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Intentional fouls ruined the Spurs-Thunder game. The NBA should abolish them — I was going to write just this post, but it’s been done for me. For 95% of that game both teams played brilliantly; it was riveting to watch. And then the last “minute” of the game became 15 minutes of free throws, time outs, and substitutions. I actually turned it off before the end; I didn’t care any more who won. This is a really, really bad problem with an easy fix.
supposedly serious news outlets still have a long way to go in subjecting publicity exercises like the World Happiness Report to appropriate journalistic scrutiny. It is easy to see why editors are tempted to assign some beat reporter without expertise in the social sciences to write up a fun little story about how much happier those enlightened Scandinavians are compared to benighted Americans. But if the media wants to live up to its self-appointed role as a gatekeeper of reliable information, it can’t continue to be complicit in the spread of such shoddy clickbait.
Over the last years, media outlets like the New York Times, universities like Oxford, and international institutions like the UN have devoted themselves to the fight against so-called “misinformation.” It is certainly true that our political discourse is awash with dangerous distortions and outright lies. But any institution which wishes to address that problem must start by looking into the mirror—and cease spreading “elite misinformation” like the World Happiness Report.
Paying for Apple Music or Adobe Acrobat is relatively harmless, but an economic model that is progressively turning more and more things into subscriptions — and renting is certainly a form of subscription — is creating conditions that are antithetical to human life freed for public life…. What was once the animal laborans is today homo subscribens, man the subscriber. The possibility of a 50-year mortgage would only confirm this reversion back to the life process, ensuring that people today are no freer than laborers bound by endless necessity.
I'm blessed to have many friends who write beautifully, and I especially love it when I hear their voices in the written words. This whole essay by Sara Hendren is like that:
You think Hyde’s telling you to give your gifts, like “giving back,” I say. But it’s weirder than that. Gifts precede you, mark your life. They invite you to imitate the pattern. This truth is hard for all of us to hear.
And this from Charles Marsh on “making anxiety great again”: “Receive anxiety as an opportunity…. Accept anxiety as an awakening…. Acknowledge anxiety’s capacity to instruct.”
Much wisdom in these two reflections.
So thorough was [Frank] Gehry’s reorientation of architecture as an art form rather than an adjunct of engineering that it’s hard to recall how the high end of his profession was perceived before him, when technocrats in big architectural firms seemed indistinguishable from any other business executives. In the mid-1970s, as he approached fifty, Gehry resolved to throw over his profitable relationship with one of the most enlightened developers of the day—James Rouse, best known for his humanely planned, racially integrated new town of Columbia, Maryland. There Gehry designed several structures, including the Rouse Company Headquarters of 1969–1974, followed by a number of other Rouse projects on both coasts, including his Pop-inflected Santa Monica Place shopping mall of 1972–1980. He then reinvented himself as an artist who used architecture as his medium, a move as risky as Andy Warhol’s decision a decade earlier to abandon his lucrative practice as a commercial illustrator and take up fine art.
The older I get, the more intensely I feel about old trees. I don’t think it’s just a sentimental love of old things. Nor is it just a reactionary or activist desire to preserve old things from destruction – I feel that about old buildings, but what I feel for trees is different. It’s more personal, in more ways than one – as if at some deep level I carry a conviction that trees are persons. I’m not sure what to make of this conviction. The difference between old buildings and old trees is that trees are not our heritage. They don’t belong to us at all; they belong to themselves, because they’re alive. Their importance doesn’t lie in their cultural value, even if they do have that in abundance. They are surely valuable in and of themselves, and for their own sake. A long-lived tree represents the hard-won triumph of life over time and happenstance, a testament to a creation far older than us. The idea that human beings with their mayfly-lives could assume the right to end that long life, suddenly and artificially, is somehow repugnant; and the idea of re-shaping a landscape by wholesale deforestation is more monstrous by orders of magnitude. It happens, of course; and the serried forests we plant, like the forests I grew up close to in the Suffolk Breckland, feel like parodies of the lost greenwood. But it may be the forest – or, in a phrase I coined for a recent book, the ‘arboreal sacred’ – lies at the heart of the pre-Christian religious history of temperate northern Europe, for the forest was everywhere once. In losing it, I fear we have lost a major part of ourselves.
This nice post In Praise of E. H. Shepard’s Illustrationss is also a useful reminder that Pooh-sticks is among the very finest of games. I might add that there is no better place to play Pooh-sticks than the Brig o’ Doon. I have played the game there several times and hope to return.
Why are executives pushing the use of new and highly questionable tools on their subordinates, even when they reduce productivity? I speculate that to understand this disconnect, you need to look at what executives do.
Jazz is improvised, but jazz is also a language. Every phrase by every major stylist is in conversation with a lineage.
Miles played with Charlie Parker, the avatar of bebop. As a generic term, “bebop” can cover a lot of terrain, but Parker himself created a specific melodic language, a specificity only matched by Bud Powell. Bird and Bud do not play the same phrases, but they share some mysterious higher ideal when it comes to the improvised line. I don’t know what it is, and I have never seen an accurate description of it, either … for myself, I call it “high bebop” or “true bebop.”
I would love to know what Iverson means by this. It would be fun to hear him play a few phrases illustrative of this “mysterious higher ideal.” ♫
Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem has become for China what Asimov’s Foundation was for the United States: a literary scaffolding for thinking about technology, geopolitics, and the fate of civilizations. As Fudan University professor Yan Feng observed, Liu “single-handedly elevated Chinese science fiction to the world stage.” His novels minted phrases that have since entered China’s everyday political and business lexicon: jiangwei daji (dimensional reduction strike), mianbizhe (wallfacer), pobiren (wallbreaker), the “dark forest law,” the “chain of suspicion,” and the “technological explosion.” These terms are now common shorthand in boardrooms and policy circles, invoked to describe competitive landscapes, strategy under uncertainty, or the fragility of trust in both markets and diplomacy. The tech community has seized upon them with particular enthusiasm. Countless essays have drawn “internet strategies of the Three-Body universe” or even “Three-Body management science,” treating Liu’s cosmic metaphors as diagnostic tools for China’s entrepreneurial reality.
The ability to exchange mundane information from afar — even from across the street at a friend’s house — is part of being a whole person in the world today…. Like it or not, becoming a person in the 2020s means becoming a user of computers. It also means figuring out how to express yourself online.
Question: If those who do not regularly use internet-connected devices and do not express themselves online are not persons, what are they?
At this point, AI tools like Gemini should be able to make most digitized handwritten documents searchable and readable in transcription. This is, simply put, a major advance that we’ve been trying to achieve for a very long time, and a great aid to scholarship. It allows human beings to focus their time on the important, profound work of understanding another human being, rather than staring at a curlicue to grasp if it’s an L or an I. Could we also ask Gemini to formulate this broader understanding? Sure we could, but that’s the line that we, and our students, should resist crossing. The richness of life lies in the communion with other humans through speech, the written word, sounds, and images.
This is good news not just for scholars, but also for writers. I do a great deal of writing by hand, and would do more except for the annoyance of getting what I write into publishable form. I have a system, but it’s not good enough. Perhaps I will soon have a better one. ✍️
Psychedelics are remarkably helpful in coming to see what an utter farce human institutions are: academia, celebrity, media, elections, prize committees, social distinction of any sort, nations, wars—vanity of vanities! “It is all ridiculous, when you think of death,” the atheist writer Thomas Bernhard said upon being given some distinction or other. He was right, of course, but he could not detect a certain significant corollary that only becomes clear when you look beyond death: that a life spent working in full knowledge of our true nature, as mortal sinners offered the infinite gift of redemption, can be a pretty wonderful thing, even if, incidentally, some prizes and distinctions happen to come our way in the course of it.
Charlie Warzel and Matteo Wong:
What’s undeniable is that we’re all living in a world where the whims and desires of wealthy and powerful men create uncertain, unstable conditions for everyone else. Although no other major chatbot has gone ballistic in the same ways as Grok, any one of them could be subtly tweaked to promote a given viewpoint over another, or to quietly manipulate users toward whatever purpose. Likewise, any major creator of AI models unwittingly [AJ: or wittingly] instills biases in its chatbots that are then difficult to expunge. Every user of mainstream AI or social media is subject to a calculus that they have no control over.
So maybe don’t use mainstream AI or social media?
Six years ago, after watching my circle of friends surrender one too many evenings to insurance wrangling and doctor portals and DMV confusion, I emailed them a proposal: Come over next Tuesday. Grab a six pack. And bring your bills, your credit-card statements, your school forms, the streaming services you need to unsubscribe from, the airline miles you need to manage, the expenses app you need to figure out. I’d be throwing the lamest party ever.
At the heart of this party was a truth that has gone under-acknowledged in recent years: We’re all sinking. We’re sinking into a quicksand of tiny, dumb administrative tasks. It is the most tedious quicksand imaginable.
So true. Too true to be good.
My son pointed me to this, and said that it’s the definitive version of this song — one of the most vital rock ‘n’ roll songs. He’s right. And essential to the greatness here is the incomparable Roy Bittan. ♫
I have no evangelical trauma story. While I am genuinely sorry for those who do have trauma stories, I come up short when scanning my own experience in evangelicalism for cults of personality, charismatic grifters, or spiritual abuse. I am keenly aware such things happen, because the algorithms that deliberately amplify such occasions won’t let them escape anyone’s notice. But my lived reality of “evangelicalism” (I’ll explain what I mean by this below) was in practice not flashy unfaithfulness but unflashy faithfulness. This is not the stuff from which bestsellers are wrought.
From an anthropological study by Polly W. Wiessner:
Control of fire and the capacity for cooking led to major anatomical and residential changes for early humans, starting more than a million years ago. However, little is known about what transpired when the day was extended by firelight. Data from the Ju/’hoan hunter-gatherers of southern Africa show major differences between day and night talk. Day talk centered on practicalities and sanctioning gossip; firelit activities centered on conversations that evoked the imagination, helped people remember and understand others in their external networks, healed rifts of the day, and conveyed information about cultural institutions that generate regularity of behavior and corresponding trust. Appetites for firelit settings for intimate conversations and for evening stories remain with us today.