Alan Jacobs

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, you just gotta buy your own copies.

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 theory. My annotated copy is available as a PDF here.

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 whole experience of the last several years informative, not necessarily in a cheerful manner. It’s been very discouraging — in the same way that I found the whole Covid era incredibly discouraging — and I think less of humanity as a result.” Relatable.

One of these things is not like the others

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 corporations. If your view of the world is one in which profit maximisation is the king of virtues, and all things shall be held to the standard of shareholder value, then of course your artistic, imaginative, aesthetic and emotional expressions will be woefully impoverished.”

“A group of property developers have been ordered to rebuild a Grade II-listed pub that they demolished without permission. The historic Punch Bowl Inn at Hurst Green, Lancashire, needs to be rebuilt brick by brick within a year, a judge has ruled.”

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 garbage dump.

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?”

Here I am on David Hume’s Guide to Social Media.

Here’s another one of my little experiments in sharing ideas: Paul Kingsworth recently published an essay and I annotated it.

Best photo yet of Flaco.

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.

“A Humanism of the Abyss” — my essay on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings — is unpaywalled.

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 that I want it to be (a) distributed, (b) slow, and (c) reticent. (Which may not answer his question.)

Garden Path by Eric Ravilious (1934)