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- Slop exists at scale.
- Slop remixes culture without understanding it.
- Slop has contempt for both creators and audiences.
- Slop hides producers from consumers, and vice versa.
- Slop exploits parasocial identification with right-wing power.
- Slop erodes your sense of the real.
Robin Sloan on chatbots as “manic technology”:
I’m starting to think language models are a fundamentally manic technology, in part because they operate exclusively through logorrhea, the “yeah, yeah, YEAH!” of the all-nighter. […]
The “best” setting for a brain (and/or an economy) isn’t necessarily straight down the middle. A dip into the realm of mania can be useful, some times revelatory. I don’t know if many creative projects would ever get started if our brains didn’t some times relax the standards by which they light up.
Yet for a human mind and a human heart, one really good project is more nourishing than ten cruddy ones; that was true a hundred years ago, and it’s true today. The AI coding companions will never ever say: “Hey … whatever happened to that other thing you were working on?”
I suppose you still need friends for that, people who know you, who know when you’re talking too fast, and the gleam in your eye has taken on a hard edge.
Telling someone to love literature because reading is good for society is like telling someone to believe in God because religion is good for society. It’s a utilitarian argument for what should be a personal passion.
It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice. This would be a more effective way to attract young people, and it also happens to be true. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t get people to stop buying and reading dangerous books. Now that books are considered virtuous and edifying, moralists can’t persuade anyone to pick one up.
The Last Days of the Southern Drawl:
Recent studies suggest I’m part of a trend: Young people are losing their southern accents. By the end of my life, there may be no one left who speaks like my father outside the hollers and the one-horse towns.
I’m part of the trend too: I certainly have a Southern accent, but it’s not as pronounced as it was when I was younger, and I profoundly regret that.
On the plus side, though, a Southern friend of mine sent me this: Redneck Shakespeare. A thing of great beauty.
Exotic Botany… (1804), by James Edward Smith
Sidney Lumet, from Making Movies:
The sound editor on Murder on the Orient Express hired the “world’s greatest authority” on train sounds. He brought me the authentic sounds of not only the Orient Express but the Flying Scotsman, the Twentieth Century Limited, every train that had ever achieved any reputation. He worked for six weeks on train sounds only. His greatest moment occurred when, at the beginning of the picture, the train left the station at Istanbul. We had the steam, the bell, the wheels, and he even included an almost inaudible click when the train’s headlight went on. He swore that all the effects were authentic. When we got to the mix (the point at which we put all the sound tracks together), he was bursting with anticipation. For the first time, I heard what an incredible job he’d done. But I had also heard Richard Rodney Bennett’s magnificent music score for the same scene. I knew one would have to go. They couldn’t work together. I turned to Simon. He knew. I said, “Simon, it’s a great job. But, finally, we’ve heard a train leave the station. We’ve never heard a train leave the station in three-quarter time.” He walked out, and we never saw him again.
I feel great sorrow for this man.
Whether or not one enjoys listening to the music of George Crumb, his scores are fabulous fun to read. ♫
One of the longstanding Christmas campaigns of my childhood was to forbid any reference to “Xmas.” Anyone attempting to remove Christ from Christmas was surely of the devil. And yet, Xmas comes from the Greek letter chi (X) which happens to be the first letter of Christos (Χριστός), meaning “Christ.” It turns out that Xmas is a way of honoring Jesus, not extracting him. Furthermore, doesn’t the letter “X” resemble something else? What if it’s a cross? Even if by accident, all signs point to Jesus.
One of the earliest surviving depictions of the Nativity in art, in the Byzantine Museum in Athens, depicts Jesus lying in a manger with the ox and ass and omits any other human figures at all (in fact, there are several early depictions of the infant Christ like this). Christ is here the unmediated Lord of animals, who recognise and adore him. It is easy for us, in a culture that takes a very low view of animals, to dismiss the role of the animals in the Nativity story as sentimental pap; but animals in the Bible are repeatedly endowed with agency.... From Balaam’s ass to the penalties for ‘criminal’ animals laid down in Numbers and Leviticus, the ancient Hebrews clearly did not have a view of animals that sharply divided them from humans in the way we are inclined to do.
Biblical, medieval and folkloric views of animals are challenging to us because, under the influence of the mechanical philosophies of the 17th century and the Theory of Evolution in the 19th century we have convinced ourselves that humans and animals are unbridgeably different in kind. People in the more distant past did not see things this way; animals to them were far closer to being persons than they were to being automata. We have travelled so far in the other direction that any treatment of animals as persons, any suggestion that they too might reverence the Creator, takes on the status of sentimental anthropomorphisation in our culture. We see a depiction of animals kneeling at the crib or the repentance of the Wolf of Gubbio, and our minds leap to Disneyesque talking animals and childish fantasies. But people in ancient Israel and medieval Europe took completely seriously the idea that animals could be held responsible for their actions (at least to some extent) and that they had a duty of reverence to their Creator.
Mark Hurst: 2025 showed why to get off Big Tech. Co-sign.
[George] Herbert desires to comprehend the infinity and timelessness of God in a finite and temporal world. His poetry is a record of a striving after glimpses of the divine in the human sphere. No difficult question is avoided, no agony of mind is shirked, and his work documents every turn of thought and feeling, from exaltation and a sense of union, to anxiety, doubt, despair, revival and eventual resurrection. Despite the complexity of this pursuit, it is chronicled in language of startling clarity. Herbert is an outstanding example from the Anglican tradition of the fact that one can convey the authentic struggle of heart and mind for the presence of God in simple dress, without having to resort to the idiom of the primary school.
The movie’s final scene changes everything, of course, and lifts this darkness. Or so it would seem. I have an artist friend who adores the movie, watches it every year, and cannot watch the ending. I watch it and always cry, now harder than ever. At the age of 66, I can’t tell how much of this reaction comes from the joyous scene itself and how much from its close proximity to the darkness it breaks, from the miracle of reprieve.
Storytelling, with its tricks, its smoothing, cobbling and evading, may be our oldest hack. But if it gives us something we keep needing, it outlives the storyteller and all the décor. For me, the staying power of It’s a Wonderful Life comes from its two gifts. It keeps faith with human goodness and doesn’t pretend the world isn’t broken, that we don’t need help.
As Eugyppius says, “Managerialism is an ever-advancing process of decay masquerading as an administrative system, and it has become a defining pathology of Western civilization.” One result is a spreading “crisis of competence”, or the death of craftsmanship as an ethic. Applied to the culture industry, managerialism seems to generate products that are hard to get emotionally invested in. In the case of the Silicon Valley takeover of television, this may even be by design. The customer’s attention must remain available on multiple fronts.
It is hard to see how the deadening effect of managerialism might be overcome, as our class structure is built on it. Due to the overproduction of degree-holders, the layer of people engaged in the meta-work of abstraction grows ever thicker. It generates its own demand, parasitical on the economy of the real. If the cumulative effect is culturally suffocating, this needn’t be taken as a judgment of the personal qualities of those with bullshit jobs. Rather, they are trapped within a system that demands that they suspend what comes most naturally to a human being: taking an active and affectionate interest in real things.
So let’s keep taking active and affectionate interest in real things, shall we? Effective resistance is as easy as that.
to his great credit, in a time of war, Milner-White grasped clearly that his beloved Prayer Book services could not meet the spiritual needs of the men. As they said in an official report, the padres had learned at the front that what was needed were modern services that were “simple, real, and short.” Milner-White said that, when it came to ministering to soldiers, the Prayer Book services were “at best semi-used and semi-usable.” Only a fool would be a stickler for doing things by the book when ministering to the fearful and the dying: “rubrics paled in a redder world.”
When he returned to Cambridge, Milner-White made good on what he had learned by creating the most beloved of all modern Anglican services, the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols for Christmas Eve, at King’s College chapel.
My father, although an American, was certainly what the British call working class. He dropped out of high school and joined the Air Force. He fought in the Korean War. Throughout my childhood and until his retirement, he worked in a construction-supply warehouse in a “low skill” job. He was also a low church, evangelical Protestant. I don’t think I ever heard him use the word “liturgy” but, if he did, he would have said it like “the rosary” or “Ramadan” as something that belonged to someone else’s religion. Yet it was a delight of his holiday season to listen to the Nine Lessons and Carols service broadcast from King’s. Milner-White learned in the trenches of the Great War how to create a worship service that could connect even with modern, working-class veterans.
My old friend and gang leader Brian Phillips on the six key attributes of slop:
Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?:
In 2024, the investor Paul Graham made that mistake when he posted online about receiving a cold pitch. He wasn’t opposed at first. “Then,” he wrote on X, “I noticed it used the word ‘delve.’” This was met with an instant backlash. Just like the people who hang their identity on liking the em dash, the “delve” enjoyers were furious. But a lot of them had one thing in common: They were from Nigeria.
In Nigerian English, it’s more ordinary to speak in a heightened register; words like “delve” are not unusual. For some people, this became the generally accepted explanation for why A.I.s say it so much. They’re trained on essentially the entire internet, which means that some regional usages become generalized. Because Nigeria has one of the world’s largest English-speaking populations, some things that look like robot behavior might actually just be another human culture, refracted through the machine.
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.