Lionel Shriver: “I don’t always want my novels to be focused on the culture wars, but I have used the culture wars and more broadly, I have found the whole experience of the last several years informative, not necessarily in a cheerful manner. It’s been very discouraging — in the same way that I found the whole Covid era incredibly discouraging — and I think less of humanity as a result.” Relatable.
One of these things is not like the others
James Bridle: “The lesson of the current wave of ‘artificial’ ‘intelligence’, I feel, is that intelligence is a poor thing when it is imagined by corporations. If your view of the world is one in which profit maximisation is the king of virtues, and all things shall be held to the standard of shareholder value, then of course your artistic, imaginative, aesthetic and emotional expressions will be woefully impoverished.”
“A group of property developers have been ordered to rebuild a Grade II-listed pub that they demolished without permission. The historic Punch Bowl Inn at Hurst Green, Lancashire, needs to be rebuilt brick by brick within a year, a judge has ruled.”
Mark Zuckerberg famously said that the Twitter founders drove a clown car into a gold mine. Now it looks like he’s driving a Lamborghini into a garbage dump.
David Stromberg on Israel: “It is really an age-old question: When things turn dark in your country, do you resist from within or go into exile?”
Here I am on David Hume’s Guide to Social Media.
Here’s another one of my little experiments in sharing ideas: Paul Kingsworth recently published an essay and I annotated it.