WaPo: “Only 16 percent of Americans age 15 and over read for leisure every day in 2023, according to a study from researchers at the University of Florida and University College London that was published Wednesday in the journal iScience, compared with 28 percent of Americans in 2003.”
MIT Technology Review, via @ablerism: “Gloo ingests every one of the digital breadcrumbs a congregant leaves — how often you attend church, how much money you donate, which church groups you sign up for, which keywords you use in your online prayer requests — and then layers on third-party data (census demographics, consumer habits, even indicators for credit and health risks). Behind the scenes, it scores and segments people and groups — flagging who is most at risk of drifting, primed for donation appeals, or in need of pastoral care. On that basis, it auto-triggers tailored outreach via text, email, or in-app chat. All the results stream into the single dashboard, which lets pastors spot trends, test messaging, and forecast giving and attendance. Essentially, the system treats spiritual engagement like a marketing funnel.”
So much winning. I’ve never had to deal with this much winning. All the things I love are doing amazingly well.
Currently listening: Momentum: Buenos Aires by Leonardo Andersen. A beautiful record. 🎵
For your dictionary:
“Takedown“: A highly critical piece that I agree with.
“Hit job”: A highly critical piece that I don’t agree with.
My thoughts on chatbots and my classes: On being Bowser and the Sorting Hat. This will probably be my last post on the big blog this week — lots to do to get ready for the new term!
Austin Kleon: “Maybe your own personal routine should look exhausting to someone else! What sets you free — the more it’s really yours — should probably look like torture to someone else.”
Well, Gunners, that was dismal but … one-nil to the Arsenal will do. ⚽️
Minuses: Gyökeres was nonexistent; Odegaard had one of his worst matches for Arsenal; everyone gave the ball away too readily, which led to way too much possession for Man Utd.
Plusses: Stout defending.
If I go too many days without posting an Angus photo I get pleading or reproachful emails.
Microclimates are odd things. When walking through my neighborhood I tend to avoid one particular street, because when I enter it the humidity shoots up and the wind dies down to nothing. It’s like walking through a damp closet. Today I followed it for three blocks and emerged sweating. It’s the lowest point in my immediate neighborhood, but the difference is slight, and in other respects, such as tree cover, it’s indistinguishable from every other street.
Here’s my theory: my neighborhood is traversed by a series of arroyos, but there are none near that street. The arroyos must serve as convectors of air, keeping breezes moving and lowering humidity. That theory may be nonsense — but whatever the cause, the difference between that one street and all the others in the neighborhood is really striking.
An older but excellent post by my colleague Philip Jenkins:
Quite regularly, the media produce claims about supposedly startling new discoveries concerning the Bible, alternative gospels, and/or Christian origins – just over the past decade, think for instance of “Jesus’s Wife” or the Gospel of Judas. A common theme in such reporting is just how astonishing and unexpected such finds are, and how their novelty would have shocked earlier generations. And in most cases, the weary academic response should properly be that actually, we have known all this stuff for a good long while, and usually for well over a century. The fact that we so often forget those earlier discoveries, and so grievously underestimate the intellectual daring of earlier generations, is in itself a significant component of the sociology of knowledge.
Jessica Yellin says that she’s an “evidence-based creator,” that she has an “obsession with facts,” and so on. But isn’t that just self-promotion? She also says “Substack, for instance, is proving that audiences are willing to stop scrolling and financially support ‘verifiers’ they trust” — but should people trust those “verifiers”? I don’t see anything more here than I promise, I really do care about evidence. What we need is a system of verification, not “creators” who testify on their own behalf. (Of course, we probably won’t get what we need.)
My typical day, technologically speaking.
Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed:
We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes. These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe. The result is not conviction but compliance….
Authenticity, once considered a psychological good, has become a social liability. And this fragmentation doesn’t end at the classroom door. Seventy-three percent of students reported mistrust in conversations about these values with close friends. Nearly half said they routinely conceal beliefs in intimate relationships for fear of ideological fallout. This is not simply peer pressure — it is identity regulation at scale, and it is being institutionalized.
Universities often justify these dynamics in the name of inclusion. But inclusion that demands dishonesty is not ensuring psychological safety — it is sanctioning self-abandonment. In attempting to engineer moral unity, higher education has mistaken consensus for growth and compliance for care.
Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed. Ya think?
I’ve said it before, but not for a while: My entire writing workflow is, and has been for years, made possible by pandoc. It’s pandoc that makes it possible for me to write everything in a text editor and then easily convert to html, docx, pdf — whatever I need.
I am pretty broken up about the death of my friend of nearly forty years, Jay Wood, but I tried to write about him.
Researchers from Arizona State University:
Our investigation, conducted through the controlled environment of DataAlchemy, reveals that the apparent reasoning prowess of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is largely a brittle mirage. The findings across task, length, and format generalization experiments converge on a conclusion: CoT is not a mechanism for genuine logical inference but rather a sophisticated form of structured pattern matching, fundamentally bounded by the data distribution seen during training. When pushed even slightly beyond this distribution, its performance degrades significantly, exposing the superficial nature of the “reasoning” it produces.