The Architectural Drawings at All Souls College, Oxford: Wren and Hawksmoor
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.
With Advent approaching, ‘tis the season to read Auden’s Christmas Oratorio For the Time Being — ideally in this lovely edition, edited by, um, me. I’ve added a long introduction and many notes, but the poem’s the thing. I also wrote a bit about the poem in this post.
This has been a three-Blackwing job and it’s not done yet.
Excellent maps of the Divine Comedy — I wish I had come across these years ago, to use in class. (But the ones in the Sayers Penguin translation are great, even if the translation itself really isn’t.)
I never read people’s Holiday Gift Guides … except for Robin Sloan’s.
Macquarie Dictionary’s Word of the Year is “enshittification” — an excellent choice. And this also gives me the chance to say that while I dip into Bluesky for time to time, I won’t commit to it, because enshittification is its inevitable fate also. (Great links in that post.)
When asked about the chatbot “hallucinations,” data scientist Jörg Pohle says, “I don’t have hallucination or bias problems because I’m not looking for the truth…. I just don’t use the system for learning something or for understanding.” Well, there you go! Problem solved.
My recommended Substack policy: First, establish the maximum monthly amount you’re willing to pay. Then, choose monthly rather than annual subscriptions. When you reach your max and want to subscribe to a new Substack, you can only do so if you unsubscribe from one of your current ones. Gradually you’ll converge on the ones that are essential to you.
(You could do this will annual subscriptions as well but it would take you a lot longer to achieve that convergence.)
Freddie: “If I had to have American policy be determined by polling the userbase of X or the userbase of BlueSky, I would choose the latter and sigh as they passed a law that ordered my own personal execution on public safety grounds. They’d probably do it by forcing me to drink fair trade cyanide through a paper straw.”
Picasso, “Leaping Bulls”
