And from six years ago, on my old Buttondown newsletter: Easter with Arcabas.

New from me: “Welcome to the party, Christmas and Easter Christians!”

Tech CEO asks
Chatbot why it is frozen.
Chatbot: “You’re frozen.”

The other day I wrote, “Chatbots’ brains don’t have a right hemisphere.” Several people — surprisingly many — have asked me to expand on that. But I dunno: expanding on it feels like a very left-hemisphere thing to do. 

My advice for the new Archbishop of Canterbury | Rowan Williams: 

It might sound odd to approach Easter thinking about fear. But it’s striking that the earliest gospel finishes by telling us that the women who came to the tomb of Jesus and found it empty initially ‘said nothing because they were afraid’. Nothing is going to be the same again: being afraid is the most natural reaction. We are all on the back foot: the ‘cultural Christian’, who likes to have a little bit of Christian decor in the house; the Christian nationalist, who wants non-Christians to know their place; the liberal Anglican, who wants everyone to feel comfortably at home. If what is said to Mary and what is done on Easter Day are indeed world-changing matters, we do well to be apprehensive. Only then can we begin to see just what we are to be thankful for. Release. Transformation. 

The key point about all these “high agency” people is that they’re agentic in relation to existing institutions and human beings but mimetic in relation to money. They do whatever money wants. They want to be money. They put money where their mouth is. And it talks. 

Today in the noon Good Friday service our parish choir sang quite beautifully two powerful anthems I hadn’t heard before:

• “Crux fidelis” — by Sarah Macdonald
• ”Were You There?” — as arranged by Bob Chilcott

(Of course I know “Were You There?” but not this arrangement of it) 

Saving the sento

Watched: Roman Holiday. Twenty years ago David Thomson write that “Seen today, Roman Holiday is hard to finish, because it has only its charm.” Since it has more charm that any dozen ordinary movies, I didn’t have any trouble finishing it — or watching it again. 🍿

Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom - Ars Technica:

So why did Sweden pivot? In an email to Undark, Linda Fälth, a researcher in teacher education at Linnaeus University, wrote that the “decision to reinvest in physical textbooks and reduce the emphasis on digital devices” was prompted by several factors, including questions around whether the digitalization of classrooms had been evidence-based. “There was also a broader cultural reassessment,” Fälth wrote. “Sweden had positioned itself as a frontrunner in digital education, but over time concerns emerged about screen time, distraction, reduced deep reading, and the erosion of foundational skills such as sustained attention and handwriting.”

If indeed Gen Z are turning to the Book of Common Prayer, I know a book that might help them understand its rich history.

I devoutly — I choose the adverb with care — wish Christians would just stop writing these speculative essays about where Christianity is headed, what the future holds for Christians, etc. etc. We’ve been ordered not to think that way. It’s a half-hearted form of divination, and an excellent way to be distracted from what the follower of Christ is called to be or do right now. Holy Week is a good time to recognize this habit of endless speculation as a form of disobedience and to renounce it.

Andre Malraux was a major French writer, a cultural icon, and also an arrogant, incompetent, and unrepentant thief of Khmer cultural antiquities. 

The Milky Way over the Rio Grande at Big Bend National Park. Photo by Stephen Alvarez. This area is part of the world’s largest international dark sky reserve. It’s hard to describe, for the modern person who lives in brightly lit areas, the magnificence of the night sky in such dark places. I am blessed to live relatively near some of the darkest skies in the world. 

Speaking of love or money, Joni Mitchell’s song by that name from her 1974 live record Miles of Aisles absolutely crushes. The band is super-tight, the recording and mixing are superb, and Joni … is Joni.

Re: my recent post on how I use Claude: I have never used a chatbot to write even one word for me, and I never will. The reason is simple: I love making sentences, and paragraphs, and stories, and arguments. Love the act of writing more than I can say; wouldn’t outsource it ...

The gift which I am sending you is called a dog, and is in fact the most precious and valuable possession of mankind. For while other animals are each of them of use to us in virtue of one particular quality, and possess a special and distinguishing excellence, this one ani...

My dear friend Wesley Hill is going to Wycilffe College at the University of Toronto — this, I predict, will be a great thing for the college and the professor alike.

here

Austin Kleon:

Years ago, we bought a big box of new doorknobs for our old house. Once I had my technique down, I could replace a doorknob in a couple minutes, but every door was slightly different, warped with time, so there was enough thinking involved to keep each replacement interesting. I found the process enormously satisfying. So satisfying, in fact, that I didn’t replace all the doorknobs at once. I saved a handful of doorknobs for times when I was feeling really stressed out.

It seems that temps perdu doesn’t just mean “lost time” but also “spare time.” Proust in search of spare time?

The Bills That Destroyed Urban America — The New Atlantis:

Americans are now three generations into a set of policies that, on the one hand, provide open-ended subsidies for sprawl and, on the other, do little to ameliorate the problems of the urban core — and maybe even aggravate them. Over time, this has come to seem like an unalterable fact of life and the work of the invisible hand of the market. But in this case, the hand is being nudged by Uncle Sam. 

The sequel is here. 

A reminder to my U.S. readers: now that Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch is published here, you have an absolute moral and aesthetic obligation to buy it and read it. It is a magnificent book — and the first of a pair! (The second one is in progress.)

Am I Against AI?

Francis Young: As we enter Holy Week and Lent draws to a close, I feel a certain relief; not just because I have given something up for Lent that I rather miss (in my case, beer), but because I find that Lent can quite easily become spiritually toxic – at least for me. It c...

The [left hemisphere of the brain] is unreasonably optimistic, and it lacks insight into its limitations. The [right hemisphere] is more realistic, but tends towards the pessimistic.

— This from McGilchrist is especially interesting in light of my recent quote from Scruton’s The Uses of Pessimism.

I’m going in: The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist 📚

Bertrand Russell (1932): Modern technic has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor necessary to produce the necessaries of life for every one. This was made obvious during the [Great] War. At that time all the men in the armed forces, all the men and wo...

I started to blog something about this new Cal Newport essay, but then I thought: Why? Everyone already knows all this. If you haven’t changed your habits by now, are you likely to do so? Newport is right to say that there is precedent for a widespread transformation of American habits, but the difference between our current situation and the unhealthy-eating-no-exercise 1950s is that those previous bad habits weren’t nearly as addictive as the ones that are consuming human minds today. 

(https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/mar/29/igor-tudor-leaves-tottenham-after-44-days-with-club-mired-in-relegation-troubled) is the shortest Tudor reign since Lady Jane Grey.