In which Alan proposes an alternative name for Plato’s Republic.
On one hand, all of Freddie’s criticisms and reform proposals for the NBA seem spot on.
On the other hand, I don’t share his experience of the actual product on the court. I’ve enjoying watching actual NBA games over the last couple years as much as I have at any other time, with the only possible exception the Duncan/Kawhi stretch from 2007 to 2017 (for obvious reasons). So what gives?
I really enjoyed Alan’s riff on Worf and therapeutic liberalism.
This morning I’m in CT with a piece about the need for folks who care about low-tech parenting to build a big tent.
In the new issue of CT Jen Pollock Michel somehow successfully accomplishes the three-book book review, united by the theme of the body’s voice. The authors are Alan Noble, Molly Worthen, and Jen Hatmaker. Beautifully written, calmly reasoned, and wise in its judgments. Not quite sure how she thread this fine a needle, but she did.
This interview of Dwight Hopkins by Vincent Lloyd could have gone on much longer and I would have kept reading.
On the blog: two utterly unrelated posts. One asks about screens in American churches, the other proposes Luka as Allen Iverson 2.0.
I’ll add my voice to the chorus and say that you need to read about the rise of “dinergoths."
Wait, so you’re saying AI is making work more intense, not less? Increasing the work load, not alleviating it?
Who could have foreseen this…
All I want for Christmas is for Heat 2 to be Michael Mann’s swan song, his epic, his Godfather: Part II. Please.
The first time I heard John Van Deusen’s voice in “None Other” I heard Michael Stipe, Paul Simon, and Sufjan Stevens.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that I can’t stop listening to it.
Read Katelyn Beaty on the ways that, for all its errors in the area of gender and purity, 1990s evangelicalism was absolutely right and regrettably prophetic in its objections to the mass sexualization of teen girls.
Read Douthat on the Oscars. Over against One Battler After Another and Marty Supreme, Douthat considers Sinners, Bugonia, Eddington, and Weapons:
These are the movies that really get at where our culture is going, I suspect. We are formally committed to seeing Trumpism versus liberalism (whether in Boomer or progressive shape) as the great conflict of the age. But our subtler filmmakers sense a different form of conflict lurking, in which the enemy is something else — the vampire in the dark, the malignant corporation, the nonhuman intelligence, or the devil.
I had no idea anybody had ever written either imitations or continuations of The Screwtape Letters. Yikes.
Read MBD for a smart take on “the minivan people” as a powerful voter constituency.
Read Bonnie Kristian on the (Christian) ethics of aesthetics, i.e., the billion-dollar beauty industry and where the moral and spiritual lines are.
Nine years ago Sonny Bunch wrote one of my favorite opinion columns of this century. It’s perfect in its simplicity, and the turn gets me every time. It works on my students, too. Take and read.
In the latest issue of First Things I have a review of Ryan Burge’s new book, The Vanishing Church.
Reading Ross Barkan on fiction in the face of AI is truly inspiring. Makes you want to get up and … write.
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.