Brad East

Read Nicholas Carr on “Creative Work in an Age of Digital Production”:

With AI, at last, the machines can take over the creator’s role. AI-generated slop marks the triumph of machine formalism. The machine establishes the pattern, and the machine fills the pattern with its own creation. The automated media system is relieved of human inefficiency, not to mention human sensibility. It’s the same thing that happens in the automation of factories and warehouses. People are kept on hand to perform tasks that robots aren’t good at doing—boxing orders, say, or feeding parts into the machine—until the robots get good at doing them.

In automated systems, human beings are placeholders for future machines. Until recently, we assumed that creative types who produce content for media systems were exceptions to that rule. We’re now going to test that assumption. Is MrBeast necessary? Am I?

I’d hoped to have written something by now about the war, but time hasn’t been permitting. There’s a lot to read, but I especially appreciated Jason Willick’s short column for The Washington Post.

Read Nick Burns on the end of the Sixties. It’s about many things, but this line stuck with me: “the Right does not want to pay for more psychiatric beds, and the Left does not want to force anyone to stay in them.” That, for Burns, is a kind of parable of post-Sixties politics in America.

On the latest episode of Mere Fidelity we talk aliens. If you want to read my take in print, I wrote an essay on the subject for The Hedgehog Review last summer.

Read Jackson Lears on Zbigniew Brzezinski. One of many nuggets:

Long years of practice had left him at ease with grandiosity in the name of the foreign policy establishment’s favourite pronoun: ‘we’.

Another:

This melding of technocratic and messianic strains would characterise the hymns to ‘globalisation’ in the 1990s. With respect to intellectual fashion at least, Brzezinski was indeed prescient.

Alan has been on a roll lately. Loving the Star Trek re-watch. Can we get an “Alan Jacobs and Timothy Burke: Where No Man Has Gone Before” podcast going or what?

Finally caught up on the essays in these collections I’d not read before. Sometimes maddening, occasionally irksome, but always beautifully written, erudite, patient, thoughtful, and challenging.

How about Lu Dort’s suspension is 10 games + any games in a playoff series against Denver?*

*And if they don’t play Denver through three rounds, then no Lu for the Western Conference Finals.

I thought Mark Oppenheimer did a great job interviewing Rusty Reno on his podcast for Arc.

Douthat on the recent Wuthering Heights adaptation:

“Gothic Barbie smut” best watched “not for the lust, but for the laughs.”

Read Freddie on the problem with reverence in big-budget Hollywood movies.

There’s nothing quite so vulnerable or stomach-churning as cold-call-emailing writers you admire to ask them to endorse your book.

I convinced the publisher, who last year stopped soliciting blurbs for their books, to grant me an exception for this one. They agreed, so long as I would do it myself. Sure, I said. No problem, I said.

It’s more than a little silly to feel happy for someone like Harrison Ford receiving a lifetime achievement awards … but he’s been my favorite actor since I was in pre-K, so I can’t help but cheer him on, even now.

Besides, Ford heads stuck with him in the dark days of the aughts and early 2010s, knowing he’d get his mojo back at some point. Now we just need to get him the Oscar and Emmy he so richly deserves before this “working actor” is no longer with us!

This morning I’m in CT writing on the prosperity gospel of comfortable college grads.

My copy of the latest issue of The Point arrived in the mail. Excited to dive in. I enjoyed Jon Baskin’s editorial introduction, especially the kicker:

The resulting essays [in the issue] question some of the baseline assumptions of contemporary leftism and liberalism, as Trilling implored the true friends of left-liberalism to do in his own time, while at the same time attempting to excavate their intellectual traditions for more promising—and, not unimportantly, more inspiring—paths forward. Our contention being that even if one agrees with [Ezra] Klein that it is not the job of the liberal intellectual to tell the citizens of 2050 (or 2026) where they should drive their electric cars, there remain few tasks more urgent today—for the friends and the foes of liberalism alike—than to demonstrate that there remain places worth going.

Finally watched Spielberg’s (less loosely than I expected) autobiographical film The Fabelmans. “We’re never not going to know each other, Sammy” just about reduced me to a puddle of tears.

PSA: Splintered Sun, the tenth book set in the world of Osten Ard, is due out this October. If you want to read more about the series or about its author, Tad Williams, read this.

I loved reading David Mamet about the genius of Robert Duvall.

This post by Alan Jacobs about warmaking and filmmaking is why blogs exist. A perfect instance of the genre.

Read B. D. McClay on beauty.

Audrey Watters is always on her game, but her latest newsletter is particularly spicy.

Minus the first paragraph, this is a solid critical reflection on what makes a film conservative—or rather, whether there is such a thing as a conservative film in the first place.

Read Becca Rothfeld on the end of books coverage at The Washington Post.

I thought this profile of Rod Dreher was generous and fair across the board. Worth a read.

Read about the film students who … can’t sit through films to the end.