In Liberties, Cass Sustein writes about what AI cannot do, not now, not ever.
Read Mark Lilla on John Ganz and the new right, but read him alongside Caldwell’s review of the same book.
I’ve been reading some reviews and essays by and about Kwame Anthony Appiah, in preparation for a piece I’m writing. Check out this 2022 profile of him in the Chronicle by Danny Postel. See also Appiah on John Rawls, on free speech, and on the dark side of Enlightenment.
Mark Oppenheimer’s conversation with Leah Libresco Sargeant for the Arc podcast is good fun, not least because Mark and Leah are willing to tell each other, “You’re dead wrong.”
Jonathan Lear, RIP.
A truly great thinker and writer. Radical Hope is one of the most impressive and morally and intellectually challenging books I’ve ever read. I want to write books like Lear’s when I grow up. I’m grateful for all the ones he left us.
I wrote a profile of Leah Libresco Sargeant for Arc, a magazine edited by the great Mark Oppenheimer and published by the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, at Washington University in St. Louis. The profile is timed with Leah’s new book, The Dignity of Dependence, but ranges across her whole public career, indeed her whole life. Check it out!
I’m in CT today with a slightly more personal piece than usual: “You Don’t Have to Be Radical."
Douthat at his best. The money summary lines, turning the column’s arguments like a hinge:
It would be immensely helpful to our debates if more sincere liberals could be persuaded that this style of progressivism really is a postliberal form of politics…
But then it would also be helpful for conservatives to acknowledge why the populist alternative can seem so threatening as well.
This story, by Nancy Walecki, about her father—“guitar guru to the rock gods”—is simply beautiful. The anecdotes alone are worth it, but mix in the music, work, paternal, and Christian themes … it’s almost too much to take in at once.
In 2014 the New York Times profiled Paul Kingsnorth and his merry band of mourners at the Dark Mountain Project. This was after his departure from journalism and move to rural Ireland, but before his conversion to Orthodoxy.
I finally read Robert Draper’s profile of Charlie Kirk for the NYT Magazine, published in February of this year.
Apropos of nothing, just reminding myself and others about Adam Smith’s 2023 essay advocating for Christian universities to set aside some dorms as tech-free.
I thought Kevin DeYoung did a marvelously charitable job reviewing Peter Kreeft’s spiritual autobiography, From Calvinist to Catholic.
Read Aaron Kheriaty on “zombie bioethics," i.e., the ethics of creating brainless human “bodyoids” on which to perform medical experiments.
The creator of AI actress Tilly Norwood has put out a statement following a fierce backlash in response to news over the weekend that talent agents were looking to sign the AI-generated character.
That’s the opening sentence of this story in Deadline.
1 Maccabees 1:11-15:
In those days lawless men came forth from Israel, and misled many, saying, “Let us go and make a covenant with the gentiles round about us, for since we separated from them many evils have come upon us.” This proposal pleased them, and some of the people eagerly went to the king. He authorized them to observe the ordinances of the gentiles. So they built a gymnasium in Jerusalem, according to gentile custom, and removed the marks of circumcision, and abandoned the holy covenant. They joined with the gentiles and sold themselves to do evil.
As I read this passage, in just five verses it summarizes (or rather, anticipates) more or less verbatim the charge of the Pharisees against Paul’s ministry to and among the gentiles via the synagogue-networked Jewish diaspora in the Roman Empire.
My review of Phil Christman’s new book, Why Christians Should Be Leftists, is out from behind the paywall at First Things. It’s called “Politics for Losers."
Not sure she quite convinced me, but I found Molly Worthen’s piece on CCM to be disarming, instructive, and moving.
J. Robert Lennon on Elmore Leonard: “He did more with less than any crime writer I can think of."
And: “Leonard’s superpower was to apprehend the broken syntax of real speech and translate it to the page so that it jumped straight from the eye to the ear, bypassing the inner grammarian.”
