“Paul Kingsnorth Wants Us to Worship Nature, Culture and God, Not Technology.” Alexander Nazaryan profiles Paul Kingsnorth for the New York Times: “it could be generations before the ever-expanding Machine collapses, if it ever does. How should we live now, in this age of relentless A.I. slop? By finding small, meaningful ways of resistance, Kingsnorth suggests. Keep it small, keep it local, keep it in the family. ‘Become human again,’ he writes. ‘Remain human despite it all.'” (Don’t worry. Despite the headline, Kingsnorth does not, in fact, want people to worship nature or culture.)
“Why Gen Z Hates Work.” Maya Sulkin talks to some influencers and wannabe influencers about the nature of work: “when you spend hours each day watching someone on the other side of your screen making money by seemingly dancing through life without much effort, you start to lose sense of what it takes to succeed in this world. If my generation tends to think that so-called ‘real jobs’ are beneath us, it’s not because we’re lazy or are egomaniacs. (Well, okay, some of us might be.) It’s because ‘the top’ doesn’t look so out of reach. Watching people earn a living with such seeming ease is breaking my generation’s perception of what kind of job—and life—is attainable, normal, and desirable.”
“Surveillance is Sapping our Humanity.” Peter White articulates what happens when we turn to machines to watch out for misbehavior: “A kind of moral labour was being handed over to a machine: the quiet discipline of noticing, of staying with another person’s experience, of holding their reality in mind. And no one seemed to notice, or care. What I was seeing—or rather, what was vanishing—was a form of attention.”(Recommended by Adam Smith.)
“The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society.” James Marriott traces the rise and fall of reading and tries to articulate some of the effects that this practice has on cultures: “If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.” (Recommended by Brian Miller.)
“The Search for a Durable Identity.” Kevin Brown turns to Simone Weil and others to imagine how we might root our identities in something more durable than the preferences of the moment: “The idea of authoring our identity, however, abstracts from relationships, commitments, and attachments. We falsely assume we have the capacity to act independently of the persons, places, and things in our lives. Moreover, our age of self-established identity is correlated with our age of anxiety. The assertion that we have the freedom to determine our self-understanding fails to deliver on its promise of liberation.”
“Politics Almost Ruined Our Friendship. Here’s How We Saved It.” Larissa Phillips describes how she stopped talking honestly with her friends, and then took up the hard practice again with one: “Do I speak up and risk alienating myself and infuriating everyone there? Or do I say nothing? I chose the latter, as I often do. I smiled woodenly and nodded along as the group happily agreed on a stance I thought was hurting individuals and damaging society, and then I drove home, muttering to myself, saying all the things I would have liked to have said in person, irritated, stewing, and frustrated.”
“‘Unnatural’ Doesn’t Mean ‘Wicked.’” Tara Isabella Burton reviews Paul Kingsnorth’s new book and offers some friendly critiques: “In Kingsnorth’s most convincing passages, he helps us see one potential answer. What if the culprit were not information, as such, nor technology, but rather desire: the harnessing of our imaginative capacities for ultimately selfish ends? What if we were to blame not, say, Project Gutenberg (or whatever the digital equivalent of the Library of Alexandria is), but dopamine-grabbing notifications and algorithmically generated advertisements and all of the other forms of attention capture to which the now-manifest noetic realm is subject? To blame the attention economy, rather than the information age?”
“Against the City of Noise.” Justin Lee responds to Paul Kingsnorth’s Erasmus Lecture, “Against Christian Civilization,” and endeavors to imagine an authentically Christian civilization: “Kingsnorth’s essay operates as such a prophetic counter-sign calling the church back to her native intransigence. We should heed the exhortation. American Christians are entering a period in which much civilization-building is both necessary and achievable. The temptation for activist-minded believers to fall into idolatry is serious, and we must take care to distinguish between faithfully building for the common good and placing our faith in the things we build instead of in Christ. Culture and civilization are worthy of our restorative efforts, but they are unfit for worship.”
“Restocking Conservatives’ Bookshelves.” Nadya Williams reviews 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (But Probably Haven’t Read) by Christopher J. Scalia and considers why and what we should be reading: “The stories we tell ourselves—and others—matter a great deal. Their significance is civilizational in scope. ‘It’s a common and accurate intra-conservative complaint that we’re not good at telling stories,’ Scalia muses in his conclusion. In the age of AI, excessive doom-scrolling habits, and universal distractions, the problem is only getting worse. But this problem is fixable, so long as we keep reading widely and reading well.”
“The Algorithm Will See You Now.” Deena Mousa looks at a field where, despite expectations, AI tools have not yet replaced humans: “Radiology is a field optimized for human replacement, where digital inputs, pattern recognition tasks, and clear benchmarks predominate. In 2016, Geoffrey Hinton – computer scientist and Turing Award winner – declared that ‘people should stop training radiologists now’. If the most extreme predictions about the effect of AI on employment and wages were true, then radiology should be the canary in the coal mine. But demand for human labor is higher than ever.”
“Illiteracy is a Policy Choice.” Kelsey Piper wonders why more states aren’t following the path that Mississippi and others have blazed to improve student outcomes: “Every single parent in the country should be showing up to school board meetings to ask why these reforms are not being done in their schools and their communities. Whatever embarrassment we feel about having to admit Mississippi beat us should be thoroughly outweighed by our overwhelming delight at having a roadmap to do better.”
