Alan Jacobs

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, on his Substack:

Clearly, [Andrew Wiggins is] afraid that the vaccine will have some long-term consequences, even though there is no evidence of it and plenty of experts who don’t believe that is a serious danger. You know who are struggling right now with long-term health problems? People who got COVID-19. The virus can damage the lungs, heart, and brain, increasing the risk of long-term health problems that can last for years.

As I’ve asked before, what specific right is he fighting for? The right to do whatever you want with your body doesn’t exist in pretty much any civilized society because we recognize that those who behave recklessly and irresponsibly can harm others. You do own your body — unless a deadly virus turns that body into a plague delivery system that can kill hundreds of thousands. Today, while Andrew Wiggins was gathering his generational wealth, 2,036 people died of COVID-19 and 71,905 new cases were confirmed. Of these deaths and new cases, 97 percent of them were unvaccinated. Tomorrow and the day after and the day after, more will die and others will face long-term health problems. He could help prevent that. He chose to use his body not to. 

As he says in another issue, 

I think of the situation like those old fire brigades when people stood in a line passing buckets of water to save their neighbor’s house from burning to the ground. Maybe some people were afraid to join the line. But when the town leaders joined in, it encouraged others to do their duty. Today’s celebrities and athletes are like those town leaders. You either join the line to save your neighbor’s home, or you stand by and let it burn because you don’t owe them anything.

I had been very much looking forward to Sarah Ruden’s translation of the Gospels, but now that I know that it features such sentences as 

• “Then he ordered them to have all the people recline in communal cohorts that abutted on the verdant turf. So they reclined by fifties and hundreds, all lined up as in garden allotments.”
• “Happy are the destitute in the life-breath because theirs is the kingdom of the skies.” 
• “But he has it coming, that specimen of mankind through whom the son of mankind is handed over.”

— well, maybe not so much. I understand and in a way approve of the desire to make the character of the Greek visible to the Greekless reader, but when a translation deviates that far from standard English vocabulary and syntax, then I think that the curious reader is better off with an interlinear Greek-English New Testament. Such a text can be forbidding at first, but after a while it becomes a wonderful gift to the person who has no Greek — and (this is what happened to me) it can greatly stimulate the desire to learn Greek. My koine Greek isn’t good, but it’s no longer contemptible, and it’s getting better; and I owe that largely to the time I spent, starting many years ago, in my interlinear New Testament. 

My friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey and her co-author Jeffrey Polet have written an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Indoctrination Sessions Have No Place in the Academy.” The heart of the essay is, I think, these paragraphs: 

True, many people also understand the university as a place where social justice should be learned and practiced, assuming that we agree on what social justice is and what it requires. But a simple thought experiment highlights the problem with this view. Can we imagine other institutions whose intrinsic purposes are to promote social justice? Of course we can. Hundreds or even thousands of such institutions exist: think tanks, businesses, social clubs, Facebook groups, and nonprofits of all sorts.

Can we imagine, by contrast, other institutions where the free exchange of ideas is valued and promoted as an end in itself? Certainly many other institutions — journals, publishing houses, public-interest groups, advocacy groups, and foundations — engage in the “ideas business.” But these operate on the basis of largely predetermined agendas and shared values. They do not tend to be interested in freewheeling conversation or debate about first principles. A foundation that exists to promote religious liberty, for example, will likely not be enthusiastic about questioning the legitimacy or importance of religious liberty itself.

Only a university invites the contestation of ideas in a ceaseless effort to get at the truth. Free inquiry is, therefore, intrinsic to universities — extrinsic to other organizations. Social-justice efforts can and do take place at universities, of course, but universities could exist without them and still retain their fundamental character. Without the free contestation of ideas, universities would lose their central animating purpose, their raison d’être. 

I think this point — a very MacIntyrean point about the goods intrinsic to a given practice — is correct. “Trainings” or “training modules” that remove disagreement and even mere inquiry from the environment are intrinsically anti-intellectual and anti-academic. The pervasiveness of such “trainings” — I can’t use that silly word without scare-quotes — raises many potential questions, but the one I want to ask today is simply: Why do universities do this kind of thing? 

Here are my answers: 

First, academia is a world that is not just strongly left-leaning but also profoundly sensitive to media attention, and the media have agreed that One Must Do Something about social justice (vaguely but recognizably defined) — so a university can create these online click-through slide-shows and say See? That’s Something. 

But why that particular Something? In the American university, the predecessor to these Diversity/Equity/Inclusion/Justice endeavors was the need to educate faculty and staff in the legal implications of Title IX. That was especially important at institutions (e.g. the one I work for) with ugly histories in these matters. So online click-through slide shows were made to train us — the word is quite appropriate in this context — in the nuances of Title IX law. And then when the next big problem rolled up … well, why not do the same kind of thing? 

And here comes what I believe to be a vital but neglected point: Universities don’t usually create their own training modules — they buy products from companies that specialize in that kind of thing. And those companies want to save money by reusing their old code. So they extract the content of their Title IX courses and simply stuff new content into the existing frameworks. Easy-peasy. And the upper-level administrators of the university, who don’t want to spend any more money on such projects than they have to, accept the Frankenstein’s jury-rigged monster they’ve been handed. 

But that creates a big problem: the kind of structure needed to communicate to people the contours of a law and the expectations generated by that law is not the kind of structure needed to explore the moral development of a community. It’s just not; it can’t be. As Corey and Polet write, “When the training involves ‘tests,’ the tests usually have only one right answer. The ‘correct’ button must be clicked before one can ‘successfully complete’ the training.” Inquiry and reflection are prohibited by the code. 

All of which leads me to one final point. The re-use of code designed to elucidate law in the very different context of communal values introduces ambiguities — ambiguities that actually might be useful to administrators of a certain cast of mind. 

Imagine that you’re working through a module on Title IX. You’re presented with a scenario in which you’re asked to choose among several possible actions. You click on one option and are told that that option could in fact land you (and by extension your university) in very hot water. You are told to go back and pick another one. The inflexibility of the code exhibits what we literary scholars like to call “imitative form”: it imitates the non-negotiability of the law. 

Now imagine that you’re working through a social-justice module. You’re presented with a scenario in which you are asked to respond to someone’s complaint they they are the victim of an injustice. You click on one option and are told that it’s wrong. But wait a minute, you say to yourself, I don’t think it’s wrong — I think the one you tell me is correct would not in fact contribute to a more just community. But there’s no way for you to say that. There’s nothing to do but choose the answer you’re told is correct. 

This is an experience that might lead you to certain questions about your responsibilities as an employee of your university. Do you have to do what the module tells you is correct? Would you be punished if you failed to — maybe even fired? What are the consequences of dissent? What might be the consequences even of asking questions? Nothing in the module itself, or in the university’s presentation of it, addresses these matters. You’re just told: Do as we say. 

But you keep thinking about it. One possibility is that the administration is just hoping that everyone will comply with the demand, because then they can say to the world, See? We’re doing Something. It might be that disciplining recalcitrant employees is more than they want to deal with, since any employee so disciplined could take legal action the outcome of which would be uncertain. But they don’t want to say that. They don’t want to admit that there will be no consequences for the disobedient, because that would reduce compliance. But, heck, maybe they don’t even care about compliance, they just want to be able to point to the creation and distribution of the “training” as evidence that they’re supportive of the current imperatives. 

Maybe. But, you reflect, the ambiguity is susceptible to a less consoling interpretation. It’s possible that the administration wants you to get this message: Nice tenured position you got there. Shame if something happened to it. 

David French:

We cannot be empathetic only to our allies. We cannot allow fear of law enforcement excess to deprive fellow citizens of the protection they need. And we have to recognize both that threats and harassment are always wrong and that in our present moment they’re especially dangerous. Our nation is playing with fire. It’s imperative that it stop now, or the angry and the cruel will ignite a blaze that we cannot contain.

The whole post is good and important. Always remember: there are people out there — the professional media and social media are dominated by them — who want us to hate one another, who make bank when we hate one another. Flee those people as you would flee the plague, because they are a plague. Don’t threaten them; don’t attack them; just get away from them. Don’t feed their fire with the oxygen of your attention, or else, as David says, we’re not gonna be able to extinguish those flames. 

The Greenwald has a point about the current anti-Facebook energy:

The social media giant hurts America and the world, this narrative maintains, by permitting misinformation to spread (presumably more so than cable outlets and mainstream newspapers do virtually every week); fostering body image neurosis in young girls through Instagram (presumably more so than fashion magazines, Hollywood and the music industry do with their glorification of young and perfectly-sculpted bodies); promoting polarizing political content in order to keep the citizenry enraged, balkanized and resentful and therefore more eager to stay engaged (presumably in contrast to corporate media outlets, which would never do such a thing); and, worst of all, by failing to sufficiently censor political content that contradicts liberal orthodoxies and diverges from decreed liberal Truth.

In Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), the factory in which the Tramp works in the opening scenes is controlled by a boss whose image appears in certain strategic places in order to issue commands:

— and even to order back to work employees who sneak into the toilet for a quick smoke:

Hey Charlie, read any Jeremy Bentham lately?

In this film industrial capitalism and the state work hand in glove, and they work by the manipulation and display of images. The boss’s image (ubiquitous and available in any size necessary) is a primary instrument of control; images of workers, conversely, are used to control them. Paulette Goddard’s gamine gets a reputable job as a dancer, but it’s her mug-shot image that allows the police to track her down and arrest her:

Note that what she’s wanted for is, primarily, vagrancy: being “without visible means of support.” See, relatedly, this essay of mine on passports, passport photos, and the technologies by which states and their allies in the corporate world make us legible and therefore controllable. (A good deal of the movie takes place in factories and jails — remarkably similar environments, though the Tramp strongly prefers jail.)

To work, this movie suggests, is to subject oneself to panoptic surveillance and to ceaseless state and corporate control. By the movie’s end the gamine is, though better dressed and more elegantly coiffed as a result of her brief employment, close to despair over the inescapability of the system:

But if there’s one thing the Tramp knows it’s … well, how to be a tramp. How to survive, however frugally, off the grid, out of the System, beyond the panopticon’s lines of sight — illegibly.

So off they go. After twenty years of dominating the screen, Chaplin’s Tramp says goodbye to us all. And this final view of him is the only time that he clearly takes his wandering way with a companion.

David Lowery's The Green Knight is a wonderful movie, but it shouldn't be thought of as an adaptation of the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In saying that I am not criticizing it: it's a mistake to expect a movie that claims to be an adaptation of a novel or some other kind of written text to actually be an adaptation. It almost never is; it's often better to think of film adaptations as riffs on the originals. But Lowery's The Green Knight is not a riff on the poem so much as a photographic negative of it. 

Lowery's Round Table is a foreboding place in a cavernous dark hall — something like a brugh; Arthur’s court in the poem is a bright and airy environment of festivity and ease, less Heorot and more Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry: 

The Gawain of the poem is the most accomplished and most fastidiously elegant member of that smart set, precisely the opposite of Lowery's Gawain, who is callow, self-indulgent, uncertain about his direction in life – basically a caricature of a millennial. Given the contrasting initial positions of the poem's protagonist and the movie's protagonist, their stories will necessarily trace very different arcs.

I think the arc followed by the movie is consistently interesting, and well presented. (Also, Dev Patel is fantastic.) The movie is visually glorious, often in ways that precisely and movingly illuminate Gawain's psychological state. However, it's the sort of story that we, today, are pretty comfortable with: a boy-man in failure-to-launch mode who finally finds something he believes in enough to bring him to the point of launching. The poem tells a very different kind of tale, one that we aren't nearly as interested in hearing: it's a story about how even the most celebrated and admired person in a particular society can be afflicted by the vices endemic to that society as a whole. And should that person ever come to the point of recognizing his own frailties and failings, which are to an even greater degree the frailties and failings of his society, then you can be sure that the society will make a point of not learning any of the lessons that he has so painfully learned. That's what the poem shows us. 

It's hard for me to imagine a film director today choosing to tell that one, though you might get a glimpse of what it would look like if you imagine an alternate final scene of The Social Network in which Mark Zuckerberg, instead of saying “I’m not a bad guy,” says, mournfully, “I’ve come to understand that I am a very bad guy” — only to have his confession laughed off.  

Hire this man for the School for Scale!

Trying and failing to capture a beautiful crescent moon this pre-dawn I accidentally made an impressionist masterpiece. (No filter, no edits.)

Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence.

— Stella (Thelma Ritter) in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954)

Ideas are stale things, so stale. The intellect is not too great a thing.

— Charlie Chaplin in an interview (1967)

Daring Fireball:

From a usability perspective, every single thing about Safari 15’s tabs is a regression. Everything. It’s a tab design that can only please users who do not use tabs heavily; whereas the old tab design scaled gracefully from “I only open a few tabs at a time” all the way to “I have hundreds of tabs open across multiple windows”. That’s a disgrace. The Safari team literally invented the standard for how tabs work on MacOS. The tabs that are now available in the Finder, Terminal, and optionally in all document-based Mac apps are derived from the design and implementation of Safari’s tabs. Now, Apple has thrown away Safari’s tab design — a tab design that was not just best-of-platform, but arguably best-in-the-whole-damn-world — and replaced it with a design that is both inferior in the abstract, and utterly inconsistent with the standard tabs across the rest of MacOS.

The skin-deep “looks cool, ship it” nature of Safari 15’s tab design is like a fictional UI from a movie or TV show, like Westworld’s foldable tablets or Tony Stark’s systems from Iron Man, where looking cool is the entirety of the design spec. Something designed not by UI designers but by graphic designers, with no thought whatsoever to the affordances, consistencies, and visual hierarchies essential to actual usability. Just what looks cool. This new tab design shows a complete disregard for the familiarity users have with Safari’s existing tab design. Apple never has been and should not be a company that avoids change at all cost. But proper change — change that breaks users’ habits and expectations — is only justifiable when it’s an improvement. Change for change’s sake alone is masturbatory. That with Safari 15 it actually makes usability worse, solely for flamboyant cosmetic reasons, is downright perverse. 

Gruber is absolutely right about this, and right to be angry about it. It’s a frustrating time to be an Apple user, because while the company’s hardware is getting better and better its software is getting worse and worse. Indeed, the whole software side needs a fundamental reorganization and an even more fundamental rebooting of priorities. 

Apple's operating systems get more and more bells & whistles but have elementary functionality issues — for instance, Bluetooth has never worked reliably on MacOS; window management on iPadOS is an incoherent mess, though even so, it handles split-screening apps better than MacOS does. (I could extend that list for quite some time.) And Apple makes it very hard to sort out your sound inputs and outputs — which makes room for wonderful Mac apps like SoundSource, but come on: an easily-discoverable way of interacting with the computer’s sound should be built in to the system. (Because of the way that iOS and iPadOS are locked down, you can’t even have an app like SoundSource there. Your only option is to play search-and-guess in the Preferences app until, on a lucky day, you discover what you need.) 

Moreover, with just a few exceptions aside — Keynote for instance — Apple’s preinstalled apps are consistently bad. 

• Mail is feature-deficient and has been unstable and crash-prone for years. (I generally have a strong aversion to Microsoft software, but Outlook, though poorly integrated into MacOS, has the features I need and is rock-solid. So that’s what I use.)
• Calendar is likewise feature-limited, painfully tedious to enter data into, totally un-integrated with Reminders. (I use Fantastical instead.)
• Pages and Numbers are good apps, but the people who make them have never figured out how they are supposed to deal with the dominance of Word and Outlook (and their file types).
• Preview on the Mac is fine for what it does, but again it’s feature-limited; though not as limited as the barely-functional built-in PDF viewer on iOS and iPadOS. (I use PDF Expert instead, on all platforms.) 
• And then there are the places where Apple clearly is not even trying. I mean, TextEdit — are you kidding me?  

And so on. What makes this situation more alarming is the dysfunctional and sometimes abusive relationship Apple has with its best developers. Hey Apple: Those are the people who make your computers worth using.  

UPDATE: You know what doesn’t work on my Mac? Dark mode. I click to enable it — nothing happens. Hasn’t worked for months. You know what else doesn’t work? Using AirPlay to play music on HomePods. A song plays for five seconds and then falls silent for the remainder of the song. When a new song begins, it also plays for five seconds before falling silent. People have been reporting this problem on various support sites for two years, but no fixes yet. Here’s another thing: One more: clicking on an app in the Dock doesn’t open the app but rather opens a Finder window. It seems to me that with every release the OS gets buggier. 

The other day Teri and I were streaming an old movie and had to give up after half-an-hour or so. The print was indifferent and the sound both incomprehensibly muddy and out of sync with the video. If you’re watching older films — which we do a lot — when you’re streaming you never know what you’re going to get. 

This is why I adore the Criterion Collection. Recently I decided that I needed to have my own copy of The Magnificent Ambersons, so I ordered it from Criterion. I got a perfect print with perfect sound, and in this packaging: 

Welles’s preferred vision of the film is, famously, lost, which means that the film as he cut it has never been seen by the general public — so the presentation of the booklet as a stapled screenplay is sheer genius: 

And the essays — by Molly Haskell, Luc Sante, and Jonathan Lethem, no less — are simply brilliant, worth the price of admission in themselves. Ditto with the many documentaries, short and long, that accompany the movies available from the Criterion Channel. (Just this morning I watched a brief chronicle of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola reflecting on their relationship with Kurosawa.) 

There’s just so much crap being offered for sale or rent today — so much that we’re expected to spend money on and like even though it’s incompetently or carelessly made. In such an environment a company like Criterion seems like a miracle. I’m so grateful for the thought and care they put into everything they do. 

(A closely related concluding point: I may be the only person in America who would gladly have a significantly thicker, heavier Mac laptop if I could have one with a Blu-Ray/DVD/CD drive.) 

Matthew Loftus:

Christians must develop and encourage practices of suffering that accompany those in pain, like Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross during Christ’s passion. The ethical imperatives of the Church are only intelligible to a watching world to the degree that Christians are willing to walk alongside those who suffer and bear their pain with them. Without these practices of accompaniment, Christian moral teaching about issues like abortion or assisted reproductive technology is a cold set of rules enforced by people who have the privilege of not having to bear their cost. It is through these experiences — and not just experiences with those who forsake an accessible but immoral technological intervention, but also accompaniment with the poor, the imprisoned, and those whose suffering cannot be relieved by any human means — that Christians are able to experience growth through suffering and acquire the perspective from below that shapes their advocacy for those who need the work-towards-shalom the most. 

A powerful essay. 

The themes of that essay do not immediately seem directly related to the themes of this interview with Loftus, but I think they are. Responding to claims by some doctors that we should ration Covid care to favor the vaccinated and disfavor the unvaccinated, Loftus, himself a physician, says, 

I think it is a matter of justice not to ration care away from the unvaccinated, because to do so, I think, is to pass a judgment on someone's other personal health decisions that we would never apply in any other case. All health care is a mixture of trying to provide justice while also being merciful to others. It's impossible to be a good health-care worker and not be willing to be merciful with people who, quite frankly, got themselves into the trouble that they're in and had many opportunities not to do so. But it's also a matter of justice in giving that person what they need to survive or, if not to survive, to die in a way that honors the person they are. 

Loftus is pointing here to a version of what Scott Alexander, in one of the more useful ethical essays I have read in the past decade, calls “isolated demands for rigor.” When doctors treat people for health problems that arise from obesity, they don’t withhold care until they learn whether those people have some kind of genetic predisposition to obesity or are fat because they eat at McDonald’s every day — they just treat the patients. Oncologists don’t give better treatment to lung cancer patients who smoke less or don’t smoke at all. We only think to subject the unvaccinated-against-Covid to that kind of strict scrutiny because the discourse around Covid has become so pathologically tribalized and moralized. 

But Christians in particular have a very strong reason not to employ such strict scrutiny: We believe in a God who sought out and saved “people who, quite frankly, got themselves into the trouble that they're in.” In an earlier reflection on this general subject, I mentioned Eve Tushnet's wise comment that “mercy to the guilty is the only kind of mercy there is.” The rationing of medical care away from the unvaccinated is structural mercilessness. It is anti-shalom. 

Paul Kingsnorth:

This process accelerates under its own steam, as Weil explained, because “whoever is uprooted himself uproots others”. The more we are pulled, or pushed, away from our cultures, traditions and places — if we had them in the first place — the more we take that restlessness out with us into the world. If you have ever wondered why it is de rigueur amongst Western cultural elites to demonise roots and glorify movement, to downplay cohesion and talk up diversity, to deny links with the past and strike out instead for a future that never quite arrives, consider this: they are the children of globalised capitalism, and the inheritors of the unsettling of the West, and they have transformed that rootlessness into an ideology. They — we — are both perpetrators and victims of a Great Unsettling.

This is not to say that “Western” people alone are responsible for the rolling destruction of culture and nature that is overwhelming the world. We may have set the ball rolling, but the culture of uprooting is global now, and was when Weil was writing. You can see it everywhere you care to look. India has been uprooting its adivasi (tribal) people systemically since independence; its government is currently trying to undermine the power and agency of the peasant farmers of the Punjab, and have triggered a rural rebellion by doing so. The Chinese state is increasingly looking like the most efficient machine ever invented for uprooting, resettling and controlling mass populations. The Indonesian state is systematically unsettling the tribal people of West Papua, in cahoots with a cluster of multinational corporations. African governments are corralling the last of the San people. This is what states do, all over the world. It’s the ancient human game of power and control, turbo-charged with fossil fuels and digital surveillance technology.

End titles for A Hard Day’s Night

Here

Giorgio Agamben:

It has been evident for quite a while that science has become our time’s religion, the thing which people believe that they believe in. Three systems of beliefs have co-existed, and in some ways still co-exist today, in the modern West: Christianity, capitalism, and science. In the history of modernity these three “religions” often and unavoidably intersected, each time clashing with one another and then reconciling until they gradually reached a sort of peaceful, articulated cohabitation (if not a true collaboration, in the name of a common interest). What is new is that, without us noticing, a subterranean and implacable conflict between science and the other two religions has ignited. Science’s triumphs appear today before our very eyes, and they determine in an unprecedented way every aspect of our existence. This conflict does not pertain, as it did in the past, to general theories and principles but, so to speak, to cultic praxis. No less than any other religion, science organizes and arranges its own structure through different forms and ranks. To its elaboration of a subtle and rigorous dogmatics corresponds, in praxis, a vast and intricate cultic sphere that coincides with what we call “technology.” It is not surprising that the protagonist of this new religious war is the very branch of science whose dogmatics is less rigorous and whose pragmatic aspect is stronger: that is, medicine, whose object is the living human body.