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

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

The 3 elements of stupidity

Outsourcing your critical thinking, being willfully ignorant, conforming (Bonhoeffer, via Jonny Thomson) https://youtu.be/HbQ-t8GXYTA?is=7JFt8t7OJUN6fqpE

Appalling and oblivious

Same for celebrity fans (and voters):

May 1, 1994. Yuge! 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump

In the presence of hope

“Trudeau has produced a steady stream of fierce social criticism for nearly sixty years and has no intention of changing his tune anytime soon. He remains an eternal optimist who vows to continue to make the most of whatever breathing room he is given. As the cartoonist emphasizes, “It’s a lot easier to get through the day in the presence of hope.””

— Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News into Art by Joshua Kendall
https://a.co/0crdHVEP

“it is important to activate the part of your brain that is happy about something”

Linda Holmes was an apostate Phillies fan who only recently returned to fandom for her team, and for baseball. I think she rationalizes it well here, somewhat echoing Roger Angell’s point about the crucial importance of caring— even for something as trivial as the flight of a ball or the fate of professional sports team—as a consistent feature of life.* 

“So, here’s the big question: Does this new daily, super-intense fanhood make you happy? Absolutely. The other day, when the Phillies had that walk-off hit, I said to one of the other Phillies fans: “I had honestly started to think that nothing good could happen.” And that applied both to that specific baseball game and to my team in general and in the world, right? I don’t ever want to be misunderstood as if I’m saying: “If your baseball team wins, that makes up for horrible things going on in the world.” Not true. However, I do think it is important to activate the part of your brain that is happy about something. And to keep that part of your brain active and alive. And even if it’s a little bit artificial compared to so many other things, I think it’s really important to activate those brain chemicals, really important to remember that sometimes things are fun and exciting. Sometimes, I can feel excited and happy.”

 — Big Fan: Two Friends, 82,490 Miles, and the Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love by Michael Schur, Joe Posnanski https://a.co/0gkG3PNy

==

*“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.” Five Seasons

Mick on Kant

… My interest in philosophy is superficial. I find it a really hard subject. I need a teacher. I can’t just do it from reading. When I was in college, I did some philosophy courses. That’s hundreds of years ago. In “Jealous Lover,” there’s a Plato reference.

Shadows on the wall? Yes, you got it! Well done. But I find it a hard subject to educate myself into. I’ve recently read a couple of books, and I’m really finding it hard. They’re always having so many arguments, these philosophers, and always disagreeing with their masters. I was reading this book on Kant. They’re quite rude to each other and then they have to make up later, and I can’t understand what they’re really talking about. Was Kant a Christian? Was he an atheist?

I think it’s cool that you’re reading Kant. Well, it’s all vaguely fashionable…

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/11/magazine/mick-jagger-interview.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

At 91, He’s Hiking the Appalachian Trail. Again.

… There are formidable obstacles remaining, like Maine’s 100 Mile Wilderness, the trail’s most remote stretch, where there will be very few opportunities for supplies or crew assistance for days. And Mr. Sanders still has to finish a section of the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. But if he continues at his current pace, the age record will be his again before his 365-day deadline.

Mr. Sanders said he plans to finish, even if he runs out of time for it to count officially. Either way, he said he will soon have to look for a new record: “I’m not going to stop unless physically I simply cannot do it anymore.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/14/well/appalachian-trail-hiking-record-grey-beard.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Mean and sublime experiencer

It’s the birthday of American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, tax resister, and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, born in Concord, Massachusetts (1817). After graduating from Harvard, he worked in his father’s pencil factory. He taught for a time, but resigned because he didn’t want to administer corporal punishment. He opened a school with his brother, John, but John caught tetanus after cutting himself shaving and died in Thoreau’s arms.

He went to work for Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet and leader of the American transcendentalist movement. Thoreau moved into Emerson’s house and tutored his children. After he accidentally burned down 300 acres of woods near Concord, his friend Ellery Channing told him: “Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you.”

On July 4, 1845, Thoreau entered the woods at Walden Pond near Concord, built a small cabin, and spent two years, two months, and two days listening to whip-poor-wills singing, frogs croaking, and owls hooting. He cultivated beans, ate fish, salt pork, and woodchuck, and spent considerable time pondering which pond was more beautiful: Walden Pond, Flint’s Pond, or White Pond. He always left three chairs ready for visitors. It was a grand experiment: to see if simple self-sufficiency could lead to a greater, more objective understanding of society.

It took almost nine years for Thoreau to complete his book on his experience in the woods. He titled the book Walden; or, A Life in the Woods (1854). The book became the foundation for the future movements of ecology and environmentalism. Thoreau developed a penchant for yoga and Hinduism. He contracted tuberculosis, which set his health back, and after spending a rainy evening counting tree rings on a stump, he developed bronchitis and never recovered. On his deathbed, his Aunt Louise asked if he had made his peace with God. Thoreau replied, “I did not know we had ever quarreled.”

In Walden, Thoreau writes: “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-sunday-july-12-2026/

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection—Sagan’s Essay Three Decades Later | Skeptical Inquirer

“Believe it or not (I certainly have a hard time believing it!), it has been three decades since the publication of Carl Sagan’s famous essay “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” incorporated as chapter 12 in his The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995). I therefore thought it would be a good idea for skeptics to reconsider Sagan’s essay and see how it has stood up to the passage of time and how it might be improved as we move toward the middle section of the twenty-first century. Let’s begin with a bird’s eye view of the original. It starts out, very symbolically I think, with a long quote from Francis Bacon’s Novum Organon, published in 1620; it marked the beginning of modern philosophy of science. While Bacon’s main concern was to reject the Aristotelian approach that had been dominant during the Middle Ages (the Organon was a collection of six books by Aristotle on the topic of logic and its use in scientific inquiry), he was also preoccupied with several common errors in judgment that human beings are prone to make. The quote chosen by Sagan reads, in part: “For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride.” You can see why Sagan thought it appropriate. His essay is roughly divided into four parts: an introduction that sets the stage, positive tools, negative tools, and a conclusion. I will focus mostly on the second and third parts, but allow me a few comments on the introduction. Sagan reminds us that belief in nonsense is widespread…” Massimo Pigliucci https://skepticalinquirer.org/2026/06/the-fine-art-of-baloney-detection-sagans-essay-three-decades-later/

TIMELAPSE OF THE UNIVERSE: 13 Billion Years in 10 Minutes • Updated and...

https://youtu.be/QTQVZuBV9oA?is=qovXshk6K8d8-Ra6

The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors

…A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning. While a plain-vanilla philosophy degree remains as hard to monetize as ever, David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher of consciousness at N.Y.U., observes: “I think the demand for philosophers with A.I. training is, if anything, outstripping the supply right now. It’s an area I encourage students to go into. I think these issues with A.I. will be front and center for a good while.”

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/business/philosophy-majors-ai-jobs.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

A delightfully denigrating demotion of George W. and our seminal national "tax revolt"...

https://youtu.be/K1BaPETVOQA?si=2IKOZ_T9Wxw8gje5

But, my comment on aspersions the hosts cast towards American teeth, food, and nomenclature: 

@PhilOliver214

Bad dentition, inferior cuisine, funny names... 

I assume the irony is intentional, if not self-deprecatory. 

But yes, to be Canada wouldn't be so bad. No Kings, though.

Morning air

Curious visitor

“Living Tree” by Robert Morgan

It’s said they planted trees by graves
to soak up spirits of the dead
through roots into the growing wood.
The favorite in the burial yards
I knew was common juniper.
One could do worse than pass into
such a species. I like to think
that when I’m gone the chemicals
and yes the spirit that was me
might be searched out by subtle roots
and raised with sap through capillaries
into an upright, fragrant trunk,
and aromatic twigs and bark,
through needles bright as hoarfrost to
the sunlight for a century
or more, in wood repelling rot
and standing tall with monuments
and statues there on the far hill,
erect as truth, a testimony,
in ground that’s dignified by loss,
around a melancholy tree
that’s pointing toward infinity.

“Living Tree” by Robert Morgan from Dark Energy. © Penguin, 2014. Reprinted with permission.  

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-tuesday-june-23-2026/

Really vital

The really vital question

AI may not have (or be) the answer, but it is fun to play with.

My next birthday tattoo

 With a little help from Gemini. It worked up my idea, from Sonnet 73 and Yogi:

 

 

Lightbulb moments

“While walking over fifty hours through unfamiliar territory, I began to think with increased clarity. Lightbulb moments became more regular, spurred on by being curious about the changing surroundings. Small, surprising details–a tombstone, an information sign hidden in the reeds, a clank of a gate–began to jump out at me. Step by step, the threads of history emerged, forming a rich tapestry. It was only by walking, by travelling at the natural human pace, that these unexpected revelations arrived. I saw so many things that I wouldn’t have done from a bike, car or library desk.”

— Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England's Lost Queen by Alice Loxton
https://a.co/04a9ogq7

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Lightbulb moments

“While walking over fifty hours through unfamiliar territory, I began to think with increased clarity. Lightbulb moments became more regular, spurred on by being curious about the changing surroundings. Small, surprising details–a tombstone, an information sign hidden in the reeds, a clank of a gate–began to jump out at me. Step by step, the threads of history emerged, forming a rich tapestry. It was only by walking, by travelling at the natural human pace, that these unexpected revelations arrived. I saw so many things that I wouldn’t have done from a bike, car or library desk.”

— Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England's Lost Queen by Alice Loxton
https://a.co/04a9ogq7

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Angel at church

Sign’s been gone for years (like Angel and many of our other walking companions in this neighborhood from ‘96 on) but I’ve carried its message ever since. Wisest words the Baptists ever shared. There are new signs there now, the result of a Boy Scout project. This one was better.

Escaping the cult

Leaving MAGA’s Billboard Campaign Targets Nashville | City Limits | nashvillescene.com https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/citylimits/leaving-maga-billboard-nashville/article_e23e9459-5a85-4939-b789-a96040022721.html

Take notes

..,The details of the encyclical were interesting, but on some level they didn’t matter: “The Pope is basically telling us that AI is here to stay,” the economist Tyler Cowen wrote.

That doesn’t mean that it’s time to start “living with the machines” and automating every aspect of your life. But it might indicate that it’s time to begin the more specific work of figuring out, in a conscious and considered way, where artificial intelligence might help and hurt you, in all your particularity. If those students were to ask me their question again, I’d answer differently. I’d say, use it, definitely—but use it seriously. Be open about it. And keep track, in different contexts, of what you’re gaining and giving up. Make a list. Take notes. ♦︎

Joshua Rothman

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/should-you-automate-your-life