Just because we don’t believe in aesthetic standards as a culture doesn’t mean we aren’t making constant aesthetic judgments that rely on a wide range of hierarchies: [Study authors] found that writers ‘with an elite degree (Ivy League, Stanford, University of Chicago) are nine times more likely to win than those without one. And more specifically, those who attended Harvard are 17 times more likely to win.’ They found that half of the prize-winners with an MFA “went to just four schools: [University of] Iowa, Columbia, NYU, or UC Irvine.

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Rowan Williams reviews Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things. A masterful and appreciative review, unsurprisingly. Williams points out that so many criticisms of McGilchrist’s work reflect exactly the tendencies that McGilchrist traces and decries in his work. He also rearticulates McGilchrist’s exceptionally helpful descriptions of thinking, truth, science, and objectivity: Thought takes time; encountering a limit suggests new questions — including the question of whether we have thus far been asking the right questions.

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Derek Thompson’s short, pensive essay on his own entanglement with effective altruism (EA) and Sam Bankman-Fried leaves off before getting to a problem that enabled both, a problem with the Internet in general: we humans just seem to be at our best when operating locally, in-person. Just as crypto’s promise of “trust in a trustless world” struck many as ridiculous, so too EA has been ridiculed for its impersonal approach to altruism.

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Instead, beauty effects a completeness that strengthens our capacity to be open and hospitable. It is fitting, in this respect, that we tend to think of giving the quality of beauty, more directly than the quality of truth or goodness, to our background surroundings, the encompassing atmosphere inside of which our existence unfolds. ~from Love and the Postmodern Predicament

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