“The Tune of Things: Is Consciousness God?” Christian Wiman’s latest masterpiece is a must-read. Here is is opening: “A 1980 case study from England depicts a young man with an IQ of 126, excellent performance in his university classes, normal social skills, and basically no brain. Trees can anticipate, cooperate, and remember, in the ordinary sense of those terms. Albert Einstein credited all his major discoveries to music. Some people revived from apparent death report confirmable details they could not possibly have observed, at times far from their bodies. Cut a flatworm’s head off and it will not only regrow a new one but remember things only the lopped-off head had learned. The term ‘species’ is increasingly meaningless. Ninety-five percent of physicists who won the Nobel Prize in the twentieth century believed in a god. A group of hotel cleaning staff showed significant improvements in blood pressure, weight, and body mass index after being told their work counted as exercise, though their levels of activity were unchanged. Until the Eighties, it was common practice in the United States to operate on infants without anesthesia, as it was believed their brains were not formed enough to feel pain. The human brain is the most complicated thing we know of in the universe, and the development of AI will have no bearing on this. The writer Fanny Howe died on July 8, 2025, at the age of eighty-four. Form is prior to matter. The first place was a voice. There is no such thing as stillness. Better to begin with a jolt. Lord knows we need it.”
“Being Changed.” Nishon Schick wrestles with Robert Farrar Capon’s marriage advice–and divorce–to help make sense of her own parents’ marriage–and divorce. When Schick was herself preparing to marry, her mother gave her some advice which she failed to heed: “Her premarital advice was brief. ‘Don’t let them change you.’ I was not raised with the notion of marriage as a sanctifying relationship. Sanctification itself was never made much of in my household. My mom has always believed in my basic goodness, despite all contrary evidence. The fact is that I have been changed through marriage. I don’t know how it could have been avoided. What’s troubling is that I still have not been changed enough.”
“Striking a Root.” Sarah Ashbach reads Ben Myers’s poems and articulates the rooted culture he praises: “Myers is an anomaly amongst poets. After college he moved back to the place where he was born and now lives in a house previously owned by his in-laws; he loves his children and is happily married to his high school sweetheart. He is not an alcoholic; he has never been divorced; and he did not move to either San Francisco or Paris to escape the tedium of ambiguously midwestern American life. On Sundays he goes to church. His life looks nothing like that of most poets for the past century (thank goodness), yet he is one of the best of our day—perhaps because besides possessing the requisite skill, he conceptualizes what it means to live a good life and to flourish in society much as Vergil did two thousand years ago. Like Vergil, the heart of his poetry has to do with the cultivation of culture.”
“How to Fix a Typewriter and Your Life.” I’m not sure if Kurt Streeter’s story is about typewriters, apprenticeship, repair, or a small shop in Bremerton, WA. But it’s a beautiful story: “The phone rings steadily; customers call from as far as Florida, New York and beyond. The novelist who needs an escape from the internet’s magnetic pull; the screenwriter convinced that only keys that fight back can force out good work; the teenagers who have just found a grandmother’s pristine Corona, a grandfather’s portable Hermes. It is Lundy who takes on apprentices now. He teaches the way Mr. Montgomery did: patiently letting mistakes happen because mistakes educate best. It’s a steady transfer of knowledge, a careful passing of the seemingly arcane, a customer-is-always-right way of doing business.” (Recommended by Tom Bilbro.)
“What OpenAI Did When ChatGPT Users Lost Touch With Reality.” Kashmir Hill and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries describe the tension within OpenAI between developing AI tools that can solve challenges and addicting users to AI chatbots. While the company has recognized the dangers of the latter approach, the need to turn a profit appears to be leading it to pursue addiction regardless of the consequences: “In October, Mr. Turley, who runs ChatGPT, made an urgent announcement to all employees. He declared a ‘Code Orange.’ OpenAI was facing ‘the greatest competitive pressure we’ve ever seen,’ he wrote, according to four employees with access to OpenAI’s Slack. The new, safer version of the chatbot wasn’t connecting with users, he said. The message linked to a memo with goals. One of them was to increase daily active users by 5 percent by the end of the year.”
“AI, Governance, and Our ‘Utopian’ Future.” Charles T. Rubin reminds tech-boosters why AI alignment is not a technical problem but a political, human one, and one that requires certain forms of education and life rather than new technologies: “What we are now seeing is the messy practical expression of a certain ideology of progress that, in one form or another, has been around for a very long time, an ideology maintaining that technological development means humanity can and will eventually overcome the need for both work and governance. These hitherto perennial aspects of human life are the products of scarcity, and when scarcity is overcome, they will ‘wither away.’ The chaotic consequences of implementing this ideology under present circumstances are not merely the result of contingent historical factors, but reflect some deep misunderstandings about human life and governance that are inherent in this vision of progress itself.”
“Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era.” A suspicious pitch from a freelancer sends Nicholas Hune-Brown on a quest to determine if the writer is even a real person. But editors and readers will have a difficult time telling truth from fiction amid the sea of AI-generated content: “Every media era gets the fabulists it deserves. If Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and the other late 20th century fakers were looking for the prestige and power that came with journalism in that moment, then this generation’s internet scammers are scavenging in the wreckage of a degraded media environment. They’re taking advantage of an ecosystem uniquely susceptible to fraud—where publications with prestigious names publish rickety journalism under their brands, where fact-checkers have been axed and editors are overworked, where technology has made falsifying pitches and entire articles trivially easy, and where decades of devaluing journalism as simply more ‘content’ have blurred the lines so much it can be difficult to remember where they were to begin with.”
“Breaking the Beef Cartel.” Nate Gates talks with Mike Callicrate about the ongoing problems in the US beef market: “Mike offers a third way between predatory capitalism and socialism: distributed ownership. His maker-owned market concept shows how communities can rebuild local food systems that create wealth, foster connection, and produce genuinely better food.”
“Ten Reasons I’m Thankful This Thanksgiving.” Brian Miller continues his yearly tradition of gratitude: “All of the 59 books I have read this year, both highbrow and low—yeah, I’m looking at you, John Sandford—and that out of those, most have been around for a hundred years or more. (Another thank-you to my grandmother for instilling in me a love of reading, and a love of older books in particular, borne of her library cast-offs.)”
