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To me our neighborhood is not just the middle-class moms with their expensive pushchairs or my writer friend across the park, but instead a place of many layers, where people are going through all kinds of struggle, many of whom I now know personally. The [local parish’s food pantry] makes me ask myself: How do you want to be connected in the world, and how do you want to be in communion with people?
Anglicanism is meaningful to me in that way. I’m not in any way an effective, good, or faithful Anglican. I am at the larder far less frequently than I should be. But I’m interested in the idea that this particular space in Willesden provides something which, at least in contemporary capitalism, seems very hard to find elsewhere. (I cannot speak for Anglican churches elsewhere.) It’s meaningful to me, in the radically local sense Philip Larkin got at in “Church Going,” as a specific place where for hundreds — or maybe thousands — of years, people have gathered for this purpose: to be quiet, to be in communion, to be with one another. These human souls can be abject, they can be lost, they can be rich or poor, hold a great variety of political views or none at all. The door is open.
As an Anglican who, unlike Zadie Smith, has “metaphysical concerns,” heck, even a set of beliefs, I say: This is a good start.
Last spring, it became clear to me that over half the students in my large general education lecture course had used artificial intelligence tools, contrary to my explicit policy, to write their final take-home exams. (Ironically, the course was titled Contemporary Moral Problems: The Value of Human Life.) I had asked them about some very recent work in philosophy, parts of which happened to share titles with entirely different ideas in medieval theology. You can guess which topics the students ended up “writing” about.
Well, of course they did! What I just can’t get over is the number of professors who think that making an “explicit policy” against AI use will have any effect at all on students’ behavior. The overwhelming majority of college students will have chatbots do their work for them unless we teachers make it impossible for them to do so. Certum est.
Nate Anderson at Ars Technica:
When the professors realized how widespread this was, they contacted the 100-ish students who seemed to be cheating. “We reached out to them with a warning, and asked them, ‘Please explain what you just did,'” said Fagen-Ulmschneider in an Instagram video discussing the situation.
Apologies came back from the students, first in a trickle, then in a flood. The professors were initially moved by this acceptance of responsibility and contrition… until they realized that 80 percent of the apologies were almost identically worded and appeared to be generated by AI.
So on October 17, during class, Flanagan and Fagen-Ulmschneider took their class to task, displaying a mash-up image of the apologies, each bearing the same “sincerely apologize” phrase. No disciplinary action was taken against the students, and the whole situation was treated rather lightly — but the warning was real. Stop doing this. Flanagan said that she hoped it would be a “life lesson” for the students.
Seems to me the most likely “life lesson” would be that there are no bad consequences for cheating with AI.
(By the way, Nate, a staff writers for Ars, is yet another of my former students doing cool stuff in the world.)
Re-upping my 2023 essay on Murray:
My thesis can be simply stated: There is today no more important writer for North American Christians to read than Albert Murray — a man who, as far as I know, had no religious belief whatsoever. But he held as his guiding principle an idea that Christians today cannot flourish without adopting: “the blues idiom” — otherwise known as life in the briar patch.
Exodus 35:
The children of Israel brought a willing offering unto the LORD, every man and woman, whose heart made them willing to bring for all manner of work, which the LORD had commanded to be made by the hand of Moses. And Moses said unto the children of Israel, See, the Lord hath called by name Bezaleel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah; and he hath filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship; and to devise curious works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in the cutting of stones, to set them, and in carving of wood, to make any manner of cunning work. And he hath put in his heart that he may teach, both he, and Aholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. Them hath he filled with wisdom of heart, to work all manner of work, of the engraver, and of the cunning workman, and of the embroiderer, in blue, and in purple, in scarlet, and in fine linen, and of the weaver, even of them that do any work, and of those that devise cunning work.
I wrote a few years ago about the men and women of cunning. One of the writings I’m most proud of.
In health care, private equity firms have sought to reorganize the industry into what they openly call a platform model. What that means in practice is squeezing more work from doctors and nurses while raising prices. Likewise, rental housing has suffered from the rise of a corporate-housing platform: the centralizing of rental homeownership along with steady increases in rents. The result is not just bad policy but also a cultural blindness: An entire generation has grown up thinking that extraction, as opposed to building, is the path to riches.
The wisdom of Bertie Wooster — whose intellectual acumen has finally been justly acknowledged.
At the type of place where I taught until recently—a small, selective, private liberal-arts college—administrators can go quite far in limiting AI use, if they have the guts to do so. They should commit to a ruthless de-teching not just of classrooms but of their entire institution. Get rid of Wi-Fi and return to Ethernet, which would allow schools greater control over where and when students use digital technologies. To that end, smartphones and laptops should also be banned on campus. If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else. Work and research requiring students to use the internet or a computer can take place in designated labs. This lab-based computer work can and should include learning to use AI, a technology that is likely here to stay and about which ignorance represents neither wisdom nor virtue.
Co-sign.
Well, what if I told you there was a community that you could be a part of that was still committed to the old way of doing things? That is, the old way of being human in community: simply being in the same room with other human beings, without much of an agenda. There is an AI backlash building, and it is priming the world to long for exactly one thing: church coffee hour.
So much that was boring and conventional has become dynamic and imaginative.
A. O. Scott’s guide to Thomas Pynchon’s novels is okay, but not as good as mine.
My buddy Austin Kleon texted to tell me that whenever I return to blogging this from Nick Cave should be the first thing I post. I felt that I had to begin by paying tribute to Ella; but having done that, here comes Nick — I’d like to quote the whole post, but let’s just do this, as good a personal manifesto as I have seen:
I am essentially a liberal-leaning, spiritual conservative with a small ‘c’, which, to me, isn’t a political stance, rather it is a matter of temperament. I have a devotional nature, and I see the world as broken but beautiful, believing that it is our urgent and moral duty to repair it where we can and not to cause further harm, or worse, wilfully usher in its destruction. I think we consist of more than mere atoms crashing into each other, and that we are, instead, beings of vast potential, placed on this earth for a reason – to magnify, as best we can, that which is beautiful and true. I believe we have an obligation to assist those who are genuinely marginalised, oppressed, or sorrowful in a way that is helpful and constructive and not to exploit their suffering for our own professional advancement or personal survival. I have an acute and well-earned understanding of the nature of loss and know in my bones how easy it is for something to break, and how difficult it is to put it back together. Therefore, I am cautious with the world and try to treat all its inhabitants with care.
Photo by the great Herman Leonard. Duke is delighted, Rodgers is bemused and admiring, and Benny is trying to figure out how she does it.
I’m partly back — with the help of the divine Ella Fitzgerald.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression:
Those students who are the furthest to the left have been the most accepting of violence for as long as we’ve asked the question. That includes very liberal and democratic socialist students. But a rising tide of acceptance of violence has raised all boats. Now, regardless of party or ideology, students across the board are more open to violence as a way to shut down a speaker. What was once an extreme and fringe opinion has become normalized.
That’s what the best science fiction does: It makes us question the social arrangements of our technology, and inspires us to demand better ones.
This idea – that who a technology acts for (and upon) is more important than the technology’s operating characteristics – has a lot of explanatory power.
[Randall Balmer] lauds evangelical involvement in nineteenth-century reform movements (particularly abolition, temperance, and women’s education) as exemplars of Christian public witness. These efforts, in his view, demonstrated faith speaking truth to power and working for the common good. Balmer also praises historical figures like William Jennings Bryan for his economic populism and Martin Luther King Jr. for his prophetic civil rights leadership, holding up such examples of progressive, justice-oriented engagement as faithful expressions of Christianity in the public square. More broadly, he voices admiration for faith-based activism that advances values like social justice, equality, and inclusion.
Conversely, Balmer is consistently critical of recent evangelical political engagement, especially when it aligns with the Republican Party or centers on issues such as abortion, gay rights, or religious symbolism in public life. He often portrays such activism not as prophetic witness but as a bid to reclaim lost cultural privilege or enforce sectarian morality through legislation. One is left to wonder why Christian moral witness is celebrated in one era but viewed as suspect in another. Of course, Balmer is entitled to his political and theological commitments, but the criteria by which he distinguishes faithful from inappropriate activism often seem ad hoc and selectively applied. The result is a framework in which Christian political engagement is endorsed when it advances progressive goals but dismissed when it reflects more traditional convictions.
Isn’t that how it always goes, on the left and the right alike? When Christian activists agree with me, I praise them for being “prophetic”; when they disagree with me, I wonder why they insist on bringing politics into worship.
The data on the Reverse Flynn Effect includes several pieces of evidence that support Marriott’s claims. The IQ reversal, for example, seems to begin right around 2010—the point at which smartphones began their rapid ascent to ubiquity. In addition, according to the Northwestern study, the demographic suffering the steepest declines is 18 to 22-year-olds, who also happen to be the heaviest users of smartphones.