Alan Jacobs

Here’s a terrific conversation at The New Atlantis about whether it’s possible to write good fiction about climate change.

A Christmas edition of the newsletter.

Renovations to our parish church continue apace, including a lovely new rose window.

Joan Didion, “Holy Water” (1977):

Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is. The water I will drink tonight in a restaurant in Hollywood is by now well down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens River, and I also think about exactly where that water is: I particularly like to imagine it as it cascades down the 45-degree stone steps that aerate Owens water after its airless passage through the mountain pipes and siphons. As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this constant meditation upon where the water is, of an obsessive interest not in the politics of water but in the waterworks themselves, in the movement of water through aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains, in plumbing on the grand scale. I know the data on water projects I will never see. I know the difficulty Kaiser had closing the last two sluiceway gates on the Guri Dam in Venezuela. I keep watch on evaporation behind the Aswan in Egypt. I can put myself to sleep imagining the water dropping a thousand feet into the turbines at Churchill Falls in Labrador. If the Churchill Falls Project fails to materialize, I fall back on waterworks closer at hand — the tailrace at Hoover on the Colorado, the surge tank in the Tehachapi Mountains that receives California Aqueduct water pumped higher than water has ever been pumped before — and finally I replay a morning when I was seventeen years old and caught, in a military-surplus life raft, in the construction of the Nimbus Afterbay Dam on the American River near Sacramento. I remember that at the moment it happened I was trying to open a tin of anchovies with capers. I recall the raft spinning into the narrow chute through which the river had been temporarily diverted. I recall being deliriously happy.

Matt Mullenweg: “As more and more of our lives start to be run and dictated by the technology we use, it's a human right to be able to see how that technology works and modify it. It’s as key to freedom as freedom of speech or freedom of religion. So that is what I plan to spend the rest of my life fighting for.”

Scott Alexander:

Science communicators are using the same term — “no evidence” — to mean:

1. This thing is super plausible, and honestly very likely true, but we haven’t checked yet, so we can’t be sure.
2. We have hard-and-fast evidence that this is false, stop repeating this easily debunked lie.

This is utterly corrosive to anybody trusting science journalism.

I got an email from the University of Austin saying: “Since we launched last month, our promise to breathe new life into American higher education has generated broad and deep support. Within weeks, over two thousand students have contacted us inquiring about student opportunities. Over four thousand faculty have written to us to express interest in joining our efforts.” Maybe it says something about the state of American higher education that they’ve heard from twice as many interested faculty as interested students. 

Matt Stoller: “The amount of utopian bullshit and fake promises on a technology that doesn’t really work as anything but a speculative bubble and money laundering device should be a big red flag. Crypto is a movement based on the theory that the existing nation-state is a system rigged by billionaires, and the right response is to create a different and more corrupt order rigged by different billionaires, money launderers, and dictators.”

James Rebanks, English Pastoral:

One morning as I was waiting by the church with the other boys and girls for the school bus, milling about, throwing stones and kicking pine cones, my grandfather walked towards us with his sheepdog and stick. He had taken some sheep to a field and was walking back to the farm. I knew he had seen me messing about. I didn’t want him to think me a fool like the others, so I stepped away from the crowd. Perhaps I also stepped away from them because I sensed what was coming, and didn’t want them to laugh at him behind his back afterwards. He stopped and asked what I was learning about at school. I told him we were supposed to be learning about the planets. He said he didn’t know much about planets, he only knew about the sun. Then he told me about how its arc over the village changed with the passing of the year. He stabbed at the skyline with his stick where it rises on the shortest day in December, pointing to the south-east. ‘There — it comes up there,’ he said. Then he used his stick to create small loops over his head to show the path of the sun on the short winter days, explaining its changing arc through the seasons. And, in my eyes, he had turned into some giant insect as he moved through the movements of the sun across our land. One after another, he made the arcs with his stick above his head. He wanted me to know how the sun passes over, and that it was a thing of great wonder. He wanted this day to include at least one useful lesson, before I wasted the rest of it in school.

Cecilia D’Anastasio: “The idea of the metaverse has reemerged under a new sky. The current frenzy? It’s simply a succinct way for Big Tech to ­repitch its extensive lineup of products. The metaverse describes the next state of the internet’s consolidation, a marketing spin on Big Tech’s increasing reach and power. It’ll be Big Tech — just as problem-riddled as now — but bigger.”

From Alex Ross’s terrific interview with Jonny Greenwood:

There are scenes in “Spencer” that require your music to be already in place, like the Christmas Eve dinner where Diana has a breakdown while a string quartet is playing.

It’s just as described in the script: it starts as conventional dinner music and unravels, as Diana does, over the course of the scene. But, again, there’s a sign of how I’ve been indulged. Pablo said it needs to be a few minutes long. So I wrote it, and he cut the scene to that. Which was lovely, because it meant that all I had to do was write this piece of music and have players play it in a room without thinking about a time code and all of that stuff. It breathes. They are playing to each other rather than playing to a film.

“In God We Trust” should be retired as our national motto and replaced with Homer Simpson’s line: “Stupidity got us into this mess, and stupidity will get us out.”

Maybe it’s just because I live in Texas, but when I read techno-optimistic pieces like this one I always have the same thought: What are we gonna do about water?

This essay in the Economist gives a pretty good idea of what level of social control would be required to eliminate Covid in any given country.

N. S. Lyons:

At this point, you might be wondering why Communist Party media apparatchiks now sound a bit like mid-2000s American Evangelicals. But it’s worth knowing that the CCP recently discovered — to its shock and horror — that many of China’s people have been gripped by a deep sense of nihilism about their society rather than by boundless love and appreciation for the Party’s leadership. Among the online youth, for example, “sang culture” (roughly the equivalent of “doomerism” in the West) has proliferated. This has kicked off a scramble, led by top Party political theorist Wang Huning, to “create core values” to fill this uncomfortably God-shaped societal hole with the comforts of a synthetic ideological alternative.