Alan Jacobs

Leszek Kołakowski, Preface to The Presence of Myth (1972):

I venture to say – and in this I merely follow many brave masters of the art of philosophy – that I am simply making available the existing inheritance. This enables me to refrain from a precise division between thoughts that are mine and those that are others', especially since this is an impossible task; for it is impossible to remember all those to whom one owes something, and in the final analysis it would assuredly turn out that whatever we have, we owe to others.

Just came across in an NYT article the phrase “post-SoundCloud rap glamlord” — a fine example of a peculiar style of writing about music that was pioneered at Pitchfork twenty years ago. You don’t describe or analyze, you just accumulate references to kinds for the benefit of Those Who Know. It’s all about sorting-by-kind. I call it Typological Stacking.

I worried the other day about the lack of coordinated resistance to the ecological damage done by the explosion of AI datacenters, and it turns out that there’s more resistance than I was aware of: here’s Mark Hurst at Techtonic interviewing Paul Mozur of the NYT.

In the TLS, Austin Spendlowe says that my biography of Paradise Lost is “an enduringly readable work of intellectual history that will justify the ways of Milton to many.”

I write about teaching The Brothers Karamazov again for the first time in many years.

I pity the fool who doesn’t have a subscription to The Hedgehog Review, because there are many cool things in the new issue, among the least cool of which is my review of a new collection of Czesław Miłosz’s post-WW2 poems. “If you read the poems collected here in chronological order, what you will see, primarily, is a man thinking about hope — what sustains it, and what happens when you lose it.”

Polish movie posters really are nuts.

The fine gentlemen at The Rest Is History struggled, in their new series on Queen Elizabeth I, to explain the religious differences that afflicted England in her time. As it happens, there’s a biography of the Book of Common Prayer that succinctly explains many of the key points. Just saying.

The acceleration of misrepresentation.

Adam Kossowski, ‘History of the Old Kent Road’ (1965), described by Adam Roberts here.

Finished reading: Silent Spring Revolution by Douglas Brinkley. A fascinating book, though marred by its Heroes & Villains approach. I won’t say too much about it now, because I will have a long essay that draws on it in a future issue of The Hedgehog Review. But I will say now that we’ve seen a decline in effective environmental advocacy that’s due in part to overly abstract writing — too much about “the planet” and not enough about particular places — and also to a lack of focus, as illustrated by this NYT report on the collapse of the Sierra Club. It’s tough watching the big tech companies building these ecosystem-destroying datacenters with almost no coordinated resistance on behalf of the communities affected.

How cool is this? My friend and former colleague Shawn Okpebholo has just been nominated for a Grammy! The nomination in the Best Contemporary Classical Composition category is for his wondrous song cycle Songs in Flight.

To my astonishment, @jaheppler made ChatBCP!!

I wrote about Leah Libresco Sargeant in my 2017 book How to Think, so I’ve been keeping tabs on her for a long time. I’m going to blog about her new book The Dignity of Dependence when I can dig myself out of the current morass, but in the meantime, she’s great in this conversation with Ross Douthat.

History’s top Alans:

1. Alan Turing
2. Alan Shearer
3. Alan Rickman
4. Alan “Blind Owl” Wilson
5. A. A. (Alan Alexander) Milne

UPDATE: My friend Adam Roberts has alerted me to another top Alan.

My son suggested today that someone should make ChatBCP: a chatbot that, no matter what you ask it, replies with a quotation from the Book of Common Prayer.

Francis Young:

Here we come to the fundamental epistemological shift in whose midst we find ourselves. It is a shift away from the idea of knowledge as justified true belief, discovered by hard work and careful investigation, verified by its correspondence to evidence, and towards an idea of knowledge as the product of the pleroma [fullness] of data, mediated by artificial intelligence. In other words, AI is a greater intelligence than us, and what it generates is the truth. The implications of this shift are profound, of course. It would mean a world where 107 lost books of Livy generated by AI are the lost books of Livy. It would mean a world where AI cannot ‘hallucinate’, because AI is itself the arbiter of truth; if AI seems to have erred, it must be [we] who are wrong, we who are misremembering the past or what we learnt in the pre-AI era. It would also mean a world without private thoughts, for if someone wants to know what a person thinks about something, they can ask a chatbot. What AI thinks you think is what you think.