I’m spending the day on a long-overdue task: going through all my unfinished drafts and deciding what to do with them, the three options being (a) post as-is to the Big Blog, (b) post as-is here, (c) discard. It’s dreary work but I’ll have a more orderly digital workplace when I’m done. And over the next few days more posts than usual will be showing up — I don’t want to put them in a queue because if I do I’ll be tempted to work further on them before they post.
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When I was a kid, my dad often bought these Ace Doubles, and they seemed magical to me. Read a book, flip it over, read another book. But I also often think of a comment made by the editor Terry Carr: If Ace were to publish the Bible they’d do it as a Double: on one side War God of Israel, on the other The Thing with Three Souls.
I love watching our male cardinals fetch seeds and suet from our feeder and bring them to their lady friends, who wait patiently and decorously. Such chivalrous young men; such appreciative young women.
The british architect Norman Foster once called the [Boeing] 747 his favorite building of the 20th century. Like the ocean liners and railcars it replaced, the 747 is more than a vehicle. It is also a dwelling.…
Use of the whole space was encouraged. Why make a building for people to remain seated in? A TWA pamphlet about 747 service from the early 1970s encouraged passengers to exercise on their flight: “Walk 13 times up and down the cabin and you’ve actually covered one mile.” Continental once boasted of removing 41 seats for four extra inches of legroom in coach. Even on a three-hour domestic flight, the experience of the airborne building was deemed as important as the transportation itself.
The photos in this article are wonderful.
Here’s an essay by me on Auden and James Schuyler. And here are links to some of the poems I mention:
- Schulyer, “A Stone Knife”
- Lawrence, “Snake”
- Auden, “Their Lonely Betters”
- Lawrence, “Tortoise Family Connections”
My book The Year of Our Lord 1943 has gotten a largely positive response, but there’s been one odd element to its reception that can be seen here: Some people complain that a book that’s quite explicitly about what five Christian intellectuals wrote during World War II is marred by its failure to cite works published in 1930 or 1955. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To put the point very mildly indeed, I am not a fan of Gov. Greg Abbott, but this letter is encouraging. It’s clear that the big AI companies think that minimally regulatory states like Texas, and all of rural America, are easy targets for predation and extraction. If their business model requires them to exploit us rather than deal fairly with us, then the sooner they fail the better.
Brian Phillips:
Of course, what seems true before a World Cup has a way of getting blown to dust by about the second day of matches. But the 2026 tournament, cohosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada — though don’t mention the cohosting part to Donald Trump — ...
There are only two conspiracy theories I truly, madly, deeply believe in: that LBJ had JFK killed, and that Gram Parsons wrote “Wild Horses.”
Good haul from Vintage Mio today.
Finished reading: Don’t Call It Art 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again by Austin Kleon. Just a terrific book, I think Austin’s best — and exactly what I need right now as I contemplate a big change in my life a year down the road. This will be my guidebook, or rather my anti-guidebook, since if there’s one lesson everyone should learn from this book it’s how sad it is to know where you’re going. 📚
Jeong Seon (1676-1759), Clearing after rain on Mount Inwang. Ink on paper, Joseon dynasty, 1751.
A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan is a very good biography, but it (inadvertently I think) raises an interesting question. Late in life Schuyler (a) achieved stability of mind and daily life and (b) became a regular churchgoer. The unasked question is whether those two developments were related, and if so, how? 📚
So strange that the Sagrada Familia is nearing completion — unfinishedness seems so integral to its identity. Much larger version of the photo here.
Freeman Dyson (1997):
It often happens that a scientific revolution is accompanied by a change in style. I like to use the names of Napoleon and Tolstoy to symbolize two contrasting styles: rigid organization and discipline represented by Napoleon, creative chaos and freedo...
Tikkun Olam, One Prompt at a Time | Sara Wolkenfeld and Samuel Arbesman:
If the Jewish approach to AI does not revolve around the imposition of a single utopian vision, then the focus should be on how AI technologies can act as enabling tools: ones that allow each of us to ...
Currently listening: John Hiatt, Crossing Muddy Waters. Haven’t listened to this in years, and am glad to be reconnected with it. Almost every song a banger. ♫
Another example. “I meant to do that.”
I’m struggling with manual focus and exposure on this film camera, but let’s call this a deliberate artifice … and call it a day.
Currently listening: Claire Holley, Where I Lived. What a superb record. Now, Claire is an old friend, and I listened to this when it came out some months ago — but I didn’t really hear it. My recently chaotic life had to settle down a bit before there was enough silence inside me to let this music in. The songs are beautifully arranged and recorded, and the whole mood is meditative, reflective, evocative. But above all these are wonderful songs, songs that often go (lyrically and harmonically) in directions you don’t expect but that always in the end come sweetly home. ♫
Donald Knuth:
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be...
Freddie preaching the gospel:
The spectacle of grown adults insisting that we simply cannot judge college students for outsourcing their thinking to machines is one of those little moral evasions that contemporary culture specializes in: tender, quasi-therapeutic, progressi...
