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/

The Writer's Almanac for Monday, June 30, 2025 | Garrison Keillor

On this day in 1860, a debate on the merits of the theory of evolution took place at Oxford University. It occurred as part of the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Darwin's book On the Origin of Species (1859) had just been published seven months earlier, and was hotly contested by scientists and theologians on both sides of the issue. Noted biologist Richard Owen had written a scathing review of the book in the Edinburgh Review, and he also coached the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, in his condemnation of the book. On the pro-Darwin side of the issue were several liberal theologians — including mathematician and priest Baden Powell — as well as scientists Joseph Dalton Hooker and Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley was such an ardent and vocal supporter of evolutionary theory that he came to be known as "Darwin's bulldog."

Bishop Wilberforce, one of the most famous orators of the day, was to be one of the speakers on Saturday the 30th. The hall was packed and hundreds lined up outside to hear the discussion, which came to be known as the Wilberforce-Huxley debate (or the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, depending on whose side you were on), even though there were many contributors to the discussion. There is no transcript of the day's events, but one exchange has reached the status of legend. Wilberforce asked Huxley whether he was descended from an ape on his father's side or his mother's, and Huxley retorted that he was not ashamed to have a monkey as an ancestor, but he would be ashamed to descend from someone who used his great gifts to obscure the truth. Most accounts include some version of this story, but according to Hooker, that may have been all that most people heard. In his report to Darwin (who was too ill to attend), Hooker wrote:

"Well, Sam Oxon got up and spouted for half an hour with inimitable spirit, ugliness and emptiness and unfairness … Huxley answered admirably and turned the tables, but he could not throw his voice over so large an assembly nor command the audience … he did not allude to Sam's weak points nor put the matter in a form or way that carried the audience. The battle waxed hot. Lady Brewster fainted, the excitement increased as others spoke; my blood boiled, I felt myself a dastard; now I saw my advantage; I swore to myself that I would smite that Amalekite, Sam, hip and thigh if my heart jumped out of my mouth, and I handed my name up to the President as ready to throw down the gauntlet."

Hooker was the closing speaker of the discussion, and he felt that his speech had carried the day (of course, Wilberforce and Huxley each felt the same way about their own speeches). In the end, though each side claimed victory, most accounts chalk it up as a win for the Darwinians.

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-monday-june-30-2025/

Bill Moyers, Presidential Aide and Veteran of Public TV, Dies at 91

Hard to imagine any recent former presidential press secretary producing thoughtful and incisive documentaries on mythology, poetry, and philosophy… let alone politics.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/business/media/bill-moyers-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear?

Some of us are still here, though we may be culturally irrelevant. So much the worse for the culture.

Men are leaving fiction reading behind. Some people want to change that.

...One real challenge at hand is a frenzied attention economy competing for everyone's time, not just men's. To present the sorry state of the male reader as having solely to do with the gendered quality of contemporary fiction misses a screen-based culture that presents nearly unlimited forms of entertainment.

"Our competition isn't other publishers," said Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster. "It's social media, gaming, streaming. All these other things that are vying for people's time, attention and financial resources."

Asked whether the publishing industry needed straight men to read more fiction as a purely economic matter, Mr. Manning focused instead on the social benefits of reading.

"It's a problem if anyone isn't taking advantage of an incredible artistic medium," he said. "It's hurtful not to be well-rounded."
...
nyt

Winning the cosmic lottery

"On the whole, I don’t fear death. Instead, I fear a life where I could have accomplished more. An epitaph worthy of a tombstone comes from the nineteenth-century educator Horace Mann: 'I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.'

Our primal urge to keep looking up is surely greater than our primal urge to keep killing one another. If so, then human curiosity and wonder, the twin chariots of cosmic discovery, will ensure that starry messages continue to arrive. These insights compel us, for our short time on Earth, to become better shepherds of our own civilization. Yes, life is better than death. Life is also better than having never been born. But each of us is alive against stupendous odds. We won the lottery—only once. We get to invoke our faculties of reason to figure out how the world works. But we also get to smell the flowers. We get to bask in divine sunsets and sunrises, and gaze deeply into the night skies they cradle. We get to live, and ultimately die, in this glorious universe."

"Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization" by Neil deGrasse Tyson: https://a.co/9AHEXyH

Middle ground

"It was not a punishment but a privilege to be perched midway between microcosm and macrocosm, between the fleeting moment and fathomless eternity. Small enough to stand in awe of our infinite cosmos, yet large enough to enjoy the little things; conscious enough to contemplate our own mortality, and yet long-lived enough to feel a tender appreciation for a flower’s ephemeral existence—truly, we found ourselves inhabiting a magical middle ground."

"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox: https://a.co/dMsYwSS

Read for empathy, imagination, resistance

And pleasure.

"I am currently in Spain. In the news today here I saw there is a massive growth in reading for pleasure.

This is good. Because in the UK reading for pleasure is currently in decline.

Literate societies make the best societies. Which is why when fascists take over they ban books and destroy libraries.

A good novel is the best invention humans have ever created for imagining other lives. Reading has been scientifically proven to increase empathy.

Resist fascism. Read more."

Matt Haig
https://www.threads.com/@mattzhaig/post/DKHNGh5MYI0?xmt=AQF0tTodm39qtBxPWDRSDiWJxds-JsPrmwY6YfqMu6YwKw

Home sweet cosmos

"Einstein very rarely made markings in his books, but Solovine’s Democritus is graced with many of Einstein’s own handwritten highlights. One of the passages that caught Einstein’s eye explained how the higher kind of human being should feel at home in the whole universe. “To the wise man every land is open,” Democritus declared, “for the homeland of an elevated soul is the whole cosmos.”"

"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox: https://a.co/cTlH8y2

Look up for wonder & awe

"In emphasizing awe, Einstein was parting ways with most past religious teachers, but he still had plenty of predecessors. Socrates said some twenty-five hundred years ago that “wonder is the mark of the philosopher.”6 Schopenhauer saw “the sense of the sublime” as a sure sign of a higher mind.7 And one of Lao Tzu’s last lessons in the Tao Te Ching is “Let not your consciousness of life become shallow, and never allow yourself to become weary of existence.”8

Aligning himself with all these first-rate philosophers, Einstein maintained that mere existence was marvelous. “Every thinking person,” he felt, “must be filled with wonder and awe just by looking up at the stars.”"

"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox : https://a.co/6Tqi73c

Moral ambition

Another name for meliorism…

Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives

NYTimes: Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/magazine/rutger-bregman-interview.html?context=audio&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Revisiting the Classics with AI

John Kaag on Rebind, at the Concord Museum. May 13, 2025

https://youtube.com/live/sYmi8Bv05dE?si=S2xv2NpK6LdOmeeF

Yogi!

100 years ago today, Yogi Berra was born in St. Louis.

A 10-time World Series champ, WWII vet, and Hall of Famer, he once said, "Ninety percent of hitting is mental. The other half is physical."

Learn more about the accidental poet laureate of American baseball in our clip from BASEBALL.

https://www.threads.com/@kenburnspbs/post/DJjripNIV-y?xmt=AQF06sEKIrWbCbKH7h6_m1XBAMCmePZ7MkNfXo7ERc4Yvg

VE Day-the lesson

On this day 80 years ago the Nazis were beaten in Europe.

I can always remember my Nan talking about the collective euphoria felt throughout the country when they heard the news.

A sense of unity that led to a belief that we should look out each other. Hence the NHS and the welfare state arriving in the years after.

85 million died on all sides in World War Two.

Very few people saw it coming until too late.

Never normalise Nazis. Never ignore fascism.

That's the lesson.

Matt Haig
https://www.threads.com/@mattzhaig/post/DJZwMqrMD0s?xmt=AQF0zi3axZ_WqreSEREyA4Upz0gxwemV9528BdG74aQGFw

Off the rails

Hey look, the GOP and its leaders are lunatics! As I published a book about months into Trump's first presidency. Chapter 40 is called "When the GOP Went Off the Rails." And here are a couple of passages from Chapter 46, "As Fantasyland Goes So Goes the Nation."

Kurt Andersen https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/business/media/trump-conspiracy-theories.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Refuse to stay silent

So many of you wrote to me about my appearance on 60 Minutes and offered such kind words of support. Thank you.🙏

I hope you read this, consider how you can speak out as well, and share with others. https://www.democracydocket.com/opinion/my-time-on-60-minutes-and-why-i-refuse-to-stay-silent/

Trust & openness

"To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control."

Martha Nussbaum (who may well be my favorite living philosopher and who turns 78 today) on how to live with our human fragility: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/03/14/martha-nussbaum-bill-moyers-world-of-ideas/

A.I. Can Trick You, Warns Book That Hid A.I.’s Help Writing It

…The book, Mr. Colamedici said, was meant to show the dangers of "cognitive apathy" that could develop if thinking were delegated to machines and if people don't cultivate their discernment.

"I tried to create a performance, an experience that is not just the book," he said.

Mr. Colamedici teaches what he calls "the art of prompting," or how to ask A.I. smart questions and give it actionable instructions, at the European Institute of Design in Rome. He said that he often sees two extreme, if opposite, responses to tools like ChatGPT, with many students wanting to rely on them exclusively and many teachers thinking that A.I. is inherently wrong. He instead tries to teach users how to discern fact from fabrication and how to engage with the tools productively...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/world/europe/hypnocracy-ai-philosopher-book.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare