I’m so glad Zach Lowe is writing again.
I have a suspicion that this new run of Substack newsletters at The Ringer portends a certain William J. Simmons III relearning how to use his fingers.
I’m so glad Zach Lowe is writing again.
I have a suspicion that this new run of Substack newsletters at The Ringer portends a certain William J. Simmons III relearning how to use his fingers.
The simple fact is that Netflix isn’t dominating like folks thought the “winner” of the streaming wars would dominate; the Entertainment Strategy Guy has a great visual representation of Netflix’s issues. At the risk of sounding glib, someone at Netflix really needs to hit the “make good stuff” button. An equally simple fact is that most Netflix output, particularly on the film side, represents nothing so much as the straight-to-VHS boom of the 1980s. Movies like War Machine, Office Romance, and The Whisper Man cost a ton and leave no impression on general audiences.
That’s Sonny Bunch. Had never thought of Netflix “content” as a replay of 1980s straight-to-VHS (or 1990s direct-to-TV) movies, but the comparison makes perfect sense. Just a lot more money thrown at “movies” that still look like junk, albeit passable, watchable, half-entertaining junk.
Since happiness is nothing else than the enjoyment of the Supreme Good, and the Supreme Good is above us, no one can enjoy happiness unless he rise above himself, not, indeed, by a bodily ascent, but by an ascent of the heart. But we cannot rise above ourselves unless a superior power raise us. However much, then, the steps of our interior progress may be well-ordered, we can do nothing unless divine aid support us. This divine aid is at hand for all who seek it with a truly humble and devout heart, that is by sighing for it in this vale of tears by fervent prayer. Prayer, then, is the mother and origin of every upward striving of the soul.
—Saint Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, I.1
I really appreciate the charitable, non-dogmatic tone of Kyle Worley’s brief against Christians drinking alcohol, but his conclusion as well as his framing drove me a little nuts. For instance:
My hope is not that you will read this and stop drinking alcohol. I think the data says it should be an exception for anyone who has a serious interest in being a good steward of their physical health, but the scriptures do not require you to completely abstain from alcohol.
This calls back to an earlier section:
The data is in: Alcohol consumption, even moderate alcohol consumption, has negative health effects. It disrupts sleep, carries increased cancer and cardiovascular risks, and strains the liver.
Leading wellness and lifestyle voices like Andrew Huberman have been shown up on podcast after podcast saying the same thing: If you can, you ought to dramatically reduce (or totally stop) your alcohol consumption.
You might say: “You are free in Christ to drink alcohol, but you should seriously question its benefits.”
“The data says” and “the data is in” as defeater statements are simply not helpful in conversations like this. To begin, “the data” is never in for good. We are not at the end of (data) history. These are always provisional matters, which are always subject to interpretation.
Plus: “Leading wellness and lifestyle voices”? Come on.
Moreover, try applying this kind of simplistic thinking elsewhere. The internet isn’t good for you. McDonald’s isn’t good for you. Owning one dollar more than you need isn’t good for you. Getting fewer than nine hours of sleep per night isn’t good for you. Television isn’t good for you, and neither are smartphones.
But Christians aren’t wellness-optimizers. We aren’t trying to live until ninety-five no matter what. Stewardship of one’s life includes stewardship of one’s mind, heart, and soul. Nearly everything we do daily is less than ideal relative to what health-optimizers would recommend. In a word, the gospel isn’t goop.
Besides, shouldn’t we look to Scripture for the rich symbolism and practice of alcohol (i.e., wine) in human life? David Bentley Hart has a wonderful reflection on this in The Beauty of the Infinite. Jesus did institute the practice of drinking wine weekly for all Christians. That seems relevant to this conversation!
So the whole frame has to go. Start afresh with another framework, and then we can really get started.
From Benjamin Kunkel’s review of Tracy Daugherty’s new biography of Cormac McCarthy, I learned that McCarthy (a) gave himself the name Cormac and (b) was born in New England to a prosperous Catholic family and lawyer father. At times I think Kunkel is ungenerous to McCarthy’s work—he seems rather obsessed with not just the postwar consumerist context of McCarthy’s novels but the notion that anyone writing in that context needs to have shown evidence of responding to it in his fiction—but overall he does an excellent job of naming and elaborating both the faults critics tend to find in his writing and the virtues that help to explain why it has resonated so powerfully across the decades.
Martin Gramling:
The Aeneid, not the Odyssey, is surely the American classical epic: a well-funded, highly anticipated blockbuster, with a screenwriter hand-picked by the emperor himself; self-conscious, wholesome propaganda wrapped in delicious popular entertainment, designed to unify, enculturate, and civilize a vulgar but cosmopolitan hegemon at the dawn of its imperial age. Like so much popular American art, the Aeneid is a derivative but transgressive sequel. It has all the best bits from Homer, but inverts the good guys and the bad. That hollow horse was a dirty trick—we all believe that now, don’t we? Surely, the Trojans should inherit the earth.
And compared to Virgil, doesn’t Homer seem a little . . . European? Agamemnon and Achilles lounge dyspeptically on the beach, prissily arguing over honor and status and women—a continental scene, worthy of a bosquet at Versailles. Odysseus, that attractive rogue, that man of splendid wickedness, traps his enemies and reminds his exotic paramour, night after night, how virtuous his wife is—an English Guards officer; like James Bond but the son of an earl.
But Aeneas is an American hero. He does not seek his irrecoverable home, or pine for the family he left behind; he carries home with him—his boy at his knees, his father on his very back, and his wife conveniently dead—forward toward his heaven-ordained dominion. His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono; imperium sine fine dedi: “On them I set no limits in space or time; I give them empire without end.” No limits! That’s what a properly American god would say.
In the latest issue of First Things, I thought James Wood’s review of Keith Johnson’s new book on Barth and nationalism was fair-minded, judicious, irenic, and patient in its assessment and criticisms. Would be interested to hear Johnson’s reply.
I also just love to read Dan Hitchens' sentences, and his review of a new biography of Jan Morris is worth a read even to those who, like me, didn’t already know who Morris was.
I’ve already observed that Dale Coulter’s “Protestant Mind” newsletter is required reading. But I’ve been going back through previous newsletters and I have learned more than I can say—mostly about the world of American and global Pentecostalism, which he acknowledges can be opaque to outsiders. Reading Coulter is like getting a bimonthly education in a religion I thought I knew from the inside. Subscribe, people!
For now, read him on “The New Apostolic Reformation," “The Demonic and the Political," and “Protestant Prosperity Politics."
Here is a link to a video of the brief remarks I gave last week at the National Press Club in D.C. I was honored to receive the second annual Michael J. Gerson Prize for Excellence in Writing on Faith and Public Life. Thanks to the Trinity Forum and to the members of the committee who awarded it to me!
I learned a lot from Arvin Alaigh’s essay for Commonweal about Richard John Neuhaus, but I was disappointed by it. It was too unsympathetic, too one-sided, and too focused on arriving at its eventual conclusion to give a fair-handed—even if still ultimately critical or dismissive—treatment of its subject.
One clue: you will search the essay in vain for even a single mention of “abortion” or “marriage.” Surely a just consideration of the man, his thought, and his changes of mind and politics over the decades would require dealing with those issues, whatever one made of them or of what Neuhaus made of them.
“The CGI in The Magician’s Nephew, as we see it in the trailer, makes the movie look like an ad for Skittles.”
WSJ headline: “Netflix, America’s Dominant Streaming Service, Has Hit a Wall”
Subhead: “Company overhauling creative leadership as it struggles to get domestic audiences to watch more”
I have news for Netflix and all other streamers: There is no more “more” to chase. It’s all watching, all the time. Unless you want non-human bots to “watch” more hours and thus be “counted” for shareholders, we’ve reached the endgame, the ne plus ultra of streaming content. No more audiences, no more eyeballs, no more hours viewed. Finito.
Robin Sloan: “These are liquid platforms, for a liquid age.”
Hebrews 10:11-14:
Καὶ πᾶς μὲν ἱερεὺς ἕστηκεν καθ' ἡμέραν λειτουργῶν καὶ τὰς αὐτὰς πολλάκις προσφέρων θυσίας, αἵτινες οὐδέποτε δύνανται περιελεῖν ἁμαρτίας. οὗτος δὲ μίαν ὑπὲρ ἁμαρτιῶν προσενέγκας θυσίαν εἰς τὸ διηνεκὲς ἐκάθισεν ἐν δεξιᾷ τοῦ θεοῦ, τὸ λοιπὸν ἐκδεχόμενος ἕως τεθῶσιν οἱ ἐχθροὶ αὐτοῦ ὑποπόδιον τῶν ποδῶν αὐτοῦ· μιᾷ γὰρ προσφορᾷ τετελείωκεν εἰς τὸ διηνεκὲς τοὺς ἁγιαζομένους.
Here is the NRSVUE’s rendering:
And every priest stands day after day at his service, offering again and again the same sacrifices that can never take away sins. But when this one had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, “he sat down at the right hand of God,” and since then has been waiting “until his enemies would be made a footstool for his feet.” For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified.
As I was working my way (slowly) through the Greek of this passage yesterday, I initially read the bolded phrase as modifying Christ’s sitting, not his offering. That is to say, he sat down in perpetuity. DBH disagrees with me, as do most translations, but Wycliffe, Darby, and NABRE all agree with me. So I reached out to Paul Sloan to see what he thought.
I remarked that it seems to me that perpetual seatedness of Christ contrasts with the perpetual standing of the Levitical priests, whereas the singularity (and thus the non-perpetualness) of the sacrifice is taken care of by its “oneness,” reiterated in both verse 12 (μίαν ὑπὲρ ἁμαρτιῶν προσενέγκας θυσίαν ) and verse 14 (μιᾷ γὰρ προσφορᾷ). In the latter instance, though, we have no reiteration of εἰς τὸ διηνεκὲς.
Paul observed that this reading makes for a nice and neat ABBA structure:
A. They stand daily (ἕστηκεν καθ' ἡμέραν)
B. Making many sacrifices (τὰς αὐτὰς πολλάκις προσφέρων θυσίας)
B. Christ made a single sacrifice
A. And sat down forever
And now all he has to do is wait to prop up his (already resting) feet on the backs of his enemies.
And in the latest issue of Harper’s I was engrossed by Jackson Lears' polemical essay against American imperialism. Parts of the piece are far too one-sided—implying that an opposing view is groundless or unthinkably stupid or irrational—but the whole thing is worth reading. Here is one of many money lines:
The Founders feared that an empire committed to endless war would create scarcity amid plenty; centuries later, that fear has been vindicated.
Lears' argument about America’s imperial past and present is worth pairing with this recent ISI debate between Curt Mills and Phillip Blond on the same question.
In the most recent issue of the LRB (in my hands, that is), I enjoyed Malin Hay on box office flops and Tom Stevenson on “war-fi,” i.e., fictional accounts of war with Russia.
On the blog I wrote about Stephen Graham Jones’s novel The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.
Leonard Sax, in what may be the saddest set of sentences I’ve read in some time:
A recent survey of American teens found that 42% of boys aged 13 to 17 are now using A.I.-powered apps to create their own pornography. Thirty-two percent have created “deepfake” porn of girls their own age, then shared those images with others. In my work as a family physician and researcher, I have talked with these boys. One told me it’s almost magical: he speaks his fantasy, and—poof!—20 seconds later, there it is: professional-grade pornography, spun up in an app such as Seedream or Nano Banana. And this boy is 15 years old. He has never kissed a girl. A growing number of boys describe themselves not as heterosexual but as “pornosexual.” In my experience, a significant minority of these young men are virgins. They say that they prefer porn to the real thing. But they have never experienced the real thing.
Unfortunately, the elderly—by which I mean people over 40 years of age—often have no idea what is going on. A 16-year-old boy was suspended at a school I visited for creating deepfake porn of a classmate, then sharing those images with other boys at the school. When the parents were told what their son had done, they could neither believe nor understand what had happened. They had no idea such a thing was possible. They didn’t think their son was even looking at porn, much less producing and distributing it.
Read Emma Green on the battle for the post-Trump Right.
Victor Lee Austin writes of angels and AI: “Neither have bodies; both are essentially immaterial.”
But this is not true. This is part of the AI myth. Why data centers and vast amounts of water and energy if AI is immaterial? This is only an appearance, and a false and misleading one at that.
[This] is why the rest of us need to keep struggling through the dense ordeal of the small materialities of everyday life and the everyday routines of labor. The headwaters of thought are in that ordeal, and from them flow human relationships, both real and aspired towards, both the relations we imagine we want and those we hope to overcome. A little help here and there with tasks that are more difficult than they need to be in the infrastructures of the previous world is fine, but the “greater things” we want, the deeper thoughts we crave, will be found only in our bodies, our minds, and our language. No tool can tell us what matters, and the use of some tools in some circumstances tells us one unmistakeable thing only, which is that the user of the tool believes that we the reader, the listener, the audience do not in fact matter. I don’t take kindly to being told that, and neither should you.
I really loved Mere O’s new Writer’s Covenant. Well done, Jake.
I really appreciated TGC hosting opposed reactions to Mere Orthodoxy’s The Faith Received project. On the question of LLM-translated texts, Fred Sanders gave a cautious thumbs up, whereas James Eglington gave it a decided thumbs down.