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.
A brilliant and necessary essay by Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy:
Being a legitimate self now requires one to be publicly identifiable, authentic and, increasingly, fully authenticated. What began as a celebration of individual uniqueness that avidly encouraged the production of digital evidence is evolving into an elaborate system of verification that will treat any trace as a potentially suspect record. As fake versions of ourselves start to circulate, we may soon find ourselves caught in endless cycles of proving and defending the reality of our own existence, submitting ourselves more and more to a machinery of institutionalised scepticism that would have repulsed the early internet’s champions of identity play and experimentation.
And:
Individuals equipped with the capacity to search the network and query large language model (LLM) oracles, and in possession of the self-confidence and the means to broadcast their findings, tend to become an authoritative source of opinion. At least that is how it feels to them. We can also understand why knowledge produced in this manner is often so emotionally charged. The more people invest in researching and developing their own understanding, the more their pursuit of knowledge transforms into a form of personal revelation, where everyone is both seeker and interpreter of their own truth. What began as an exercise in independent reasoning becomes a matter of belief, belief defended all the more passionately because it seems to have been self-discovered rather than externally given.
Walked out my door in the pre-dawn and was immediately stung by a bee. Go back to sleep, bee!
The morning sun on this plant seems to have freaked out my iPhone’s camera software.
WaPo: “Only 16 percent of Americans age 15 and over read for leisure every day in 2023, according to a study from researchers at the University of Florida and University College London that was published Wednesday in the journal iScience, compared with 28 percent of Americans in 2003.”
MIT Technology Review, via @ablerism: “Gloo ingests every one of the digital breadcrumbs a congregant leaves — how often you attend church, how much money you donate, which church groups you sign up for, which keywords you use in your online prayer requests — and then layers on third-party data (census demographics, consumer habits, even indicators for credit and health risks). Behind the scenes, it scores and segments people and groups — flagging who is most at risk of drifting, primed for donation appeals, or in need of pastoral care. On that basis, it auto-triggers tailored outreach via text, email, or in-app chat. All the results stream into the single dashboard, which lets pastors spot trends, test messaging, and forecast giving and attendance. Essentially, the system treats spiritual engagement like a marketing funnel.”
So much winning. I’ve never had to deal with this much winning. All the things I love are doing amazingly well.
Currently listening: Momentum: Buenos Aires by Leonardo Andersen. A beautiful record. 🎵
For your dictionary:
“Takedown“: A highly critical piece that I agree with.
“Hit job”: A highly critical piece that I don’t agree with.
My thoughts on chatbots and my classes: On being Bowser and the Sorting Hat. This will probably be my last post on the big blog this week — lots to do to get ready for the new term!
Austin Kleon: “Maybe your own personal routine should look exhausting to someone else! What sets you free — the more it’s really yours — should probably look like torture to someone else.”
Well, Gunners, that was dismal but … one-nil to the Arsenal will do. ⚽️
Minuses: Gyökeres was nonexistent; Odegaard had one of his worst matches for Arsenal; everyone gave the ball away too readily, which led to way too much possession for Man Utd.
Plusses: Stout defending.
If I go too many days without posting an Angus photo I get pleading or reproachful emails.
Microclimates are odd things. When walking through my neighborhood I tend to avoid one particular street, because when I enter it the humidity shoots up and the wind dies down to nothing. It’s like walking through a damp closet. Today I followed it for three blocks and emerged sweating. It’s the lowest point in my immediate neighborhood, but the difference is slight, and in other respects, such as tree cover, it’s indistinguishable from every other street.
Here’s my theory: my neighborhood is traversed by a series of arroyos, but there are none near that street. The arroyos must serve as convectors of air, keeping breezes moving and lowering humidity. That theory may be nonsense — but whatever the cause, the difference between that one street and all the others in the neighborhood is really striking.