“We advertise our commitment to immaturity, mendacity and profound gullibility”

Mute the commercials.

“Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s vital book The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market shows you need not be paranoid to uncover conspiracies. Their book offers detailed explanations of how the myth went mainstream, capturing American and British governments in the 1980s and enacting a welter of laws and (de) regulations that played havoc with the world’s economies. Even more importantly, they show how the myth was carefully prepared by business interests whose influence ranged from university professors to newspaper cartoons, from Hollywood studios to church pulpits. In the English drawing rooms and Italian gardens that Henry James inhabited, he could not have imagined how thoroughly we’d be changed by “the new science of advertising” he foresaw. Half a century later Galbraith wrote: 

We, quite literally, advertise our commitment to immaturity, mendacity and profound gullibility. It is the hallmark of the culture. And it is justified as being economically indispensable. 14 He continued:

 Nor should scholars and scientists be detained for a moment by the protest that this is a highbrow view and that people must be allowed to have what they want. This is the standard defense of economic priority. It is not the argument of those who want to defend the public choice. It is the argument of those who want no interference in their management of the public choice. 15 Propaganda is sometimes a matter of simple deception. The claim that one group of people is eating another group’s puppies is just a lie, though as Goebbels discovered, repeating lies regularly can lead many to believe them. Repetition is always important, but most propaganda is subtler…”

— Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era by Susan Neiman
https://a.co/06cdRcSo

“We advertise our commitment to immaturity, mendacity and profound gullibility”

Mute the commercials.

“Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s vital book The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market shows you need not be paranoid to uncover conspiracies. Their book offers detailed explanations of how the myth went mainstream, capturing American and British governments in the 1980s and enacting a welter of laws and (de) regulations that played havoc with the world’s economies. Even more importantly, they show how the myth was carefully prepared by business interests whose influence ranged from university professors to newspaper cartoons, from Hollywood studios to church pulpits. In the English drawing rooms and Italian gardens that Henry James inhabited, he could not have imagined how thoroughly we’d be changed by “the new science of advertising” he foresaw. Half a century later Galbraith wrote: 

We, quite literally, advertise our commitment to immaturity, mendacity and profound gullibility. It is the hallmark of the culture. And it is justified as being economically indispensable. 14 He continued:

 Nor should scholars and scientists be detained for a moment by the protest that this is a highbrow view and that people must be allowed to have what they want. This is the standard defense of economic priority. It is not the argument of those who want to defend the public choice. It is the argument of those who want no interference in their management of the public choice. 15 Propaganda is sometimes a matter of simple deception. The claim that one group of people is eating another group’s puppies is just a lie, though as Goebbels discovered, repeating lies regularly can lead many to believe them. Repetition is always important, but most propaganda is subtler…”

— Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era by Susan Neiman
https://a.co/06cdRcSo

“playgrounds for our souls”

Do You Feel Needed?

… In an essay from 2000, published in Wired and titled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” the computer scientist Bill Joy worried about society’s direction: by 2030, he predicted, we’d be able to build computers “a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today,” making “the prospect of human-level computing power” realistic for the first time. (By some measures, today’s most advanced A.I. chips can be about that fast.) Joy feared that such technology, coupled with genetic engineering and other advancements, might “replace our species”—an anxiety that becomes even more credible when you realize that it’s existed for nearly two centuries. Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man argued that individuals had become “piano keys” that could be played on command, in a composition coördinated by supposedly rational rules. In “Signs of the Times,” from 1829, Thomas Carlyle warned that we were entering a “mechanical age,” in which not just “the external and physical” would be “managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also.” Leo Tolstoy, in his 1886 novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” imagined a man who was basically successful but who realized, on his deathbed, that he’d lived on autopilot. These thinkers suggested that we might internalize modernity’s logic of redundancy, finding ways to be unnecessary not just to one another but to ourselves. From this perspective, the development of technologies such as A.I. is just a furtherance of a long-standing trend.

Will A.I. really take our jobs? Will scientific and economic developments actually render the traditional human way of life obsolete? Maybe (hopefully!) not. But even the possibility of such outcomes wounds us. How can we insist upon—and really feel the existence of—our necessity, when so many forces seek to minimize it?

It helps to recognize that, just as there’s a rich discourse of redundancy, so there are many perspectives that clarify how and why we’re needed. In his book “Deep Utopia,” from 2024, the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who studies A.I. and coined the term “superintelligence,” asks how we might find meaning in a “solved world” in which A.I. does everything for us. He imagines people devoting themselves to hobbies, spirituality, the arts, sports, food, conversation, and “other domains which can serve as playgrounds for our souls,” and which will allow us to learn about each other and develop “our virtues and potentialities.” Hobbies, conversation—these seem slight against the steamroller of modernity. Yet my wife sings in a choir on Sundays, and, because there aren’t many altos, she can’t miss a rehearsal without letting the group down. Our participation in communal life really does make us necessary; it conjures, out of nothing, a place we need to be.

In “The Dignity of Dependence,” Sargeant suggests that, by believing in our own autonomy, we create the very conditions that obscure how much we’re needed. In his book “Dependent Rational Animals,” from 1999, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that we should do the opposite, by acknowledging that both needing and being needed are fundamental to our existences, from our vulnerable childhoods to our dependency in old age. Across our lives, MacIntyre wrote, “in order to flourish, we need both those virtues that enable us to function as independent and accountable . . . and those virtues that enable us to acknowledge the nature and extent of our dependence on others.” One of the complexities of being a dependent, rational animal, he pointed out, is that we’re not always needed and needful at the same time; in life, there are some periods when we give help, and others when we receive it. If you feel needed today, know that you’ll have needs later; if you feel unnecessary now, the odds are that you’ll be relied on down the road. Apocalyptic thinking tells us that we’re on a one-way journey to obsolescence. Actually, we’re on a wheel...

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/do-you-feel-needed#intcid=recommendations_the-new-yorker-mobile-app-homepage_90f74c5d-2066-4e44-b6d7-6cf86d23959f_cygnus-tny-app_bkta

Creative loafing in St. Pete

It’s been a great fall break, in a place with a much younger and more progressive vibe than its reputation suggests. We’ll be back. Nice connection to our last out-of-town trip too:

W.S. Merwin on writing

On writing, Merwin insists on regular practice. He said: “I’ve found that the best thing for me is to insist that some part of the day — and for me, it’s the morning until about two in the afternoon — be dedicated to writing. I go into my room and shut the door, and that’s that. You have to make exceptions, of course, but you just stick to it, and then it becomes a habit, and I think it’s a valuable one. If you’re waiting for lightning to strike a stump, you’re going to sit there for the rest of your life.”

And he said: “I think there’s a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time.”

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-wednesday-september-30-2026/

"Talk about Walking” by Philip Booth

Where am I going? I’m going
out, out for a walk. I don’t
know where except outside.
Outside argument, out beyond
wallpapered walls, outside
wherever it is where nobody
ever imagines. Beyond where
computers circumvent emotion,
where somebody shorted specs
for rivets for airframes on
today’s flights. I’m taking off
on my own two feet. I’m going
to clear my head, to watch
mares’-tails instead of TV,
to listen to trees and silence,
to see if I can still breathe.
I’m going to be alone with
myself, to feel how it feels
to embrace what my feet
tell my head, what wind says
in my good ear. I mean to let
myself be embraced, to let go
feeling so centripetally old.
Do I know where I’m going?
I don’t. How long or far
I have no idea. No map. I
said I was going to take
a walk. When I’ll be back
I’m not going to say.

"Talk about Walking” by Philip Booth from Lifelines: Selected Poems 1950-1999 (Viking Press). Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-wednesday-september-30-2026/

The Good List: 6 Things to Add Delight to Your Day

Always look for d’light… https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/16/briefing/16-the-good-list-september-migration.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

A bargain!

Look It Over

by Wendell Berry

I leave behind even
my walking stick. My knife
is in my pocket, but that
I have forgot. I bring
no car, no cell phone,
no computer, no camera,
no CD player, no fax, no
TV, not even a book. I go
into the woods. I sit on
a log provided at no cost.
It is the earth I’ve come to,
the earth itself, sadly
abused by the stupidity
only humans are capable of
but, as ever, itself. Free.
A bargain! Get it while it lasts.

"Look It Over” by Wendell Berry from New Collected Poems. © Counterpoint Press, 2012. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-wednesday-september-16-2026/

Think for yourselves, American scholars (but not BY yourselves)

On this day in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous “American Scholar” address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard. He told the students to think for themselves rather than absorb thought, to create rather than repeat, and not to look to Europe for cultural models...

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio-categories/twa-2018/

The point of life

He Said He Was the World’s Healthiest Man. Then Came a Stunning Diagnosis.

… Trying to defeat aging, Dr. Emanuel and other critics of the live-forever movement say, is arrogant and narcissistic.

Dr. Emanuel supports simple — even enjoyable — biohacks like cutting out ultraprocessed foods, getting good sleep and taking up new experiences. The title of his latest book, “Eat Your Ice Cream,” speaks for itself.

“The point of life, I think, is to make the world better for your family, your community, for humanity,” Dr. Emanuel said. “We’re here for a short time, and it’s not all about us.”

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/us/bryan-johnson-biohacker-autoimmune-gastritis.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share