“The Intellectual Virtues of the Small Magazine.” Jeff Reimer brilliantly narrates the joys of an intellectual life and the role that small magazines can play in foster this: ‘Now remember the two poles. On the one end is academic research, which for all the good work that happens (and it does happen! I’m not here to take down the academy!) tends toward professionalization and specialization and fussiness and footnotes and bibliographies. On the other end is the reactive world of hot takes and culture-warring and mindless pleasure-seeking and ease. I was burnt out on the one and had no patience for the other. But here was this small, modest magazine navigating a middle way. I loved it.”
“Come With Me if You Want to Survive an Age of Extinction.” Ross Douthat issues a stirring invitation to defend and preserve precious good things in an age of cheap substitutes: “This isn’t just a normal churn where travel agencies go out of business or Netflix replaces the VCR. Everything that we take for granted is entering into the bottleneck. And for anything that you care about — from your nation to your worldview to your favorite art form to your family — the key challenge of the 21st century is making sure that it’s still there on the other side. That challenge is made more complex by the fact that much of this extinction will seem voluntary. In a normal evolutionary bottleneck, the goal is surviving some immediate physical threat — a plague or famine, an earthquake, flood or meteor strike. The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.” (Recommended by Adam Smith.)
“Handshakes.” Dixie Dillon Lane praises the value of an honest handshake: “By giving me his right hand — in historical terms, his sword hand — he told me he trusted me not to be his enemy, not to attack him or otherwise do him or his children harm. By looking him in the eyes as we shook, I also told him non-verbally that he could trust me, that I was not deceitful.”
“The Beauty Around Me.” Brian Miller bears witness to the beauty of spring on a Tennessee farm: “A pair of bluebirds, nesting at the end of the porch in a birdhouse Cindy made, make endless trips to feed their young. Farther out, past the orchards and muscadine vines, at woods’ edge, a pileated woodpecker taps, its red-crested head cocked to the side, listening for the hollow sound of bugs feasting within a dying maple. Even the buzzards soaring high on their endless funereal quest are granted temporary spring admission into this avian fellowship of loveliness.”
“The Gen Z Lifestyle Subsidy.” Lila Shroff reports on the discounts that large AI companies are offering to college students in an effort to snag longterm customers for their products: “Even before the current wave of promotions, college students had established themselves as AI’s power users. ‘More than any other use case, more than any other kind of user, college-aged young adults in the US are embracing ChatGPT,’ the vice president of education at OpenAI noted in a February report. Gen Z is using the technology to help with more than schoolwork; some people are integrating AI into their lives in more fundamental ways: creating personalized workout plans, generating grocery lists, and asking chatbots for romantic advice.”
“Columbia Student Suspended over Interview Cheating Tool Raises $5.3M to ‘cheat on everything.’” Speaking of all the benefits that AI tools will bring, Charles Rollet profiles a new startup: “Cluely has published a manifesto comparing itself to inventions like the calculator and spellcheck, which were originally derided as ‘cheating.’ Cluely also published a slickly produced, but polarizing, launch video of Lee using a hidden AI assistant to (unsuccessfully) lie to a woman about his age, and even his knowledge of art, on a date at a fancy restaurant.” The manifesto and video are quite revealing.
“An Unsentimental Education.” Merve Emre revisits Tom Wolfe’s classic campus novel I Am Charlotte Simmons and peels back its various layers of irony: “Twenty years later I can look at my young self and wonder that she should have understood so little—about the novel, and about the university, the relentless pressure it exerts on the souls of its inhabitants. A person who prided herself on withstanding this pressure would not only end up surrendering to it like everyone else but also experience her surrender as tragic, while everyone else would merely smile at her naiveté and self-importance. I had failed to understand this because, like Charlotte Simmons, I believed in the university. I believed in it in the same way that many people believed in the church, as a place of the purest and highest purpose.”
“‘MAHA Moms’ are Pushing for Changes to America’s Food System.” Shannon Osaka’s articulation of the MAHA movement is perhaps overly critical, but she still gives a helpful window into its concerns: “They say the food industry is putting pesticides, dangerous food dyes and other toxic chemicals into the U.S. food supply. They eschew highly processed foods, raise chickens and grow organic vegetables in their backyards. Some call themselves “crunchy moms,” a term once linked with 1970s liberal environmentalists. But these aren’t traditional, left-wing environmentalists. They are the moms in the “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement: They lean conservative, distrust vaccines and support Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And they are changing what it means to be an environmentalist in the United States — and generating growing momentum to change the country’s food system.”
“Chess: A Microcosm of the AI Revolution.” Brody C. J. Eldridge reviews Peter Doggers’s The Chess Revolution: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age: “Doggers’ analysis reveals one important aspect of chess as a modern sport: the sport is a laboratory for the AI revolution to conduct its experiments. Part of why chess has played an important role in the history of AI and intelligent machines is that to play chess ‘perfectly’ requires a lot of skill, a lot of ‘intelligence.’ So, if a computer can play it perfectly without error, it would then be doing much more than a human can.”
