorker
Jun 1, 2011: Enthusiasms Enthusiasms
May 30, 2011: Are these the 100 places that made Britain? | Culture | The Guardian Are these the 100 places that made Britain? | Culture | The Guardian
May 28, 2011: Postmodern Pythagoras « Public Discourse Postmodern Pythagoras « Public Discourse
May 27, 2011: Critical Mass » Blog Archive » What Umberto Eco hasn’t read Critical Mass » Blog Archive » What Umberto Eco hasn’t read
May 24, 2011: I Read Where I Am I Read Where I Am
May 16, 2011: The End of Sexual Identity - TGC Reviews The End of Sexual Identity - TGC Reviews
May 15, 2011: This Easter, try to avoid the Gospel of Grayling | Brendan O’Neill | spiked This Easter, try to avoid the Gospel of Grayling | Brendan O’Neill | spiked
May 14, 2011: A life in writing: China Miéville | Books | The Guardian A life in writing: China Miéville | Books | The Guardian
May 11, 2011: A Generalist’s Work, Day 3 A Generalist’s Work, Day 3
Mar 30, 2011: McGonigal is not advocating any kind of real change, as she purports, but rather a change in perception: She wants to add a gamelike layer to the …
Mar 30, 2011: The Lenten season is devoted especially to what the theologians call contrition, and so every day in Lent a prayer is said in which we ask God to give …
Mar 25, 2011: “Win the Future” is about re-imagining human life as the worst massively-multiplayer online game ever designed, an endless boss raid without a …
Mar 24, 2011: To save your world you asked this man to die: Would this man, could he see you now, ask why? — W. H. Auden, “Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier”
Mar 24, 2011: The books that I remember best are the ones I stole in Mexico City, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, and the ones I bought in Chile when I …
Mar 24, 2011: I must say, here, that sociologists are the greater offenders. I listen to them around here with every effort to be fair and understanding but I can’t …
Mar 24, 2011: When offered the chance to get out, to choose our own communities, to choose our own friends, to relate to our families on our own terms, to get out …
Mar 24, 2011: So these apps need to work in a fundamentally different way: as more of my friends access content through Flipboard or TweetMag, my experience should …
Mar 24, 2011: And this is why I think the New Atheists are a disaster, a danger to the wellbeing of America comparable to the Tea Party. It is not so much that …
Mar 24, 2011: This isn’t a particularly great insight, I suppose: that you can goose demand if you shift costs into the future. Discount rates exist; it’s why …
Mar 22, 2011: And now the learner, has he no lot or part in this story of suffering, even though his lot cannot be that of the Teacher? Aye, it cannot be otherwise. …
Mar 21, 2011: As instructors naturally become aware of their students’ attachment styles—this is an anxious student who is in my office every day, or this is an …
Mar 18, 2011: In everyday thought and speech we have reasons, intentions, feelings. In brainspeak we have synapses, firing patterns, neurotransmitters. For the …
Mar 17, 2011: As to a practical “freedom to connect” policy agenda, “we believe there is no silver bullet in the struggle against Internet repression,” Clinton …
Mar 17, 2011: Moby: The reason I started making music really young is that no other art form affected me as powerfully. I was a latchkey kid who didn’t have a ton …
Mar 17, 2011: Sometimes I get the feeling that Collini is hearing people urging others to be civil, and mis interpreting it as a demand that they stop arguing. The …
Mar 16, 2011: I did however glean some of Ariely’s bigger picture ideas: • Most people cheat a little, but very few cheat a lot. • If offered the incentive to cheat …
Mar 15, 2011: I chose not to write about the nitty-gritty of the current technical situation for a simple reason: I don’t really have anything to add to what the …
Mar 15, 2011: Today, however, it isn’t culture per se that is a “principle of authority” but increasingly the algorithms to which are delegated the task of driving …
Mar 15, 2011: But an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes …
Mar 14, 2011: There is an analogy here with the Christian interplay between divine providence and human free will. For the Christian, I act freely when I strangle …
Mar 14, 2011: Thank God Jamie merely opened a school, and didn’t decide to explore the NHS’s failings by opening his own Dream Hospital, in which famous actors …
Mar 12, 2011: For decades, Chinatown Fair welcomed everyone — misfits, cool kids, world champions, novices, dancers, fighters, strategists, tourists carrying …
Mar 12, 2011: If the technologies I use and value take steps to jeopardize the important connections and relationships cultivated and facilitated there, I will stop …
Mar 11, 2011: Conservatives should make their case against NPR based on objective evidence of programming decisions. If they can’t do so, what one employee says in …
Mar 11, 2011: After all, if we are going to grant that the fiends in the Westboro Baptist congregation have the right to make their noisome protests at a time and …
Mar 10, 2011: Modern measurements of Americans’ historical and political knowledge go back at least to 1943, when the New York Times surveyed college freshmen and …
Mar 9, 2011: Anonymity has long been hailed as one of the founding philosophies of the Internet, a critical bulwark protecting our privacy. But that view no longer …
Mar 9, 2011: Where is psychiatry headed? What the discipline badly needs is close attention to patients and their individual symptoms, in order to carve out the …
Mar 9, 2011: Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all those who are penitent; Create and make in us …
Mar 8, 2011: John Dominis: Jacques D’Amboise playing with his sons, Seattle, Washington, 1962 ©Time Inc
Mar 8, 2011: R. B. Kitaj, If Not, Not, 1975–75, oil on canvas
Mar 8, 2011: In college, I was lucky enough to take an English class with the novelist Reynolds Price, before he died in January—and one of his most striking …
Mar 8, 2011: I spoke to an academic at a US university (who wishes to remain anonymous) who regularly sets open-book, open-laptop exams for his maths students. “I …
Mar 8, 2011: HarperCollins has informed libraries that henceforth, ebooks will be sold on the condition that they can only be circulated 26 times before they …
Mar 7, 2011: McEnroe believes that Florida’s live-in tennis academies have created an assembly-line sameness to America’s young players and have contributed to the …
Mar 7, 2011: The great power of modern digital filters lies in their ability to make information that is of inherent interest to us immediately visible to us. The …
Mar 7, 2011: The organizers called everyone together to read the rules — likely the only national championship where this needs to be done — and then they played …
Mar 6, 2011: mwfrost: Mark Linkous died by his own hand a year ago today.
Mar 6, 2011: To create the literature of fact, we have to work like novelists in many ways. We select. We cast light on this object, shadow on that. We imagine. We …
Mar 6, 2011: Randy Mora, El Futuro de la Educación, via Abler
Mar 6, 2011: When I started to use [Kodachrome], its stability was well known (and still unique), and was a strong consideration in my choosing it: the little …
Mar 6, 2011: Whatever the reason for the gender imbalance, college administrators across the country have been going to great lengths to lasso the boys—adding …
Mar 6, 2011: My neighbor shrugged. ’[The college application essay is] an exercise,’ he said. ‘You want to see if the applicant can craft something impressive.’ …
Mar 6, 2011: Left-handedness has sometimes been treated as pathological. Cesare Lombroso, the infamous 19th-century physician who identified various facial (and …
Mar 6, 2011: But let’s go back to the math of the Kindle authors. While their cut is better than traditional publishers, it is not 100% (70% at the most), and the …
Mar 6, 2011: Why assign any special value to an hour spent online in the first place? Given the proven models of revenue on the web, it’s reasonable to assume that …
Mar 6, 2011: [Allan] Bloom described his students as unmoved by loved and death, fit to be competent technical specialists and nothing more. They were social …
Mar 6, 2011: His obsession with cities—and with programming—never abated. By early 2006, having dropped out of N.Y.U. and bouncing between jobs, he found himself …
Mar 5, 2011: I met Daniel Ellsberg for the first time recently. Ellsberg was a US military analyst, turned conscious objector, who released the top-secret Pentagon …
Mar 5, 2011: Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play …
Mar 5, 2011: Kelly’s long engagement with technology furnishes a fountainhead of rich observations on the life of tools. But the “ethical void” Morozov limns here …
Mar 4, 2011: Today, the role of the telegraph in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution—just like the role of the tape recorder in the 1979 Iranian revolution and of the …
Mar 3, 2011: I don’t think journalism school is a place to learn how to write computer code. I think a lot of the tool kit you’ll need, you’ll get on the job. I …
Mar 3, 2011: To say that rappers possess originality and that they rely on traditional literary devices is not to say that they don’t – or shouldn’t – borrow from …
Mar 3, 2011: Novelists have an endless drive to aestheticize and to complicate. I know there’s a very strong tradition—a tradition in which I write, myself—about …
Mar 3, 2011: Take a look, for example, [at] the Civil War blogging done by Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic… . Coates is not an historian, but he’s a smart guy …
Mar 3, 2011: The first people to perform useful studies specifically on composure in crisis were World War II combat researchers, who could examine soldiers under …
Mar 3, 2011: The Aphrodite of Bactria
Mar 3, 2011: Sony has a platform for e-books. Amazon has a platform for e-books. Barnes & Noble has a platform for e-books. Apple has a platform for e-books. …
Mar 3, 2011: Heyman uses the phenomenon of addiction to make a profound point about neuroscientific progress in general. “The implication is that as we learn more …
Mar 3, 2011: According to Portland brewing consultant Hans Gauger, the high-hops and high-alcohol trend grew out of four factors: First, the American craft-brewing …
Mar 3, 2011: Nothing fans a stammer’s flames like the fear that your listener is thinking “Jeez, what is wrong with this spasm-faced, eyeball-popping strangulated …
Mar 2, 2011: I’m less pleased with the word sacrament (a legal term coined for a mostly unfortunate western theology by Tertullian, after all) and prefer the more …
Feb 27, 2011: Now that the social layer has been built, some people say the next layer will be the game layer. The game layer will install game mechanics in …
Feb 26, 2011: landscapelifescape: Japanese (Acer Palmatum) Maple trees at Westonbirt Arboretum, Gloucestershire, UK Golden Cloud by parallel-pam
Feb 25, 2011: thingsorganizedneatly: Julien Valée
Feb 24, 2011: The republic of letters is in thrall to an unprecedented scientism. The word is out that human consciousness - from the most elementary tingle of …
Feb 24, 2011: The Internet kill-switch debate is not about the precision or care with which such a policy might be designed or implemented. It’s about the galling …
Feb 24, 2011: Once you enter the Zone, the quiet is a shock. It would be eerie were it not so lovely. The abandoned backstreets of Chernobyl are so overgrown, you …
Feb 23, 2011: It may be perhaps a question, whether St. Paul did mean that we sin as oft as ever we go about any thing, without an express intent and purpose to …
Feb 23, 2011: Bono: You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a …
Feb 23, 2011: This fear of being misapprehended may in fact have some influence on stuttering itself. Alfred Kazin stopped stuttering badly as soon as he made a …
Feb 23, 2011: what Google knows and many parents don’t know is that a person’s city of birth and year of birth can be used to make a statistical guess about the …
Feb 23, 2011: It is the connection between memory and creativity, perhaps, which should make us most wary of the web. ‘As our use of the web makes it harder for us …
Feb 23, 2011: If the culture of the future has more people producing cultural work for smaller personal payments, then that says less about what has to happen to …
Feb 23, 2011: Slowing down one’s writing as well as one’s reading can assist in this. It’s in that spirit, as well as to answer an entirely practical question …
Feb 23, 2011: The problem with the Internet, however, is that it lets anyone become otaku about anything instantly. In the ’80s, you couldn’t get up to speed on an …
Feb 23, 2011: The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, …
Feb 21, 2011: The Times finds a small group of people who it quotes being concerned about the decline of marginalia. What they are really concerned about, I’d …
Feb 20, 2011: When did we become so enamoured of unpleasantness? More importantly, when did we start automatically accepting it as truth, particularly in …
Feb 19, 2011: [youtube …
Feb 19, 2011: wesleyhill: “Book rest”
Feb 18, 2011: Only after the online movement had gained an impressive offline momentum in Tahrir Square did Mr. Mubarak’s associates choose to switch off the …
Feb 18, 2011: You could say ‘the face of the deep’ was found or chosen or selected by the 1611 translators, but you can’t say it was theirs. And, in that respect, …
Feb 18, 2011: But just how many English idioms come from the KJB? When I was writing Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, I asked people how many …
Feb 18, 2011: Scrapping the King James version, in the well-meaning way of the well-educated classes, had a number of effects, the most decisive and the most …
Feb 18, 2011: The Wallace archive at the Harry Ransom Center efficiently dispels the ‘genius’ status awarded to the writer, not because his writing isn’t singularly …
Feb 18, 2011: mwfrost: In Memoriam
Feb 18, 2011: Are attention spans deteriorating? Forty years ago, the length of Marcel Ophüls’ The Sorrow and The Pity (at 4 hours 11 minutes) or Andy Warhol’s …
Feb 18, 2011: I would add a few more points about the difference between possibilism and agnosticism. We have to acknowledge that both Possibilians and Agnostics …
Feb 18, 2011: I don’t subscribe to the ‘Google is making us dumber’ position. I think Google is allowing us to be differently smart. I also refuse to bracket off my …
Feb 17, 2011: But I come here, and follow the Christian monastic day laid out like a garden plot by Benedict at the close of the Roman era. I am Western; I like my …
Feb 17, 2011: If it was impossible to replace politics with righteous anger in 1944, it is surely all the more impossible in 2011. In fact, when Hessel tries to …
Feb 17, 2011: What these errors add up to is that Watson really cannot process natural language in a very sophisticated way — if it did, it would not suffer from …
Feb 17, 2011: One might argue that literacy is unalloyedly a good thing – yes, I can think of counter-examples, but then again one always can – but it is pretty …
Feb 16, 2011: I feel like shrinking now, I am so embarrassed for what I have done and how many people I offended. I always meant for my work to offend the powerful …
Feb 16, 2011: Conventions of politeness aren’t based purely or even primarily on functional considerations—putting one’s elbow on the table doesn’t affect the taste …
Feb 16, 2011: Perhaps the most important thing to be said about the Art Project is that despite all the talk of interactivity and the application of Google’s street …
Feb 16, 2011: nostos All right, dammit, I’m back. Posterous is seriously problematic.
Feb 4, 2011: transfer of attention Friends, enemies, and followers — I’m giving up on Tumblr, which I have only been able to access intermittently for months now. Henceforth, More Than …
Feb 3, 2011: The New Atlantis (2) The New Atlantis (2) Reading the first few pages of The New Atlantis, I was surprised by its effusive piety. God is invoked at every turn, and our …
Feb 3, 2011: Fabulous chalk lettering by Dana Tanamachi
Feb 3, 2011: Adiaphora: Our Refusal to be Spoken To Adiaphora: Our Refusal to be Spoken To preciseandtowering: “Hermeneutical and methodological questions are at best of secondary importance in the …
Feb 2, 2011: via socks-studio.com
Feb 2, 2011: In a new book, “Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality,” Stanford University psychiatrist Dr. Elias Aboujaoude argues that the time …
Feb 2, 2011: At the core of science fiction is the notion of extrapolation, of asking, “If this goes on, where will it lead?” And, unlike most scientists who think …
Feb 2, 2011: via www.chicagotribune.com
Feb 2, 2011: via www.chicagotribune.com
Feb 2, 2011: Nobody has said it better than the art historian Rainer Crone, who worked closely with Warhol from 1968 onward, and recently wrote that Warhol’s …
Feb 1, 2011: teaching e-books teaching e-books I’ve been teaching The Lord of the Rings pretty much every year for the past decade, and as a result my old copy of the one-volume …
Feb 1, 2011: from an interview with Herb Kelleher, Southwest Airlines JB: You have not had long-term plans in general. You have eschewed that. HK: Not long-term plans in the meticulous, detailed sense. What we’ve had is …
Feb 1, 2011: Google is not evil, but neither is it morally good. Nor is it simply neutral—far from it. Google does not make us smarter. Nor does it make us dumber, …
Feb 1, 2011: Back in dial-up days, when Google launched it was just a blank screen with a box, so it loaded fast. Later, when the dot-com crash came, in 2000, it …
Jan 31, 2011: Backlit screens are something we’ve grown very used to without realizing what they’ve done to our way of thinking. They are hypnotic, arresting, and …
Jan 31, 2011: ‘It’s a big puzzle,’ said Russell D. Gray, head of the Auckland lab. 'Why [the New Caledonian crow]? Why is this species on a small island in the …
Jan 31, 2011: river maps river maps The Mississippi river system as an Underground-style map. More info here; thanks to Matt Frost for the tip.
Jan 31, 2011: iconoclassic: daydreaming (by hollie chastain)
Jan 31, 2011: not quite "times of war," but still... wesleyhill: I just read this quote from W. H. Auden: “In times of war even the crudest kind of positive affection between persons seems …
Jan 30, 2011: landscapelifescape: Phander, Ghizar, Pakistan Morning.. (by Atif Saeed)
Jan 30, 2011: Particularize Particularize As I mentioned the other day, the Shirky/Doctorow thesis is that the internet in general and social media in particular tend to generate …
Jan 30, 2011: The Harrowing of Hell: one of the great 15th-century alabasters from Nottingham. See others here.
Jan 30, 2011: from the tomb of Agilbert, Bishop of Wessex, at Jouarre Abbey, France
Jan 30, 2011: Egypt, like many Arab societies, has a wealthy and well-armed elite at the top and a fanatical and well-organized Islamic fundamentalist movement at …
Jan 30, 2011: I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the events in Egypt and Tunisia – but … the citizens of the Arab world all too often have a choice between a …
Jan 30, 2011: Such wistful desire to evade responsibility exposes the childishness of the adults now preaching the good news of emerging adulthood. They have …
Jan 30, 2011: Who, alive today, will still be famous in 500 years? It’s the kind of question people might ask at dinner parties during a lull in conversation. But …
Jan 29, 2011: Unfortunately, however, traditions that are not passed on from one generation to the next die. If an entire generation grows up largely unexposed to a …
Jan 29, 2011: The great thing about art is that it’s there whether the academic humanities are or not. And if you make the study of literature and the arts your …
Jan 29, 2011: We are unique as a species in our ability to point meaningfully. Chimps may draw saleable pictures and create tools, but they do not point. If I point …
Jan 29, 2011: The big difference Facebook and, especially, Twitter has made is that it is easier for critics to hear other people’s opinions. Even then, though, you …
Jan 29, 2011: Late last year there was a confluence of critical opinion in America the likes of which the nation hadn’t seen in years. Every single film critic in …
Jan 28, 2011: None of these observations is intended to condemn technology. They say that we have put in place a powerful technology and have not yet learned to use …
Jan 28, 2011: Eagleton suggested three ways we engage with the tragic dimension: “social transformation” which passes through disillusionment; “psychoanalysis” …
Jan 28, 2011: Too many of the elderly do not have the family or the communal attachments necessary to feel valued; too many are widowed or otherwise alone; too many …
Jan 28, 2011: The Whale and the Reactor (final installment) The Whale and the Reactor (final installment) Let me conclude these posts on Winner’s book by looking at its third and last section, “Excess and …
Jan 28, 2011: Aaron Belz, "You Can't Pick Your Friend's Nose" You can pick your friends, we used to say, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose. We said it often and understood what it …
Jan 27, 2011: It’s hard to imagine a revolution in understanding a popular sport that could entirely circumvent that sport’s followers. But that, weirdly, is what …
Jan 27, 2011: Virus-writers seemed, at least at first, to be in it for anything but money. The outcome was simply vandalism, as dull as someone smashing out the …
Jan 26, 2011: When Lévi-Strauss at last reached the Nambikwara after an 800-mile trek, the encounter shattered his romantic expectations. ‘I had been looking for a …
Jan 26, 2011: The human habit of overestimating other people’s happiness is nothing new, of course. Jordan points to a quote by Montesquieu: ‘If we only wanted to …
Jan 26, 2011: As Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law and its associated Book Reviewing website, I commissioned and then published a review …
Jan 26, 2011: The Whale and the Reactor (7) The Whale and the Reactor (7) The idea that Reagan Ruined Everything seems to dominate, silently, the next chapter, “Decentralization Clarified.” I …
Jan 26, 2011: Strikingly, liberal education is not only effective at enhancing student learning, but also in producing college graduates well-equipped for the …
Jan 26, 2011: After all, the radical transparency of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook may not be mutually exclusive with what we might as well call the radical opacity …
Jan 26, 2011: The devil has his grip on the business of the NFL. Former players, like Aikman, who are still profiting from their NFL image, see little benefit in …
Jan 25, 2011: books owned and leased books owned and leased Tim Spalding: We used to own our books. With most ebooks we own them in name, but effectively we lease them. As Jane …
Jan 25, 2011: The 2010 election seemed to be about voters repudiating the $14 trillion national debt, yet politicians of both parties continue to merrily squander …
Jan 24, 2011: ‘The best research has failed to show that people who stutter, as a group, are more neurotic or have more psychological disorders than those who do …
Jan 24, 2011: Francesca Woodman
Jan 23, 2011: Did Montaigne intuitively know that by inviting his would-be enemy into his living room, and into the moral equivalent of his peripersonal space (or …
Jan 23, 2011: Of course, technology doesn’t need to make us happy—indeed if it is capable of wanting, as Kelly suggests it is, it would be advised against wanting …
Jan 21, 2011: The reason robots are such a slippery slope, according to Turkle, is that they take advantage of a deeply human instinct. When it comes to the …
Jan 21, 2011: The guardians of the liberal arts have made exactly the same mistake. They themselves are securely grounded in the tradition of the liberal arts—they …
Jan 21, 2011: Every time we postpone some necessary event—whether we put off doing the dishes till morning or defer an operation or some difficult labor or study—we …
Jan 20, 2011: landscapelifescape: Yorkshire, England Simplicity Of The Complex (by jasontheaker)
Jan 20, 2011: However wrongheaded you believe your ideological opponents to be, laying ‘all that ails the world’ at their feet represents an absurd politicization …
Jan 18, 2011: preciseandtowering: Graphic: How big, exactly, is Starbucks’ new ‘Trenta’ size? | National Post
Jan 18, 2011: If photography was once for special occasions, today we have an astonishing ability to document every passing moment. That can, of course, be a lot of …
Jan 18, 2011: Students who study by themselves for more hours each week gain more knowledge – while those who spend more time studying in peer groups see …
Jan 18, 2011: The truth is that as remarkable as Steve Jobs has been in many ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (ruthless and demanding) leader—his most singular …
Jan 18, 2011: Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old …
Jan 17, 2011: To appreciate the importance of a pre-modern blog, consult a database such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online and download a newspaper from …
Jan 17, 2011: It soon became clear, however, that despite his personal warmth and charisma, when it came to Church dogma [John Paul II] was stern and intractably …
Jan 16, 2011: The results of the new paper suggest young people have a compulsion to feel good about themselves that overwhelms and precedes other desires. ‘I was …
Jan 16, 2011: In Kansas City, going to a white barbecue joint is like going to a gentile internist: everything might turn out all right, but you’re not playing the …
Jan 16, 2011: writing in the dust: Jaron Lanier's advice for remaining a person on the internet writing in the dust: Jaron Lanier’s advice for remaining a person on the internet wesleyhill: Don’t post anonymously unless you really might …
Jan 15, 2011: There are at least two problems with calling Loughner a ‘loner.’ First and foremost, he almost certainly isn’t one. The fact that he used to have a …
Jan 14, 2011: Apps shatter the very idea of aesthetic coherence, turning computers into weird samplers that betray the smooth, slick exteriors of the iDevices that …
Jan 14, 2011: Jared Loughner’s despair that everything is unreal and words have no meaning amounts to hatred of the world (a mania of moralism and narcissism) for …
Jan 14, 2011: The main barrier is the scientism that pervades our mentality and our culture. We are prone to think that if there’s a serious problem, science will …
Jan 14, 2011: I’m not exactly a slow writer—when I’m really cooking I can do 800-1,000 good, polished words in two hours, that’s not bad—but it can take me a long …
Jan 14, 2011: Atargatis, the “Syrian Goddess,” was a demanding mistress. For one thing, her priests (the galli) could win their way into her affections only by …
Jan 14, 2011: I’m always being informed that if I find something wrong on Wikipedia I’m supposed to “fix” it. Good god. How bullying, really. Let me free up my Mort …
Jan 14, 2011: By Monday, The New York Times’ editorial page had kicked into action. It conceded that, sure, Loughner operated “well beyond usual ideological …
Jan 14, 2011: Defenders of traditional authority will object to the relativism of all this, but relativism is all we’ve got – the rise of the scientific method has …
Jan 13, 2011: mwfrost: The fundamental contradiction in my thinking about social life is bound up with the juxtaposition in me of two elements — an aristocratic …
Jan 13, 2011: If Wikipedia pulled a MySpace and started dwindling away, who could save them? And who could ever build another one? Bruce Sterling on Wikipedia’s …
Jan 13, 2011: The most significant thing about the feature on ‘Why Criticism Matters’ is the title. The New York Times would never find it necessary to publish an …
Jan 13, 2011: Throughout his book, but especially toward the end, Metaxas turns this erudite and at times abstruse theologian into a living and tragic human being. …
Jan 13, 2011: myaloysius: Female (detail) behind the figure of the Bacchante in Scene VII, Villa of the Mysteries, Porta Ercolano, Italy
Jan 12, 2011: Apart from being gratified that my book has been filmed by one of the best living English-speaking producer-directors, instead of by some pornhound or …
Jan 12, 2011: To insist in the face of all this that Second Life is not a game is to miss out on the way it illuminates what’s becoming of that impulse. Yes, Second …
Jan 12, 2011: Most linguistics departments have an introduction-to-language course in which students other than linguistics majors can be exposed to at least …
Jan 12, 2011: A landmark study published in 2003 in Psychological Science by Iowa State Professor Craig Anderson and other academics, which surveyed significant …
Jan 12, 2011: How do you navigate content on the iPad? Scroll or flip? In 1987, the biggest neck beards in tech held conference on the Future of Hypertext and there …
Jan 12, 2011: I break tablet reading distances into three main categories—Bed, Knee, and Breakfast—and define the categories by generic use case: • Bed (Close to …
Jan 12, 2011: The inhabitants of Osh (Ūsh) drive the enemy out with sticks and clubs and hold the town for Babur, from Illuminated manuscript Baburnama (Memoirs of …
Jan 12, 2011: You can use my name on your board, I guess, although I generally try to keep off of letterheads unless I am able to be of substantial assistance. When …
Jan 12, 2011: The substitution of online for bookstore distribution of books will provide a substantial social saving and, as I said, increase the demand for books …
Jan 12, 2011: Back then, the basic unit of Internet buzz was the blog entry. Blogs, which today seem so quaint, gave you the chance to stretch out and make case …
Jan 12, 2011: ‘Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it,’ McLuhan explained during an uncharacteristically candid …
Jan 11, 2011: Is it ever right to just wind up and let someone have it with all you’ve got? That’s a question that I think has to be asked. It’s certainly possible …
Jan 11, 2011: brief iPad reading update brief iPad reading update As I have explained elsewhere, the iPad has become a major teaching tool for me. But as a reading device … not so much. I …
Jan 11, 2011: A schoolmaster’s calling is usually but poor and very painful, requiring much close attendance; but yet it is of so great use to the common good, and …
Jan 11, 2011: The atrocity in Tucson on Saturday was a horrifying act of political nihilism. As everyone knows, six innocent people were murdered, and thirteen more …
Jan 10, 2011: Augustine’s Confessions (the very title implies an admission of guilt) is considered the first Western autobiography ever written, or in other words, …
Jan 10, 2011: Ruined Armenian churches. More astonishing photos here. Hat tip to Tim Maly.
Jan 10, 2011: The Whale and the Reactor (1) The Whale and the Reactor (1) The chief theme of the opening pages of The Whale and the Reactor is the absence of a substantial philosophy of …
Jan 10, 2011: When our politicians and media loudmouths act like fools and zealots, they should be held responsible for being fools and zealots. They shouldn’t be …
Jan 10, 2011: I’ve become a big fan of tools like Freedom, which effortlessly permit you to turn off the noise. An hour after you haven’t kept up with the world, …
Jan 9, 2011: In one view, both the revelations of WikiLeaks and of the Telegraph would, if they became the norm, encourage a more truthful public sphere. Conscious …
Jan 7, 2011: Google was designed to play the role of a passive observer of the internet: web content was created for people, not specific Google queries, and …
Jan 7, 2011: The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each …
Jan 7, 2011: Writers and editors, as Harper’s Magazine’s Thomas Frank points out, are being driven into penury by Internet wages — in most cases, no wages. But, as …
Jan 7, 2011: Starting early in the 20th century, tens of thousands of scripts were produced by different mediums in several countries over a period of more than 30 …
Jan 7, 2011: Here’s the problem though, today’s English graduate student digital natives are not. Not digitally native, I mean. In part, I am highly skeptical of …
Jan 7, 2011: Headphones work best for people who need or want to hear one sound story and no other; who don’t want to have to choose which sounds to listen to and …
Jan 7, 2011: The Tools of Poetry, according to Andrei Codrescu A goatskin notebook for writing down dreams Mont Blanc fountain pen (extra credit if it belonged to Mme Blavatsky) A Chinese coin or a stone in your …
Jan 7, 2011: landscapelifescape: Vermont, Smugglers Notch State Park (by Kevin McNeal)
Jan 7, 2011: I’m especially looking forward to Windoro, the robot that cleans both sides of your windows at once; Kitara, the guitar with no strings but rather a …
Jan 6, 2011: Quotations from politicians have been getting shorter for more than a century. According to a new article in the academic journal Journalism Studies …
Jan 5, 2011: plans plans One of my plans for this blog in the coming year is to spend less time responding to the news of the moment — that’s really what Twitter is for …
Jan 5, 2011: If you want to be a New Atheist, first and foremost, you need to possess an unrelenting desire to help. The desire may seem at times cruel, but you …
Jan 5, 2011: I propose we abandon the Internet, or at least accept the fact that it has been surrendered to corporate control like pretty much everything else in …
Jan 5, 2011: The new Aston is beautiful. Chest-squeezing, arrythmia-inducing, stunningly gorgeous. I had occasion to park our willow-green-metallic test car next …
Jan 5, 2011: If one censors Mark Twain’s use of the word, why not censor the black writers who use the term? Whose characters use the term? My new book, Barack …
Jan 4, 2011: saint preserve us . . . from microfilm saint preserve us . . . from microfilm So, worried about the long-term survival of digitized documents? Here’s your answer: Schielke and Rauber’s …
Jan 4, 2011: Of course, the model that Zuckerberg is hoping to replace isn’t the Peel show but the search engine. If Zuckerberg gets his way, Facebook …
Jan 4, 2011: Here’s what’s happening, as I see it. My students aren’t unique but represent a portion of the millennial generation: at least moderately intelligent, …
Jan 3, 2011: more comments needed? more comments needed? Bob Stein writes: People are very resistant to leaving comments in a public space. There was a much more extensive discussion …
Jan 2, 2011: A study in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that brightening lights in dementia facilities decreased depression, cognitive …
Jan 2, 2011: In non-fiction, there are simple improvements to be made in the form of links – after all, what is a link but a better version of the footnote? There …
Jan 2, 2011: In 2035, most of humanity will live in favelas. This will not be entirely wonderful, as many people will live in very poor housing, but it will have …
Jan 2, 2011: At the Q gathering in 2010, urbanologist Richard Florida observed that young adults meeting one another no longer ask, ‘What do you do?’ They ask, …
Jan 2, 2011: But our Eden communities may have the solution. In Great Asby, one volunteer discovered there was already fibre, paid for by the taxpayer, for the …
Jan 1, 2011: It is precisely because Ramadan is unsympathetic to the idea of individual autonomy and moral independence that he can casually dismiss tolerance as …
Dec 31, 2010: ‘The universal reaction to book lists,’ I wrote a few days ago, 'is annoyance over what has been left out.’ I should have added: followed immediately …
Dec 31, 2010: Now that I have a family of my own, we do observe the changing of the calendar year in our own tepid way. A glass of champagne at midnight on New …
Dec 30, 2010: posts unwritten, end-of-year edition, part 2 posts unwritten, end-of-year edition, part 2 How interesting would it be to have a writer’s every keystroke recorded and played back? Pretty …
Dec 30, 2010: From the Atlantic’s Kodachrome gallery
Dec 30, 2010: [youtube …
Dec 29, 2010: opting out, revisited opting out, revisited Regular readers, if I have any regular readers, will know that this is the kind of thing I strongly disagree with: Overwhelmed …
Dec 29, 2010: In the late ‘90s I started an awkward—some might say excruciating and as-yet incomplete—transition from graduate student to freelance journalist. For …
Dec 29, 2010: www.youtube.com/watch A justly famous scene from Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
Dec 29, 2010: Bruce Herman, “Little Gidding”, oil on wood
Dec 29, 2010: Research has been done on how the internet affects us, but because I don’t use the internet much now, I can’t google those experts’ opinions and …
Dec 29, 2010: does anything change anything? does anything change anything? Marshall Poe says that “the Internet changes nothing”: The media experts, however, tell us that there really is …
Dec 28, 2010: Books contain the most carefully crafted and edited text that we have – truly the richest source of information in the world – and yet all that …
Dec 28, 2010: On the wall of a long-closed station of the Paris Métro
Dec 28, 2010: Agnolo Bronzino, “Head of a Smiling Young Woman in Three-Quarter View,” ca. 1542–43, Charcoal and black chalk, with stumping, highlighted with white …
Dec 28, 2010: I would offer up ‘coolly extravagant’ to describe Bronzino’s vision. Above all, it is full of urbanity, which favors presence but renders it …
Dec 27, 2010: I’d guess that most organizations a generation from now will be pretty small by contemporary standards, with highly convoluted cell-like structures. …
Dec 27, 2010: Via The Big Picture: A homeless child holds a candle during a street Christmas celebration at Dom Pedro Park in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil on December …
Dec 26, 2010: The best thing about America is its universities. Not Harvard, Yale, e tutti quanti: though marvelous, they are not distinctively American – their …
Dec 26, 2010: I find that it is much more for most men’s good and edification, to converse with them only in that way of godliness which all are agreed in … and to …
Dec 26, 2010: Handed-down wisdom and worked-up information remain the double piers of a cook’s life. The recipe book always contains two things: news of how …
Dec 25, 2010: To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over ploughshare or spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope, to pray — these are …
Dec 24, 2010: Andrew Hudgins, "The Cestello Annunciation" The angel has already said, Be not afraid. He’s said, The power of the Most High will darken you. Her eyes are downcast and half closed. And there’s a …
Dec 24, 2010: Botticelli, The Cestello Annunciation
Dec 24, 2010: Let no man deceive himself; if by vulgarity we mean coarseness of speech, rowdiness of behaviour, gossip, horseplay, and some heavy drinking, …
Dec 24, 2010: G. K. Chesterton, "Christmas Poem" There fared a mother driven forth Out of an inn to roam; In the place where she was homeless All men are at home. The crazy stable close at hand, With …
Dec 24, 2010: “How the Christmas Tree Got Its Lights”
Dec 23, 2010: To declare God’s goodness, that hath enabled us to speak, we are bound to speak: speech is the Glue, the Cement, the Soul of Conversation, and of …
Dec 22, 2010: Unfortunately for the US State Department, they clearly shouldn’t have been messing with computers, either. In setting up their SIPRnet, they were …
Dec 22, 2010: Writing a book is like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle, unendurably slow at first, almost self-propelled at the end. Actually, it’s more like doing a …
Dec 22, 2010: austinkleon: The Man With The Electronic Brain Kevin Huizenga remixes, edits, and erases from a crazy old comic.
Dec 22, 2010: landscapelifescape: Cumbria, England A frosty morning at Castlerigg (by Tim Smalley)
Dec 21, 2010: Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a …
Dec 21, 2010: While it’s stated like a given, the idea that the number of evangelicals buying into the extreme ‘Green Dragon’ line is 'far larger’ than the number …
Dec 21, 2010: Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It’s partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today’s social games, and partly an earnest …
Dec 21, 2010: Niagara Falls, minus the falls
Dec 21, 2010: There are many people – happy people, it usually appears – whose thoughts at Christmas always turn to books. The notion of a Christmas tree with no …
Dec 21, 2010: Andrew Hudgins, "Praying Drunk" Our Father who art in heaven, I am drunk. Again. Red wine. For which I offer thanks. I ought to start with praise, but praise comes hard to me. I …
Dec 20, 2010: Both Newman’s attraction to Catholicism and his hesitation in embracing it sprang from a radical historicism. As an Anglican, he had subscribed to the …
Dec 20, 2010: Without the holy night, there is no theology. ‘God is revealed in flesh,’ the God-human Jesus Christ—that is the holy mystery that theology came into …
Dec 20, 2010: metadata and our discontents metadata and our discontents See that? Huge spike on the word “internet” in … 1903. Natalie Binder explains why Google’s really bad metadata is …
Dec 20, 2010: [vimeo 16501697 w=250 h=141] Makoto Fujimura’s Four Holy Gospels (Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
Dec 20, 2010: [youtube …
Dec 20, 2010: Underwater sculptures by Jason deCaires Taylor. Please look at all the photographs — they’re stunning. (Via here, originally via Tim Maly.)
Dec 20, 2010: Putnam and Campbell are quantitative, liberal, and upbeat; Hunter is qualitative, conservative and conflicted. But both books come around to a similar …
Dec 20, 2010: Most of the other Ancient Near Eastern cultures see the divine realm as quite heavily populated with gods, often having different interests and …
Dec 19, 2010: All of the disciplines are increasingly identifiable as professionalisms, which are increasingly conformable to the aims and standards of …
Dec 19, 2010: Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need …
Dec 19, 2010: Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed …
Dec 19, 2010: The American corporate model looks a little battered at the moment, while American universities have become paragons of learning to which all the …
Dec 19, 2010: A human being at rest runs on 90 watts. That’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, …
Dec 18, 2010: Now there’s a delightful conundrum for modern morality: we’d all love to be able to shop that douchebag who cut us up while clocking ninety in the …
Dec 18, 2010: austinkleon: If you hit this sign you will hit that bridge by under exposure Sez @sparehed: Good UX is making sure people know in advance what to …
Dec 16, 2010: austinkleon: “A Year in Marginalia” by Sam Anderson The writing I enjoy doing most, every year, is marginalia: spontaneous bursts of pure, private …
Dec 14, 2010: Not surprisingly, patients who escaped depression with the help of anti-depressants, and then stopped taking the drugs, relapsed about 70 percent of …
Dec 14, 2010: London Review: “One of the most striking exhibits at the Wellcome Collection’s High Society exhibition is a set of images of webs spun by spiders on …
Dec 13, 2010: A few weeks ago at a conference, I listened to a distinguished political philosopher tell those in attendance that he would not be speaking before …
Dec 13, 2010: Rory Stewart: Now I was walking downstream in Cumbria. It was a holiday: I hoped to let my thoughts settle, but I also hoped to learn more by walking …
Dec 13, 2010: Why do we weed the collection? First, we don’t have much choice. We’re running out of space and building a wing onto the library to make room for more …
Dec 13, 2010: Another of the king’s chief men, approving of his wise words and exhortations, added thereafter: ‘The present life of man upon earth, O king, seems to …
Dec 12, 2010: mwfrost: via io9
Dec 12, 2010: This is a deluxe copy of the Quintet (Khamsah) of Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī (d.725 AH /1325 CE). Although now incomplete, this manuscript was penned in …
Dec 11, 2010: [youtube …
Dec 11, 2010: Giacometti in his studio, via Paris Review
Dec 10, 2010: information considered and reconsidered information considered and reconsidered Here’s a wonderful little post by James Gleick about the meaning of the word “information,” according to the …
Dec 9, 2010: The Fourth Amendment’s increasing irrelevance stems from the fact that the Supreme Court is mired in precedent decided in another era. Over the past …
Dec 9, 2010: I’ve been emphasizing the bad news, but I do think it’s genuinely good news that well-educated opinion — as opposed to just well-educated behavior — …
Dec 9, 2010: adventurousness and its enemies, part 3 adventurousness and its enemies, part 3 Nick Carr’s post on Craig Mod’s brief for interactive storytelling is more incisive and cogent than mine. Not …
Dec 9, 2010: sociopathy sociopathy Susan Orlean has written a beautiful, melancholy post about the challenges of dealing with her mother’s physical and mental decline — and …
Dec 9, 2010: litfolksarehip: Professor Roy’s research specializations include Robert Burns, reader response theory, and defense against the dark arts.
Dec 9, 2010: Gradually the humanities are being invaded and disciplined by explanations of that kind, which purport to sweep away the mess of hermeneutics and …
Dec 8, 2010: The landscape has changed in enormous ways, most good, some not so good. Anybody who tells you that PEPFAR and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, …
Dec 8, 2010: The brief history of the internet is dominated by wishful thinking about turning internet traffic into revenue; companies that have managed to do it …
Dec 8, 2010: I admire the magnificent plotting of Annie’s adventures. They are just as adventure strips should be–fast moving, slightly macabre (witness Mr. Am), …
Dec 8, 2010: atestu: Kawah Ijen by night - The Big Picture - Boston.com A sulfur miner stands inside the crater of the Kawah Ijen volcano at night, holding a …
Dec 8, 2010: How do you help your children balance when the whole education system is pushing, pushing, pushing, and you want your kids to be successful? Parents …
Dec 8, 2010: adventurousness and its enemies, part 2 adventurousness and its enemies, part 2 It’s not just in writing that the social can militate against innovation: it happens in teaching too. Some …
Dec 8, 2010: class blogs class blogs On Twitter this morning I asked for thoughts on how best to run a class blog, and replies are coming in. People are reminding me of Mark …
Dec 8, 2010: The Age of Anxiety is coming at you! (in a good way) The Age of Anxiety is coming at you! (in a good way) Pre-order here.
Dec 8, 2010: The Pleasures of Reading are coming at you! (also in a good way) The Pleasures of Reading are coming at you! (also in a good way) Not on Amazon yet, but at OUP’s site. Here’s the Amazon link.
Dec 8, 2010: I predict we’re in a phase. In a few years, people will learn to reduce their message sending, the same way many of us have learned not to answer the …
Dec 7, 2010: I don’t think such a law should pass. I think the current laws, which criminalize the leaking of secrets but not the publishing of leaks, strike the …
Dec 7, 2010: adventurousness and its enemies adventurousness and its enemies Yesterday I wrote that insofar as writing becomes social, it will become less, not more, adventurous. Here’s why: …
Dec 7, 2010: Ohio State lists 458 people in its athletic department. Included are the athletic director (who’s also a vice president of the university), four …
Dec 6, 2010: brave new digital world (number 3,782 in a series) brave new digital world (number 3,782 in a series) Craig Mod on how the digital world changes books: The biggest change is not in the form stories …
Dec 6, 2010: crabwise crabwise Umberto Eco always makes me think: I once had occasion to observe that technology now advances crabwise, i.e. backwards. A century after the …
Dec 6, 2010: The abstractions of science are too readily assimilable to the abstractions of industry and commerce, which see everything as interchangeable with or …
Dec 5, 2010: landscapelifescape: Olive Tree, Jerusalem, Israel via 2.bp.blogspot.com
Dec 5, 2010: That said, there is something reassuring about a list, a precision and formality that makes us think we’ve got a handle on things. Isn’t every list in …
Dec 5, 2010: Shteyngart says the first thing that happened when he bought an iPhone ‘was that New York fell away … It disappeared. Poof.’ That’s the first thing I …
Dec 5, 2010: Blasphemy, in the Bulgakovian sense, means not only denial of the authority of God, although it certainly does mean that. It also means insufficient …
Dec 5, 2010: It was more useful for the global media. ‘Twitter functioned mainly as a huge echo chamber of solidarity messages from global voices, that simply …
Dec 5, 2010: Then, miraculously, out of the hundreds of nearly indistinguishable stone figurines, my husband found the one we were looking for. We were now …
Dec 3, 2010: opting out of the monopolies opting out of the monopolies At the Technology Liberation Front, Adam Thierer has been reviewing, in installments, Tim Wu’s new book The Master …
Dec 2, 2010: Advent is only secondarily about the baby Jesus. It is primarily about the rending of the heavens (Isaiah again) and the coming of the Lord in power …
Dec 2, 2010: Allow me to illustrate with an example. Every few months, I would visit a little whitewashed school in the hills of Indonesian-occupied East Timor. …
Dec 2, 2010: Small wonder the state department is crying blue murder. Yet, from what I have seen, the professional members of the US foreign service have very …
Dec 2, 2010: It may be cathartic for critics of state power to cheer when Assange sticks an online thumb into leviathan’s eye. But WikiLeaks is at best a temporary …
Dec 2, 2010: Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is …
Dec 2, 2010: less than singular less than singular Cosma Shalizi (click through to the original for important links): The Singularity has happened; we call it “the industrial …
Dec 2, 2010: Most ‘cheating’ (I truly believe) is undertaken as an act of desperation, a means of coping with failure as measured by receipt of lower-than-average …
Dec 1, 2010: Daily Lit Daily Lit Here’s the place to go if you would like to have books emailed to you in installments, at a frequency you set yourself. At first I strongly …
Dec 1, 2010: A company composed wholly of men of learning, though greatly to be valued and respected, is not meant by the words “good company”; they cannot have …
Nov 30, 2010: The very notion in America of four years of a post-high school liberal arts education as a default experience for people between 18 and 21 is a …
Nov 30, 2010: novelty, once more novelty, once more There have been some interesting reflections recently on the advantages and disadvantages of the blog as a medium for literary …
Nov 29, 2010: email, we hardly knew ye email, we hardly knew ye Cringely is sad about the decline and fall of email. Me? Not so much. I like the lightweight minimalism of text/IM/Twitter, …
Nov 29, 2010: When the NME voted him 26th in its annual Cool List, one place above his hero Dr Dre, [James] Murphy just found this preposterous. ‘Things like that …
Nov 29, 2010: Ostler has faith in a virtual system, which he claims will revolutionize global communications, and make foreign language learning a thing of the …
Nov 28, 2010: landscapelifescape: Burrator Reservoir, Sharpitor, Devon, UK Burrator Reservoir Plantation
Nov 28, 2010: If there is such a thing as world literature, it is because today’s most interesting writers are also well‑travelled readers and a lot of what they …
Nov 28, 2010: A scene, unlike a description, not only has a beginning, a middle and an end, but by the time it’s over, something has changed, something has happened …
Nov 27, 2010: In recent years, neuroscience has begun to solve the mystery of overeating. It turns out to have little to do with our taste buds, or even with our …
Nov 26, 2010: Half a millennium before Columbus’ calamitous 1492 arrival in the Caribbean, DNA from the Americas may have infiltrated the European genome by way of …
Nov 26, 2010: One good outcome of McGurl’s analysis would be to lay to rest the perpetual handwringing about what MFA programs do to writers (e.g., turn them into …
Nov 26, 2010: I started Riddley Walker in straight English but my characters wouldn’t wear it, they insisted on breaking up long words and imposing their own …
Nov 25, 2010: On no grounds whatever, our chastened worldview is taken to require the exclusion from philosophic thought of the human self as experience. Now, when …
Nov 24, 2010: Now more than ever is the time for our statesmen, legislators, and enlightened writers to talk up the Puritans in the name of the most sublime …
Nov 24, 2010: copia copia If I think of Copia as a standard, everyday way of reading, it seems like a nightmare to me. But if I think of it as a way to conduct a focused, …
Nov 24, 2010: material developments material developments So what should e-readers be made of? How about, let’s see — yes: paper. This article reports on the use of paper as the …
Nov 22, 2010: reader's report: Jane Smiley reader’s report: Jane Smiley Well, the recent traveling and busyness may have kept me from posting, but it didn’t keep me from reading. Nothing …
Nov 22, 2010: university presses university presses After reading yet another story this morning about the problems university presses find themselves in, with all-too-brief …
Nov 22, 2010: The problem, as it appears to me, is that we are using the wrong language. The language we use to speak of the world and its creatures, including …
Nov 22, 2010: PHILADELPHIA—Historians at the University of Pennsylvania announced the discovery this week of a personal diary from the late 18th century that …
Nov 21, 2010: Then, just last month came the well-publicised British study that suggested that a little drinking during pregnancy is healthy, and that children …
Nov 19, 2010: busyness continues . . . busyness continues . . . … which means that I haven’t been able to blog here. I have managed, though, to post some quotes to my tumblelog. A poor …
Nov 19, 2010: I look forward to the day where studying biology is a prerequisite for a PhD in Classics, and biblical criticism can help round out your doctorate in …
Nov 18, 2010: I can be influenced as an artist by all kinds of people I have very little chance of meeting – Kurosawa’s death has no relevance to his influence on …
Nov 18, 2010: Rather than focus on passing laws, Gushee conveyed an alternative approach: He urged pro-lifers to study data on why women seek abortions and to …
Nov 18, 2010: One compelling study used PET imaging to watch what is going on in the brain during inner speech. As expected, this showed activity in the classic …
Nov 18, 2010: If I’ve done my job, she said in the last class, you won’t be happy with anything you write for the next 10 years. It’s not because you won’t be …
Nov 18, 2010: In the extent and diversity of our dependence on technology, humankind is unique. But we’re also singular for having wrested moments of purposeless …
Nov 18, 2010: As for the argument that the humanities don’t pay their own way, well, I guess that’s true, but it seems to me that there’s a fallacy in assuming that …
Nov 18, 2010: Conservatives bear a lot of blame for their current predicament. This comprehensive assault on individual freedom didn’t occur in a vacuum; it …
Nov 18, 2010: I think atheists miss the point. I don’t grant atheism and agnosticism the same moral quality that I give to people who pursue the religious or …
Nov 17, 2010: Harold Parker State Forest (5)
Nov 17, 2010: Bradley Palmer State Park
Nov 17, 2010: Harold Parker State Forest (6)
Nov 17, 2010: near Wilton, New Hampshire (2)
Nov 13, 2010: I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. …
Nov 13, 2010: brief hiatus brief hiatus I’ll be traveling for a few days, folks, so no new posts until late next week.
Nov 13, 2010: There is no shortage of places in Manhattan where visitors can spend the night. Luxury hotels offer lavish suites that can run thousands of dollars, …
Nov 13, 2010: Of all the defenses of online I’ve read, the most pathetic - and one of the most frequent - is that it’s great for students who are so shy, so …
Nov 13, 2010: education as a public good education as a public good In a typically smart column about online education, my friend Reihan Salam quotes Anya Kamenetz: The only way to restore …
Nov 12, 2010: Curiously enough, in the midst of all this gloom and doom and sounding of various alarms, the high-humanist conviction that liberal arts education can …
Nov 12, 2010: Having myself grown up in Berkeley, where Nobel laureates are a dime a dozen, I certainly know the syndrome: the mismatched socks, the spectacles …
Nov 12, 2010: Yet our system obliges us to elevate to office precisely those persons who have the ego-besotted effrontery to ask us to do so; it is rather like …
Nov 12, 2010: It is not reasonable to suppose that such a Christian Party will will acquire new powers of leavening the infidel organization to which it is …
Nov 11, 2010: making connections making connections One of Tim Burke’s colleagues is a little concerned about the breadth of interests represented by Tim’s syllabi: My colleague …
Nov 11, 2010: plusses and minuses plusses and minuses … of the iPad as a reading device. The minuses: Terrible screen glare, even indoors. Fingerprints on the screen are a major …
Nov 10, 2010: atestu:
Nov 10, 2010: preciseandtowering: Espinosa Nova font family « MyFonts A beautiful family of 16th c. revival types that not only has regular Roman, italic and bold …
Nov 10, 2010: What is remarkable about [Oscar] Wilde’s formalism is that it is so absolutely human. This may come as a surprise, because we’re inclined to think of …
Nov 10, 2010: “Frankfurt Kitchen,” Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, 1926–27. Commentary by Jed Perl here.
Nov 10, 2010: When the church’s theological rejection of sadness was secularised, sadness became a pathology requiring medical intervention. The medicalisation of …
Nov 9, 2010: The order read: ‘Although plaintiffs are entitled to statutory damages, they have no right to silence defendant’s criticism of the statutory regime …
Nov 9, 2010: more changes more changes Speaking of personal vacillation and changeableness, remember how I returned my iPad? Yeah, well, I got another one, and basically for …
Nov 9, 2010: the commodification of intimacy the commodification of intimacy This sobering post from Nick Carr suggests that we ought to be worried, or at least seriously reflective, about “web …
Nov 9, 2010: In all the mountain ranges of commentary on [the Gospel of] John — the all but endless attempts to explain John’s alleged dislocations, his stops and …
Nov 9, 2010: Can it be that we tend to overestimate the influence of language partly because we so often underestimate the intelligence of other people? Think …
Nov 9, 2010: freakyfauna: Transition No. 13, 1928. Magazine cover by Pablo Picasso. Found here.
Nov 8, 2010: What, then, are we to make of the two books Kelly has penned here? I remain extremely torn. I feel that the opening and closing portions of What …
Nov 8, 2010: When interviewed while he was researching this book, Kelly, who describes himself as a devout Christian, declared that technology ‘is actually a …
Nov 8, 2010: When professional writers, especially ones trained in the literary arts, see horrifically bad writing online, they recoil. All their training about …
Nov 8, 2010: Professor Gleason was a bumbling biologist whom, due to his generous and ovoid physical proportions, we students had nicknamed ‘The Egg.’ He seemed to …
Nov 8, 2010: changes to the System changes to the System It’s just not in my nature, I guess, to stick with one organizational method for very long. A few months ago, I wrote about my …
Nov 7, 2010: A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found a decided link between celibacy and good grades. Among high school students who …
Nov 6, 2010: The Mind’s Eye would have been a disappointment had it looked no further for clinical material. But there’s a redeeming fifth case: Oliver Sacks. And …
Nov 6, 2010: against humanism The language that has been developed over the centuries for talking about the mental and spiritual side of life is not some feeble, amateurish …
Nov 6, 2010: And increasingly, Facebook is performing the social filtering for us, absolving us of the guilt implicit in that as well. Social media structures …
Nov 6, 2010: The restoration mind-set of the next Christians is similar to that of the early Christians lived. Both are consumed with loving their neighbors, …
Nov 6, 2010: Given this tendency, it makes sense that we often rely intuitively on external rules to help ourselves out. A few years ago, Dan Ariely, a …
Nov 5, 2010: I resemble that remark I resemble that remark Keith Gessen: I want to move us into life choices. Does anybody regret the profession they have chosen? Mark Greif: I have no …
Nov 5, 2010: Gjertrud Schnackenberg, "Archimedes Lullaby" A visit to the shores of lullabies, Where Archimedes, counting grains of sand, Is seated in his half-filled universe And sorting out the grains by …
Nov 5, 2010: Ms. Hartsock, 23, diligently typed notes. A hard-working student who maintains an A average, she was frustrated by the online format. Other members of …
Nov 4, 2010: the book in the browser the book in the browser [vimeo 15826571 w=400 h=300]The Booki.sh reader from Inventive Labs on Vimeo. Via if:book.
Nov 4, 2010: At the time, though, I felt distant from Zuckerberg and all the kids at Harvard. I still feel distant from them now, ever more so, as I increasingly …
Nov 4, 2010: Lévi-Strauss thus promised two things: first, a combinatory schema that would reveal the basic operations of the human mind - all kinship systems …
Nov 4, 2010: visual storytelling visual storytelling I just finished reading Bone — all 1300 pages of it. It was okay, I guess. The usual cod-Tolkienian stuff, with the slight twist …
Nov 3, 2010: austinkleon: Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a diagram by Helena Wahlman I searched in vain for a view up close. Let me know if you find one. Thx, …
Nov 3, 2010: Voting is probably the least effective way to make your political preferences influence elections. You’d do far more with a bumper sticker, a chat …
Nov 3, 2010: open letters and closed ones open letters and closed ones So far three friends of mine have signed up for letter.ly, and are producing newsletters that I can sign up for. I have …
Nov 3, 2010: Although it seems that Facebook can be used by narcissists to fuel their inflated egos, Mehdizadeh stops short of proclaiming that excessive time …
Nov 2, 2010: The single cutest photograph in history.
Nov 2, 2010: For 25 years, the researchers have made detailed observations of bottlenose dolphins in the eastern gulf of Australia’s Shark Bay. That one-of-a-kind …
Nov 2, 2010: Try to promote the pro-life case that we have described within the Democratic Party and you will at best go unheard and at worst be shouted down. Try …
Nov 1, 2010: ad (non)sense ad (non)sense Micah White is upset: The vast library that is the internet is flooded with so many advertisements that many people claim not to notice …
Nov 1, 2010: Philosophy does not contribute to our knowledge of the world we live in after the manner of any of the natural sciences. You can ask any scientist to …
Nov 1, 2010: The dismal performance of the experts inspired Mr. Tetlock to turn his case study into an epic experimental project. He picked 284 people who made …
Oct 31, 2010: landscapelifescape: Glenorchy, New Zealand The Most Beautiful Road in the World
Oct 31, 2010: ‘The battle for the American mind right now is between talk show hosts and comedians,’ said Alex Foxworthy, a 26-year-old doctoral student from …
Oct 31, 2010: It looks, said Srivastava, as if ‘what is happening in America is a loss of self-confidence. We don’t want America to lose self-confidence. Who else …
Oct 30, 2010: Ideology is one thing. But if the tea-partiers do well next week, especially if the Republicans capture the House, they need to move past ideology …
Oct 30, 2010: oldhollywood: “It was on purpose that I started looking miserable, humiliated, hounded, and haunted, bedeviled, bewildered, and at my wit’s end. Some …
Oct 30, 2010: The thing is, Harry Potter’s story is finished. He’s defeated Voldemort. Friends have died, lessons have been learned, Draco Malfoy is all grown up …
Oct 30, 2010: landscapelifescape: Dover, Kansas, USA Country Road (by Marcos)
Oct 29, 2010: cutaway cutaway Jonathan Safran Foer made his forthcoming story Tree of Codes by cutting words and phrases out of Bruno Schultz’s story “The Street of …
Oct 29, 2010: The moral authority of Jon Stewart is a baffling phenomenon. ‘He’s Cronkite,’ proclaims New York magazine, 'the most trusted man in America.’ He is …
Oct 29, 2010: The elegance of many of the engraved plates in Cartographies of Time and the chaste beauty of the instruments in Alpern’s collection suggest a mastery …
Oct 29, 2010: Dracula himself is a fabulous creation, not at all like the perfumed fop or melancholy poet of popular conception. Stoker’s vampire does not think …
Oct 28, 2010: nature as information nature as information Via Clay Shirky, some really important thoughts from Mike at The Aporetic: A woman in a farm kitchen had a LOT to consider – …
Oct 28, 2010: If one team is good enough to warrant beating another in 55% of its games, the weaker team will nevertheless win a 7-game series about 4 times out of …
Oct 28, 2010: Most type designers are understandably proud of their work. But Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, the maker of the beautiful Doves type, was so taken by it, …
Oct 28, 2010: The odds of any given venture succeeding are, of course, low. But it’s rational to invest $1 million in a business that will fail nine out of ten …
Oct 28, 2010: The poet Jo Shapcott used a nice phrase recently about confessional writing: ‘chasing your own ambulance’, she called it. I am guilty of that. In my …
Oct 28, 2010: amplified authorship amplified authorship Chris Meade writes — and please forgive the length of the quotation — The amplified author doesn’t wait for a publisher to …
Oct 27, 2010: Much of what I have read on Plato reads much as though he, to whom the whole of subsequent philosophy is said to be so many footnotes, were in effect …
Oct 27, 2010: And my saddened sympathies to colleagues at Virginia Theological Seminary, whose chapel burned down yesterday afternoon. The grief from such losses …
Oct 26, 2010: The internet currently has two very different models of social networking. There is, of course, Facebook – a massive sprawl of friends and …
Oct 26, 2010: I can’t really counter all the claims made about the Kindle by the true believers. It really is handy. It can hold ten million books and fifty million …
Oct 26, 2010: Some writers, though, scribble and tap more fruitfully than others. Next month brings with it the scent of rose petals, cushions and lapdogs: all …
Oct 25, 2010: Of course Franzen wrote the autobiography—just as he wrote each word of the novel [Freedom]—and placed it in the narrative in a considered way; so why …
Oct 25, 2010: Is liberalism any better off now that Juan Williams ‘got what was coming to him’ for going on Fox in the first place? Aren’t Fox News’s millions of …
Oct 25, 2010: A plot, if there is to be one, must be a secret. A secret that, if only we knew it, would dispel our frustration, lead us to salvation; or else the …
Oct 25, 2010: landscapelifescape: Hunza, Gilgit, Pakistan Color Bonanza (by Atif Saeed)
Oct 25, 2010: Amish country, in Kelly’s telling, is a version of the hippie-nerd Maker Faire without the colorful clothing. The Amish may not have cars or buttons, …
Oct 25, 2010: the relative value of innovation the relative value of innovation Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From is primarily about innovation — about the circumstances that favor …
Oct 23, 2010: These people remind me of wine snobs - they can detect all these subtle notes and flavours but the average person probably won’t notice all these tiny …
Oct 23, 2010: The narrowing effect of technology on language itself is something I discussed with the novelist Joseph O’Connor, best known for the success of his …
Oct 23, 2010: oh, for the good old days oh, for the good old days You know, the good old days when I could safely sneer at people who hadn’t read the Officially Approved Books of my social …
Oct 22, 2010: The rigid scripting of childhood and adolescence has made young Americans risk- and failure-averse. Shying away from endeavors at which they might not …
Oct 22, 2010: Which brings me to the Clarence Thomas Rule. It goes something like this: When a black person expresses views that liberal elites have deemed …
Oct 20, 2010: Steven Johnson and the connected mind Steven Johnson and the connected mind Folks, I’m still way busy, so posting will continue to be light for a while. I’m hoping at some point to have …
Oct 20, 2010: what I would blog about if I had time what I would blog about if I had time Robert Pippin defends naïve reading. Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Kevin Dettmar dissent, sort of. How I would love …
Oct 19, 2010: E-readers have yet to dramatically alter the reading experience; e-ink still feels a lot like old-fashioned ink. But it seems inevitable that the same …
Oct 19, 2010: unpopular highlights unpopular highlights Virginia Heffernan: Amazon is quick to point out that you can always disable the [Popular Highlights] feature. But there’s a …
Oct 18, 2010: [Text is] a very flexible and pliable medium. You can skim or search. You can copy and paste. You can read at your own speed. It’s simple and cheap to …
Oct 18, 2010: Things with stories became incredibly unfashionable for kids. There was a point in the eighties and nineties when young-adult literature was being …
Oct 18, 2010: More and more people who are approaching retirement age now kind of know that retirement in prosperity will likely not be an option for them. They’ll …
Oct 18, 2010: Cartooning isn’t writing and art – it’s poetry and graphic design. James Sturm, cf. the cartoonist Seth: “The ‘words & pictures’ that make up the …
Oct 18, 2010: Instruction leaves a person trained and better informed – but otherwise unaltered. To stand at the threshold of an education, by contrast, is to stand …
Oct 17, 2010: landscapelifescape: Trieves, French Alps Le soleil s’en est allé - The sun went there (by lavanthym)
Oct 16, 2010: landscapelifescape: Lushan, Jiangxi, China a huge tree in Lushan (by shenxy)
Oct 16, 2010: A basic feature of the venture capitalist’s worldview is its narcissism, and with that comes the desire to clone oneself—perhaps literally in Thiel’s …
Oct 16, 2010: I hoped, of course, that I can find the way out, but also the hopeless was an everyday guest. And I was full of energy. It was possible that I explode …
Oct 16, 2010: Will an iPhone productivity app make you more productive? It will make you more productive if you’re in a position to become more productive. But …
Oct 15, 2010: In the postideological YouTube-topia that Orwell couldn’t have foreseen, information flows in all directions and does as it pleases, for better or for …
Oct 15, 2010: This is what I tell students: You should be proud of your profession because there’s less lying in journalism than in any other profession. They lie …
Oct 15, 2010: Isn’t it surprising when people don’t return books? I have lost Norman Rush’s Mortals, the complete poems of Thomas Hardy in a two-volume edition I …
Oct 15, 2010: mwfrost: Cover of The American Penman Dec 1920 (by ddsiple)
Oct 15, 2010: Alexis Madrigal on Pictorialists
Oct 15, 2010: and while I'm being grumpy and while I’m being grumpy Let’s fact-check our meditations on the past and future of reading, okay? No one knows where all this will end up, …
Oct 15, 2010: Enough! or, Too much! Enough! or, Too much! Kevin Kelly: Today some 4.5 billion digital screens illuminate our lives. Words have migrated from wood pulp to pixels on …
Oct 14, 2010: The spirit of the Gospel is eminently that of the ‘open’ type which gives, asking nothing in return, and spends itself for others. It is essentially …
Oct 13, 2010: Well, I say, being an anarchist, that I don’t believe in taking people by the hand and force-feeding them culture. I think they should make their own …
Oct 13, 2010: austinkleon: Art Spiegelman on the Woodcuts of Lynd Ward Ward’s wordless woodcut novels (like Prince Valiant, come to think of it) were easier for …
Oct 13, 2010: Years ago when I used to drive by car from Prague to our country cottage in Eastern Bohemia, the journey from the city centre to the signboard that …
Oct 13, 2010: a brief, random thought a brief, random thought This week, as I’m helping my students get their first major projects written, and dealing — I am long expert in this — dealing …
Oct 13, 2010: charting Harry charting Harry J. K. Rowling’s plan for key events in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. More information here. Via my indefatigable …
Oct 12, 2010: Blogs — the best blogs — are public diaries of preoccupations. The reason why they are preoccupations is that you need someone who is continually …
Oct 12, 2010: The first decapitation in Spartacus: Blood and Sand occurs 11 minutes into the first episode of Season 1. Two swordsmen in northern Greece, circa 75 …
Oct 11, 2010: Writing for an audience is a special and important sub-case: it’s writing with feedback and consequences. Doing it yourself changes how you think …
Oct 11, 2010: The main vector for the execution of Zuckerberg’s vision is Facebook’s platform strategy. Summed-up again by David Kirkpatrick: ‘Facebook’s long term …
Oct 10, 2010: fall coming
Oct 10, 2010: stonecrop
Oct 10, 2010: Sunday morning chillin’
Oct 10, 2010: I’ve been using Google Docs for several years to do the bulk of my writing work. But not until the last month had I used the collaborative real-time …
Oct 10, 2010: Solomon Burke has died at age 70. From the AP report: “Burke combined his singing with the role of preacher and patriarch of a huge family of 21 …
Oct 9, 2010: beyond the pond
Oct 9, 2010: early fall flowers
Oct 9, 2010: slanting morning sun
Oct 9, 2010: Two years ago in Rangoon, I met a toothpick-thin, boisterous young Burmese man called Somerset. He had conferred this nickname on himself at age …
Oct 9, 2010: When it was a crime to pick up a bloodied body on the street, Haitian writers introduced Haitian readers to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Antigone, which …
Oct 8, 2010: Beautiful Cray-1 Architecture rentzsch: Chris Fenton is cloning a cycle-accurate Cray-1A. In 1/10 scale. Awesome. I was especially smitten with the Cray 1 Hardware Manual’s …
Oct 8, 2010: Another questioner asked [Bjorn Lomborg], why did he choose a conservative think-tank like Heritage to show the movie in DC? His answer: because they …
Oct 8, 2010: From the archives of the Foundling Hospital in London.
Oct 8, 2010: stock overflow stock overflow Here’s a post by Peter Osnos on a book about Russian state security in the post-KGB era called The New Nobility: PublicAffairs printed …
Oct 8, 2010: Poetry, in other words, is mathematics. It is close to a particular branch of the subject known as combinatorics, the study of permutations – of how …
Oct 8, 2010: Soviet-era postage stamps
Oct 7, 2010: first and last first and last Martyn Lyons, from an essay on “New Readers in the NIneteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers”: By the 1890s, 90 per cent literacy …
Oct 7, 2010: A decade or two ago, students learning about, say, Stephen Shore, would head to the library and find a book, or perhaps see some slides projected in a …
Oct 7, 2010: Les Murray, "Poetry and Religion" Religions are poems. They concert our daylight and dreaming mind, our emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture into the only whole thinking: …
Oct 7, 2010: Cell phones cannot cause cancer, because they do not emit enough energy to break the molecular bonds inside cells. Some forms of electromagnetic …
Oct 6, 2010: learning Greek learning Greek Sure, people think it’s a good idea to learn Greek. But of course they would when you put the question that way. It’s a good idea to …
Oct 6, 2010: I suppose we could just roll over and accept that this is the way the world is going. “Privacy is dead. Get over it,” as Scott McNealy, the co-founder …
Oct 6, 2010: If you want to be innovative, you need to put yourself into innovative environments: places where lots of contradictory ideas from many disciplines …
Oct 6, 2010: Playing video games is a revolt against life. All art forms, even the polite ones, are escapist in that each answers some fundamental objection to the …
Oct 6, 2010: What we have in Hipster Christianity is a jaded ethnography written by someone who spent a youth-group-lifetime trying to be one of the cool kids. As …
Oct 5, 2010: picture books picture books David Abrams, new Kindle owner and speculator about the future of reading: While I might initially object to the distraction of video …
Oct 5, 2010: I have no phone and no internet connection in my office. And the days when the BlackBerry comes along because I have to expect some call or something, …
Oct 5, 2010: Procrastination is a basic human impulse, but anxiety about it as a serious problem seems to have emerged in the early modern era. The term itself …
Oct 5, 2010: According to the analysis of procrastination I have developed in my work, one reason that procrastination is so common—much more common, presumably …
Oct 5, 2010: But what if religion is not primarily about knowledge? What if the defining core of religion is more like a way of life, a nexus of action? What if, …
Oct 5, 2010: So, assuming that copyright holders will never be able to stop or even slow down copying, what is to be done? For me, the answer is simple: if I give …
Oct 5, 2010: Yet I continue to love American (and Canadian) trains. I am trying to rebrand my debilitating and expensive fear of flying as Steampunk Travel and – …
Oct 4, 2010: the binding of the vanities the binding of the vanities Please don’t miss this wonderful post from Matthew Battles about Nathan Myhrvold’s lavish multivolume celebration of …
Oct 4, 2010: Arboretum, west side
Oct 4, 2010: spruce wood
Oct 2, 2010: Over the years I’ve come to adopt a pretty extremist view on this, and I think I’m even prepared to accept the reductio ad Hitler case. Had it been …
Oct 2, 2010: Peter Callesen, Dead Angels.
Oct 2, 2010: creepy lines (and those who draw them) creepy lines (and those who draw them) Follow-up to this post: The end of the interview turned to the future of technology. When Bennet asked about …
Oct 2, 2010: Why would a bestselling author, capable of garnering a six-figure advance on a book, forgo the money, the media, and the mojo associated with a big …
Oct 1, 2010: Yesterday, the NPD Group released the results of a survey of iPad owners. The most intriguing finding was that ‘20 percent of users’ time with the …
Oct 1, 2010: Before I first acquired a Kindle, exactly one year ago, I didn’t usually buy books while under the influence of alcohol. I won’t say I never did it, …
Oct 1, 2010: One of the premises of this entire debate is that religious people want to use religious reasons in public debates. A few political scientists have …
Oct 1, 2010: Zuckerberg faced no such barrier. For less than $1,000, he could get his idea onto the Internet. He needed no permission from the network provider. He …
Oct 1, 2010: resisting print resisting print I’m reading and enjoying Andrew Pettegree’s The Book in the Renaissance, and as I move along I can’t stop comparing that moment of …
Oct 1, 2010: the saddest thing I have read in some time the saddest thing I have read in some time Arikia Millikan: Now, I am always connected to the Web. The rare exceptions to the rule cause excruciating …
Oct 1, 2010: the world between two covers the world between two covers I don’t think I understand all of William Germano’s essay on what books are good for. “I’ve been wondering lately when …
Sep 30, 2010: In fact, one of the peculiar ironies of modern life is that the more successful we are, the more time stress we experience. An extensive survey of …
Sep 30, 2010: Flood Lite: Apple's Attention to Detail Flood Lite: Apple’s Attention to Detail In July 2002, Appled filed a patent for a “Breathing Status LED Indicator” (No. US 6,658,577 B2). They …
Sep 30, 2010: Franz Xaver Messerschmidt
Sep 30, 2010: There are, of course, many other, less prominent reasons for the current anti-faculty climate. But perhaps it is enough to say that the reason we feel …
Sep 30, 2010: College costs a lot. I teach at BC, where a year’s tuition, fees, room, and board currently add up to $52,624. What are the students paying for? What …
Sep 30, 2010: This is pretty much what drives me up the wall about the cottage industry that’s grown up in development circles that aims to identify the magic …
Sep 30, 2010: Quantification in most professions is being used to keep us from having to shoulder the messy burden of making human, intimate judgments, or …
Sep 29, 2010: Cloud Atlas Cloud Atlas James Joyce once wrote to a friend that the thought of Ulysses is simple; it’s only the method that’s complex. Much the same could be said …
Sep 29, 2010: discuss discuss “Fortune favors the connected mind.” — Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From. “City ideas, like cities, are fashionable. But fashions …
Sep 29, 2010: Ramelli's wheel Ramelli’s wheel Yesterday I tweeted about Agostino Ramelli’s reading wheel, and this appears to be a subject near to the heart of my editor, …
Dec 29, 2009: "Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed." “Anyone who doesn’t read Cortázar is doomed." Over at if:book, Dan Visel has a nice post on the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, who is …
Aug 24, 2008: the Sunday morning prayer of Lancelot Andrewes Through the tender mercies of our God the day-spring from on high hath visited us. Glory be to Thee, O Lord, glory to Thee. Creator of the light, and …
Mar 7, 2008: Richard Wilbur, "Advice to a Prophet" When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city, Mad-eyed from stating the obvious, Not proclaiming our fall but begging us In God’s name …
Feb 1, 2008: Claudio Rodriguez, "Eugenio de Luelmo" who lived and died near the Duero 1 When someone wakens with grace, so simple are the things beside him, they almost seem new, we almost feel the …
Dec 24, 2007: W. H. Auden, "At the Manger" Mary Oh shut your bright eyes that mine must endanger With their watchfulness: protected by its shade Escape from my care: what can you discover From …
Dec 19, 2007: Les Murray, "The Quality of Sprawl" Sprawl is the quality of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce into a farm utility truck, and sprawl is what the company lacked when it made repeated …
Dec 14, 2007: Rowan Williams's Advent hope A great deal of the language that is around in the Communion at present seems to presuppose that any change from our current deadlock is impossible, …
Nov 28, 2007: Czeslaw Milosz, "Elegy for Y. Z." Never forget that you are a son of the King. — Martin Buber A year after your death, dear Y.Z., I flew from Houston to San Francisco And remembered …
Jun 14, 2007: Les Murray on writing a poem It’s wonderful, there’s nothing else like it, you write in a trance. And the trance is completely addictive, you love it, you want more of it. Once …
May 16, 2007: prayer as bird-watching The true disciple is an expectant person, always taking it for granted that there is something about to break through from the master, something about …
Apr 25, 2007: Brigit Pegeen Kelly, "Song" Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree. All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it Felt a hurt in their hearts and …
Apr 1, 2007: Richard Wilbur, "A Christmas Hymn" And as he rode along, they spread their cloaks on the road. As he was drawing near—already on the way down the Mount of Olives—the whole multitude of …
Mar 6, 2007: Trevor-Roper on CSL Do you know C.S. Lewis? In case you don’t, let me offer a brief character-sketch. Envisage (if you can) a man who combines the face and figure of a …