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...
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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. 🍿
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).
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.