I’ll add my voice to the chorus and say that you need to read about the rise of “dinergoths."
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.
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.