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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