“Hollow Body.” Peter Wayne Moe teaches writing and was depressed by the ways AI hollowed out his job. “So I signed up for guitar lessons. I wanted to do something with my hands, something real, tangible, and material. Pleasure and mastery. I also wanted to retreat into a familiar role, to become a student again, and to rediscover what it means to, and how one does, learn. I hoped that, in the long hours of practicing, I might somehow cast aside the cynicism and despair overtaking my teaching and so rekindle my love of the classroom—and of life.” The essay he wrote about the experience is brilliant.
“Abundance Is Not Enough.” This excerpt from Christopher Beha’s new book draws on John Stuart Mill to probe the flaw at the heart of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s technocratic vision of liberalism: “One of the most salient features of contemporary American life is how anxious, depressed, isolated, angry—simply put, how unhappy—many of us are. If we take seriously the utilitarian view of happiness as the great measure of the good, this would seem to be liberalism’s most profound failure. We are unhappy although in absolute terms we remain the richest nation on the planet. We are far less happy than many far less affluent societies. We already have technological powers beyond the imagining of Bentham or Mill or even our own great-grandparents, and we are not happier than any of them. We have cut the distance from New York to London from months to weeks to days to seven hours. Will cutting it from seven to two finally deliver us from our existential distress?”
“Chromebook Remorse: Tech Backlash at Schools Extends Beyond Phones.” Natasha Singer reports on schools that are unwinding their reliance on one-to-one laptops and finding real benefits: “For years, giants like Apple, Google and Microsoft have fiercely competed to capture the classroom and train schoolchildren on their tech products in the hopes of hooking students as lifelong customers. For more than a decade, tech companies have urged schools to buy one laptop per child, arguing that the devices would democratize education and bolster learning. Now Google and Microsoft, along with newcomers like OpenAI, are vying to spread their artificial intelligence chatbots in schools. But after tens of billions of dollars of school spending on Chromebooks, iPads and learning apps, studies have found that digital tools have generally not improved students’ academic results or graduation rates.”
“On Judging Books.” Matt Reynolds defends the value of critical book reviews. If readers inevitably do some “intellectual outsourcing,” negative reviews are vital: “This isn’t (always) a knock on readers for reading sloppily or prejudicially, but simply a concession that ordinary life limits our capacity to see the full field of literary endeavor with pure, unclouded eyes. Leaving aside kids, chores, jobs, illnesses, and a thousand other time-claimers, there aren’t enough hours in the day or days in the year to read everything worth reading—not, at least, with anything approaching scrupulousness. Even the big media titans, with their enviable resources, can’t pretend their best-of pronouncements flow from Olympian insight into an entire year’s crop of books.”
“The Surveillance Economy Is Apple’s Legacy, Too.” Patrick McGee details how Apple enables and profits from mass surveillance. Apple “built the platform on which the surveillance economy runs, often taking a 30 percent cut of its revenue through the App Store. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007—and the steady improvement, from the addition of GPS in the next model to the current panoply of sensors and features—set the stage for the world of tracking we live in now.”
“The Bills That Destroyed Urban America.” Joseph Lawler looks at the process that hollowed out American city cores: “Americans are now three generations into a set of policies that, on the one hand, provide open-ended subsidies for sprawl and, on the other, do little to ameliorate the problems of the urban core — and maybe even aggravate them. Over time, this has come to seem like an unalterable fact of life and the work of the invisible hand of the market. But in this case, the hand is being nudged by Uncle Sam.”
“Harlan Hubbard’s Ohio River.” Michael Winters describes the origin of the painting on the cover of Jayber Crow. Hubbard created it in response to a request from the pastor of Mt. Byrd Christian Church for a baptismal painting: “The painting he created, measuring roughly 4 feet high by 8 feet wide, depicts a contemporary view of the Ohio River. Sunlight comes out of the clouds in the upper right corner, covering the water and summer hills in light. A few buildings, including a church steeple, can be seen in the lower right portion of the painting, but they are not centered or highlighted by the glorious sunlight. If the church was expecting a view of an ancient Jordan River, they instead got something that looked very much like the river just down the hill.”
“Prairie Prophecy.” PBS has released a new documentary about Wes Jackson: “The Wes Jackson Story follows visionary scientist and farmer Wes Jackson, co-founder of The Land Institute, whose lifelong work in perennial agriculture offers a hopeful path toward restoring balance with the Earth. This inspiring film celebrates a vision for a sustainable future.”
“‘This feels fragile’: How a Satellite-smashing Chain Reaction Could Spiral out of Control.” In an impressive visualization for The Guardian, Frederick O’Brien, Ashley Kirk and Oliver Holmes show how crowded earth’s space is becoming: “The United Nations is close to registering all objects in orbit. Still, these new mega-constellations have sparked intense debate among astronomers regarding light pollution, and have significantly added to the complexity of managing orbital traffic in an increasingly crowded space. The surge in orbital activity has created a significant collision risk.”
