Christianity and the problem of the gods - by Francis Young: I am not proposing a solution to the problem of the gods. It is an age-old and difficult cultural problem for Christians. But it is worth pointing out that the ‘re-supernaturalisation’ of mainline Christianity we ...

I like to read lying on the sofa, but if I ever get up and go into another room for a few moments, this is inevitably what I find when I return: 

Are Terrence Malick’s films “pretty”?

For some time recently I contemplated writing a biography of M. R. James — and I’m now glad I didn’t commit because here’s a new one. Any editor who would like me to review it should hit me up!

Watched: Munich. Had to write a (spoilery) post on this one. 🍿

A decade or more ago there was a robust ecosystem of libraries and museums sharing items from their collections on the open web, but now they’re all on Instagram and other walled gardens. I think that’s wholly inconsistent with their institutional missions. I hope they come back some day. 

Felix Hoffmann

Wonderful photo by Wendi Poole of Steuart Pincombe, whose music did so much to enhance this retreat. 

This explanation of why my Big Blog is called The Homebound Symphony is also a good overview of what I’m trying to do in all my online writing. 

me irl rn

My old internet friend Erin Kissane and I probably have some significant disagreements about electoral politics, but there’s a deeper politics of how human beings communicate with one another about which we are in real agreement. I love the work on our common life she’s been doing ever since the Covid Tracking Project — a great example, by the way, of how anarchic practices can achieve things impossible for our formal political order. Nowadays she’s thinking about clouds and atmospheres‚ literally and metaphorically, and I am tracking carefully.

See also Ruskin on the open skies and on cloud beauty.

This clip of the “worst 20 seconds in football” — from a 1993 QPR-Man City match — is just mesmerizing. The intricacy of the choreography is worthy of a Jackie Chan movie.

Synopsis: Four drug-addled Englishmen are lost, confused, and at one another’s throats until a quiet, friendly Texan comes along to give them new hope and a new sense of purpose. 🍿

Over at Cosmos Malick: The Girl’s Story. 

A shipwreck with a great deal of champagne (and other things) 

I’m teaching a class this term called Four Big Books. I describe it here. 

Interviewed by Ezra Klein, the political consultant Morris Katz notes one major factor making it difficult for genuinely grass-roots political candidates to emerge and succeed: the precipitous decline in local journalism. If a candidate says that people in his or her area ca...

John McWhorter:

In Latin, H was “ha,” and K as “ka” came after it. People reciting the alphabet would say “ha, ka, el ….” But Latin didn’t really need the K, because C did its job. (Caesar was pronounced “KIGH-sar.”) So people started thinking of “ha, ka” as referring just to H and saying “haka.” Heavy usage transforms pronunciation. “Haka” dropped the “H” at the start like Eliza Doolittle was taught out of in her “Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire” exercise — “aka.” Then the K changed to a “ch” — “ahcha” — and the A at the end dropped off — “ahch.” Then the “ah” changed to “ay” and hence “aitch”! We should really be calling H something like “hay.” But hey, we don’t — and the world keeps spinning.

"So, Professor Jacobs, what do you work on during your summer break?” 

“Well, mainly I watch Jackie Chan movies.” 🍿

A new entry in my ongoing series of posts on religion, the Bible, and the movies: this one on how that earnest purveyor of Biblical epics, Cecil B. DeMille, put more skin on the screen than any other Hollywood director and forced the creation of the Hays Code. 

A random snapshot taken in Central Park in 2008 — with the original iPhone. Funny how lo-res digital imagery now has a nostalgic aura.

Watching Stray Dog, the chief experience I have is a feeling of immense gratitude for air-conditioning. The film takes place during a brutal Tokyo heatwave (indeed it was filmed in those conditions) and everyone sweats rivers throughout. 🍿

At the end of Tarkovsky’s Solaris we see Kris returning to his father’s house — the place where we had first seen him in the opening seconds of the movie. Shortly after that opening we had heard Kris’s father tell a friend that he had built that house in imitation of another house he liked; and now, at the end, the camera pulls back from Kris and his father to show that the concluding events of the story are not taking place in a Russian dacha but rather on a tiny island in the great ocean of the planet Solaris. We might also reflect that the house being filmed is a set in a movie. So what we’re seeing as the film concludes is a simulacrum of a simulacrum of an imitation of a fictional house. 🍿

The Atlantic: 

By dominating the digital world, Silicon Valley has already exerted indirect control over the physical one. Today’s data-center build-out is a whole new beast. From the most concrete aspects — cooling, power, land — to the most abstract financial instruments, AI has morphed into a heavy industry. 

And needs to be regulated as such. 

The second entry in my series of essays on the ongoing interest in the Second World War is now up.

Kaiju IPO:
Initiating Psychic
Obliteration.

When you need a good album to cook to, I highly recommend Dusty in Memphis.

Five minutes from snooze.

Comment’s Seedbeds of Christian Humanism gallery is a wonderful resource.