John Webster:  In word and deed, in speech and action, then, we utter our Amen to God. If there is a conclusion to draw here, it is this. Christian wisdom consists in letting God be God, in hearing and consenting to God's great declaration in the gospel that the time i...

The Kyiv Psalter

One season in and I’m a bit annoyed with DS9. Details here.

I wrote about Malick’s To the Wonder as a contrapuntal composition.

I have some questions about an article claiming that religious persuasion should be deemed a human-rights violation.  

My guitar hero Martin Simpson has posted a beautiful recording of an old English folk song, “The Recruited Collier” — also known as “Jenny’s Complaint” or “Jimmy’s Enlisted.” These folk songs often have obscure and convoluted histories.

I wrote a post on the Canvas ransomware attack and its fallout.

Baylor, like most American universities, is in panic mode. Meanwhile, my students are writing to me to ask “Oh, is this why you don’t use Canvas?“ One of several reasons, my friends.

Sergey Maidukov:

What strikes me now is not that we were careless. It is that we were able, at the same time, to be sincere. To drink and mean it. To feel genuine warmth while knowing, somewhere else in the mind, that the world had already shifted. We inhabited two realities. And we chose, as people always do, to live inside the warmer one.

Nate Anderson (my former student!) on how Reddit is trying to force people onto its app, employing the same enshittifying strategy that Substack does. This is why I’m on micro.blog. Manton makes apps for our convenience but never tries to force us to use them.

Brian Phillips:

When Ford rolls out a new pickup truck, the CEO generally doesn’t go around giving keynote addresses about how much more lethal it will make American highways. But the AI industry is selling a narrative — a mythos, if you will — as much as it’s selling a product, and that narrative is one of revolutionary, transformational power. “Our product can make your life a bit easier, although there are still a lot of kinks to iron out” is not a trillion-dollar sales pitch; “we’ve invented something so powerful that it has the potential to destroy humanity” is. The company that can end the world controls the future, and investors will spend big on that upside bet. After all, if the world ends, an investor’s losses won’t matter anyway.

I think I’ve mentioned that every morning — every morning without exception — I wake up with a different song in my head. Never know what the internal roulette wheel will serve up, whether something from fifty years ago or from last week. Anyway, this morning I got a banger.

The Chandos Oak

Illustrations by Bruno Bamanti for an edition of Caesar's Gallic Wars:

John Ruskin, The Kapellbrücke, Lucerne (1857)

I wrote a post for my Buy Me a Coffee subscribers.

Teri had a rather complicated surgery today and all went well — thanks be to God! One bright moment: her nurse — imagine a grizzled Jerry Garcia with a thick Texas accent — said to her, “You’ve probably had a good many more drugs today than you have in a typical day. I don’t want to rush to judgment, but your tooth-to-tattoo ratio suggests that you’re not a heavy drug user.”

Ethan Ding:

the productivity gains from coding agents are not evenly distributed. they’re split along a k-shape: senior engineers are getting meaningfully more productive. junior engineers are, at best, treading water. at worst, they’re getting worse. 

This is exactly what we should expect. You have to be experienced (as a coder, as a researcher, as a thinker) to discern hallucinations and fakery. Only experience will make that alarm bell ring in your head. Younger and less experienced coders/scholars/writers will uncritically accept whatever their preferred chatbot offers them, and that will all too often lead them into more and more profound errors. 

I don’t usually do straight book reviews on my blog, but I made an exception for Simon Armitage’s marvelous new version of Gilgamesh.

Seth Kaplan:

If we remove phones without rebuilding the social architecture that once gave childhood meaning, agency, and joy, we risk leaving kids with less stimulation but not more formation.

TEXAS! (by Erin Newman-Mitchell)

Francis Young on the inscribed stones of the Dark Ages. 

How AI Swarms Are Disrupting Democracy: I’m wondering whether the emergence of these swarms will finally prompt people to ask whether social media platforms are appropriate sources of information. Probably not, but I’m grasping at straws here. 

Finished reading: The Dark Bible: Cultures of Interpretation in Early Modern England by Alison Knight. A fascinating book, about which I hope to write when life is less crazy. 📚

Apple calls this OS version Tahoe because Lake Tahoe is on the Nevada border and you’re basically gambling with your computing life when you use this OS.

Just got my new Mac Mini, and, since it has Tahoe installed, I had to “upgrade” my MacBook to Tahoe in order to use Migration Assistant. I now have two shockingly buggy Macs. I’m on the newest version, and can’t quite believe how little Apple has done to fix bugs that have been reported since Tahoe came out.

this post is obviously against all new things.

I have a new piece at the Dispatch on the best writer about the Second World War, A. J. Liebling. I am told that if you use the promo code JACOBS at checkout, you’ll get 15% off a Dispatch membership.