Beautiful engravings by Alice Miller Parker from a 1964 edition of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge.

My old friend and gang leader Brian Phillips on the six key attributes of slop

  1. Slop exists at scale.
  2. Slop remixes culture without understanding it.
  3. Slop has contempt for both creators and audiences.
  4. Slop hides producers from consumers, and vice versa.
  5. Slop exploits parasocial identification with right-wing power.
  6. Slop erodes your sense of the real.
I would only add that slop exploits and encourages parasocial identification with every form of power, not just that from the right.

The other morning I was standing in my kitchen looking across my back yard and into the canopy of trees beyond. Through the branches I saw what looked like an early-morning sun … but the sun doesn’t rise in that direction. Puzzled, I walked down the street towards the strange vision and saw, on the highest point in our neighborhood, this maple, the tallest tree in our neighborhood. But still, whenever I see it through the branches I immediately think I’m seeing the sun.

Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?:

In 2024, the investor Paul Graham made that mistake when he posted online about receiving a cold pitch. He wasn’t opposed at first. “Then,” he wrote on X, “I noticed it used the word ‘delve.’” This was met with an instant backlash. Just like the people who hang their identity on liking the em dash, the “delve” enjoyers were furious. But a lot of them had one thing in common: They were from Nigeria.

In Nigerian English, it’s more ordinary to speak in a heightened register; words like “delve” are not unusual. For some people, this became the generally accepted explanation for why A.I.s say it so much. They’re trained on essentially the entire internet, which means that some regional usages become generalized. Because Nigeria has one of the world’s largest English-speaking populations, some things that look like robot behavior might actually just be another human culture, refracted through the machine.

‘‘Tis the season for the Netherlands Bach Society. You might start here.

Email from one of my best students accompanying a final paper: “While I always want my final papers for classes to be the culmination of all my learning, in truth, they usually end up being the worst work of the semester. I always find out what I really wanted to say once the break starts as I learn what it feels like to be a thinker and not just a harried, hunted animal.”

Intentional fouls ruined the Spurs-Thunder game. The NBA should abolish them — I was going to write just this post, but it’s been done for me. For 95% of that game both teams played brilliantly; it was riveting to watch. And then the last “minute” of the game became 15 minutes of free throws, time outs, and substitutions. I actually turned it off before the end; I didn’t care any more who won. This is a really, really bad problem with an easy fix. 

Yascha Mounk:

Supposedly serious news outlets still have a long way to go in subjecting publicity exercises like the World Happiness Report to appropriate journalistic scrutiny. It is easy to see why editors are tempted to assign some beat reporter without expertise in the social sciences to write up a fun little story about how much happier those enlightened Scandinavians are compared to benighted Americans. But if the media wants to live up to its self-appointed role as a gatekeeper of reliable information, it can’t continue to be complicit in the spread of such shoddy clickbait.

Over the last years, media outlets like the New York Times, universities like Oxford, and international institutions like the UN have devoted themselves to the fight against so-called “misinformation.” It is certainly true that our political discourse is awash with dangerous distortions and outright lies. But any institution which wishes to address that problem must start by looking into the mirror—and cease spreading “elite misinformation” like the World Happiness Report.

Adam Roberts has written an even-more-brilliant-than-usual post on chastity. I did something similar — trying to complicate and revivify a fusty old word — a few years ago in an essay on piety. Join Adam and me and seek to become more pious and chaste!