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