Renovation on a bookshop in Guildford, England revealed a stunning medieval chamber, forgotten beneath the ground for some 700 years. Archaeologists have identified it as a Synagogue dating back to the year 1180. The oldest Synagogue remains in the British Isles.
Julian Lage’s new album Scenes from Above is FAB. Maybe his best record yet — adding John Medeski to his trio was a genius move. ♫
Collaboration: cherry farmers and kestrels.
I joked last week that it would make more sense if we found out that the team behind redesigning the UI for MacOS 26 Tahoe was hired by Meta not a month ago, but an entire year ago, and secretly sabotaged their work to make the Mac look clownish and amateur. More and more I’m wondering if the joke’s on us and it actually happened that way. It’s like MacOS, once the crown jewel of computer human interface design, has been vandalized.
I wrote about analog devices as luxury goods.
Listening to Joni Mitchell’s 1974 album Miles of Aisles on the remastered vinyl released by Acoustic Sounds. A wonderful record, and performed by Joni and her band at a level of musicianship that’s pretty much unimaginable today. ♫
Re: my previous post: If I discovered that anyone in my university was changing the grades I had assigned to students, I’d say: “Excellent. You do the grading from now on — I’ll forward all my students' work to you for evaluation. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to my teaching.”
It was late, the end of an exhausting term at a public university in the Midwest. I logged into our learning-management system (LMS) to answer a routine student email. The gradebook — rows and columns I had populated myself — should have been familiar. But one number was wrong.
A student who had failed my course after submitting a final exam composed almost entirely of AI-generated text now showed as having passed. The F I had entered, following my syllabus and the university’s academic integrity policy, had become a D. […]
Once I understood what had happened to my grades, I did what professors are supposed to do. I raised the matter internally. I tried to work through existing channels. I invoked the language of policy, accreditation, and Title IV compliance. I was told, politely, that the system was working as intended.
Wow.
My friend and colleague Philip Jenkins is pursuing a late Roman Welsh mystery. [UPDATE: after posting that I realized that it sounds like I’m talking about one of the last novels by a detective-story writer named Roman Welsh. But let it stand, just for fun.]
My buddy Austin Kleon on the glories of RSS. As Austin notes, I’ve been promoting RSS for years to no avail. People can easily use RSS to see only what they want to see, but instead spend their days prowling through the wreckage of social media like raccoons in a dumpster. I don’t get it.
The outpouring of new recordings prompted by tape and the LP (and, in pop music, the 45) makes it easy to overlook the fact that, in many ways, the new formats were limiting forces. They gave control of the market to big companies, which licensed the formats to smaller companies. They crowded out “amateur” performers and raised the bar for “professional” ones. They placed the responsibility for choosing which music would be recorded and made public with record-company executives, many of whom had extramusical motives in the front of their minds. And they proved so attractive that they drove the existing format — the 78 — into oblivion, and, with it, the thousands of recordings that existed only as 78s. This would be the pattern of progress for recordings in the postwar period. The new formats were advanced forms of mechanical memory, and they entered experience into the record with ever greater fidelity. Yet they were not means of revival so much as of forgetting.
Finished reading: Reinventing Bach by Paul Elie. Just re-read this for the first time since it came out, fourteen years ago. What an extraordinary book. 📚
On the topic of my previous post, here’s Thomas Mann, from Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918):
I do not think that it is the essence and duty of the writer to join “with great fanfare” the main direction the culture is taking at the moment. I do not think and cannot from my very nature think that it is natural and necessary for the writer to support a development in a completely positive way by direct, credulous-enthusiastic advocacy — as a solid knight of the times, without scruple and doubt, with straightforward intentions and an unbroken determination and spirit for it, his god. On the contrary, authorship itself has always seemed to me to be a witness to and an expression of ambivalence, of here and there, of yes and no, of two souls in one breast, of an annoying richness in inner conflicts, antitheses, and contradictions.
Robert Alter, from the Preface to his translation of the Hebrew Bible:
Literature in general, and the narrative prose of the Hebrew Bible in particular, cultivates certain profound and haunting enigmas, delights in leaving its audiences guessing about motives and connections, and, above all, loves to set ambiguities of word choice and image against one another in an endless interplay that resists neat resolution. In polar contrast, the impulse of the philologist is — here a barbarous term nicely catches the tenor of the activity — “to disambiguate” the terms of the text. The general result when applied to translation is to reduce, simplify, and denature the Bible. These unfortunate consequences are all the more pronounced when the philologist, however acutely trained in that discipline, has an underdeveloped sense of literary diction, rhythm, and the uses of figurative language; and that, alas, is often the case in an era in which literary culture is not widely disseminated even among the technically educated. […]
Modern translators, in their zeal to uncover the meanings of the biblical text for the instruction of a modern readership, frequently lose sight of how the text intimates its meanings — the distinctive, artfully deployed features of ancient Hebrew prose and poetry that are the instruments for the articulation of all meaning, message, insight, and vision.
Sometimes I feel that our entire media environment is about disambiguating the intrinsically ambiguous. When Eliot’s bird said “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality” it could have substituted “ambiguity” for “reality.”
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/9b/e1/9be141f1-1017-4ba3-b74d-8f5b72059e81/vag_000325_copy.jpg)
Emily Carr, Among the Trees, 1936, oil on canvas. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery
I wrote about angels in the architecture at Coventry.
Woodrow Hartzog & Jessica M. Silbey:
AI systems are built to function in ways that degrade and are likely to destroy our crucial civic institutions. The affordances of AI systems have the effect of eroding expertise, short-circuiting decision-making, and isolating people from each other. These systems are anathema to the kind of evolution, transparency, cooperation, and accountability that give vital institutions their purpose and sustainability. In short, current AI systems are a death sentence for civic institutions, and we should treat them as such.
Our guidelines for generative AI in music and audio are as follows:
- Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp.
- Any use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles is strictly prohibited in accordance with our existing policies prohibiting impersonation and intellectual property infringement.
Resistance is not futile; it is necessary. Some people understand that.
From an essay in Persuasion: “So here is our suggestion: Professors should actually teach the scholarly controversies on the issues that most divide them, and they should advertise their success at opening their classrooms to dissenting perspectives.” For academic humanists of my generation, what’s odd and funny and slightly disorienting is how many of the debates we’re having today simply repeat the ones we had in the late 80s and early 90s. For example: Gerald Graff’s essay “Teach the Conflicts” appeared in 1990, and was expanded into a very smart book that was widely discussed at the time. But the authors of the Persuasion essay appear not to know that history.