Alan Jacobs

Charlie Warzel: “When I look at a future dominated by generative-AI tools that are embedded in every nook and cranny of industry, I fear the coming grind. I see inboxes crushed under the weight of robot responses and rapid-generated slide decks. A sea of forgettable, lorem-ipsum emails whose sole purpose is to trigger other robots to reply to their polite, authoritative MBA-speak. I see creative industries strip-mined of their humanity in order to create content at the vertiginous scale of a generative-AI internet.” I think “grind” is precisely the right word.

Glad to see that my buddy Austin Kleon enjoyed my recitation!

Hit up some used-record stores in Austin today – all these from the 3-dollar bins!

Gary Saul Morson: “The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, published 50 years ago, was much more than a detailed account compiled from the testimonies of hundreds of people; it was also arguably the 20th century’s greatest piece of nonfiction prose." At the moment I’m thinking that its primary competition for that title is Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and Claude Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques.

I read and annotated that new Tara Isabella Burton essay on postrationalism in Silicon Valley.

From William James’s speech at the dedication of a memorial in Boston to a soldier named Robert Gould Shaw (1887):

The deadliest enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within their borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always in need of being saved. The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks. Such nations have no need of wars to save them. Their accounts with righteousness are always even; and God’s judgments do not have to overtake them fitfully in bloody spasms and convulsions of the race.