Joe

In Praise of Joe

by Marge Piercy

I love you hot
I love you iced and in a pinch
I will even consume you tepid.

Dark brown as wet bark of an apple tree,
dark as the waters flowing out of a spooky swamp
rich with tannin and smelling of thick life—

but you have your own scent that even
rising as steam kicks my brain into gear.
I drink you rancid out of vending machines,

I drink you at coffee bars for $6 a hit,
I drink you dribbling down my chin from a thermos
in cars, in stadiums, on the moonwashed beach.

Mornings you go off in my mouth like an electric
siren, radiating to my fingertips and toes.
You rattle my spine and buzz in my brain.

Whether latte, cappuccino, black or Greek
you keep me cooking, you keep me on line.
Without you, I would never get out of bed

but spend my life pressing the snooze
button. I would creep through wan days
in the form of a large shiny slug.

You waken in me the gift of speech when I 
am dumb as a rock buried in damp earth.
It is you who make me human every dawn.
All my books are written with your ink.

"In Praise of Joe" by Marge Piercy from The Crooked Inheritance. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Reprinted with permission. 

https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2008%252F08%252F18.html

William James and I went to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field...

It was a nice dream. We didn't care if we ever got back.

"When my revered friend and teacher William James wrote an essay on “A Moral Equivalent for War,” I suggested to him that baseball already embodied all the moral value of war, so far as war had any moral value. He listened sympathetically and was amused, but he did not take me seriously enough. All great men have their limitations, and William James’s were due to the fact that he lived in Cambridge, a city which, in spite of the fact that it has a population of 100,000 souls (including the professors), is not represented in any baseball league that can be detected without a microscope..." Morris R. Cohen, in The Dial,Vol. 67, p. 57 (July 26, 1919)

Baseball as a National Religion, John Thorn

The Most Human Human

 What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian 2012

• “To be human is to be 'a' human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggest that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity.”
• “When I fight off a disease bent on my cellular destruction, when I marvelously distribute energy and collect waste with astonishing alacrity even in my most seemingly fatigued moments, when I slip on ice and gyrate crazily but do not fall, when I unconsciously counter-steer my way into a sharp bicycle turn, taking advantage of physics I do not understand using a technique I am not even aware of using, when I somehow catch the dropped oranges before I know I've dropped them, when my wounds heal in my ignorance, I realize how much bigger I am than I think I am. And how much more important, nine times out of ten, those lower-level processes are to my overall well-being than the higher-level ones that tend to be the ones getting me bent out of shape or making me feel disappointed or proud.”
• “The more helpful our phones get, the harder it is to be ourselves. For everyone out there fighting to write idiosyncratic, high-entropy, unpredictable, unruly text, swimming upstream of spell-check and predictive auto-completion: Don't let them banalize you. Keep fighting.”
• “What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun to show me was that we fail - again and again- to actually be human with other humans, so maddeningly much of the time.”
• “It’s amazing,” he says, “how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.” And, as far too many can attest, how it halves when you take that responsibility and trust away.”
• “a utopian future where we shed our bodies and upload our minds into computers and live forever, virtual, immortal, disembodied. Heaven for hackers.”
• “the “7-38-55 rule,” first posited in 1971 by UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian: 55 percent of what you convey when you speak comes from your body language, 38 percent from your tone of voice, and a paltry 7 percent from the words you choose.”
• “We go through digital life, in the twenty-first century, with our guards up. All communication is a Turing test. All communication is suspect.” g'r

The outrageous Mitford sisters

 

The series is good, this book fills in crucial details:

  

 

Oliver Burkeman: “Why most scholars worked for only 4 hours a day”

Happy people work to their capacity, but not beyond.

https://youtu.be/gm1OfxhmxEY?si=EhYJkke2YNK62ic9

Was it the vinegar or the beach?

The Origin of Myth

by Ed Ochester

That summer I was drinking 
apple cider vinegar because I read
in an obscure book it was good 
for my health. A tablespoon or two
in a glass of spring water, with a bit 
of honey or raw sugar. Controls weight,
the book said, flushes harmful toxins
from joints, tissues and organs.
"Doctor George Blodgett drank it
every day, and remained vigorous 
until his death at age 94"
One reads
and perhaps believes almost anything
when one has lived alone for a while.
I felt good, doing it, though perhaps
that was because I walked on the beach
every day, swam, then walked again,
collected beach glass smoothed by the waves.
Pale blue and green, like solidified air,
dark green like emeralds, very rarely
sapphire blue and once a tiny piece 
of red round as the pupil of an eye.
No one was on the beach because it was 
September, and I had a white cabin
to myself. I swam and walked and read
and ate sparingly. I had come there
to be alone, and to think things through.
Every morning I drank my vinegar.
I read that the soldier who gave Jesus
vinegar on a sponge did so not in mockery
but in pity, to offer a restorative.
After a week I set the "red eye" on my desk
so we could watch one another. At dusk
the mist far out over the water looked like
distant hills, and I understood how
an earlier inhabitant might have thought
these were mountains that rose at nightfall
and disappeared with the dawn.

"The Origin of Myth" by Ed Ochester from Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New. © Autumn House Press, 2007. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-wednesday-august-13-2025/

Inside a Poet’s Cozy Tiny Home 📚 Built for Books, Beauty & His Beloved H...

Inspired by Bluegrass…

 

https://youtu.be/R-L_36GTd0g?si=YTkbhC8kqrCxLLHn

The mad peripatetic

"Nature's particular gift to the walker… is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe — certainly creative and suprasensitive."

Love walking? This century-old gem is for you https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/01/10/kenneth-grahame-the-fellow-that-goes-alone/

"Zhuzh up"? Shut up!

 More and more I find I have to look up the meaning of unfamiliar language casually tossed off in staid textual sources I've never found alien (-ating) before. There are better older words for this in our native tongue. (And if that makes me sound old, so be it.)

The mere idea of cigarettes is being adopted to zhuzh up* tamer indulgences. Diet Coke has been jokingly renamed the “fridge cigarette”; on TikTok, a viral video of a can being cracked open in the sun is captioned “time for a crispy ciggy in the summer.” “Wow, that’s so real,” one of the more than 1,200 commenters responded. “It just takes the edge off.” nyt

*make something more stylish, lively, or attractive.

Into the Unknown

A good discussion of Something and Nothing, in ch3...

Baloney

Grant & Walt, peripatetics

"Perhaps his most remarkable extracurricular activities were his solitary walks around Washington, sometimes covering five or six miles. Grant disbanded his personal guard and sauntered around town alone, hands clasped behind his back, smoking a cigar. On these rambles, he often passed Walt Whitman, then working in Washington. The poet told his mother, “I saw Grant to-day on the avenue walking by himself—(I always salute him, & he does the same to me.)”"

"Grant" by Ron Chernow: https://a.co/aguNTho

For the Children

by Gary Snyder

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us,
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

"For the Children" by Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island. © New Directions, 1974. Reprinted with permission. https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-sunday-july-27-2025/

The children

Shelby Foote, delighted

Ron Chernow's Mark Twain sent me back to his Grant, which has now reignited my interest in the Civil War. 

I'm recalling the day we were moving Older Daughter into Rhodes and, finding myself more an obstacle to dorm-decorating than not, I went for a walk down East Parkway to find Shelby Foote's home. "Empty rooms now."

 

He'd been gone for several years at that point, and the property had fallen sadly into neglect. But I had no difficulty conjuring an image of him at work on his mammoth Civil War there, a twenty-year period he told Brian Lamb he'd delighted in.

 

More Purring, More Buying? Why Bookstores Showcase Their Pets.

Why Bookstores Showcase Their Pets. At shops across the country, some of the most popular sales associates have four legs, twitchy ears and whiskers.

...Dog lovers, never fear. Plenty of bookstores cater to the canine crowd, including Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tenn., where employees are welcome to bring their best friends to work. The current roster includes Miller, a French bulldog; Barnabus, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel; Winnie, a tiny hound mix; and Nemo, who is half Bichon and half poodle, according to the novelist Ann Patchett, who owns the store.

Her rules for shop dogs are simple: “No barking. No biting. You have to like children and be patient, and you can’t run out the front door.”

Patchett recalled a lively beagle, Eleanor Roosevelt, who bolted out of Parnassus, across five lanes of traffic and into a parking garage before being corralled by an employee.

“Eleanor worked remotely after that,” Patchett said...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/books/review/bookstore-pets.html?smid=em-share

Writing is thinking/Philosopher-builders

 I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students

…What we stand to lose is not just a skill but a mode of being: the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work. I am a writer because I know of no art form or technology more capable than the book of expanding my sense of what it means to be alive.

Will the wide-scale adoption of A.I. produce a flatlining of thought, where there was once the electricity of creativity? It is a little bit too easy to imagine that in a world of outsourced fluency, we might end up doing less and less by ourselves, while believing we've become more and more capable.

As ChatGPT once put it to me (yes, really): "Style is the imprint of attention. Writing as a human act resists efficiency because it enacts care." Ironically accurate, the line stayed with me: The machine had articulated a crucial truth that we may not yet fully grasp...

Meghan O'Rourke 

==

Reminder: writing is thinking. This article in Nature is doing the rounds — noting that outsourcing writing to LLMs is THE SAME AS OUTSOURCING THINKING. “Writing compels us to think — not in the chaotic, non-linear way our minds typically wander, but in a structured, intentional manner.” There has never been a more important time than right now to pick up a pen and engage in the act of creation.

- The Culturist

Read on Substack

==

Philosopher-builders

Cosmos Institute

Walking with Kierkegaard

 

The living word

Reports of the death of literature, David Brooks, are greatly exaggerated.

Ann Patchett-
https://youtu.be/tPrH7kqGKCY

The carousel of happiness

Amid the chaos of Vietnam, Marine Corporal Scott Harrison clung to a vision of a carousel in a mountain meadow. Decades later, he brought it to life in Colorado. Now, his Carousel of Happiness spins to spread joy.

https://cbsn.ws/4eZ8G4E

I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students.

…What we stand to lose is not just a skill but a mode of being: the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work. I am a writer because I know of no art form or technology more capable than the book of expanding my sense of what it means to be alive.

Will the wide-scale adoption of A.I. produce a flatlining of thought, where there was once the electricity of creativity? It is a little bit too easy to imagine that in a world of outsourced fluency, we might end up doing less and less by ourselves, while believing we've become more and more capable.

As ChatGPT once put it to me (yes, really): "Style is the imprint of attention. Writing as a human act resists efficiency because it enacts care." Ironically accurate, the line stayed with me: The machine had articulated a crucial truth that we may not yet fully grasp...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/opinion/ai-chatgpt-school.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Students Want the Liberal Arts. Administrators, Not So Much.

…It's not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it's out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, and an administrative class that won't fight for the liberal arts even when it attracts both students and major financial gifts. The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power…

When a university education is truly rooted in the liberal arts, it can cultivate the interior habits of freedom that young people need to live well. Material success alone cannot help a person who lacks the ability to form a clear, informed vision of what is true, good and beautiful. But this vision is something our students both want and need…

we invited our students to enter "the great conversation" with some of the most influential thinkers of our inherited intellectual tradition. For their first two years they encountered a set curriculum of texts from Homer to Hannah Arendt. These texts were carefully chosen by an interdisciplinary faculty because they transcend their time and place in two senses: They influenced a broader tradition, and they had the potential to help our students reflect in a sustained way on what it means to be a good human being and citizen. Our seminars were led by faculty members who did not lecture or use secondary sources. Rather, the role of the faculty members was to foster and guide conversations among our students that allowed them to think through these questions for and among themselves...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opinion/liberal-arts-college-students-administration.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Will we let AI decide for us?

Philosopher-Builders will not…

https://youtu.be/H_g0RSSo0ho?si=M18OIVYFVQzXWTTN

The Scopes Monkey Trial at 100: Why People Don't Accept the Theory of Evolution

…Here is how Charles Darwin himself thought about the religious implications of his theory, in the 2nd edition of On the Origin of Species, 1860:

I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feeling of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, 'as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.' A celebrated author and divine has written to me that 'he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms, capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the actions of His laws.17

Theists and theologians should embrace science, especially evolutionary theory, for what it has done to reveal the magnificence of the divinity in a depth never dreamed by our ancient ancestors. We have learned a lot since the Scientific Revolution, and that knowledge should never be dreaded or denied. Instead, science should be embraced by all who cherish human understanding and wisdom, or else, as the book of Proverbs (11:29) warned (and from whence the film version of the Scopes Trial got its title):

He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.

https://www.skeptic.com/article/scopes-monkey-trial-at-100-what-it-tells-us-about-why-people-dont-accept-the-theory-of-evolution/

The Scopes Monkey Trial at 100: Why People Don't Accept the Theory of Evolution

…

1. A general resistance to science. This reaction falls under the rubric of what I call the Conflicting Worlds Model of the relationship of science and religion, where one is forced to choose one over the other. In particular, if scientific discoveries do not appear to support religious tenets, believers tend to opt for religion, nonbelievers for science. 
2. Belief that evolution is a threat to specific religious tenets. Objections given to the theory of evolution of this sort often fall under the rubric of the Same Worlds Model, in which an attempt is made to use science to prove religious tenets, or to mold scientific findings to fit religious beliefs. For example, the attempt to prove that the Genesis creation story is accurately reflected in the geological fossil record has led many creationists to conclude that the Earth was created within the past 10,000 years. This is in sharp contrast to the geological evidence for a 4.6 billion-year old Earth. If one insists on the findings of science squaring true with religious doctrines, this can lead to conflict between science and religion.
3. Misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. A significant source of evolution denial (the doppelganger of Holocaust denial, in that evolution deniers use similar techniques of rhetoric and debate as Holocaust deniers),12 is that most people know so little about the theory. In a 2001 Gallup poll, for example, a quarter of the people surveyed said they didn't know enough to say whether they accepted evolution or not, and only 34 percent considered themselves to be "very informed" about the theory. Because evolution is so controversial, public school science teachers typically drop the subject entirely rather than face the discomfort aroused among students and parents. What is not taught is not learned. Even those who profess belief in the theory of evolution have a difficult time explaining how it works, typically offering a Lamarkian explanation involving the inheritance of acquired characterstics (with the iconic example of giraffs that stretch their necks to reach leaves high up on trees give birth to baby giraffs with longer necks).13
4. The fear that evolution degrades our humanity. After Copernicus toppled the pedestal of our cosmic centrality, Darwin delivered the coup de gr­ace by revealing us to be "mere" animals, subject to the same natural laws and historical forces as all other animals. Copernicus no longer generates controversy because his theory of heliocentrism is about the relative place and position of cosmic real estate, whereas Darwin's theory remains controversial because it is about us, which we take personally.
5. The equation of evolution with ethical nihilism and moral degeneration. This sentiment was expressed by the neo-conservative social commentator Irving Kristol in 1991: "If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no community can survive if it is persuaded—or even if it suspects—that its members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe."14 Similar fears were raised by Nancy Pearcey, a fellow of the Discovery Institute in a briefing on Intelligent Design before a House Judiciary Committee of the United States Congress. She cited a popular song urging "you and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals so let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel." Pearcey went on to claim that since the U.S. legal system is based on moral principles, the only way to generate ultimate moral grounding is for the law to have an "unjudged judge," an "uncreated creator."15
6. The fear that evolutionary theory implies we have a fixed human nature. The first five reasons for the resistance to evolutionary theory come almost exclusively from the political right. This last reason originates from the political left, primarily from progressives and liberals who fear that the application of evolutionary theory to human thought and action implies that political policy and economic doctrines will fail because the constitution of humanity is stronger than the constitutions of states. This is what I call Cognitive Creationism—evolution from the neck down—the doppelganger of Conservative Creationism.16

…

Michael Shermer

https://www.skeptic.com/article/scopes-monkey-trial-at-100-what-it-tells-us-about-why-people-dont-accept-the-theory-of-evolution/