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.
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:
- Alan Turing
- Alan Shearer
- Alan Rickman
- Alan “Blind Owl” Wilson
- A. A. (Alan Alexander) Milne
UPDATE: My friend Adam Roberts has alerted me to another top Alan.
For the rest of this term I’ll be teaching two books: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky and The Man Born to Be King by Dorothy L. Sayers — I suspect that all my blogging, or almost all, will be about them. 📚
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.