There are some compelling resonances between Tara Isabella Burton’s New Atlantis essay “Rational Magic” and Luke Burgis’s essay for Wired, “The Three-City Problem”.
For starters, both identify how a Silicon Valley …
'What man needs is silence & warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium.' ~Simone Weil
Reading
The Power Broker
Robert A. Caro
Currently reading: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen 📚
Current listening: Danish Rain, the new album from a duet of wonderful musicians: pianist Justin Kauflin and bassist Thomas Fonnesbæk. 🎶
A wonderful essay by Tara Isabella Burton in The New Atlantis on Effective Altruism, the rationalist and now post-rationalist online communities, and the turn they’ve taken toward the transcendent.
Paywalled, but TNA is well worth a sub for …
Current listening: Brian Blade, Mama Rosa.
I’ve loved this singer-songwriter-Gospel album from a world-class jazz drummer. 🎶
Finished reading: Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin.
My second read; it’s as beautiful and profound as it was the first time through.📚
The Temptation in the Wilderness, part 1 (Good Teacher #3) ✝️
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these …
Welcome to the Good Teacher (Good Teacher #1) ✝️
In this newsletter, the goal is to consider Jesus’ teaching: what makes it worth following now, 2,000 after Jesus lived? Can it speak to us today? Does it have anything to offer our world?
This newsletter won’t be about institutional Christianity; it …
Realizing I should be maintaining issues of my newsletter here on my blog, not just on Substack, in case things fall apart, as they tend to do. So I’ll start re-posting 1-2 a week.
The newsletter is on the ethical teachings of Jesus. It …
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.
✝️📚🔗
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 …
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.