Alan Jacobs

One of Christian’s Gibsons has survived, and here it is being played by the (also great) Julian Lage:

John Banville:

The English language is beautiful. It’s immensely rich and untidy with so many influences from other cultures, and I glory in it. People say to me that they have to go to the dictionary. Is that a great trouble? The dictionary is one of the most precious things you have in your house. You should be thanking me for the excuse to go to it. I say to them: “I bet when you went to look up whatever word, you came across four or five new ones. So you gained! I did you a favour!” 

Alas, most of Banville’s readers would’ve looked up the words on Google. It’s only the dictionary in codex form that works the way Banville wants it to work — the way it should work. Trust me on that — and also trust my buddy Austin Kleon. If you don’t have any other books in codex form, have a dictionary and a Bible. They’ll surprise you and teach you every time you pick them up. 

P.S. Unrelated, but here’a another great passage from that interview:

You know, someone said to me recently: “John, I suppose you’ll be writing your Covid novel?” I said: “I certainly will not, and I hope nobody else does either.” The art of fiction isn’t for commenting on events of the time. It may do that, but that’s not its object, which is to imagine the world. 

Don’t know why that book info has the author’s name in Russian, but it looks cool so I decided to keep it.

Thomas Harrison:

Musil was not the only writer of his time to think of the essay as the method and intellectual mode most appropriate to ethical reflection. A predilection for this flexible genre had taken strong root by the end of the nineteenth century, with brilliant standards established by Søren Kierkegaard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and half a dozen prominent others. Their essays bent “positivistic” accounts of objective phenomena to the purposes of feeling and subjective need, to matters of spiritual and moral import. A loose manner of prose composition without fixed rules of method — incorporating aphorism, lyrical condensation, confession, invective, and satire — the essay straddled a spectrum along which Western metaphysics seemed to have arrayed two components of human experience: head and heart, science and art, truth and fiction, body and soul, law and desire.

This is why the essay is such a culturally vital and underrated genre, a topic on which I hope soon to write an … essay, I guess.  

[Some of you may have seen that I originally posted this as a screenshot from Instapaper, which was easy and looked pretty good … but because it was an image rather than text (a) the text so imaged didn’t resize properly in different-sized browser windows and (b) the content isn’t searchable. So I’m back to the usual way of posting. But I dunno, I might try again at some point; it not being searchable isn’t such a big deal if I have tags. The value for me is that it’s a way of sharing with less friction.] 

You Can Forget About Crypto Now: “Imagine your debit card suddenly stopped working because the executives at your bank were out making high-risk trades with your money while you were trying to pay for groceries — that’s roughly analogous to what Bankman-Fried is accused of pulling off.”

This Adam Neely video on the ways that intellectual property law is simply unsuited to music is just superb.

Prediction: By this time in 2024, Elon will have sold Twitter to people who will pledge to return it to the Good Old Days of 2018. And all the journalists and politicos will rush back. Mark my words: Revenant Twitter is coming.

The most amazing part of this story is the teacher who says that he used to keep his smartphone on his desk so he could “check in with the outside world” while he was teaching.