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."
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
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...
…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...
…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...
…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.
"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind." God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (and see Mr. Rogers, below)
"Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail."
Jailbird, prologue
When asked in 1978 about his writing process, Updike said, “I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them, you will never write again.”
After the birth of his third child, he had rented an office above a restaurant in Ipswich, and spent several hours each morning writing there. Throughout his 50-year career, he remained devoted to that schedule, writing about three pages every morning after breakfast, sometimes more if things were going well. He said: “Back when I started, our best writers spent long periods brooding in silence. Then they’d publish a big book and go quiet again for another five years. I decided to run a different kind of shop.” WA
 | Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton) |
Why ‘Earthrise’ Matters thebookoflife.org/why- | |
 | Five Books (@five_books) |
The 'father of science fiction' HG Wells suffered terribly from class anxiety. Huxley and Woolf thought him 'vulgar' == Five books on... | |
Charles Darwin (@cdarwin)1/11/15, 6:51 AM"And maybe this is what I have learned more than anything from my great-great-grandfather: to keep my eyes and my mind open, to enjoy the wonders of nature and never cease to ask questions." Sarah Darwin, foreword to "A Modest Genius: The story of Darwin's life and how his ideas changed everything" by Hanne Strager
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