I don’t know which is worse, the belief that if you’re sounding off on social media you’re Doing Something, or the belief that if you’re not sounding off on social media you’re Not Doing Anything.
Convergence!
- Ted Gioia, “The Glorious Future of the Book”
- Austin Kleon, “Why Our House Is a Library”
Georgios Klontzas. What a painting.
I wrote a bit about being a supply officer.
It would be a tragedy if writers stopped using em dashes out of fear of sounding like AI, because em dashes are one of the best tools writers have for not sounding robotic in the first place. Their very potential to be irritating is a sign of what makes them so beautiful: Of all the forms of punctuation, the em dash is the one that most rewards tact, judgment, and taste. It has the closest relationship to the way we experience thinking—rushing forward, suddenly swerving, forking into different branches that eventually come together again. If chatbots copy our use of it, they do so for the same reason we need to protect it. It’s the most human punctuation there is.
I wrote about my irrelevance for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters — and of course for anyone who would like to become one of my Buy Me a Coffee supporters. And also for anyone else.
John Muir, writing in the Pasadena Star, 1909:
It would make a good and useful tattoo: Nothing dollarable is safe.
This “retrospective” on Houellebecq's Submission by John Hardy describes the book as a prophecy, which I don’t think it was. Here’s my review, written when the book appeared.