Looks like my review of Miłosz’s Poet in the New World has escaped its firewall.
Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem has become for China what Asimov’s Foundation was for the United States: a literary scaffolding for thinking about technology, geopolitics, and the fate of civilizations. As Fudan University professor Yan Feng observed, Liu “single-handedly elevated Chinese science fiction to the world stage.” His novels minted phrases that have since entered China’s everyday political and business lexicon: jiangwei daji (dimensional reduction strike), mianbizhe (wallfacer), pobiren (wallbreaker), the “dark forest law,” the “chain of suspicion,” and the “technological explosion.” These terms are now common shorthand in boardrooms and policy circles, invoked to describe competitive landscapes, strategy under uncertainty, or the fragility of trust in both markets and diplomacy. The tech community has seized upon them with particular enthusiasm. Countless essays have drawn “internet strategies of the Three-Body universe” or even “Three-Body management science,” treating Liu’s cosmic metaphors as diagnostic tools for China’s entrepreneurial reality.
huge if true
The ability to exchange mundane information from afar — even from across the street at a friend’s house — is part of being a whole person in the world today…. Like it or not, becoming a person in the 2020s means becoming a user of computers. It also means figuring out how to express yourself online.
Question: If those who do not regularly use internet-connected devices and do not express themselves online are not persons, what are they?
This is the pinnacle of my blogging — so far, anyway. And only a few parenthetical words are my own.
Soup stage: completed. Next up: nap stage.
Soup stage: initiated
At this point, AI tools like Gemini should be able to make most digitized handwritten documents searchable and readable in transcription. This is, simply put, a major advance that we’ve been trying to achieve for a very long time, and a great aid to scholarship. It allows human beings to focus their time on the important, profound work of understanding another human being, rather than staring at a curlicue to grasp if it’s an L or an I. Could we also ask Gemini to formulate this broader understanding? Sure we could, but that’s the line that we, and our students, should resist crossing. The richness of life lies in the communion with other humans through speech, the written word, sounds, and images.
This is good news not just for scholars, but also for writers. I do a great deal of writing by hand, and would do more except for the annoyance of getting what I write into publishable form. I have a system, but it’s not good enough. Perhaps I will soon have a better one. ✍️