Aesthetic judgments in an anti-aesthetic age 📚 🔗

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 on Iain McGilchrist 📚

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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The result of more free time for the masses is not more leisure, as Aristotle conceived it, but more time to scroll social media, flick through online dating profiles, binge on Netflix, and/or work on what Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha call “The Startup of You.”

~Zohar Atkins

Finished reading: A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles 📚

Finished reading: The Nature of Oaks by Douglas W. Tallamy 📚

It seems like the people most awed by “generative AI” art are those least familiar with humanity’s greatest artistic achievements. Those most impressed by ChatGPT are least familiar with good writing, good philosophy.

Unfortunately, they’re the same ones who run Silicon Valley.

Don’t come at me with some “philosopher test” if Hegel’s not one of the possible results. Hegel should be the only possible result. Sheesh.

My friend Patrick worked with his daughters to make an awesome collaborative card game—Nature Kin—celebrating San Diego’s biodiversity. Check it out!

This World Cup’s group-stage matchday 3 has produced absolutely scintillating, wild, edge-of-your-seat soccer. So, of course, FIFA is considering a bunch of really stupid ways to destroy it. ⚽️

World Cup update: 🇺🇸 and 🇦🇷 are through, so I’m happy. I can enjoy the rest of the group stage without stress. ⚽️