On writing, books, tech, and faith
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
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
Happy Holy Week - hands down my favorite week of the year, culminating in Easter Sunday. Today, of course, is Maundy Thursday. I've been focusing my reading on the gospel of John and two spectacular little books of art: The Art of Lent and The Art of Holy Week and Easter, both by Sister Wendy … Continue reading A Voice You Love
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
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
Happy first week of Lent! I'm writing a simple update this time. I'd like to make this a recurring format so that I can push out regular content rather than waiting until I have something polished to share. What I'm Reading: Ever so slowly, I finished Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio and am now working through … Continue reading Lent and Comedy Divine
In an essay for The Atlantic, Thomas Williams criticizes book skeptics, like Kanye West, who proudly admit their disdain of books. Micah Mattix, in turn, criticizes Thomas Williams: "Listen, lots of people never read books. The vast majority of people who have lived on this planet have never read at all. This isn’t a virtue, … Continue reading Reading and Moral Superiority
I came across the following image in a book review of the recently-published English Garden Eccentrics. Source: The Critic.co.uk With the open cloudy sky and the grassy pasture jutting up against a wide plane of glacier-like rock formations and distant mountains, it strikes me as something out of a fantasy novel. I don't know exactly … Continue reading Writing Inspiration: Weird Gardenscapes
There are times in life when you meet nerdy enthusiasts whose speech and mannerisms make you promise to never stoop to such depths of nerdy obsession yourself---only to later realize you merely needed the right book to pull you in. This is what happened to me when I first read The Lord of the Rings … Continue reading Book Review: ‘Tolkien: Maker of Middle Earth’
Robin Sloan in his July 2022 newsletter writes about watching every movie ever made by the beloved Japanese anime director Hayao Miyazaki. Scroll to the end to read his observations. Here's what he says about Kiki's Delivery Service: There is so much kindness in so many of Miyazaki’s movies. Plots animated by kindness. If people … Continue reading Plots Animated by Kindness
Richard Rabil, Jr. 