The dek here is exactly right: “Tech companies believe in intellectual property, but not yours.” They’ll protect their own IP with every resource available to them and steal ours without a moment’s hesitation.
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Today I was dicing a ham steak for risotto and dropped a few pieces on the floor, which Angus vacuumed up. Here he is a minute later, looking for all the world like Oliver Twist in the workhouse: “Please, sir, may I have more?”
Daring Fireball: ‘Your Frustration Is the Product’:
You read two paragraphs and there’s a box that interrupts you. You read another two paragraphs and there’s another interruption. All the way until the end of the article. We’re visiting their website to read a f***ing arti...
Richard Beer, Tresham’s Triangular Lodge (1971)
The Last Quiet Thing | Terry Godier:
What if the exhaustion everybody feels isn't a moral failure but the completely rational response to being made responsible for an ecosystem of objects that never stop asking?
I thought I had escaped the gravitational pull of Arsenal fandom, but then Max Dowman showed up. Now I’m in an unstable orbit.
We concluded that the public has a deep interest in understanding the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse. In so doing, we applied the same principle Reuters uses everywhere. The people and institutions who seek to shape social and political discourse are subject to scrutiny, accountability, and, sometimes, unmasking. Banksy’s anonymity – a deliberate, public-facing, and profitable feature of his work – has enabled him to operate without such transparency.
The idea that an artist, like a government agency, cannot be allowed to “operate without transparency” is ludicrous. This is idle curiosity masquerading as social responsibility.
Cal Newport:
This is a worst-case scenario: you work faster and harder, but mainly on shallow, mentally taxing tasks (because of all the context shifting they require) that only indirectly help the bottom line compared to harder efforts.
It’s not quite clear why AI tools ar...
Carole King, 1971. So so beautiful.
A wonderful essay on Constable’s The Leaping Horse and … other matters.
I’m in The Dispatch this morning on Christopher Beha’s new book on unbelief, belief, and skepticism. And, I am told, if you use the promo code JACOBS at checkout you can get 15% off an annual Dispatch subscription.
A great saint, John M. Perkins, has passed. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.
A coarse world does not require us to become coarse; we can insist on our values even if they appear not to be widely shared. What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding? (What’s so funny about truth, justice, and the American way?) I am not (and I will wager: you are not) a head of state or a political operative; we are not required to be cynical or “realistic”. We can remain, with discipline, realists of a larger reality —the knowledge that the people who do this kind of stuff are already in hell.
The next few days are gonna be … interesting
Novelists who help us think theologically about this country’s racial history:
- for 1850-1900: William Faulkner
- for 1900-1950: Ralph Ellison
- for 1950-2025: Albert Murray
All of America’s most theologically rich and provocative thinkers are novelists — and this is true even when they don’t know they’re being theological.
- Marilynne Robinson: theologian of America’s past
- Thomas Pynchon: theologian of America’s present
- Philip K. Dick: theologian of America’s future
[Richard Zhang] said the members of his group had many questions about how to deploy Al in their lives, such as: “Can I have an Al pastor? Should we have Al-generated worship music? Should I get an Al to read the Bible or pray with me, to judge my spirituality?”
I’m gonna say
(a) Are you out of your mind?
(b) Lord have mercy, no
(c) Absolutely not
(d) Oh HELL no
My suggestion to pastors who are tempted by this stuff: Read Brad East’s book on the screen-free church when it comes out, and read Matt Erickson’s book on The Pastor as Gardener now.
Paul Kingsnorth:
The thing is, once you begin to examine those delusions, you see that one of the most pernicious is the construction of a self-identity. This is necessary to survive in the world, probably, but soon enough it becomes a yoke around the neck. This constructio...
Romare Bearden, The Visitation (1941)
Romare Bearden, Baptism (1964)
Here’s Micah Mattix, the editor of Portico, on this new endeavor.
I wrote a post for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters about Cosmos Murray and Cosmos Jacobs.
Wanting to find out if money does in fact make everything better, I bought a brand-new, confidently-made, 2026 portable CD player, equipped with all the fixings to make playing a CD as smooth as streaming.
So far so good: yesterday, going to Barbes in Park Slope, SMOKE on the Upper West Side, and back home to Bay Ridge, I listened to Daniel Barenboim and Gervase DePeyer play Brahms’ Clarinet Concerto No. 1 enough times to develop a favorite movement (2nd) and to feel that Barenboim is sometimes just too rubato for me. I just wouldn’t have done this with streaming, where endless novelty is the point. Scarcity and necessity are back.
Christopher Beha, from Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer :
I could tell that my foundation was sound. I just wanted to know what was underfoot. So I told myself, Suppose you start with love. That was the one clear and certain thing in my life...
Watched: 49th Parallel. An excellent piece of propaganda, though I can’t decide whether it is enlivened or diminished by the French-Canadian trapper’s accent of … Laurence Olivier. Sacré bleu! 🍿
Watched: Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger. A wonderful tribute to the Archers (especially Michael Powell) by Scorsese, which makes me wish I could enjoy their movies as much as he does. 🍿