“A Jonquil for Wendell Berry (1934-2026).” Jason Peters remembers Wendell Berry and muses on his lasting legacy: “When Thoreau died Emerson said of him, ‘no truer American existed.’ It is not for me (and it wasn’t for Emerson) to make such claims, though when notable men die you can understand the temptation. I had the good luck to know Berry a little, it is true, yet it would be as wrong of me to overstate the intimacy as it would be to exaggerate his greatness. Nevertheless I think the country, the real country, has lost a great man.”
“Wendell Berry’s Difficult Hope.” Michael Lamb shares how Wendell Berry helped him articulate authentic hope: “Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that “every work of genius” enables us to ‘recognize our own rejected thoughts’ and then gives them ‘back to us with a certain alienated majesty.’ That was Berry’s genius. He clothed my intellectual and moral formation on the farm with majesty, helping me see it as the fertile ground it had always been.”
“Honoring Wendell Berry.” A few weeks ago, I talked with Ken Myers about Wendell Berry’s legacy to honor the fiftieth anniversary of The Unsettling of America. Ken’s Friday Feature includes part of that conversation and further reflections on Berry’s work. Our full conversation is out now as well.
“Delicious Life.” Elizabeth Stice remembers her grandmother: “I never heard my grandmother expound her philosophy of life, but I think it was partially reflected in her final word. Delicious. Despite everything. Because of everything.”
“On AI, Bernie Is the Last Conservative.” Gregory Conti reflects on the odd situation that has a progressive taking a conservative stance on AI: “Artificial intelligence is the ultimate devil you don’t know. The widespread embrace of it is certainly a ‘perilous adventure.’ But almost alone in our political class, it is not a conservative but America’s best-known socialist who is proposing a pause on AI development and a permanent ban on the development of artificial superintelligence.” (Recommended by Adam Smith.)
“Statement.” Details are still disputed, but according to this report from Tristan Buckmaster, it appears OpenAI’s model may have solved a math problem by, at least in part, incorporating data into its training from two mathematicians working on a similar problem: “I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer.” Regardless, OpenAI has behaved very strangely during this process.
“The Race to Keep Cheating.” Alex Bronzini-Vender details the cat-and-mouse game as it unfolds at “elite” colleges: “If higher education loses the struggle against AI, Carr believes, it won’t be for want of solutions. ‘If your wife is having an affair with the milkman,” she says, ‘it’s not that it’s so confusing about what to do.’ It’s just that ‘the solutions would be pretty annoying.’”
“Actually Existing Nun Girl Summer.” Sister Carino Hodder explains how even what seems like bureaucratic administration can be a source of delight: “Absolutely no one who asked me what this actual nun did on her Nun Girl Summer was expecting me to say that one of the most enjoyable and spiritually refreshing activities of the past couple of months was the process of revising our Book of Constitutions.”
“The AI Researcher Who Just Quit Anthropic Says It’s ‘Crunch Time for Humanity.’” Maxwell Zeff talks with former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon about why many AI researchers think AI could eliminate humans yet continue the development race: “Evan Hubinger, the AI alignment lead at Anthropic, predicted in a post on X that there’s a greater than 10 percent chance that AI could kill all people in the next decade. That post was reposted by current and former researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic, some of whom said it was a common sentiment in the industry. What’s less obvious is how exactly these AI fears will come to pass and what the world is supposed to do about the concerns being raised by the people building AI.”
“How Scared Should We Be of A.I. Right Now.” For a contrary take, and probably a more perceptive one, see Cal Newport’s argument about why alarmist claims can distract from present harms: “The observation that the most alarmist claims about A.I.’s impact seem to come from the individuals most connected to Rationalism should anger us. This exaggerated grimness makes it easy to overlook the more immediate harms created by these technologies, such as their potential use in cybersecurity attacks, excess resource consumption, impact on our cognitive fitness, role in undermining education and amplification of soul-deadening slop.”
“There’s No Such Thing as an AI ‘Lab.’” Matthew Sun wants to stop calling AI companies “labs”: “Ultimately, AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t tweedy labs doing arcane research—they’re industry-defining corporations reshaping our workplaces, our schools, and our communities.”
“College Campuses Need to be Liberated from their Administrators.” Barry Lam traces how administrative bloat and technological solutions burden colleges: “For the last few years, Washington University in St. Louis has been working to get software to do the same job, integrating graduation requirements with enrollment, transcripts, and financial aid systems. It’s part of a software system that has cost the school $99 million to implement. At that price, the school could have hired 20 work-study students for well over a century. A faculty member at Wash U who is also a student adviser tells me that some students now need an hour to figure out if they have satisfied their major requirements, using a piece of the software so unwieldy that it requires ongoing mitigation, updates, and video training for staff, faculty, and students.”
