I did group, almost falling asleep at the end. I came home and did a nap. Something like 4 hours. When I woke, I was a little disoriented about time and date. The sky outside was as dull and gray as it had been this morning.
What I thought would be a small diversion became this post. It has been at least 4 hours since I started. Now, I have run through my emails and have nothing more to say about the outside world. Or life. Or whatever you find here.
I regret to notify you that it has been decided that "Agnes" will not be published in Flying Island Journal at this time. On behalf of the journal's editorial team, I wish you the best of luck with your writing endeavors.Sincerely,Hiromi Yoshida--
And:
Thank you for allowing us to consider "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984" for Midwest Review. We are sorry to report it was not selected for publication.
We are honored you thought of us as a home for your work.
Sincerely,
The Editors, Midwest Review
‘The Odyssey’ Review - by Sonny Bunch ( The Bulwark )
The Odyssey is more fractious, more fissured. It is, first, two hours of abuse and defeats and arguments and disappointments and the occasional bit of grubby cleverness, followed by an hour of glorious vengeance. (So glorious, in fact, that people in my audience were clapping at the mere plucking of a bow and the beautiful twang of its reverberations.) Odysseus, like Oppenheimer, is a man who changed the world, albeit one who had some regrets after the fact: Change is momentous, change is dangerous. When you shatter norms and fail to respect what has come before, you risk calamitous darkness.
Nukes, Data Centers, A VAT in our future: Race and Gender-Based Contract Practice Ends | Indiana Week in Review | July 17, 2026.
Donald Trump claims election insecurity; Markwayne Mullin warns states to cooperate - and so we all join the madness?
Trump's remarks on election security: What to know is that there is no meat on this bone.
John Ware: troubling light on The Troubles (The Article)
Neither Confirm Nor Deny is a book written by a journalist who, with his colleague Geoff Seed, took personal risks and now presents a rigorously researched and balanced account of what happened in Northern Ireland. It is not a book that makes you want to go into the garden and hoist a Union Jack — nor, come to that, an Irish Tricolour. Ware explains – in almost too much detail — how undercover security work during serious conflict can, unimpeded by the law, take an ethical nose-dive. It is to be hoped that this book will make such events, and the moral judgements behind them, much less likely in the future.
‘At times I felt I’d bitten off more than I could chew’: Christopher Nolan on sweeping the Oscars, making The Odyssey – and getting a puppy (The Guardian).
Bitten by Willie Nile - again!
The Odyssey review – Nolan goes god-tier with breathtaking epic of men, monsters and moral metamorphosis (The Guardian)
The result is a gigantic, shimmering mirage, a mysterious three-hour vision of crazy episodes that does not yield up wisdom or contentment, but only a grim resolution to continue with the fight, to make sense of ruined lives, to re-enter the scorched battlefield of loss.
I've seen only one John Waters movie, Hairspray, but maybe I should have seen more. He was just not on my or my friends' radar. Still, I knew who he was. ‘The minute I had success, I stopped taking drugs’: John Waters on 60 years of screen carnage (The Guardian) is a good reminder.
Nor should the comedy in either film disguise their underlying seriousness. Hairspray may treat the Civil Rights era with a deft touch but its indignation is palpable. Both movies celebrate resistance in the face of racism, fascism and tyranny. What do these movies have to say about the US in 2026? “I think they say that anger can be good, but the way you change things is through humour.” Is there anything he wouldn’t joke about? “I’m certainly not going to go into Israel and that whole situation. It’d be a lose-lose for me to even try. But I’ve always walked the edge of what you can’t make fun of. In all my movies, I make fun of things I like, not things I hate. That’s why I’ve been getting away with this for 60 years.”
The Day She Returns review – another Hong Sang-soo round of slow, reflective boozing really hits the spot (The Guardian) has some interesting writing advice:
...The film withholds overt meaning like a short story … and is quietly engrossing.
Our Hero, Balthazar review – a darkly comic satire of incel culture and gun violence | Movies (The Guardian) hits on a subject I have no understanding of and has me pondering this paragraph:
Deathdealer_16 turns out to be Solomon (Asa Butterfield), a Texan living in a trailer with his grandma, none too pleased to see Balthazar. But the two strike up a friendship, with Balthazar besotted by the shooting range, and Solomon eager to prove to the New Yorker there’s more to him than incel futility. Hitting a homoerotic pitch (“You wait to see the rest of what I’m packing,” says Solomon after revealing his glove box pistol), the film is at its strongest outlining this queasy interdependence. It’s a buddy-movie travesty of the mutual incomprehension and fascination between liberal and red-state America, suggesting that resignation to and glorification of gun violence aren’t so far apart.
It seems to me we are now a nation of the infantilized. I thought that was the goal of prison. Have the powers that be learned their lessons from the pirson-industrial complex and applied them to the nation at large?
Why Is Digital Freedom Making Us Exhausted and Sad? (The New Atlantis)
For more than two decades, Han has shaped a form of writing equal to his concerns: brief, concentrated books that think in movements rather than arguments. Their brevity feels deliberate, as if composed for the attention economy yet guided by another sense of time. Winding through subjects as varied as Zen, smartphones, and gardening, they often return to the same question: What has become of freedom in the digital age?
***
Burnout, depression, anxiety: these are the maladies of our time. No one denies their spread, but their wider significance is a matter of debate. For Han, they are not signs that the new order is breaking down. They are signs of its success. We are free — and the result is not liberation but exhaustion.
***
What Han would later diagnose as burnout is not just a condition of exhaustion; it is a condition of perception. Moods are how we feel the world, even before we think about it. They are less like emotions than the background conditions of our experience, like slow-moving weather patterns that give times and places their character. They cannot be examined like objects from the outside — we are always already within them — but they can be named and described. In Heidegger, Han found a way to notice them. And it made him weather-wise, alert to the world at a time when the weather was changing.
The Berlin Wall came down during Han’s years as a student, marking the end of the Cold War. For most in the West, the mood was jubilant. Liberal democracy and the free market had triumphed, and the specter of totalitarianism seemed to recede into history. The future, many assumed, belonged to societies that were more market-driven — and therefore more free. Han, however, had seen enough to question that story of progress. Growing up under the extreme pressures of Korean capitalism, he knew that domination could take many forms. South Korea had not followed the Big Brother model of the North, yet its people labored with an intensity that suggested another kind of domination — one rooted not in surveillance or prohibition but in competition, achievement, and the inner compulsion to perform.
If the twentieth century had feared domination by the state, the twenty-first would reveal another possibility: domination by freedom.
***
By now, we understand the basic mechanics of the profit model. While complex in one sense, its logic is painfully simple: keep users using; sell their attention to advertisers. In the early 2010s, news about predictive algorithms came as a shock. It seemed uncanny that an advertising algorithm could detect a woman’s pregnancy before anyone else knew about it. But the headlines have long since moved on. What once seemed unsettling has faded into the din of daily life, normalized under the regime Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.”
When Zuboff began writing about it in 2015, the public imagination often returned to a familiar nightmare: Orwell’s Big Brother, the all-seeing avatar of the surveillance state. Zuboff argued that the comparison was misleading. Today’s most powerful surveillance systems are not instruments of the state, nor do they rule by repression. They are transnational, driven by a market logic that shapes behavior without appearing to command it — what she called “Big Other,” a diffuse computational order that monitors and modifies human action at scale.
***
Han’s new book, The Tonality of Thought, approaches freedom in a different mood. Consisting of three public lectures, the book returns to themes that have run through his work for more than two decades. Han is not searching for a stronger self, but for a way beyond the self — another way of inhabiting the world, combining German Romantic ideals with Eastern thought. “If I may compare my thinking with a fruit,” he writes, “then its skin and flesh are deeply romantic. The seed, in contrast, is Far Eastern.”
***
In this clearing, Han’s thinking lets Western concepts take root differently. Among them is eros — a term that, in Greek thought, signifies much more than desire in the everyday sense. It is the soul’s movement beyond itself, toward a beauty that transcends possession. Eros reorients the reflex of self-enclosure, the habit of drawing the world inward and rendering it usable. The soul, instead of grasping, is laid hold of.
Against a Zen backdrop, this can seem difficult to place: the Western longing for beauty seems to unsettle the stillness of Buddhist detachment. Han’s books, inhabiting that tension, do not systematically resolve it. Instead, they bear its fruit in a mood that attunes us to the world. What matters for Han is that both movements, in their different ways, loosen the grip of a possessive inwardness. The question is no longer how to possess the self, but how to move beyond it.
***
Han begins from a different premise. Freedom in the digital age is found not in resisting the Other, but where the Other resists us. It is a question of ends: does freedom secure the ego or free us from its grip? One posture is habitually on guard, the other habitually open. For Zuboff, who draws again from Sartre, the danger is plain: “Hell is other people.” For Han, the more radical danger is an “inferno of the same” in which the Other disappears.
A life organized entirely around the self — its projects, its performance, its wants — leaves no room for the kind of relations in which freedom can actually take shape. The word freedom, Han likes to note, shares a root with friend. One is not free alone. Freedom arises from vulnerability. It begins not in mastery but in exposure, where one is no longer fully one’s own.
Which, since John Locke is integral to my research project, makes me think of Locke's idea that true freedom reaches its height in civil society - with other people, ordered liberty.
AI Is Changing What We Can Do. Who We Become Is Still Our Choice. | The Humanist Review of AI
Let’s step back and ask one of the central questions of ethics: “What kind of people should we want to be?” Ethics, in the classical sense, is about how to live well. And that involves more than producing the right outward acts. It involves becoming the sort of person who can recognize what is right, choose it for the right reasons and respond to the world with the appropriate thoughts and feelings.
How, then, could an automated oracle help? It cannot tell you what to feel, because feeling is not something you can summon by obedience. But neither can it settle the matter by telling you what to do. Reasons matter, and to be a morally responsible agent you must reason for yourself. That thought is central to the ethical tradition that reaches back through the European Enlightenment and to Immanuel Kant. Central to Kant’s thought was the ideal of people fully in charge of their own lives, reasoning toward the right decisions through a kind of self-government he called autonomy. People who simply do what they are told, even when what they are told to do is right, are not living autonomous lives. Nor is this a uniquely European idea. Confucius taught the virtue of yi, which involves recognizing what is right and acting in harmony with moral principle. Buddhism offers similar lessons. What matters is not just what you do but the intention with which you do it.
Accordingly, philosophers have rightly been suspicious of “moral deference”, in which someone decides what to do based on what another person or institution declares to be right. Moral guides, your priest, your rabbi, your imam, your guru, even a humble philosopher, can help you think things through. They can draw your attention to features of a situation you may have overlooked. But if they are doing their job, they will not simply listen to your quandary and pronounce a course of action without giving reasons. They will want you to do what is right because you understand why it is right, because only acts that arise from your own deliberation are fully yours. If they espouse values you do not recognize, your compliance does not turn their judgment into your own.
I should add that I am not assuming values are matters of mere belief rather than knowledge, or endorsing relativism, the notion that different normative traditions are entitled to their different answers. You can reject moral deference and affirm autonomy while still believing that there is such a thing as moral truth, and even moral expertise. Perhaps many moral questions, perhaps even all of them, have a universally correct answer. It remains the case that, even if LLMs give excellent answers to moral questions, you still should not defer to their conclusions. You should try to understand the reasons they offer, because it remains important that people act on the basis of their own, admittedly imperfect, understanding. That, in my view, is itself one of the universal moral truths.
***
Once we recognize that people, media outlets or spiritual guides may try to shape us in these ways, we can take that into account. We can ask what interests they have in influencing us. We can consult a range of sources with different interests. I know the pastor has an interest in getting me to make a larger offering. I know that Fox News tilts right and The Guardian inclines left. So, I can weigh what they say accordingly.
But the most effective forms of manipulation are invisible. And one problem with applying this strategy to AI is that we often lack any clear picture of the interests, if any, that guide it. That is one place where public education would help. One strength of LLMs, however, is that, unlike the pastor, they are often willing to tell you what they “know” about the forces that shaped them. And researchers have explored the political bent of the major models. There is a lot of evidence that existing LLMs tend to lean somewhat left of political center. It would be unfounded conspiracy-mongering to suggest that some secret center-left cabal is controlling things behind the scenes. Once you consider the shape of politics in the North Atlantic world, where the main LLMs are based, more ordinary explanations present themselves.
***
Political outlooks also differ in ways that reflect evaluative disposition rather than straightforward factual belief. Moral psychologists Graham and Haidt, for example, argue that concern about fairness tends to diminish, and concern about group loyalty to increase, as one moves rightward.[8] If so, users should know that fine-tuning may favor equality over national loyalty, reflecting the outlook of the cosmopolitan, highly educated people who help shape these systems. Autonomy is strengthened when people can judge advice in light of the perspective that informs it.
***
But notice that an AI guide that did agree to simply choose options would not be much use if you could neither identify the relevant features of your situation nor see what your options were. An LLM cannot tell you anything useful unless you can inform it about your situation. And grasping what matters in your situation is a capacity you can acquire only through practice. There is always something else you might consider. You have to learn what is relevant and how to respond to it.
I would add it is not enough to learn, but to remember and to have faith in what you know in the face of a world that does not care. I knew much. Depression became nihilism as my faith in ethics, in people, in what I was doing with my life dissipated.
Oops, I stopped reading too soon.
Aristotle thought that we develop this capacity through habituation, by practice. For him, the virtues were not rules or isolated good acts but settled dispositions of character, ways of seeing, feeling and responding that are formed over time until they become, in a good sense, second nature. Confucius, in a different key, stressed the role of ritual and custom in shaping good habits of response. Our sensibilities, our capacities for detecting what matters in the human world, do not come ready-made. That thought, largely sidelined for a time in modern moral philosophy, was revived in the twentieth century by thinkers such as Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, who urged that ethics return its attention to character, judgment and human flourishing.
One role of fiction, in fables and parables—in novels and short stories, in film, video and even painting—is to let us imagine complex moral situations and so develop habits of judgment and feeling. Conversational exchanges with an LLM, in which scenarios are built out collaboratively, could certainly engage the imagination in ways that help shape character and sensibility. Still, it is likely to remain true that we develop these capacities mostly by using them in the situations we face, alone and with others. Time online draws us away from those encounters.
I once told a friend of mine that the hardest ethical questions were between two equally bad choices. It seems now that may not have been taken as much comfort. I think that was the last time I saw Paula.
I am not a Saul Bellow fan. He put me off my writing for decades. I felt it was a milieu that had no reality - factual or emotional - for me. Yet, I keep coming back to him. Wondering was I wrong about him. Did I close my mind? I wish I had read Philip Roth first rather. Bellow was older - closer to Mailer, whose fictions leave me cold. But I admire Nelson Algren - also of Chicago and close to Bellow's age. And Vonnegut, Heller, Gore Vidal were of the same generation. There is someone else from the Fifties dancing in the shadows of my mind who leaves me as disinterested in his topics as does Bellow. I cannot get a name to form. Cheever's people have all the sexual tics and social anxieties. Yet, I understand their problems better. Augie March I found a novel worth reading, but Humboldt's Gift preceded it by decades.
And today I received a link to ‘Ravelstein’ Revisited - by Jonathan Marks (The Bulwark). This fit into the previous entries in this post. It might have also sparked a bit of reflection on my Bellow bias. A recession of sorts. It is a consideration of a Bellow novel for which I have only read disdain, to be polite.
I DON’T THINK THAT CHICK’S EXPOSURE, sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional, of his own defects justify his shameless exposure of a friend. To be sure, Ravelstein and Chick both merit praise from Bellow’s perspective. Bellow, throughout his career, took a special interest in ineffectual intellectuals, most notably Moses Herzog in Bellow’s novel Herzog, whose book-learning and talent for observation does little to make him wise. Herzog is, however, raised above his fellow moderns, who are less foolish than he is in some ways, by his high ambition, rare in a world ruled by economics, natural science, and the quest for the comforts those pursuits provide. Herzog wants to “live out marvelous qualities vaguely comprehended.” That desire, pursued even to the brink of madness, matters more than the failure of Herzog to gain more than the mystical conclusion that “only the incomprehensible gives any light.”
Chick and Ravelstein, who attempt but fail to understand a world Chick deems “mysterious,” are honorable in the same way Herzog is, a way that is compatible with great foolishness. Perhaps Ravelstein, who understood the quest for human completeness to be nearly always futile, wouldn’t mind being understood as a noble failure. But I doubt that even Chick’s Ravelstein would consider the abandonment of his lifelong convictions and preferences in the face of death to be the kind of failure that is noble.
Yeah, pretty sure I will only read Ravelstein if I am stuck with nothing else to do.
Effing brilliant: Star Shrapnel by Ata Zargarof
Book Review: Talking Classics by Mary Beard
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