This piece on stargazing in the Chihuahuan desert in west Texas is a reminder that there’s nowhere darker in the United States and scarcely anywhere darker in the world. You owe it to yourself to go there, or some similar location, just to see the Milky Way as it was meant to be seen. I wrote a bit about my experience out there in this essay.
Why are executives pushing the use of new and highly questionable tools on their subordinates, even when they reduce productivity? I speculate that to understand this disconnect, you need to look at what executives do.
Jazz is improvised, but jazz is also a language. Every phrase by every major stylist is in conversation with a lineage.
Miles played with Charlie Parker, the avatar of bebop. As a generic term, “bebop” can cover a lot of terrain, but Parker himself created a specific melodic language, a specificity only matched by Bud Powell. Bird and Bud do not play the same phrases, but they share some mysterious higher ideal when it comes to the improvised line. I don’t know what it is, and I have never seen an accurate description of it, either … for myself, I call it “high bebop” or “true bebop.”
I would love to know what Iverson means by this. It would be fun to hear him play a few phrases illustrative of this “mysterious higher ideal.” ♫
They have returned, and bring with them their cruelty, their malice, and their will to dominate all life.
Long live the citizen humanities.
Timothy B. Lee: “If Google is run by engineers and Anthropic is run by philosophers, OpenAI seems to be run by product managers.”
My reading is so performative that I became a professor of literature. That’s what’s called committing to the bit.
Currently reading: The World Ahead 2026 in the Economist. As I have often noted, I strictly ration my news intake, and while I do not share the Economist’s technocratic-marketcentric worldview, I find its writing blessedly free from hot takes and clickbaity BS. I always look forward to the magazine’s forecasts, because they’re very well-informed and help me know what I should be reading more about now and in the near future. 🗞️