Alan Jacobs

Seasteading’s been and gone for the second (third?) time, the secession and Six-State-California guys have been and gone.  It is that time in the cycle where the Libertarian App Future Brothers start living off the grid, buying guns and getting good and weird out there alone in the dark.  I wonder how we’ll look back at this whole period of the last five or ten years.  At how the digital gold rush and the strange pressures of a new, yet accelerated, period of cultural invention cooked a whole new set of mental wounds out of the people swept up in it.  Yes, sure, it gave us sociopaths who prefer humans to be drones and believe that everything is rotting.  But I think, reviewing the era, that we will be sad.  I think we may look back and consider that, one more time, we saw the best minds of our generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves after an Uber that isn’t actually there because Uber fake most of those little cars you see on the Uber app map.

— Warren Ellis

When I saw that N. T. Wright had reviewed Wesley Hill’s new book Paul and the Trinity, I thought, “I know what he’s going to say: that Hill’s main claims are correct but that he doesn’t get to them by way of scrupulous and ample citation of the works of N. T. Wright.” And indeed, so it came to pass.

Arthur Benson ... was in the evening summer of his life. He wrote beautiful, at times too beautiful, prose. He published at least one book a year; readers who began could not put them down, though at the end of the book they had received nothing. He kept meditating on the highest ideals and professed weakness to do anything about those ideals. He observed naughtily, subtly, wittily, passively, on occasion with a feline caress.... His mind usually stayed at the level of gossip and anecdote but not always. His diary has been well edited: to read it is like looking into a large egg-shell full of bubbles. The undergraduates of Madgalene used to say about their Master that he spent the morning doing nothing and spent the afternoon writing about what he had done in the morning.

— Owen Chadwick, Michael Ramsey: A Life

I am not all here, I am here now preaching upon this text, and I am at home in my Library considering whether S. Gregory, or S. Hierome, have said best of this text, before. I am here speaking to you, and yet I consider by the way, in the same instant, what it is likely you will say to one another, when I have done. You are not all here neither; you are here now, hearing me, and yet you are thinking that you have heard a better Sermon somewhere else, of this text before; you are here, and yet you think you could have heard some other doctrine of down-right Predestination, and Reprobation roundly delivered somewhere else with more edification to you; you are here, and you remember your selves that now yee think of it: This had been the fittest time, now, when every body else is at Church, to have made such and such a private visit; and because you would bee there, you are there.

But when we consider with a religious seriousnesse the manifold weaknesses of the strongest devotions in time of Prayer, it is a sad consideration. I throw my selfe downe in my Chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a Flie, for the ratling of a Coach, for the whining of a doore; I talke on, in the same posture of praying; Eyes lifted up; knees bowed downe; as though I prayed to God; and, if God, or his Angels should aske me, when I thought last of God in that prayer, I cannot tell: Sometimes I finde that I had forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A memory of yesterdays pleasures, a feare of tomorrows dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine eare, a light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a Chimera in my braine, troubles me in my prayer.

John Donne, funeral sermon for Sir William Cokayne, 12 December 1626.

Phenomenon: “Two of Mr. Price’s most valued employees quit, spurred in part by their view that it was unfair to double the pay of some new hires while the longest-serving staff members got small or no raises.”

Explanation: “A study by researchers at the University of Warwick and Cardiff University has found that money only makes people happier if it improves their social rank. The researchers found that simply being highly paid wasn’t enough – to be happy, people must perceive themselves as being more highly paid than their friends and work colleagues.”

So sad about Cedric the lion!

So sad about Cedric the lion!

So sad about Cedric the lion!

The guy who killed Cedric ought to be put to death himself.

So sad about Cedric the lion!

The guy who killed Cedric ought to be put to death himself.

Why do you care about lions more than black people?

So sad about Cedric the lion!

The guy who killed Cedric ought to be put to death himself.

So sad about Cedric the lion!

Why do you care about lions more than the unborn?

The guy who killed Cedric ought to be put to death himself.

Why do you care about lions more than black people?

So sad about Cedric the lion!

I’m sure this new column proves once more that David Brooks is History’s Greatest Monster, but I’ll have to wait for y’all to explain why.

But if Apple is committed to a cruft-ridden iTunes, other developers could step in the void. It’s not just classical music libraries: Many users with their own sizable libraries want software that lets them listen to MP3s and AACs. Plenty of minimalist text editors for Macs and PCs persist in the world. If iTunes is beyond repair, it might now be time for some minimalist media management software.

Robinson Meyer. Oh please. Please, please let me get what I want in digital media management. Lord knows it would be the first time.

Then a demonstrator directed his attention to an older man all but melting on a bottom step. “He looked fatigued, lethargic — weak,” Mr. Smith said. “I knew there was something very wrong with him.”  

He called up the steps to the Columbia fire chief, Aubrey Jenkins, for assistance. Then, with his left arm around the man’s back and his right hand on the man’s right arm, he walked the swastika-adorned demonstrator up the steps, as many as 40. Slowly, steadily, all the while giving encouragement:  

We’re going to make it. Just keep on going.  

A female demonstrator shadowed the climb. On the back of her black shirt appeared a familiar white-supremacist slogan (“Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth”). She kept asking Mr. Smith whether the man was going to be all right — as if his safety, as well as his health, might be in some jeopardy.