Blogs about Society

After writing my last post about chatGPT, I got in touch with Nick Seaver to see what he had to say about some of these issues. Here’s our conversation: Ryan Anderson: So, I just signed …

The candy is half-price the flowers are wilting, and in my inbox some sweet folks are a-jilting. My manuscript’s growing, my brain needs a break, so time for some letters about hope and heartbreak. This …

From The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth (Lume Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 367-370). Lume Books. Kindle Edition. Population pressure seems to have been the primary cause of the Slav’s …

At 16.05 minutes into Ken Russell's decidedly eccentric documentary In Search of the English Folk Song, local minstrel Bob Appleyard sings about a giant oil refinery on the Solent. The whole doc is worth a …

The Knees needed their daily. Curiosity looked at the map and suggested this. A thin strip of woodland, apparently a ridge between two suburban areas just north of Glasgow. It turned out to be as …

Some quick updates: I completed a big section of the new website: updating and expanding the How To Beginner Practices booklets. So if you ever wanted 4000 well-formatted words on how to read a book, …

Old Book Illustrations features “Devil Turned Hermit,” from an early 19th-century book titled Cent Proverbes. The book describes the illustration: “The Devil, in the guise of an old man with horns, has a female visitor …

For centuries, Western intellectuals have centered public culture around the triumvirate of Homer, Socrates, and Plato. In Homer they placed the origins of Greek tragedy and extended its ethos to popular cultural sentiment in the …

While I have your attention: now that writing is no longer something my day job pays me to do, I’ve decided to keep the newsletter free but set up a Kofi tip jar so that …

The post Sunday Secrets appeared first on PostSecret.

❚ THREE YEARS AGO the critics divided over a TV “mockumentary” about Spandau Ballet’s Kemp brothers, which Martin summed up as “French and Saunders do Gary and Martin Kemp”. Gary added: “Our traits, but highlighted”. …

The primary social forces disrupting American society today are modern versions of two false religions.

David Stooke wrote us an email about this first Pepperbox party (there seem to have been others prior to this but the series of three parties that David drew the flyers for are the ones …

Check out my new blog My AI Obsession. And my latest post there, “Critics are battering that “AI Pause” letter. But it’s still worth signing.” Men’s Rights activists joke about it all the time, but …

Ever since the night of the harvest feast the village has seemed somehow unsettled. Lifelong friends meet warily or won’t talk at all. There is suspicion all around and little work being done. There is …