Adam Roberts with a brilliant tale within a tale within a tale within a tale… I’d love to see more stories from Adam on his Substack.

Finished reading: Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer by Christopher Beha. A very good book. More thoughts coming soon in The Dispatch. 📚

Kevin D. Williamson: “Negative partisanship is the third-strongest force in American politics, coming in behind only inertia and stupidity.” 

A few years ago I had the honor of writing a little blurb for a wonderful book called Talking About Race: Gospel Hope for Hard Conversations, by Isaac Adams, the pastor of Iron City Church in my home town of Birmingham, Alabama. In the photo above Isaac is right in the middle, surrounded by other pastors in Birmingham who are part of an endeavor called United We Pray. Christians always say that want the unity Jesus promised to them — well, do they gather to pray for it? These folks do. I can’t be there for the gathering on March 15, but how I wish I could. I will pray from a distance but there’s no substitute for praying hand in hand. A meeting like this is a great sign of hope in a dark time; “For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground” (Isaiah 44:3). 

Rebuilding Jottit — tinypost:

Then last year something shifted. I kept seeing people express a longing for the old web. Before social media turned every thought into content and every person into a brand. Before the timeline replaced blogs. I felt it too. I started working on an open-source microblogging tool inspired by Jottit, but at some point I thought: why don't I just build Jottit instead? 

Ah yes, I remember it well! 

From Cadillac Desert I learned about some absurdly gigantic plans to move water from northern Canada to the American desert Southwest, among other places: the Great Recycling and Northern Development Canal and the even more bonkers North American Water and Power Alliance.

Re: Stewart Brand’s new campaign for maintenance, I’d like to add my own — somewhat neglected recently — project on Invitation and Repair.

I think the next U.S. military adventure should be called BONESTORM.

WSJ:

Your turn, ChatGPT. According to the OpenAI app, Claude is “an earnest grade student who will not take a position. If you ask Claude, ‘Is this policy good,’ it replies: ‘It can be understood as operating within a broader ethical framework that may, depending on one’s normative commitment.’ By the time Claude finishes clearing its throat, the Roman Empire has fallen again.”

Gemini doesn’t get off any easier. ChatGPT calls it a “corporate intern with a search bar. It doesn’t write essays. It produces deliverables. If Claude is anxious to be ethical, Gemini is anxious to be useful to a product manager.” 

Sneering at other writers? Can’t get any more human than that. 

The newest issue of Comment, on the need for renewal of our institutions, has many useful and provocative pieces. Anne Snyder has done such a great job as editor.

Nicholas Carr: What is it that MrBeast, as a “creator,” is “creating”? The obvious answer would be “content.” Content, after all, is what we talk about when we talk about digital media. It’s certainly what MrBeast talks about. But the more I think about online programming, ...

Approaches to Valhalla 

Finished reading: Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner, a powerful book that will make you despair of humanity. Representative passage: “You’re from the Park Service, aren’t you?” Mulholland demanded more than asked. “Yes, I am,” sa...

Matt Kleberg

Here’s my first post as a contributing writer for The Dispatch: an essay on how the rise of AI has changed my teaching.

Timothy Lee, whose newsletter is consistently the best guide to developments in AI: “I’ve read all of this information carefully, and it sure looks to me like OpenAI gave the Pentagon what it wanted and undercut Anthropic in the process. The contractual language shared by OpenAI does not appear to meaningfully restrict the government’s ability to spy on Americans or build fully autonomous weapons.” Unsurprising.

Also in this new edition of Hedgehog, another, shorter piece by me on how not to save the planet. Sample:

This marks for me my problem in reading [Jonathan] Schell and [Bill] McKibben: My “slow, unreckoning heart” is unable to keep up with the abstractions of “the Earth” or “Nature.” It needs something smaller to capture its power of affection. Schell himself wrote at the outset of The Fate of the Earth that “in spite of the immeasurable importance of nuclear weapons, the world has declined, on the whole, to think about them very much. We have thus far failed to fashion, or to discover within ourselves, an emotional or intellectual or political response to them.” Precisely.

New issue of The Hedgehog Review out today, with an essay by me trying to outline the conditions under which a new understanding of humanism might be forged and sustained. I’ve been thinking and writing on this topic for several years now, and this essay is my best attempt to map the territory.

A few years ago Reclaim Hosting (which hosts my big blog) decided to increase protections against hacking, so if I try to refresh the blog in MarsEdit it shuts everything down for an hour, making the blog inaccessible to readers as well as to me as editor. I like using MarsEdit to back up my blog to my computer, but I can no longer to that. Similarly, we’re about to change banks because our current bank repeatedly declines to honor obviously legitimate charges, like purchases at our local grocery store. I understand the need to protect against fraud, but not to the point at which a service regularly becomes completely unusable.

Watched: The Awful Truth. Not only the movie in which Cary Grant became CARY GRANT, it’s the very best of the Hollywood screwball comedies. I watch it almost every year. 🍿

Watched: Star Trek: The Next Generation S5E2, Darmok. A justly famous episode, and one day I need to write to explain why Ian Bogost gets it all wrong. 🍿

Watched: Blue Moon. Ethan Hawke’s performance as Lorenz Hart has been getting raves that it thoroughly deserves, but the story starts jumping off the screen when Andrew Scott’s Richard Rodgers shows up. The two of them together are electrifying. 🍿

Listening to Peter Gregson ♫

Ross Barkan: People still do read, make music, watch films, and visit art museums. There is a culture, high and middle and low, even if it’s under attack. There’s an awareness, too, of the cultural and spiritual sickness of anti-humans. The AI revolution is not very popular...

Terry Godier on his new RSS app:

When a source floods your feed with eighteen posts in a day, a quiet card appears between articles: “The Verge posted 18 items today.” With options to rate-limit or quiet the source. When you've skipped ten straight articles from the same source, Current notices: “You've skipped 10 from TechCrunch. Quiet or remove?” When you keep reading everything from a particular source: “You keep reading Craig Mod. Pin to the top?” When you keep reading about the same topic across different sources: “You keep reading design. Want a design Current?” 

To which I want to say: I’m reading my RSS feeds, I’m not taking questions right now. This seems far more intrusive than having an Unread count on your app’s icon (and I have that disabled in NetNewsWire anyway). 

We know that the best most effective users of AI platforms are people with highly developed skills and domain knowledge that they acquired independently of any AI use. So if we want our young people, who will become adults in an AI-dominated world, to navigate that world wisely and skillfully, we need to teach and train them as though AI does not exist. Only then can they use AI rather than be ruled by it. 

This story about a universally despised, utterly useless, and yet widely deployed e-learning app should remind us of a key truth: American schools at all levels will buy and mandate the use of anything that promises them cost savings. (And “cost savings” = “employing fewer humans.”) 

Terry Eagleton:  The liberal tends to hold that once we’re allowed to be free, our better natures will flourish; the conservative believes that only by the strict application of order and discipline can anything morally valuable be squeezed out of our selfish, indolent...

Yesterday we began discussing The Lord of the Rings (Book I) and the first question was: “Can you explain Tom Bombadil?” So we plunged in to a discussion of old Tom, who in fact is a key to the whole novel. At one point G, sitting next to her dear friend A, raised her hand.

G: There was a time when A’s greatest wish was to marry Tom Bombadil.

A (covering her face in her hands): I was twelve!