I do love me some Caslon 

“Influencers” and “content creators”: People who want to affect others in unspecified ways for unspecified reasons by unspecified means.

Postcards

This biographer of C. S. Lewis has no comment.

Currently reading: A Company of Readers Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from The Readers’ Subscription and Mid-century Book Clubs. It’s odd to think that Auden and Barzun were born in the same year, two years after Trilling, and the Barzun lived until 2012. 📚 

Barton Swaim: I am reminded by the appearance of this delightful magazine that my own desultory education happened in large measure in the pages of periodicals. Many were the hours I sat at coffeeshops and bars, or in my little apartment over cheap dinners, reading the Time...

This announcement of Delays Ahead on Cosmos Malick — complete with an Albertina Walker shout-out — is relevant to readers of my other blogs also.

Finished reading: Twilight of Authority by Robert Nisbet, from 1975. Nisbet has long been an important writer for me, but this, the only one of his major books I hadn’t read, is a disappointment, vague and full of moot assertions. There’a a provocative point in the Preface,...

One lawn down the street from us is filled this evening with fireflies! — or lightning bugs, as we called them in Alabama when I was growing up. It’s so wonderful to see them: they are rare now (I hadn’t seen any for years) but they filled the summer evenings of my childhood. Sitting cross-legged on the porch and watching the lightning bugs under the pecan trees was one of the defining experiences of my whole sensibility.

Gianni Benvenuti, illustration from Winny-Puh (the Italian translation of Winnie-the-Pooh). 

Gianni Benvenuti

British footy announcers identifying a player from the U.S. when he does something impressive: “the Fulham left-back,” “the Juventus midfielder,” etc.

British footy announcers identifying the same player when he does something wrong: “The American.”

From an earlier essay on Elizabeth on the alternative to thinking of every social/cultural political situtation as a pitched battle:

Warriors are right that this world is certainly full of problems, and sometimes battles must be fought. Nobody can shrug them off or pretend that they don’t exist. But losers don’t in fact shun the active life. Instead, they are engaged in activity that takes place in a much deeper stratum of consciousness than political and journalistic warfare. They invest energy in existentially permanent activities, like loving and caring for other people: children, students, family, neighbors, colleagues. They work as musicians, educators, physicians, priests, and artists. Beautiful losers renew and pass on the art, literature, and manners that constitute the best of our culture.

My friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey: Certainly the professoriate leans leftward. But it turns out that people from right and left can agree on many things despite our differences: for example, what to read in our courses, pedagogical practices, and how to care for our s...

On the right tools for the (or my) classroom job.

I say this every couple of years, and it’s time: The next time someone tells you that René Girard is a great genius, before you decide you believe it please read this essay by Joshua Landy.

Sylvia Pixley

Sara Hendren: It can be hard to fully appreciate this kind of design for the astonishing, radical statement in its provision: that the babies of strangers carry the kind of dignity that is tantamount to those of close kin and tribe. It’s an idea that had to be invented, tha...

Freddie: The most telling thing about the LLM moment is what this technology is actually good at. LLMs write code, generate images, produce music, summarize documents, draft prose… which is to say, they have achieved mastery over the exact domains that were already, by any ...

Emma Green’s long report on the College of St. Joseph the Worker is just wonderful. Jacob Imam, the college’s founder, was our student here in Baylor’s Honors College — and my son’s classmate — and we all knew he was destined for great things, but we couldn’t have predicted this Great Thing. 

Is this church open?

Why your AI assistant is suddenly selling to you:

Chatbots are employed every day as teachers, counsellors, coders and escorts. Now they are taking on another role: salesmen. Advertisements are popping up ever more frequently in users’ conversations with large language models, punctuating chats with promotions. Consumers’ search queries, editing sessions and even intimate moments are increasingly at risk of interruption by sponsored messages. 

Who could possibly have predicted this??? 

Malick, Emerson, the Sphinx.

Robin Sloan:

I believe the notebook provides a basically comprehensive model for information technology:

• Easy to manufacture anywhere on Earth
• Available in many configurations, from cheap to luxe
• Never runs out of power
• Never surprises you with an OS update
• Totally flexible interface: becomes whatever you imagine
• Totally private … yet never locks you out for lack of a password
• Can be shared when needed: as easy as tearing out a page
• Durable and reliable
• Data is sensibly partitioned: loss of a notebook is annoying, not life-ruining
• Compostable 😌

I know some of those sound a bit silly, even glib, but I think they’re all very serious, even the last one. I have purchased and trashed enough e-readers!! I don’t want any more plastic confections. I don’t want any more accounts. 

I am so enjoying Robin’s metamorphoses. 

You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education - The New York Times:

Besides, so the thinking goes, kids today are digital natives. Because they’ve grown up around screens, their brains must be fundamentally different from those of older generations. Teachers need to “meet them where they are” by catering to shorter attention spans and swapping books for multimedia lessons. The more that math and language assignments resemble a video game, the more students will learn.

Every step in this argument is wrong.

This is good news, but not quite as good as I thought it was after reading the first few words

Sober or blotto
This is your motto
Keep muddling through

Ordering the texts for my classes … for the last time. (A solitary tear slides down my cheek.) All 19th and 20th century texts, which is somewhat unusual for me, but not altogether unrepresentative of what I do. The one book on the list I’ve never taught before is the Balzac...

A Manufacturing Town by L.S. Lowry (National Media Museum/Royal Photographic Society/SSPL/Getty Images), from an essay by Salford’s own Terry Eagleton. 

When I look at the choices offered to Americans by their two chief political parties, I always remember a line from Woody Allen’s “My Speech to the Graduates”: “One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”