This nice post In Praise of E. H. Shepard’s Illustrationss is also a useful reminder that Pooh-sticks is among the very finest of games. I might add that there is no better place to play Pooh-sticks than the Brig o’ Doon. I have played the game there several times and hope to return.
This piece on stargazing in the Chihuahuan desert in west Texas is a reminder that there’s nowhere darker in the United States and scarcely anywhere darker in the world. You owe it to yourself to go there, or some similar location, just to see the Milky Way as it was meant to be seen. I wrote a bit about my experience out there in this essay.
Why are executives pushing the use of new and highly questionable tools on their subordinates, even when they reduce productivity? I speculate that to understand this disconnect, you need to look at what executives do.
Jazz is improvised, but jazz is also a language. Every phrase by every major stylist is in conversation with a lineage.
Miles played with Charlie Parker, the avatar of bebop. As a generic term, “bebop” can cover a lot of terrain, but Parker himself created a specific melodic language, a specificity only matched by Bud Powell. Bird and Bud do not play the same phrases, but they share some mysterious higher ideal when it comes to the improvised line. I don’t know what it is, and I have never seen an accurate description of it, either … for myself, I call it “high bebop” or “true bebop.”
I would love to know what Iverson means by this. It would be fun to hear him play a few phrases illustrative of this “mysterious higher ideal.” ♫
They have returned, and bring with them their cruelty, their malice, and their will to dominate all life.
Long live the citizen humanities.
Timothy B. Lee: “If Google is run by engineers and Anthropic is run by philosophers, OpenAI seems to be run by product managers.”
My reading is so performative that I became a professor of literature. That’s what’s called committing to the bit.
Currently reading: The World Ahead 2026 in the Economist. As I have often noted, I strictly ration my news intake, and while I do not share the Economist’s technocratic-marketcentric worldview, I find its writing blessedly free from hot takes and clickbaity BS. I always look forward to the magazine’s forecasts, because they’re very well-informed and help me know what I should be reading more about now and in the near future. 🗞️
I’ve written an essay for a forthcoming issue of the Hedgehog Review on the conditions required the for emergence of a new humanism, and I wish when I was writing it I had remembered this passage from Kołakowski’s Religion:
Absurd as it might have been to denounce envy and resentment as the roots of Christianity – the entire text of the Gospels is and irrefutable argument against this indictment – it was not at all absurd to see in it a confession of irreparable human infirmity. It does not take, however, a clever philosopher to unmask this side of Christianity, for this is what it says about itself. Sickness is the natural state of a Christian, Pascal wrote to his sister, Madame Perrier. Christianity may be viewed as an expression of what in human misery is incurable by human efforts; an expression, rather than a philosophical or psychological description. Thereby it is a cry for help. By making people acutely aware of their contingency and the finitude of life, of the corruptibility of the body, of the limitations of reason and language, of the power of evil in us, and by concentrating this awareness in the doctrine of original sin, Christianity clearly defied the Promethean side of the Enlightenment and was to be inevitably castigated for its “anti-humanist” bias. To what extent this accusation is justified – and indeed in what sense it amounts to an accusation – depends on the meaning of the word “humanism”, and all the known definitions of it are heavily loaded with ideological content. If “humanism” means a doctrine implying either that there are no limits whatever to human self-perfectibility or that people are entirely free in stating the criteria of good and evil, Christianity is certainly opposed to humanism…. Recent history seems rather to suggest that attempts, in traditionally Christian societies, to achieve a perfect “liberation” from what radical humanists believed was man’s bondage under God’s imaginary tyranny, were to threaten mankind with a more sinister slavery than Christianity has ever encouraged.
Angus loves the cooler weather.
I wrote about the friendship between Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner.
Looks like my review of Miłosz’s Poet in the New World has escaped its firewall.
Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem has become for China what Asimov’s Foundation was for the United States: a literary scaffolding for thinking about technology, geopolitics, and the fate of civilizations. As Fudan University professor Yan Feng observed, Liu “single-handedly elevated Chinese science fiction to the world stage.” His novels minted phrases that have since entered China’s everyday political and business lexicon: jiangwei daji (dimensional reduction strike), mianbizhe (wallfacer), pobiren (wallbreaker), the “dark forest law,” the “chain of suspicion,” and the “technological explosion.” These terms are now common shorthand in boardrooms and policy circles, invoked to describe competitive landscapes, strategy under uncertainty, or the fragility of trust in both markets and diplomacy. The tech community has seized upon them with particular enthusiasm. Countless essays have drawn “internet strategies of the Three-Body universe” or even “Three-Body management science,” treating Liu’s cosmic metaphors as diagnostic tools for China’s entrepreneurial reality.
huge if true
The ability to exchange mundane information from afar — even from across the street at a friend’s house — is part of being a whole person in the world today…. Like it or not, becoming a person in the 2020s means becoming a user of computers. It also means figuring out how to express yourself online.
Question: If those who do not regularly use internet-connected devices and do not express themselves online are not persons, what are they?