Only Adam Roberts would launch an investigation into Dorothy Sayers' height. Loved seeing this in my inbox.
Only Adam Roberts would launch an investigation into Dorothy Sayers' height. Loved seeing this in my inbox.
Freddie on the fantastical prophecies of the AI true believers:
So this is what I would say to Read and others who are trying to skate the line of being AI skeptic skeptics without being full-on deranged maximalists: you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives in a world that would be almost totally recognizable to people living in the year 2000, a world that functions more or less the same way our world has functioned for the duration of our entire lives, with an economy that is not structurally much different from the same one we’ve always known. There will be jobs, and there will be cancer, and any missions to Mars will be fundamentally scientific endeavors that do not promise any economic return at all. No human being alive today will make it to 150 years old, not even the youngest infants; any asteroid mining that occurs will be a gimmick and will be a net money loser by a vast margin. Nothing in the world of medicine will happen that will come close to matching the improvements in health and longevity that were achieved in the 20th century, when the boring mundane advances of routine handwashing, antibiotics, and vaccines saved lives by the tens of millions. More and more often, you’ll get around in self-driving cars. And that will be cool. Traffic fatalities will decline. But we won’t live to see a world where human-driven cars are banned—you can’t technology your way out of a political problem, and if you think getting Americans to give up their guns is hard, just wait until you see how they cling to their cars. And, you know. Cars are just cars.
Peter Leithart on Samuel Moyn:
Precisely as my own personal time horizon shrank, my familial time horizon expanded because my wife and I lived to see our children’s children. Grandchildren perform a miraculous resurrection that many in my generation experience only on a small scale, or not at all. If Moyn really wants to smash the gerontocracy, he should go natalist.
First line of the Odyssey: ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
First verse of Hebrews: Πολυμερῶς καὶ πολυτρόπως πάλαι ὁ θεὸς λαλήσας τοῖς πατράσιν ἐν τοῖς προφήταις
Somehow it took me two decades to learn that the (in)famous word Homer uses to summarize Odysseus’s winding/many-layered/multiplicitous character is the same word that Hebrews uses to describe God’s many and various ways of speaking to Israel before sending his Son in the person of Jesus.
How did I miss this?
I finally read Antón Barba-Kay’s wonderful essay for Commonweal, published back in January, called “Havens for the Human.” I’m glad I saved it and made time for it. The analysis and prescriptive vision for the future of the university are both lovely.
Plus, we get the line “big brother, big tech, big LOL.” That one got me.
“Ryan Gosling And WB Eye Live-Acton ‘Flintstones’ Pic About Bamm-Bamm”: a real headline at Deadline.
Len Gutkin, “Reading for Sins,” in Liberties:
In fact, the deep logic of any given taboo expresses important, and in some cases perfectly rational, societal commitments. The prerational aspect of any taboo isn’t necessarily the social argument it reflects, but the disabling emotions that its violation elicits.
And “snowflake hermeneutics” is a great tag, too. There is probably a degree of overlap with a certain kind of ideologically inflected hermeneutics in biblical and theological studies. Bears further thought.
Another excellent piece by Dale Coulter, this time on the state of American Protestant seminaries. I have more thoughts than I can share now, but I hope to write them up at a later time.
Read Kit Wilson in Portico on Leszek Kołakowski. As Wilson observes, it is hard to grasp why Kołakowski’s name and influence have waned in the years following his death. A revival is in order.
I learned a lot reading Dale Coulter’s eulogy for postliberal theology. I had no idea about some of the sociopolitical antecedents in the 1970s.
Dan Hitchens bids farewell to Douthat, as does Bill McCormick, SJ, while Massimo Faggioli once more elevates lack of charity into a kind of performance art.
Douthat bids farewell to his side hustle as film critic for NR. He writes:
But over time, in spite of my resolution to stay positive, decline and decadence would become signal themes. The great superhero takeover of Hollywood began early in my run as a critic, and by the time we reached the days of Ant-Man and the Wasp, only a true philistine could deny that the comic-book era had changed Hollywood for the worse. So did the shuttered cinemas of the Covid-19 era, the reign of wokeness (whose clearest negative effects were manifest in children’s movies, which as a parent I took personally), the streaming-era migration of talent to the small screen, the fateful lure of smartphone scrolling, and the decline of the dating and socializing that once had made the movie theater a hub.
Living through cultural decline can take a writer to dark places. In last month’s issue, I reviewed David Thomson’s recent history of the movies, a kind of valedictory for his career as a critic — one far more distinguished than my own — in which he reads his own pessimism about the American present back into the motion-picture past and wonders whether the art had been corrupted and corrupting from the start.
I respect Thomson, but I reject this view. The waning of Hollywood’s creative spirit, the triumph of the blockbuster sequel over the epic and the romance and the comedy, is worth lamenting precisely because it represents a fall from the greatest heights of American popular art. The motion picture has been as essential to the American age as the novel was to the Victorians or the Homeric epic to the Greeks. And today, in what often feels like their autumn, movies still burst with colors that make other forms of pop culture look gray or wan by comparison.
Just in the past year, we’ve seen certain movies seize hold of the discourse in a way that no video game or YouTube short or podcast can ever hope to match.
Read Paul Griffiths on the bloody certitudes of Omri Boehm. (See the rest of the symposium in Commonweal, too.)
Read B. D. McClay on the Talking Page and “yesterday’s university of tomorrow." Put me in mind of Audrey Watters' wonderful book on teaching machines.
Over on the proper blog I shared big news about my next book: the title, the cover, the pub date, and more than a dozen endorsements ranging from John Mark Comer and Andy Crouch to Tish Harrison Warren and Russell Moore to Alan Jacobs and Sara Hendren to Audrey Watters and L. M. Sacasas. Go check it out! (And pre-order today!)
For Comment I wrote about my pilgrimage to France earlier this summer.
Tyler Cowen excerpts Peter Gray on children and smartphones. I’ll have to read the book, but the reason I am skeptical of these “anti–moral panic” responses to Haidt et al is that they work from a strange premise: If empirical studies cannot demonstrate that smartphones and/or social media are a mega-mono-cause for child and teen suffering (esp. mental health but other areas as well), then it necessarily follows that we need not be particularly worried about them, they must not be doing much harm, and we ought simply to find a proper use for them. As Gray writes:
Future research should focus on understanding better the ways teens use these tools and how to help them maximize the benefits and minimize the harm.
But why should we make this assumption? We don’t need smartphones or social media to be the mega-mono-cause of anything to see with our own eyes how they are affecting young people. Why treat them as “merely” a neutral tool? Why not still go ahead and restrict them to adults? The burden of proof is on those who presuppose their teen use, not on those who are cautious about a global generational experiment.
Despite the “debunking” subhead, this is a usefully dispassionate, empirical approach to the question of a literacy crisis.
L. M. Sacasas, “AI as Christian Heresy”:
Discussions around the human in relation to technology, specifically AI, parallel older debates about science and religion. In that discursive context, there was a form of argument known as “God of the gaps.” The idea was that God was simply a name for the gaps in our scientific understanding of the world. Of course, once those gaps were filled, God would be effectively squeezed out of the metaphysical picture. Similarly, we are operating with a “human of the gaps” model when we try to locate the essence of the human creature by pointing to what cannot yet be accomplished by a machine, whether these be matters of physical prowess, cognitive ability, or creativity. Such an approach to the human is misguided, just as it was when it was applied to God.
It had been a while, so I rewatched O Brother, Where Art Thou?
And Alastair Roberts is right: If you’re looking for a truly Christian, ingenious interpretation of Homer’s Odyssey, it’s not Nolan you’re seeking. It’s the Coen brothers.
You keep using that word. I do not think, etc.
Two Compact essays by Nathan Pinkoski: one with a sharp descriptive analysis of the return of ethnic politics in the U.K.; another with a deflating and unpersuasive recommendation for conservative popular culture-making in America.
“Somewheres, Everywheres, and Elsewheres” will stick with me. A patriotic Disney World will not.
Michael Tracey explains how podcasts ruined America. Exactly five years ago I wrote, “Quit podcasts." I did, for a year or two. It was a good thing to do. I came back, but I’m not sure I was wrong. Tracey’s point stands even if some pods are worth listening to.
I’m partial to Dwight Macdonald, and I enjoyed this tribute to him via a new collection of his political essays.