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Book/magazine cover art by Kenneth Romney Towndrow
A remarkable intaglio from the Getty Museum: Aeneas and his family escaping Troy. The museum dates this around 20 B.C., which was around the time of Virgil’s death, with his poem unfinished — and surely this is a depiction of the scene specifically as described by Virgil, with Aeneas carrying Anchises on his back and leading Ascanius by the hand. Does this mean that the artist had read the in-progress Aeneid? Or that Virgil was borrowing the details from some earlier history?
The third installment of my Dispatch series on the meaning of the Second World War today.
Back in Tokyo, after the fireworks spectacular, I went to Yoyogi Park. An announcement was playing: “Rollerblading is dangerous, make sure you don’t do it! And be sure to not play catch! And stay off the bike paths! And don’t run in the non-running areas!” I was barely ten feet into the park when I heard those broadcast rules in both Japanese and English. As the rules were sermonized overhead, people moved with heat-stroke torpidity, smartphones cradled near their faces. Last fall, while walking through Yoyogi, I counted: 97 out of 100 people were looking at their phones. Nobody was doing anything that looked particularly fun. Never have I felt it more acutely: The world doesn’t need a park that bans rollerblading. It needs one that bans smartphones.
Glenn Reynolds:
As Nachman said, [Sullivan] lost because they changed the law. And, I think it’s fair to say that they changed the law because the Court — and in particular Justice Brennan — favored the role of the institutional press in American society and wanted to creat...
On AI Coding and Its Discontents - Cal Newport
He told me that features he generated using Claude Code ended up crashing their product on two different occasions. His boss told him that if it happened one more time, he’d be fired. “I’ve never had quality issues like this before in my career.”
The problem is that code produced by an AI agent looks reasonable, but can contain ‘hard-to-spot bugs’ that end up causing major problems. As a result, you should carefully review your agent’s output, but this is difficult. As the engineer told me, it’s “famously hard” to understand code you didn’t write yourself, so this extra step becomes “easy to just blow it off (especially when we are all trying to ‘10x’ our velocity).” Soon, systems start to break.
When you start to lose the coders….
At Cosmos Malick: New Worlds and Old.
A very small part of the supermassive datacenter being built on the shores of Lake Whitney. The companies who build these things always deny that they use a lot of water, and yet they always build them on lakes and rivers. What an odd coincidence.
Ezra Pound, from Guide to Kulchur (1938):
The Homeric world, very human. The Odyssey high water mark for the adventure story, as for example Odysseus on the spar after shipwreck. Sam Smiles never got any further in preaching self-reliance. A world of irresponsible gods, a very high society without recognizable morals, the individual responsible to himself.
John Adams:
Scarcely any two writers, much less nations, agree in using words in the same sense. Such a latitude, it is true, allows a scope for politicians to speculate, like merchants with false weights, artificial credit, or base money, and to deceive the people, by maki...
Coming: Tom and Wystan.
Today I concluded my four-post miniseries on religion and the movies — as seen through moments in Hail, Caesar!
David Bennett has a wonderful music-theory-ish overview of Revolver — released 60 years ago this week.
As you've heard me say many times, I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health. It’s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer.
When I see any AI make any progress on the amelioration (not even the cure) of any disease, I’ll treat this as something other than the sales pitch of a con man. Not until. And I think that should be everyone’s attitude. The Big Tech companies have been so indifferent, or even hostile, to human well-being for so many years now that their promises are worth absolutely zero. Maybe they (or people using their products) will indeed cure some diseases; and if they do I will thank them and praise them. (h/t @manton for the quote)
What makes the Arday situation distinctive, and different from the Platner situation and from my former colleague who claimed she was chased by a rhinoceros once too often, is that the organization — Cambridge University — doesn’t seem to have responded with any recognition that the organization’s mission was in any way damaged or threatened, other than in a public relations sense, if the accusations against Arday were true. That raises the reasonable suspicion that the organization doesn’t recognize that it has a mission, or, alternatively, believes that whatever Arday was doing was unrelated to that mission. That suspicion, in turn, is a far, far greater threat to the organization than Arday’s hire was.
Michael Marinaccio:
Whether they know it or not, the laissez-faire techno-optimists in those parenting manuals are taking issue with the words of King Thamus, the legendary Egyptian monarch invoked by Plato in the Phaedrus. According to the parable, Theuth, t...
T.J. Clark:
The practices of present-day ‘comparable’ communities strike me as a very poor guide. We have at different times labelled such groupings Indigenous, Marginalised, Tribal, Primitive; all names, tabooed or not, that circle around some kind of rearguard action – s...
Frank C. Keil:
Well before they begin schooling, children are driven to look beyond the obvious. They spontaneously explore and uncover hidden parts that provide pleasing insights into the underlying causal machinery governing their visible properties and behavior. This is ...
Someone Is Mysteriously Snapping Up Used Books Around the World - The Atlantic:
For now, this is what we know: A lot of used books are suddenly being bought up by companies including Zoom Books. But we do not know how many of these orders are coming from AI companies, or whether these books will be destroyed. Based on the practices of Anthropic and the attempted purchases by 2077AI, it seems very possible that the books are destined for AI companies, but we can’t be certain.
Regardless, the idea of an AI behemoth destroying books has sent a bolt through the collective psyche. Book destruction is historically linked to authoritarian regimes and attempts to control public discourse, as well as ancient tragedies — the burning of the Library of Alexandria comes to mind.
Wendell Berry, in a 2006 interview about his novel Jayber Crow:
Jayber, as he looks back on his life, feels that he was called to be a member and a servant of Port William. Looking back on my own life, I have a similar feeling — that I was called to do the work I’ve done. L...
The Mackintosh Building at the Glasgow School of Art is an extraordinary work of architecture — but it was badly damaged in a 2018 fire and the school can’t afford to restore it. I very much hope some persons or organizations with deeper pockets will step up.
Baylor is transitioning from a monthly to a semi-monthly pay schedule, so this assignment just showed up in my inbox: “Your Semi-Monthly Payroll Readiness Journey has been assigned to all monthly-paid employees.”
My “journey.” My journey.
My Readiness Journey.
This morning I had a difficult conversation with Claude.
Looks like this could be a complicated story
Finished reading: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. I haven’t read this in many years, and it’s just fabulous. The mastery with which Collins organizes and deploys his many threads of plot is something to behold. I’m tempted to to start over! 📚
For a long time, I conflated the university with the intellectual goods it happened to house. I assumed that if I cared about reading, teaching, inquiry, and intellectual formation, then I had to defend the university in its present form.
I no longer think that.
My more primary commitment is to those practices and to the possibility of participating in them, sharing them, and carrying them forward. The university has cared for some of those practices for the past couple of centuries. In many ways, it is still materially hospitable to them. It gives us libraries, salaries, laboratories, students, and time.
But it has also become increasingly inhospitable to them.
See Chad’s brilliant new book on this subject.