James Rebanks, English Pastoral:
One morning as I was waiting by the church with the other boys and girls for the school bus, milling about, throwing stones and kicking pine cones, my grandfather walked towards us with his sheepdog and stick. He had taken some sheep to a field and was walking back to the farm. I knew he had seen me messing about. I didn’t want him to think me a fool like the others, so I stepped away from the crowd. Perhaps I also stepped away from them because I sensed what was coming, and didn’t want them to laugh at him behind his back afterwards. He stopped and asked what I was learning about at school. I told him we were supposed to be learning about the planets. He said he didn’t know much about planets, he only knew about the sun. Then he told me about how its arc over the village changed with the passing of the year. He stabbed at the skyline with his stick where it rises on the shortest day in December, pointing to the south-east. ‘There — it comes up there,’ he said. Then he used his stick to create small loops over his head to show the path of the sun on the short winter days, explaining its changing arc through the seasons. And, in my eyes, he had turned into some giant insect as he moved through the movements of the sun across our land. One after another, he made the arcs with his stick above his head. He wanted me to know how the sun passes over, and that it was a thing of great wonder. He wanted this day to include at least one useful lesson, before I wasted the rest of it in school.
Currently reading: English Pastoral: An Inheritance by James Rebanks 📚
Cecilia D’Anastasio: “The idea of the metaverse has reemerged under a new sky. The current frenzy? It’s simply a succinct way for Big Tech to repitch its extensive lineup of products. The metaverse describes the next state of the internet’s consolidation, a marketing spin on Big Tech’s increasing reach and power. It’ll be Big Tech — just as problem-riddled as now — but bigger.”
From Alex Ross’s terrific interview with Jonny Greenwood:
There are scenes in “Spencer” that require your music to be already in place, like the Christmas Eve dinner where Diana has a breakdown while a string quartet is playing.
It’s just as described in the script: it starts as conventional dinner music and unravels, as Diana does, over the course of the scene. But, again, there’s a sign of how I’ve been indulged. Pablo said it needs to be a few minutes long. So I wrote it, and he cut the scene to that. Which was lovely, because it meant that all I had to do was write this piece of music and have players play it in a room without thinking about a time code and all of that stuff. It breathes. They are playing to each other rather than playing to a film.
“In God We Trust” should be retired as our national motto and replaced with Homer Simpson’s line: “Stupidity got us into this mess, and stupidity will get us out.”
Maybe it’s just because I live in Texas, but when I read techno-optimistic pieces like this one I always have the same thought: What are we gonna do about water?
This essay in the Economist gives a pretty good idea of what level of social control would be required to eliminate Covid in any given country.
At this point, you might be wondering why Communist Party media apparatchiks now sound a bit like mid-2000s American Evangelicals. But it’s worth knowing that the CCP recently discovered — to its shock and horror — that many of China’s people have been gripped by a deep sense of nihilism about their society rather than by boundless love and appreciation for the Party’s leadership. Among the online youth, for example, “sang culture” (roughly the equivalent of “doomerism” in the West) has proliferated. This has kicked off a scramble, led by top Party political theorist Wang Huning, to “create core values” to fill this uncomfortably God-shaped societal hole with the comforts of a synthetic ideological alternative.