You cannot finally justify yourself to nihilists. Plato’s Socrates tries at least twice – in the Gorgias and in the Republic. It makes for thrilling reading in both cases. But all he really manages to do to his antagonists – Callicles in the first dialogue, Thrasymachus in the second – is to press them on the points where they are still capable of shame. Which is to say, points on which they are insufficiently committed to the nihilistic principles they have espoused. I’m not sure all Silicon Valley types have that problem.
My buddy Austin Kleon has made a cool winter-solstice zine about LIGHT — which, as it turns out, is the Advent theme also. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone.” (Isaiah 9:2).
All but the most visible, verified-by-default Democrats (and fellow travelers) on X spent the last election alongside the rest of the unverified users in X’s proverbial spam folder, mostly invisible to the rest of the platform but especially to people who didn’t already follow and want to hear from them. They might have been scrolling in a familiar-enough place. But they were posting into a void, living out a sort of mass shadowban of everyone who wasn’t willing to pay for a subscription. It wasn’t harrowing so much as strange and a little sad, with established users going through the motions, posting and sharing and waiting, propelled by years of habit, imagining audiences where they simply no longer existed.
Taking a break from my life as a nurse to say that I’m currently listening to Ethan Iverson’s Playfair Sonatas — though “currently” means “when my head finally falls on the pillow.” I think this may well be my Record of the Year for 2024. 🎵
Each of the six volumes of Churchill’s history of the second world war has a Theme. Here’e the one for the final volume.
Stuart Ritchie: “As ever, you have to wonder whether the field of Alzheimer’s research has a disproportionate level of bad science, or whether it’s just getting disproportionate attention and all fields are like that.”
One day he was so happy, so healthy, and the next….
In Christianity Today my colleague SJ Murray has an essay on why Christians need to rediscover Boethius. See also her very cool Boethius Project.
The tiniest hint of autumn here
The miracle at Cana isn’t water becoming wine — any old magician could do that sort of thing. Whatever it was that Jesus was about, it wasn’t stupid party tricks. The miracle is that the Ruler of the Universe cared about such a little thing as the social anxieties of a bunch of nobodies in an obscure little corner of the world of no particular importance, and that He loved them the way a father loves his children — and what kind of father offers just enough at a time like that when he has, at his disposal, the very best? The best robe, the gold ring, the fatted calf, the wine that was better than any wine the local whatever-was-Hebrew-for-sommelier had ever tasted? The supernatural stuff is one thing, but consider the magnificence of that gesture, the sheer audacious style of it. I do not care if you are the most cynical atheist walking the Earth — it is impossible not to admire the panache. He bends reality into a new shape, makes the universe follow new rules, to help out a friend, and He does it cool — nobody even knows what happened except for the waiters.
Fara Dabhoiwala: “And then, a few months ago, everything changed. On a hunch, I asked the V&A for the ultra-high-resolution scans that had been made of the painting’s surface. Within a few hours of opening those on my computer I found something completely unexpected. And that in turn catapulted me into the most exciting series of intellectual discoveries I have ever made.”
Currently listening: Ralph Vaughan Williams, Oboe Concerto 🎵
I wrote about why writing on Substack, though cool in many ways, is not going “indie."
Why do so many songs present the phrase “caught in the middle” in exactly the same (musical) way? Adam Neely has a brilliant answer.
Thomas Merton somewhere talks about being thankful in a situation but not for the situation. That applies to us because my beloved has broken her upper arm and shoulder and is in much pain (and will be spending a great deal of time with doctors in the coming weeks). I have some posts queued up on the big blog, but otherwise I’ll be quiet for a while.