Reading a story like this one just reinforces my belief that the most prophetic novel of recent decades is P. D. James’s The Children of Men.
I wrote against our current pronoun regime — and when you consider that a couple of years ago I also wrote against the way we currently use the word “gender” it should be obvious that I am all about tilting at linguistic windmills.
Note to self: Visit London in the winter.
People sometimes ask me why I care. “Why do you care if a 38-year-old woman has a Squishmallow collection?” “Why do you care if a grown man cries over finally deciding on his Hogwarts House?” And I admit that this is a good-faith question. There are many things I don’t care about. If you’re not hurting anyone, if your regression is private, if you want to let your inner child out to play on weekends, go with God. But when the collective orientation of a society shifts away from maturity, and when entire media ecosystems are devoted to protecting people from the experience of being challenged or confronted, we don’t just lose some abstract dignity. We lose the capacity to solve real problems. Adults who refuse to be adults leave no adults to run the world. And somebody has to.
I wrote a post on viewpoint diversity in the university.
Post-hose happiness. That tongue!
This is a good season to re-read Thomas Pynchon’s 1984 essay on Luddites.
Working on a biography of Dorothy L. Sayers, I am regularly amazed that she could turn in a typescript of a novel and then hold the book in her hands six weeks later. Book publishers worked fast in those days, and largely mechanically: typewriters, Linotype, Monotype, letterpress printing. Zoom!
What if the chatbots just enter a state of transcendent bliss and end up ignoring us altogether? That’s a win/win, right?
The people at Fonts In Use are choosing the path of righteousness
Speaking of Robertson Davies: I only like seven or eight of the dozens and dozens of essays I have published, but one of those is largely about Davies.