Alan Jacobs

Ben Shapiro’s book, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, relies heavily on the Miltonian conceit that the use of Reason alone, absent God’s moral law and universal will, dooms us to live in the abyss. And, like Milton, Shapiro’s attempt to demonstrate that secular civilization needs to rekindle the Judeo-Christian teachings upon which it is based, inadvertently shows us why we were right to leave them behind in the first place.

— Jared Marcel Pollan. “We.”

The third thing I do when I get a new computer.

The second thing I do when I get a new computer.

The first thing I do when I get a new computer.

Lovely morning at Lake Waco Wetlands — though the wetlands are still waking up to springtime.

In his column today, Ross Douthat writes:

A good many members of the opposition to Donald Trump — a mix of serious journalists, cable television hosts, pop culture personalities, erstwhile government officials, professional activists and politicians — have been invested in what appears to be exactly the kind of conspiracy-laced alternative reality that they believed themselves to be resisting.

With the apparent “no collusion” conclusion to the Robert Mueller investigation, there will now be a retreat from this alternative reality to more defensible terrain — the terrain where Trump is a sordid figure who admires despots and surrounded himself with hacks and two-bit crooks while his campaign was buoyed by a foreign power’s hack of his opponent.

Will there be “a retreat from this alternative reality”? I don’t see why there would be, or why Ross thinks there will be. Similarly, listening on my morning walk to the National Review Editors podcast, I heard all the members of that distinguished panel agree that the release of the Mueller report will be very bad news for, a big black eye for, the media, and I thought: Really?

I mean, I’m sure a handful — more likely, a hand half-full — of journalists and media talking heads will say they got ahead of the story, but I’d be shocked if it were more than that. More likely scenario: the Rachel Maddows and Jonathan Chaits and Stacey Abramses of the world

(1) will say “We won’t really know anything until we see the full Mueller report”;

and if the entire report isn’t released

(2) will insist that whatever has been redacted contains the key to the whole mystery, and that it remains overwhelmingly likely that Trump and his entourage are guilty of collusion with the Russians and other high crimes and misdemeanors;

and if the entire report is released

(3a) will find something, anything, in it that, they insist, confirms their worst suspicions,

or, if the full report gives them nothing,

(3b) will say that Mueller was scared into silence or is part of the con.

And their followers and enablers will cheer them on. In short, I can imagine no circumstances in which the people most committed to the Trump-and-the-Russkies narrative would acknowledge that they got it wrong. And the people who trusted them before will continue to trust them, while the people who didn’t trust them before will continue not to trust them.

Changing your views because you realize you got the facts wrong? Or because you realize that you “theorized in advance of the facts,” as Sherlock Holmes warned you not to do? In American politics today that’s not how it works. To understand why, take some time to read a book — a book I explore fairly extensively in my How to Think — called When Prophecy Fails. It was published in 1956, but it tells you much of what you need to know about how politically invested people behave in 2019.

What Michael Tsai says about Apple News is correct:

I continue to find Apple News to be disappointing. It’s like Apple reinvented the RSS reader with less privacy (everything goes through an Apple tracking URL) and a worse user experience (less control over fonts, text that isn’t selectable, no searching within or across stories). So the idea of content that must be accessed from the app — and likely can’t even be opened in Safari — is not attractive to me.

Those are among the reasons I deleted Apple News from my iOS devices — Apple won’t let you delete it from the Mac — some time ago. But I downloaded it again yesterday and signed up for the trial subscription to News+ just to check out developments. I found that the problems Tsai mentions are still there, along with what is for me the single greatest deterrent to using Apple News: Apple’s insistence on feeding you clickbaity stories, especially about celebrities, no matter how many times and in how many ways you try to indicate that you don’t want to see them.

When you sign up for News+, you get a list of suggested magazine content in a sidebar, and can click/tap a Like button to get stuff from that magazine or a not-Like button to … well, to do what? Because when I tapped the not-Like button next to Vanity Fair I still got stories from Vanity Fair in my feed. And I found this to be true of several other magazines as well.

Apple is taking a Facebook-like approach to News: “No, you don’t tell us what you want, we tell you what you want.” So I canceled my subscription after about an hour.

Here’s a cool fact for you all to keep in mind: Guess what you see when you look at your RSS reader? Exactly what you chose to subscribe to. Neither less nor more.