TikTok Versus Long, Hard, Boring Books

From Matthew Lee Anderson: "[...] the attempt to ‘accommodate’ the Tiktok-ification of our college intellectual culture does young people a grave disservice. Young people desperately need the difficulty of long, hard, boring books. They need large tomes, much more than they need efforts to capture their attention that try to outdo the TikTok videos they … Continue reading TikTok Versus Long, Hard, Boring Books

Ideological Science and the New American Dream

Greetings! Check out the opening of this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education about ideological biases in social science:   "Last summer in these pages, Mordechai Levy-Eichel and Daniel Scheinerman uncovered a major flaw in Richard Jean So’s Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction, one that rendered the book’s … Continue reading Ideological Science and the New American Dream

On Dante’s ‘Paradiso’ and How Tolkien Improved His Story

Another week, another dollar. What I'm reading: I finished Dante's Paradiso---at last. The poet ascends the spheres of heaven with his guide Beatrice, meeting figures such as Adam, Thomas Aquinas, St. Peter, Mary, and St. John along the way. I have many thoughts and feelings about it, but one surprising moment was in canto 27, … Continue reading On Dante’s ‘Paradiso’ and How Tolkien Improved His Story

On Writing, ChatGPT, Harry Potter, and Evil Equity Language

What a week. One of the low points was the discovery that Clarkesworld magazine has temporarily halted short story submissions due to an overwhelming influx of fake content generated by AI tools. Clarkesworld is one of the venues where I was planning to submit a work of mine, so needless to say, I'm ticked at … Continue reading On Writing, ChatGPT, Harry Potter, and Evil Equity Language