Alan Jacobs

These are really well done, as opposed to those.

My colleague Philip Jenkins on the extremely violent and politically disrupted era in which Jesus was born.

Richardson and Levy stand on opposite sides of a busy road, watching technology speed past towards a clouded horizon. If the future of sex (as all arrows seem to point) is in robotics, then Richardson is right: it requires a thoughtful discussion about the ethics of gender and sex. But while she identifies the relationships that appear to be emerging as modelled on sex work – the robot as passive, bought, female; the man as emotion-free and sex-starved – surely rather than calling for a ban on them, to forlornly try stalling technology, the pressure should be to change the narrative. To use this new market to explore the questions we have about sex, about intimacy, about gender.

Source: Sex, love and robots: is this the end of intimacy? | Technology | The Guardian. It's fascinating, in a deeply depressing sort of way, to listen to people trying to debate the ethical implications of sex with robots when they* have almost no moral categories or moral vocabulary to work with. Levy: "One has to accept that sexual mores advance with time, and morality with it." (Or, as the poet put it, "Whatever is, is right.") Richardson: It’s all about “hyper-capitalist societies driven by neo-liberal ideas” — so call in the therapists! (Yes, of course, modern psychotherapy has nothing to do with hypercapitalism and neoliberalism.) Our fearless journalist, Eva Wiseman: Um ... let's "change the narrative" and ... um ... "explore the questions we have." Or whatever. So confusion. Such flounder.

*The people, not the robots. The robots may have much better moral algorithms, for all I know. 

Uttering the unacceptable in prose and exploring the elusive, not-yet-captured depth of things in poetry have in common the crucial recognition that we shan’t learn about ourselves or our world – including our political world – if we are prevented from hearing things to argue with and things that leave us frustrated and (in every sense) wondering. Our current panics about ‘offence’ are at their best and most generous an acknowledgement of how language can encode and enact power relations (my freedom of ‘offending’ speech may be your humiliation, a confirmation of your exclusion from ordinary public discourse). But at its worst it is a patronising and infantilising worry about protecting individuals from challenge; the inevitable end of that road is a far worse entrenching of unquestionable power, the power of a discourse that is never open to reply. Debates about international issues like Israel and Palestine, or issues of social and personal morals – abortion, gender and sexuality, end of life questions – are regularly shadowed by anxiety, even panic, about what must not be said in public, and also by the sometimes startlingly coercive insistence on the ‘rational’ and canonical status of one perspective only. On both sides of all such debates, there can be a deep unwillingness to have things said or shown that might profoundly challenge someone’s starting assumptions. If there is an answer to this curious contemporary neurosis, it is surely not in the silencing of disagreement but in the education of speech: how is unwelcome truth to be told in ways that do not humiliate or disable? And the answer to that question is inseparable from learning to argue – from the actual practice of open exchange, in the most literal sense ‘civil’ disagreement, the debate appropriate to citizens who have dignity and liberty to discuss their shared world and its organisation and who are able to learn what their words sound like in the difficult business of staying with such a debate as it unfolds.

— Rowan Williams

Some of these behind a paywall; some of the reflections more extensive than others.

• Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage
• Adam Roberts’ edition of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria
• Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics
• Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
• Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head
• Lambros Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement
• Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man
• Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora
• Les Murray, New Selected Poems
• Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet
• Matthew Battles, Palimpsest

Once upon  time, it involved scourging the flesh or living in a hermitage or spending years atop a pillar. Now it’s doing without your phone for eighteen minutes.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“2928”] From the 1984 manga “The Apple II Story”[/caption]

I’m not saying that having a President – or even a major candidate – who spouts xenophobic rants is a good thing. It’s a bad thing. I’m just suggesting that we’ve long since gotten used to things that are much worse, and perhaps we should pay a bit more attention to that fact.

— Noah Millman; nobody writes more incisively about politics. 

[caption id=“attachment_15408” align=“aligncenter” width=“433”] I’d like to suggest that we replace the entire internet with this picture[/caption]

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] via things magazine tumblr[/caption]