So much going on in the garden right now I can’t keep it all in focus.
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Wow, more than a third of the 100 best novels of all time were written in my lifetime, almost all of them in English. I guess we’re just a lot better at writing novels than non-Anglos all those mediocrities who preceded us.
Many people have already written about the chatbot-generated phishing scams directed at writers: We love your writing and can’t wait to promote your book etc. But what surprises me is how many of them there are. I get them almost every day now. Fortunately, it didn’t take long for spam filters to figure them out … which is interesting in itself. Such messages are unlike typical spam in most respects, so what gives them away?
Frank Hughes, A Somerset Farm (c. 1930)
Currently listening: The Danish String Quartet, Keel Road. Healing music. ♫
Speaking of being ahead of the curve: there’s a new book on what’s wrong with the whole “cultural Marxism” discourse, but I showed what’s wrong with it in this 2018 blog post.
in Breaking Bread with the Dead I have a riff on R. A. Lafferty’s 1965 story “Slow Tuesday Night” — which, in light of this report by Charlie Warzel puts me ahead of the curve and puts Lafferty waaaaaay ahead of the curve.
The Unofficial Angus Fan Club has been vocal lately, so here you go, guys.
If you happen to see me this week and I am muttering to myself or laughing maniacally, this is why.
Halfway through one of my lectures [at the Kyiv School of Economics], the air-raid siren went off. We relocated to this old Soviet-era building and went two or three stories underground into a bomb shelter with huge blast doors. We continued the class. And the students were beaming. It lifted me up to see their enthusiasm, their commitment. It also reinforced something very deep about our common humanity, which is that we humans like to learn, even in a time of war.
I also couldn’t help but notice that these students had a very different understanding of safety than American students. When American students want a safe space, it’s because they don’t want to hear threatening ideas. For Ukrainian students, safety means learning without bombs falling.
Typesetting Races before the Age of Linotype:
On the afternoon of Saturday, February 19, 1870, a young compositor named George Arensberg astonished the printing world when he achieved a feat few thought possible: setting more than two thousand “ems” of solid minion type in a single hour (about 760 words, or 13 words a minute).
My son is my biggest fan.
‘The digital colonization of flyover states’: how datacenters are tearing small-town America apart. We’re dealing with our own version of the situation here in the Waco area. The first common thread is the contempt the techbros have for any resistance. They make no attempt to win hearts and minds; they just try to trample everyone in their path. The second common thread is their ceaseless lying about water use: a new data center about 30 miles from me denies that it will be using any water from Lake Whitney. It is, we are told, pure coincidence that the data center happens to be located on the lakeshore.
Our Monterey oak is 10 years old — seems like it was a baby just yesterday.
John Webster:
In word and deed, in speech and action, then, we utter our Amen to God. If there is a conclusion to draw here, it is this. Christian wisdom consists in letting God be God, in hearing and consenting to God's great declaration in the gospel that the time i...
One season in and I’m a bit annoyed with DS9. Details here.
I have some questions about an article claiming that religious persuasion should be deemed a human-rights violation.
My guitar hero Martin Simpson has posted a beautiful recording of an old English folk song, “The Recruited Collier” — also known as “Jenny’s Complaint” or “Jimmy’s Enlisted.” These folk songs often have obscure and convoluted histories.
Baylor, like most American universities, is in panic mode. Meanwhile, my students are writing to me to ask “Oh, is this why you don’t use Canvas?“ One of several reasons, my friends.
What strikes me now is not that we were careless. It is that we were able, at the same time, to be sincere. To drink and mean it. To feel genuine warmth while knowing, somewhere else in the mind, that the world had already shifted. We inhabited two realities. And we chose, as people always do, to live inside the warmer one.
Nate Anderson (my former student!) on how Reddit is trying to force people onto its app, employing the same enshittifying strategy that Substack does. This is why I’m on micro.blog. Manton makes apps for our convenience but never tries to force us to use them.
When Ford rolls out a new pickup truck, the CEO generally doesn’t go around giving keynote addresses about how much more lethal it will make American highways. But the AI industry is selling a narrative — a mythos, if you will — as much as it’s selling a product, and that narrative is one of revolutionary, transformational power. “Our product can make your life a bit easier, although there are still a lot of kinks to iron out” is not a trillion-dollar sales pitch; “we’ve invented something so powerful that it has the potential to destroy humanity” is. The company that can end the world controls the future, and investors will spend big on that upside bet. After all, if the world ends, an investor’s losses won’t matter anyway.
I think I’ve mentioned that every morning — every morning without exception — I wake up with a different song in my head. Never know what the internal roulette wheel will serve up, whether something from fifty years ago or from last week. Anyway, this morning I got a banger.
