“‘Your Friend, Wendell’: A 90th Birthday Tribute to Wendell Berry.” To mark Wendell Berry’s 90th birthday, The Library of America published a set of reflections by several of the people he’s influenced over the years. Here’s a taste of Andrew Peterson’s: “the Wendell Berry I’ve encountered in person has been one with a glimmer in his eye, with a quick smile and a boisterous laugh, one who has borne the cost of true hospitality by opening his home every Sunday to perfect strangers whom he hopes to be nice to. That’s the kind of person I want to grow into. I’m inclined to take Wendell’s written words seriously because he doesn’t seem to take himself seriously. That’s the kind of neighbor I’d like to have. It’s the kind I’d like to be. The serious business of being human means being ‘joyful, though you’ve considered all of the facts.’ Cheerful too, I’d argue.”
“Crews Work to Protect Stehekin as Pioneer Fire Nears.” On our travels this summer, we were supposed to spend some time in one of my favorite places: Stehekin, WA. Unfortunately, a bad wildfire that was started in June by a careless property owner is raging in that area, so we had to cancel those plans. It’s tough to watch from afar while people you love are fighting to save a place they love. The fire is making national news, but this local story by Leah Pezzetti gives the gist of the situation. One of the subtexts is that if firefighters had fought the fire aggressively in June, they could easily have put it out. Instead, they let it burn and now they are spending millions of dollars a day to try to protect residents’ property: “Davis, Jester and Phelan all agree that they’re thankful for the hard attack on the fire they’re seeing now but wonder if this growth could have mitigated with a stronger fight early on. ‘I can’t help but feel if it had been attacked with the same intensity then as it is now, we wouldn’t be in the position we’re in,’ said Davis. He said he remembers when the Flick Fire prompted a Level 3 evacuation for Stehekin in 2006. He chose to stay and fight then as well. ‘It’s pretty much all about defending the things we care about and Stehekin’s worth defending. So is our home,’ said Davis.”
“Liberating Weather-Cock Minds.” I contributed to an issue of Credo Magazine dedicated to the ongoing revival of classical education. The whole issue is worth reading. My charge was to distill the basic vision for classical education: “The weather-cock mind spins freely, pointing toward whatever idea or meme or slogan happens to be current. So even when such a mind feels strong approval or disapproval, these tend to be impulsive; weather-cock minds have little patience for reasoning out a particular opinion or for assessing consistency among their different opinions. The uncommitted, aimless lives of these souls may seem ‘free’ in one sense; they are detached and uncoerced. But such negative freedom does not, in fact, liberate them to pursue truth, understand reality, or live well.”
“Tearing Down Idols: William Cavanaugh’s Theology is a Must-read for the Modern West.” Patrick Gilger reviews William Cavanaugh’s new book, The Uses of Idolatry and finds it quite illuminating. Cavanaugh defines idolatry “as the ‘human creation of systems that react back upon us and come to dominate us as false gods.’ False gods like an inescapable economy that always demands growth, eliminates traditional ways of life, hides sweatshop labor at the far side of the earth and transforms even those who receive its “blessings” into anxious, alienated, competitive consumers. Or false gods like the nation state, for which so many are not only willing to die but to kill.”
“The Real Digital Divide.” Michael Toscano points out that those with privilege are increasingly placing limits on the ubiquity of screens: “The real digital divide, it turns out, is between those who can get a break from their devices and those who cannot. Perhaps genuine social justice demands a redistribution of this freedom to every social class in the country.”
“The New Verbal Economy.” Richard Gibson points out that AI still depends utterly on high quality human communication, something that was already endangered before LLMs came on the scene: “Our immediate conceptual challenge is not to prepare for a future where the machines embarrass us into silence but to deal with a present awash with writing produced by humans and machines, often in tandem. Generative AI was made possible by our condition of textual superabundance (or, better said, media superabundance since now audio, image, and video are all also widely available at scales previously thought impossible), but, as Matthew Kirschenbaum has warned, it could spiral into a ‘textpocalypse.’”
“The Era of Predictive AI Is Almost Over.” I’m more persuaded by Gibson’s argument, but for a thoughtful counterpoint, see this essay by Dean W. Ball: “For firms like OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic to achieve their ambitious goals, AI models will need to do more than write prose and code and come up with images. And the companies will have to contend with the fact that human input for training the models is a limited resource. The next step in AI development is promising as it is daunting: AI building upon AI to solve ever more complex problems and check for its own mistakes. There will likely be another leap in LLM development, and soon. Whether or not it’s toward ‘general intelligence’ is up for interpretation. But what the leap will look like is already becoming clear.”
“After Virtue Came Strongman Politics.” Jake Meador traces the shifting terms of the conversation around postliberalism in recent years and argues that “the postliberal right, which began in conversations around The Benedict Option about how to better catechize young people and create thick communities of Christian belief has, in just under 10 years, shifted into something primarily partisan and quite often linked to white nationalism. The irony in all this is that just as the postliberal right has become maximally partisan in its outlook and sensibilities, it has been abandoned by the very party and leader it looked to for security.”
“How One Bad Scene Can Ruin an Otherwise Great Movie.” Bill Kauffman considers a few of his favorite forgettable movie scenes: “I expect streaming-service censors can’t wait to erase Hattie and substitute in her stead an AI-generated robo-actor who talks like a 2024 USC film school student. In the meantime, otherwise talented filmmakers are inserting tone-deaf or eye-rollingly ‘woke’ scenes into their work. But I suppose that’s why fast-forward was invented.”
“Chatbots and the Problems of Life.” And Alan Jacobs asks a probing question that gets at the root of pedagogy in the age of AI: “If I can only pursue a ‘pedagogy of the gaps,’ assignments that happen to coincide with the current limitations of the chatbots, then what has become of me as a teacher, and of my classroom as a place of learning?”
