Currently reading: Looking for the Good War by Elizabeth D. Samet 📚
Another Sherman Alexie comment: “Self-censorship among writers is a real and serious problem in this era. To believe otherwise either means you live and work in a very small circle of like-minded friends or that you think this self-censorship is a good thing.” Surely people who organize social-media campaigns against wrongthink do indeed believe that self-censorship is a good thing. The point of such campaigns is less to punish already-published writing than to intimidate writers going forward. If writers self-censor for fear of offending someone, that’s precisely the goal of the intimidators.
Sherman Alexie’s comment that “the right wing are censorship vikings and the left wing are censorship ninjas” is accurate and useful.
Finished reading: Reinventing Bach by Paul Elie. What an extraordinary book — so glad I decided to revisit it a decade after I first read it. My head is just buzzing with ideas. 📚
I get why you need to chew it, but why do I have to hold it?
Getting closer….
Ezra Klein: “Do we want a world filled with A. I. systems that are designed to seem human in their interactions with human beings? Because make no mistake: That is a design decision, not an emergent property of machine-learning code. A.I. systems can be tuned to return dull and caveat-filled answers, or they can be built to show off sparkling personalities and become enmeshed in the emotional lives of human beings.”
Dr. Bill Gardner: “MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying) is inexpensive, completely effective, and easily delivered. If we do not resist it, the system will, as if pulled by gravity, increasingly provide suicide and euthanasia instead of healing for the poor, elderly, and severely ill.”
