Speaking is no substitute for writing… and thinking

Everyone’s Using This A.I. Dictation App That I Want to Murder With a Hammer

… Because writing, when it comes down to it, is a higher form of thinking. Writing takes time and editing and a deep level of commitment. Writing is a rigorous process to understand your own thoughts and then lay those thoughts out in a way that convinces or inspires or moves other people. But speaking is not that process. Speaking out loud can be tremendously useful when you need to deliver instructions or talk something out with another person or jot down a quick brainstorm while you are in the middle of washing your face in the bathroom or something.

We’ve been talking a lot about the so-called end of literacy, but the real problem isn’t that people don’t read — it’s that they do read and spend all day ferociously consuming words, but those words aren’t really written, not in the way that any writer would consider them written, because the words they’re reading are more like speaking. I wish I could italicize the word “really” in that last sentence. Italics really. Uh. Close enough, I guess.

I just got a notification from Wispr Flow congratulating me that I have written enough words with the software in just these few minutes here that I have “written 12 wedding vows.” Which, I mean, is kind of my point. Can you imagine if wedding vows were off-the-cuff speaking? Could we stop, soon, with the apps and programs that want to replace every facet of human thought with something more efficient, like there’s no value at all in … reflection? At this point I’m ready never to speak aloud ever again...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/19/magazine/ai-dictation-app-wispr.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Sane and happy

“Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). 

Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future.”

—Arthur C. Clarke 

Colombo, Sri Lanka September 19, 1996

3001: The Final Odyssey Valediction/afterword
https://a.co/0aG1eeZZ

Otium!

There is a Latin word that has no satisfying translation in English, and precisely for that reason it is worth pausing on it. The word is otium. It does not mean “idleness” in the sense we usually intend: laziness, inactivity, time wasted on the couch. In Latin, otium denotes something precise and precious: time free from public and professional obligations, dedicated to what nourishes the mind and spirit. Reading, reflection, philosophical conversation, writing, study. For Roman intellectuals, otium was not an occasional luxury but a structural necessity of the well-lived life. Its opposite was negotium, literally, the negation of otium: business, public duties, work, social obligations. The nec-otium, that which is not rest... Massimo Pigliucci https://figsinwintertime.substack.com/p/the-ancient-contrast-between-otium?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Misunderstanding “Liberal Arts”

The term “liberal arts” does not have the most glorious reputation these days. Online, there’s a starter pack of associations: useless degrees, fake jobs, oat milk, pink hair, Marxism. When a newspaper reports on college graduates struggling to find jobs, somebody asks how many have STEM degrees versus “the usual liberal arts,” like dance or “sexual intersectionality.” The Babylon Bee — which is like The Onion, but with conservative commonplaces instead of jokes — runs the headline “‘Liberal Arts Degrees’ Renamed ‘Non-Essential Worker Degrees’” and imagines colleges admitting that “the pottery, French literature or zero-gravity space station basket weaving classes you’re taking are completely useless.” Even the individual words are unpopular: liberal and arts! One educator writes about a rural college president who stopped using them after a neighbor asked: “What’s wrong with ‘conservative arts’?”

There are also some long-suffering people who keep pointing out that these critiques may be misunderstanding what “liberal arts” means. (One even took The Chronicle of Higher Education to task for how it used the term.) In 2022, a physics professor named Chad Orzel grumbled about people constantly confusing “the collection of academic disciplines shorthanded as ‘the liberal arts’ with the idea of liberal arts education.” That’s not a major; it’s the simple idea that every student should “study a broad range of topics. A range that, in any sensible formulation, includes math and science.”

Orzel is correct: “Liberal arts” traces back to ancient Greek ideas about teaching a full spectrum of knowledge — arithmetic, music, rhetoric, astronomy, etc. — in order to cultivate agile-minded men capable of wise self-governance, not peons trained for a single task. It’s liberal as in free, not the much-newer political label. The idea was sustained across centuries in Europe — people were writing about “liberal artes” in Middle English — and built into the foundations of higher education in the United States, where Ben Franklin imagined students at the future University of Pennsylvania learning art and oratory and debating “justice and injustice.”

But Americans have come to use “liberal arts” for loose sets of specific disciplines. One community college administrator wrote that some on his campus used it for “anything nonvocational” while others used it for “anything not math-based.” Fine arts and humanities like philosophy almost always count; social sciences like anthropology sometimes do. Law is curiously exempt (people point “liberal arts” at things they consider indulgent or impractical); the proverbial “basket weaving” is not (despite probably being a trade). In memeafter meme, “STEM” is presented as liberal arts’ utilitarian opposite — a lucky break for pure math, where you can study stuff that makes literature look like HVAC repair...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/30/magazine/liberal-arts-degree-conservatives.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share