Austin Klein won’t be hiring a virtual assistant anytime soon. 🔗
R.I.P. Ahmad Jamal, one of the greatest and perhaps my absolute favorite jazz pianist.
My dad used to play “Stolen Moments” at night while I was going to sleep. I’ve loved Jamal ever since. 🎶 🔗
The best AI app wouldn’t be an everything app. It would be a nothing app—so smart it helped me do nothing on my screens and more in the real world. 🔗
Everything Iain McGilchrist has to say is worth considering, but I can’t recommend his conversation with Dark Mountain Project co-founder Dougald Hine highly enough.
It’s about climate change, the place of science in modernity, AI, and much more. 🔗
On Brad East’s blog, Denise Levertov’s Good Friday poem “On a Theme from Julian’s Chapter XX”:
Every sorrow and desolation He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.
✝️📚🔗
[Early book collectors] supported the lively culture of book hunting that still goes on, diminished but not dead yet, in the auction houses and antiquarian bookshops of New York, Boston and other cities.
Can this gentle, humane culture survive the attritions of social media and the carceral state? In a way, it already has.
~Anthony Grafton, in an delightful LRB review-essay of Denise Gigante’s new book. 📚
Yeesh. For Minnesota United fans, things are not looking good on the Bebelo front.
Fortunately, we’ve been playing shockingly well without him. #MNUFC #COYL ⚽️
Currently reading: The Secret Commonwealth by Robert Kirk
A gloriously strange book from 17th-century Scotland. 📚
Blue Note Records is absolutely crushing it lately: Julian Lage, Charles Lloyd’s trio of trios, Bill Frisell’s new quartet, Gerald Clayton’s Bells on Sand, Ethan Iverson’s Every Note is True: seems like all my fav new albums are Blue Note.
And this week, new Walter Smith III and Kendrick Scott. 🎵
Current listening: Charles Lloyd, Trio of Trios 🎵
Three fantastic trio albums, each with a different cast of musicians alongside Lloyd: Thomas Morgan & Bill Frisell; Anthony Wilson & Gerard Clayton; Julian Lage & Zakir Hussain.
Current listening: Charles Lloyd, Trio of Trios. 🎵
Three fantastic trio albums, each with a different cast of musicians alongside Lloyd: Thomas Morgan & Bill Frisell; Anthony Wilson & Gerard Clayton; Julian Lage & Zakir Hussain.
No world / wears as well as it should but, mortal or not, / a world still had to be built.
~Auden, “The Birth of Architecture”
What is mobile is always the most just.
~Robert Walser. So many great sentences in Walser. 📚
Every last silly little thing has its unspeakably swift justification, its good clever grounds.
~Robert Walser in 1907, writing about the Internet 📚
Jaron Lanier, being typically insightful:
“We have to say consciousness is a real thing and there is a mystical interiority to people that’s different from other stuff because if we don’t say people are special, how can we make a society or make technologies that serve people?”
The profile is titled, “The danger isn’t that AI destroys us. It’s that it drives us insane.” Which does certainly seem like a more likely possibility.
Then, in all labyrinthine economies
there are obscure nooks into which Authority never pokes a suspicious nose
~Auden, “The Horations”
What has become of us as a people that we can possess the beautiful only in dreams.
~Robert Walser
Currently reading: Berlin Stories by Robert Walser 📚
The cultivation of taste, in morals as well as in art, is neither snobbish nor elitist; it is, rather, the key means by which we emancipate ourselves from the tyranny of passions that the people who make our smartphone apps would like to see dominate us.
~Alan Jacobs, reflecting on David Hume & social media 🔗
I encountered a stunning book of photos on the Getty’s website today: Kazumasa Ogawa’s Some Japanese Flowers, from 1896.
19th-century photograph is always shocking & disorienting—how foreign, yet contemporary. 📚