The current POTUS issues a great many insults, but his linguistic capabilities are extremely limited, so he simply recirculates the same handful of vague descriptors: “loser,” “weak,” “traitor.” How dull. Let’s remember that American politicians used to have some skill in th...

In church yesterday we began the service with the Great Litany. As the choir repeatedly circled the congregation, with our music minister chanting the versicles and all of us responding to them, I felt myself part of a much larger phenomenon, the penitential procession of the whole Church as we enter Lent. Good Lord, deliver us … We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord … Son of God, we beseech thee to hear us.

Coaling towers

I can’t remember whether my review of a collection of poems by Czeslaw Miłosz has previously been liberated from its paywall, but it’s free to read now.

Austin Kleon:

It’s a weird time, to say the very least, to be putting out a book about curiosity and wonder and freedom and fun and humor and imperfection and magic. But it’s also a time when, I think, we could desperately use those things in our lives. Watching my kids draw and make music and come alive to the world unlocked something in me that I’ve been trying to get into book form for over 10 years.

I keep hearing AI advocates say that the universal deployment of AI will create a “productivity explosion” and “unprecedented wealth creation” and will “end poverty.” All I want to know is: How? How will the money made by the big AI companies end up in the pockets of the poor? I’m not even asking for a plausible scenario — I’d be happy to see any scenario at all, anything more than “THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS.” 

By me: Blow-Up: A Parable

I’m pleased to say that I will be editing another volume in the Auden Critical Editions series: the 1951 collection Nones. 

So pleased to see Philip Hensher’s rave review of Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch. I had the privilege of reading Nonesuch during the process of composition, and let me tell you, it’s everything Hensher says it is. What a book. See also Andrew Motion’s review in the TLS: “These ...

Can’t imagine a better Lenten endeavor than to read and reflect on Matt Milliner’s close encounter of the chatbot kind.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent. Very large version here. As Auden reminds us, one of the most noteworthy elements of these crowded Bruegel paintings is the depiction of people going about their own business, completely oblivious to whatever theme or topic the painting is supposed to be depicting.

Currently reading: Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer by Christopher Beha 📚

Mary Elizabeth Groom’s engravings from the 1937 Golden Cockerel Press edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost:

Last week I announced to my BMAC supporters that I’ll be severely curtailing my Big Blog for the foreseeable future, but I’ve discovered that I have a few drafts of essays — nearly finished or else complete but with no obvious home — that I could post. So one of those went up today: it’s on making movies and making war. I wrote it after reading Dan Wang’s Breakneck.

I’m grateful to Amanda Patchin for this generous review of my Paradise Lost biography.

Thinking of buying this house — I mean, how much could it cost?

I often think of a passage from David Foster Wallace’s famous essay on television, “E Unibus Pluram,” in relation to our current media environment:

TV is the epitome of Low Art in its desire to appeal to and enjoy the attention of unprecedented numbers of people. But it is not Low because it is vulgar or prurient or dumb. Television is often all these things, but this is a logical function of its need to attract and please Audience. And I’m not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

I would rather call it Writers for Writing, but sure, sign me up.

Gabriel Rossman:

As a friend who works in Al told me, Al heightens the contradictions. It is a boon to those with the motivation and background to cultivate knowledge but it spells total destruction for the system of universal education and credentialing. My worry is that we may run out of people with motivation and background to learn, know, and do. In the future, Gen X and millennial knowledge workers will be the human capital equivalent to pre-war steel. Just as particle detectors need steel forged before atmospheric nuclear testing gave all newly forged steel unacceptable background radiation, we will discover that even if your job mostly consists of interacting with LLMs, doing so well will require people who remember what it was like to read and interpret a document or contrast two ideas without asking an LLM to do it for you.

I’m very much enjoying teaching Lud-in-the-Mist again. A few years back I wrote a brief essay about it.

An update for my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.

A heart-breaking and heart-healing reflection by Rachel Teubner on birth and death in an endlessly mobile world.

Robert Gibbings

John Gallagher: States struggled to work out their role in these rapidly changing systems. Private mail presented different problems: should couriers working for state-funded postal services be allowed to carry post on behalf of paying customers? For the states that underwr...

On learning a lesson from ST:TNG.

I wonder how many U.S. court cases have already been decided by judges using chatbots to write their opinions in response to lawyers on both sides who used chatbots to write their briefs.

Robin Sloan:

It’s inter­esting and useful to imagine — really visualize — the chat­bots and agents in ten years or twenty … barnacled with gunk … locked in a per­ma­nent cat-and-mouse game with their adversaries … just as a plat­form like Google is today. In 2036, you send your AI agent out into the internet, and it returns battered, bedraggled, inex­plic­ably enthu­si­astic about a bar­gain flight to Bermuda.

Symmetries in Homer.

Lord Dunsany, from The King of Elfland’s Daughter:

There passed ten years over the fields we know; and Orion grew and learned the art of Oth, and had the cunning of Threl, and knew the woods and the slopes and vales of the downs, as many another boy knows how to multiply figures by other figures or to draw the thoughts from a language not his own and to set them down again in words of his own tongue. And little he knew of the things that ink may do, how it can mark a dead man’s thought for the wonder of later years, and tell of happenings that are gone clean away, and be a voice for us out of the dark of time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages; or carry to us, over the rolling centuries, even a song from lips long dead on forgotten hills.