If you don’t accept the optimized project rubric for having children, then you should think all the way through what an alternative rubric might be, and how it might shift the very foundations undergirding family-making, period. But most people short-circuit well before what Kierkegaard called “thinking a thought whole” — taking seriously a line of reasoning all the way through to its implications. For most people opining on selective abortion, including many of my counterparts in disability advocacy, it feels better to say publicly: You’re missing the heart of the matter, your judgments are misguided, I would never do what you did. And afterward, in any sustained conversation, most people will shrug and concede that each couple makes “the decision that is right for them.” We manage our collective uncertainty by redounding to the sole good of private choice: the project rubric. But it feels much better to see ourselves occupying the rightly-calibrated rhetorical high ground.
A lot can be said in a phrase, and Sara’s comment that most Americans consider whether to have children and how many children to have under the “optimized project rubric” — that is a powerful phrase because it is so concisely accurate.
You know, I’ve seen the Uffington White Horse and it doesn’t really look like this.
In which I explain why I’d like to be the first biographer of Bob Dylan.
(I also posted this to BlueSky because I want to see how long it will be before someone responds, “Actually, there are already several biographies of Bob Dylan.”)
Gary Saul Morson and Julio M. Ottino:
Artificial intelligence can process vast datasets, identify patterns invisible to human perception, and generate explanations with remarkable coherence. Faced with such capabilities, it is tempting to believe that uncertainty can finally be overcome — that the future can be rendered legible in advance.
But the deeper effect of AI lies in its ability to reorganize the past. Given sufficient data, AI systems can produce narratives that make outcomes appear coherent, even inevitable. They can identify correlations, reconstruct causal chains, and highlight what they regard as signs foreshadowing what followed. The result is not necessarily false, but it is selective.
In this way, AI functions less as a predictor than as a powerful engine of narrative compression, reducing the apparent space of possibilities by presenting a single path as the path. What was once understood as a field of possible alternatives becomes retrospectively legible as an inevitable sequence, reducing many “futuribles” to one. The danger here lies in premature coherence, the sense that complexity has been resolved when it has only been reorganized into a persuasive form.
David Hackett Fischer, from Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America:
Shortly before the American Revolution … the Anglican Society for the Propagation of Gospel sent missionaries to Massachusetts for the conversion of the “heathen.” They built one of their missions not on the frontier but across the street from Harvard College and labored to convert the sons of Congregational New England. The head of this Anglican organization, Bishop Thomas Seeker, made no secret of his contempt for the colonists, whom he collectively characterized in 1741 as “wicked, and dissolute and brutal in every respect.”
An excellent idea whose time has come again.
Oxford reprinted the anthology in hard covers until the mid-1960s, then issued it in paperback in 1973, a few weeks before Auden's death, under the title W.H. Auden's Oxford Book of Light Verse, as if to signal that it was more of a personal selection than one that came with the authority of its publisher. Oxford also commissioned Kingsley Amis to compile a New Oxford Book of Light Verse, which appeared in 1978. This collection of undemandingly amusing verse (about half the length of Auden's) was effectively the book that Auden's disappointed reviewers had hoped to see in 1938. In his introduction Amis approvingly echoed Charles Dibdin, who had written in a preface in 1825: "To raise a good-natured smile was the major part of this work written." Amis succeeded in this purpose, partly by devoting one of the largest sections of the anthology to Auden, who received as many pages as Lewis Carroll did, and whose share of the book was smaller only than Lord Byron's. Amis's anthology is consistently amusing, but Auden's, perhaps more than any other anthology of English poetry, manages to be amusing, moving, instructive, outrageous, and profound.
This is exactly right. It may be my favorite anthology of anything.
I keep seeing these petulant-to-angry stories in the London sports pages about how vast North America is and how hot — as though ICE had expanded the continent and heated it up to make Europeans uncomfortable. Sorry, but it’s always been this way. North America is more than twice the size of Europe (excluding Russia) and most of it is further south: London’s latitude = that of Calgary, Alberta; Chicago shares a latitude with Madrid and Kansas City with Rome. Miami is at the same latitude as Luxor, Egypt and Dubai. Also, Calgary, Chicago, and Kansas City are in the midst of an enormous continent with no ocean to moderate temperatures. This is reality.
Incidentally: Waco, where I live, is at the same latitude as Jerusalem. The Lord knoweth His own.