Finished reading: Mao II by Don DeLillo. Conceptually fascinating but not wholly successful as a novel. 📚
Phil Christman: “A certain man went down from Athens to Atlanta, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain conservative megachurch head pastor that way….”
Michael Luo in the New Yorker:
In June, 2020, Keller announced that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. One of his final projects, completed earlier this year, was an eighty-three-page white paper he called “The Decline and Renewal of the American Church.” It offers a wide-ranging set of prescriptions for what he viewed as the profound afflictions of the evangelical movement, including its anti-intellectualism, its problems with race, and the politicization of the church that has “turned off half the country.” The document is an exhaustive blueprint, but the question now is who will carry it out.
That is precisely the question.
(Also, maybe I should annotate that white paper the way I annotated the terrific new essay on postrationalism by Tara Isabella Burton.)
Clive Thompson: “The problem is that while we moderns desperately need exposure to nature, it sure doesn’t need exposure to us.”
Oh cool: Journals having to suspend accepting submissions because they’re being overwhelmed by pieces written by LLM bots.
Abraham M. Nussbaum: “We have all become accustomed to the gun violence plaguing our congregate spaces. Comforting each other after another shooting is, sadly, what we all do. I thought again about my daughter’s texted comment. Just stressful day. She, like all of us, has become accustomed to school as a place where school administrators and teachers are shot, where seventeen-year-olds are killed, and where each new day could be another lockdown.”
Taken in 2004 with what was even then a cheap digital camera on a trail on Mount Seymour, above Vancouver. Might’ve been an interesting shot with a decent camera.
