Good question, Tyler

I'm a Professor. A.I. Has Changed My Classroom, but Not for the Worse.

At the end of a class in mid-September, as everyone was gathering their things, a student named Tyler approached me. "Can we talk sometime about how we can ask the questions on our own?" he said. "We always have you to ask the questions and set up how we're going to discuss and analyze, but I'd like to know how to do that for myself, for when we don't have someone else to do it for us."

…

nyt

Happy Thanksgiving

 Try to enjoy it. 

(And in case you happen to be secular and are called on to bless the feast, here are some Thanksgiving Non-Prayers...)

Burkeman on transforming the mundane

 Happy Thanksgiving!

Heard the start of this on the radio in the car, en route to a mundane walk in the Warner Park woods that became personally meaningful...

NSE Thanksgiving Special: Conversation and Gratitude
No Small Endeavor with Lee C. Camp

Happy Thanksgiving! How can one be grateful during difficult times? And how do we talk to one another in a polarized world? In this episode, we bring you four conversations to tee you up for a successful and meaningful time with family and friends. First, we hear from six-time Grammy-winner Amy Grant on her newfound gratitude in the wake of a traumatic bike accident. Then, Heather Holleman gives us all practical tips on having great bonding conversations that make people feel seen and heard, transcending the things that divide us. Third, community organizer and activist Diane Latiker shares how she opened up her home and changed the trajectory of a neighborhood through hospitality. Lastly, author Oliver Burkeman reveals the key to living in the moment and transforming the mundane into something meaningful. Altogether, it's the perfect toolkit for getting in the right frame of mind and heading into the holidays with gratitude and conversation.

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/no-small-endeavor-with-lee-c-camp/id1513178238?i=1000635785163

“Time isn’t yours… nothing to lose”

Actually, our relation to time is more intimate than possession. It's identity. You are it, it is you. But shouldn't we say, per Neil deGrasse Tyson, that we are space-time? Neither space nor time (nor us) exists in a vacuum. So we've got plenty to lose, and plenty to be thankful for. Have (be?) a happy Thanksgiving.

"Cosmic Joke"

Looking forward to learning more about the "cosmic joke," May.

The joke's closely related, I think, to what Burkeman calls "Cosmic Insignificance"...

...To be reminded of your cosmic insignificance therefore isn't just relaxing, but actively empowering. Because once you remember the stakes aren't anywhere near that high, you're free to take meaningful risks, to let unimportant things slide, and to let other people deal with how they might feel about your failing to live up to their expectations.

It's not that nothing matters from your perspective, obviously: it doesn't stop being important to feed a newborn baby, or keep up your rent payments, just because nobody in a million years will care whether you did so or not. What cosmic insignificance therapy™ does, though, is to recalibrate the yardstick with which you measure what's important from your perspective.

This results, if you're anything like me, in the realisation that 99% of what you worry about isn't worth the worry. The universe will trundle on its way regardless of what you do or don't do. So you might as well focus your time and attention on what you care about most deeply yourself – and let everything else join the infinite list of things that people have been fretting about since the dawn of humanity, but that never really mattered to begin with.

In other words: plenty matters. But we've only got so many weeks, so we've got to prioritize what matters most to us. That's not selfish, it's sane and sensible. It's inseparable from our happiness. 

Rutger Bregman's Reith Lectures

Our recommended author (Moral Ambition) is this year's distinguished Reith Lecturer in Britain. 

Lecture 1: A Time of Monsters

BBC Reith Lectures 2025 – Moral Revolution

This year's BBC Radio 4 Reith lecturer has been announced as historian and best-selling author Rutger Bregman.

Titled Moral Revolution, the lectures will delve into the current 'age of immorality', explore a growing trend for unseriousness among elites, and ask how we can follow history’s example and assemble small, committed groups to spark positive change.
The four lectures will span:
• A Time of Monsters
• How To Start a Moral Revolution
• A Realist’s Utopia
• Zoom Out



Bregman's 2025 Reith Lectures will reflect on moments in history, including the likes of the suffragette and abolitionist movements, which have sparked transformative moral revolutions, offering hope for a new wave of progressive change. Across four lectures, he will also consider the explosive technological progress of recent years - placing us at a moment of immense risk and possibility, and will look ahead to how we might shape the future.

Bregman is an author whose works include Humankind (2020) and Utopia for Realists (2017), which were both Sunday Times and New York Times best sellers,as well as Moral Ambition which was released earlier this year and was also a Sunday Times bestseller. His work has been translated into 46 languages and has sold over two million copies. During a discussion at the Davos World Economic Forum in 2019, he also attracted international attention for holding his billionaire fellow panellists to account for not paying their taxes.

The 2025 lectures will be recorded in front of live audiences in London, Liverpool, Edinburgh and the United States. They will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service later this year and will be available to listen to on BBC Sounds.

Rutger Bregman says, "I’m deeply honoured to give this year’s Reith Lectures. Across history, moments of decadence and decay have often been followed by movements of renewal, times when people redefined what it means to live with integrity and ambition. I believe we are at such a crossroads today. These lectures are my attempt to explore how moral ambition can help us face the challenges of our age."

...

BBC Radio 4

==

UPDATE, Nov.26: 

Bregman criticises BBC for removing Trump line from Radio 4 lecture

...says he is "genuinely dismayed" after a comment about Donald Trump was removed from a lecture he delivered on BBC Radio 4.

Rutger Bregman, who is presenting this year's Reith Lectures, said he included the line in a section discussing US politics, but that it was removed prior to its broadcast.

The Dutch historian wrote on social media that the decision had come "from the highest levels within the BBC".

A BBC spokesperson said the corporation had "made the decision to remove one sentence from the lecture on legal advice". BBC News is not repeating the line in question on the same legal advice... (continues)

How to Fix a Typewriter and Your Life

"…Lundy bought the business at the end of 2014. Soon, he quit his job and walked away from its stultifying steadiness, its salary and benefits. His colleagues were sure he had lost his mind. But Lundy knew he was trading security for meaning, predictability for possibility. "I was happy," he says simply…"

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/20/us/typewriter-repair-seattle-bremerton.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Pabst, Pamphlets and a Petition: A Harvard-Yale Tailgate in the Trump Era

Students and alumni set aside rivalries at the 141st Harvard-Yale football game on Saturday to summon support against attacks on higher education under the Trump administration.

..“Do you want to stand up for academic freedom and the First Amendment?” Ms. Schwartz asked a group of students, shouting above a cacophony of portable sound systems, each playing songs with different beats. “How would you feel about doing that?”
... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/us/politics/yale-harvard-football-trump.html?smid=em-share

Any comment on this professor’s rant?

Students these days, according to a colleague at another state school, can't or won't read, write atrociously, are addicted to their phones, and can't sit still.

Happiness students are in a different category, of course. 😉 But some of this seems spot-on, I have to say. For instance:

"They can't sit in a seat for 50 minutes. Students routinely get up during a 50 minute class, sometimes just 15 minutes in, and leave the classroom. I'm supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones. They know I'll call them out on it in class, so instead they walk out. I've even told them to plan ahead and pee before class, like you tell a small child before a road trip, but it has no effect. They can't make it an hour without getting their phone fix."

Any comment, on this point in particular or on the essay as a whole?

https://open.substack.com/pub/hilariusbookbinder/p/the-average-college-student-today?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Fwd: Chapter 14 Presentation — Basil Lozano

(Basil, & all-

Better prepare an old-school version, in case the computer is still non-cooperative.)

Here's a link to the Canva I'll be using during class:

https://www.canva.com/design/DAG5QNHjrKE/ld_TARWtRrDZhCFNbrUofg/edit?utm_content=DAG5QNHjrKE&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton

Questions NOV 25

 Concluding 4,000 Weeks... See audio review link for Dec. 2 exam below... Final draft of final report blogpost due Dec.5.  Don't forget to add links etc.*

1. Have you found Burkeman's message of life's finitude, brevity, and imperfectability helpful, in thinking about what it might mean to live a happy, purposeful, meaningful, good life? How would you summarize that message and its practical application to your life? 
2. Looking back over all our texts (Happiness: A Very Short Introduction, Epicurus, The Good Life, Against Happiness, 4,000 Weeks) what total message do you take away from the course? And what other texts would you recommend we read next time this course is offered?
3. What does it mean to "enter space and time completely"? 218 Have you? Will you?
4. How would you answer any of Burkeman's Five Questions? 220-27
5. What do you think of Jung's advice to Frau V.? 227-8
6. Do you agree with Burkeman's definition of hope? 230 Does it sound to much like resignation? Or do you define hope as I do: modest confidence that our efforts to ameliorate the human condition may not be wholly futile? Or do you propose a different definition?
7. Will you commit to Orwell's perspective? Do you resolve to enjoy your life, come what may? 234
8. What's your answer to Cousin Mary's question at the end of The Summer Day? 
9. Which of Burkeman's Ten Tools do you, or will you, use?v 235-45. Do you have any better ones?

==

*How to add links, embed videos etc. in final report posts (post early drafts at will, final draft due Dec.5)--

To insert links:
1. Highlight a word or phrase in your text
2. Click on the link icon
3. Paste the URL address of the site or passage you want to link to
==
Videos: in Blogger, after clicking on "New Post"--
1. Copy the URL of the video you want to share.
2. Click on "More options" on the far right of the toolbar above, then Insert Video icon (3d from left)
3. Select YouTube
4. Select Search 5. Paste the URL & Select it
==
To insert graphics, either just copy-&-paste... OR, click on the "insert image" icon (to the right of the link icon, to the left of the "insert video" icon) and select the appropriate option
==
To embed Google Books pages:
1. Find the book you want to embed.
2. Select Preview
3. Select (click on) the page you want to embed.
4. Click More Actions (the three vertical dots in the upper right)
5. Select Embed (unless you just want to link the page)
6. Copy the code
7. In edit mode on blogger, select the pen icon in the upper left and click on HTML view
8. Paste the code
==
Familiarize yourself with the edit icons in the drop-down menu (link, insert image, insert video, etc.) Always make sure, after you Publish, that the formatting is correct on the blogsite. If not, click More options (the three horizontal dots in the upper right) and then Clear Formatting on the far right (the T with a diagonal slash).

What’s gloriously possible: Burkeman’s meliorism

What Oliver Burkeman calls "hope," in his Afterword, I would call wishful or delusional thinking. Whatever you call it, he's right: give it up. Giving up delusions of personal infinitude, he concludes,

"kills the fear-driven, control-chasing, ego-dominated version of you—the one who cares intensely about what others think of you, about not disappointing anyone or stepping too far out of line, in case the people in charge find some way to punish you for it later… the "you" that remains is more alive than before. More ready for action, but also more joyful, because it turns out that when you're open enough to confront how things really are, you're open enough to let all the good things in more fully, too, on their own terms, instead of trying to use them to bolster your need to know that everything will turn out fine. You get to appreciate life in the droll spirit of George Orwell, on a stroll through a war-dazed London in early 1946, watching kestrels darting above the grim shadows of the gasworks, and tadpoles dancing in roadside streams, and later writing of the experience: "Spring is here, even in London N1, and they can't stop you enjoying it."

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn't a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It's a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible—the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you're officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what's gloriously possible instead."

— Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

https://a.co/aV7pMQz 

“Hope is a precondition of what matters”

Kieran Setiya, like Oliver Burkeman, calls for "acknowledgment and close reading of the lives we have" as the prerequisite of genuine and not merely delusional hope--the sort of hope that, as Rebecca Solnit points out, needs to act and not just lazily wish for a winning lottery ticket. I highly recommend Setiya's Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help...

"…It is much easier to say why despair is bad than why hope is good. We despair when things are hopeless, but we remain attached to them. "The relationship is over; she is gone forever," cries the jilted lover. The terminal patient weeps: "There is no cure." What they feel is grief or something like it. The pain of passion for a possibility that has died...

Hope coexists with quiescence. If there's courage in hoping, it's the courage to face the fear of disappointment that hope creates. When things turn out badly, hope is more harrowing than despair.

So Hesiod has a point. Hope can be deceptive, docile, daunting. Why celebrate its role in life? In a book she wrote in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the writer and activist Rebecca Solnit rose to hope's defense: "Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky," she wrote. Instead,

hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

The problem is that hope can be like clutching a lottery ticket and it needn't shove you out the door: as I know too well, you can hope intently as you stretch out on the sofa watching the news. The call for action comes from somewhere else.

Solnit may be right that action is impossible without hope: you cannot strive for what you care about, when success is not assured, without hoping to succeed or at least make progress. This is where the myth of hope's value starts. Hope is a precondition of what matters: the pursuit of meaningful change…"

...

This is how we should approach life’s hardships, finding possibility where we can: the possibility of flourishing with disability or disease, of finding one’s way through loneliness, failure, grief. The question, then, is not whether to hope but what we should hope for. In the spirit of this book, the answer’s not an ideal life. What we need is acknowledgment and close reading of the lives we have… For who are we? Not just the living but humankind, and there is hope for humanity, and so for us… Other concepts we should leave behind: the concept of the best life as a guideline or a goal, of being happy as the human good, of self-interest divorced from the good of others… Human life is not inevitably absurd; there is room for hope.

— Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way by Kieran Setiya

“Life Is Hard” pushes back against many platitudes of contemporary American self-improvement culture. Setiya is no friend to positive thinking — at best, it requires self-deception, and at worst, such glass-half-full optimism can be cruel to those whose pain we refuse to recognize. He describes a situation many of us have experienced: We tell someone about an illness or a fight we had; they try to convince us not to worry so much, or to focus on the bright side. Worse still, they might tell us that “everything happens for a reason.” This grotesque bromide is, explains Setiya, “theodicy,” an attempt to justify suffering as part of God’s plan. The problem is not that it cannot be true — theologians can extend divine providence to anything, even childhood leukemia — but that such thinking can easily serve as an excuse to avoid compassion.

Another theory Setiya challenges is the idea that happiness should be life’s primary pursuit. Instead, he argues that we should try to live well within our limits, even if this sometimes means acknowledging difficult truths. Happiness is a matter of definition; Setiya cites Tal Ben-Shahar, the Harvard professor and psychologist who writes about not only happiness but also the importance of accepting reality. Plato, too, he reminds us, held that true happiness lies in recognizing the lies of ordinary life, famously imagined as a cave filled with shadows. If you really consider “happiness” in its everyday sense — a feeling of contentment and pleasure — its desirability is complicated; we can certainly be made to feel good by ignoring injustice, wars, climate change or the hardships of aging. But we cannot live meaningfully that way... 

And what does living well mean in practice? To Setiya, it lies in embracing one of the many possible “good-enough lives” instead of aching for a perfect one. Setiya’s liveliest writing is on the subject of infirmity, no doubt because of the chronic pain he has suffered for years...

The golden thread running through “Life Is Hard” is Setiya’s belief in the value of well-directed attention. Pain, as much as we wish to avoid it, forces us to remember that we are indelibly connected to our bodies. Ideally, it also helps us imagine what it is like to inhabit the bodies of others, imbuing us with “presumptive compassion for everyone else.” By cultivating our sensitivity to ourselves and to others, we escape another destructive modern myth: that we are separate from other people, and that we can live well without caring for them...

“Life Is Hard” is a humane consolation for challenging times. Reading it is like speaking with a thoughtful friend who never tells you to cheer up, but, by offering gentle companionship and a change of perspective, makes you feel better anyway. Irina Dumitrescu

Let’s get small

"We tend to believe that to be happier, we need to become bigger in our own mind, and in the minds of others," Arthur Brooks writes—but that isn't true. On the happiness in insignificance:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/happiness-confidence-grandness-humility/684988/?link_source=ta_thread_link&taid=691f9e4981d1f40001b52ab4&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_medium=social&utm_source=threads

Get out

Everyone knows time in nature is good for your health, walking is good for your creativity, etcetera, but I also think there's something incredibly important about the sheer fact of being outside a lot in these apocalyptic-feeling, social-media-addled, AI-distorted, disinformation-saturated times. The sheer outsideness of outside (as opposed to beautiful landscapes or inspiring walks, great as they are). You know what I mean? This is the opening paragraph of John Stilgoe's 1998 book Outside Lies Magic:
… https://substack.com/@oliverburkeman/note/c-178571810?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Oliver Burkeman

Exam 2 audio review

Revisit the relevant texts associated with the questions mentioned here... 

‘Human Narratives’

At This College, the English Dept. Is Out. 'Human Narratives' Is In.

At Montclair State University in New Jersey, a departmental restructuring plan is igniting concerns about the future of the humanities.

...The departments of English, classics, philosophy, world languages and Spanish and Latino studies, for example, will be grouped into the tentatively titled School of Human Narratives and Creative Expressions. The psychology, linguistics, social work and religion departments will make up the School of Human Behavior and Well-Being. (There will be four schools in all; faculty will help determine the final names.)

...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/nyregion/montclair-state-restructuring.html?smid=em-share

Thinking in Transit

I've returned Megan Craig's book to the library. It inspires movement. Highly recommended!

World Philosophy Day

 By celebrating World Philosophy Day each year, on the third Thursday of November, UNESCO underlines the enduring value of philosophy for the development of human thought, for each culture and for each individual.

Philosophy is an inspiring discipline as well as an everyday practice that can transform societies. By enabling to discover the diversity of the intellectual currents in the world, philosophy stimulates intercultural dialogue. By awakening minds to the exercise of thinking and the reasoned confrontation of opinions, philosophy helps to build a more tolerant, more respectful society. It thus helps to understand and respond to major contemporary challenges by creating the intellectual conditions for change...

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by MTSU College of Liberal Arts (@mtsucla)

Fwd: PHIL-3160-001 Ch13 Presentation

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Sophie Duffy <sad5k@mtmail.mtsu.edu>

“feel the joy”

"Despite everything that's happening in the world and everything around us and any frustration or helplessness we feel or betrayal we feel, we have to remember it's also all right to feel the joy of being alive and feel the joy of your own possibilities." —Patti Smith

How people spent time, 1930-2024

A graphic illustration that explains a lot:

https://www.threads.com/@slipmatt/post/DRMnAuwAXpI?xmt=AQF0RM-4Tlpous2HywJOsw6ngcRGgY9Qh5shdzBLIEZHstXr8sUpKu_Ippuy_7WAYE7TbVyW&slof=1

"How we spend our days is how we spend our lives." Annie Dillard

(And yes, I do note the irony of having found this online.)

A + message for you all

from Kamala, in Nashville yesterday:

https://www.threads.com/@fiskuniversity/post/DRN_YdIkgzP?xmt=AQF0ttbkJcb0uAJegrlwAygNHtSHYJt8WzD1hIXtD4zLtBSGGwvFsZMNHBfOwOR4EpjP7oo&slof=1

So he’ll plant a tree

94-year-old William Shatner finds himself considering the question, "Where do we go when we die?" more often.

"All my life is fertile," he says. "And I don't want to leave it. And that's the sadness. I don't want to go."

https://www.threads.com/@cbssundaymorning/post/DRNUybqEoRo?xmt=AQF0_7WVI-tPtHuERym1Sx7zkJPjSD4lwn8DNg6RUHDIrwGYaLxXu8D5rQ3us-5Z66c18lhD&slof=1

Questions NOV 20

Have you found Burkeman's message of life's finitude, brevity, and imperfectability helpful, in thinking about what it might mean to live a happy, purposeful, meaningful, good life? How would you summarize that message and its practical application to your life? 

1. Looking back over all our texts (Happiness: A Very Short Introduction, Epicurus, The Good Life, Against Happiness, 4,000 Weeks) what total message do you take away from the course? And what other texts would you recommend we read next time this course is offered?
2. What does it mean to "enter space and time completely"? 218 Have you? Will you?
3. How would you answer any of Burkeman's Five Questions? 220-27
4. What do you think of Jung's advice to Frau V.? 227-8
5. Do you agree with Burkeman's definition of hope? 230 Does it sound to much like resignation? Or do you define hope as I do: modest confidence that our efforts to ameliorate the human condition may not be wholly futile? Or do you propose a different definition?
6. Will you commit to Orwell's perspective? Do you resolve to enjoy your life, come what may? 234
7. What's your answer to Cousin Mary's question at the end of The Summer Day? 
8. Which of Burkeman's Ten Tools do you, or will you, use?v 235-45. Do you have any better ones?

==

*How to add links, embed videos etc. in final report posts (post early drafts at will, final draft due Dec.10)--

To insert links:
1. Highlight a word or phrase in your text
2. Click on the link icon
3. Paste the URL address of the site or passage you want to link to
==
Videos: in Blogger, after clicking on "New Post"--
1. Copy the URL of the video you want to share.
2. Click on "More options" on the far right of the toolbar above, then Insert Video icon (3d from left)
3. Select YouTube
4. Select Search 5. Paste the URL & Select it
==
To insert graphics, either just copy-&-paste... OR, click on the "insert image" icon (to the right of the link icon, to the left of the "insert video" icon) and select the appropriate option
==
To embed Google Books pages:
1. Find the book you want to embed.
2. Select Preview
3. Select (click on) the page you want to embed.
4. Click More Actions (the three vertical dots in the upper right)
5. Select Embed (unless you just want to link the page)
6. Copy the code
7. In edit mode on blogger, select the pen icon in the upper left and click on HTML view
8. Paste the code
==
Familiarize yourself with the edit icons in the drop-down menu (link, insert image, insert video, etc.) Always make sure, after you Publish, that the formatting is correct on the blogsite. If not, click More options (the three horizontal dots in the upper right) and then Clear Formatting on the far right (the T with a diagonal slash).

Fwd: Presentation 11/18 PHIL 3160 001

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Nicholas Bagwell <nwb2w@mtmail.mtsu.edu>
Date: Tue, Nov 18, 2025 at 12:03 PM
Subject: Presentation 11/18 PHIL 3160 001
To: Phil Oliver <Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu>

Ode to joy

A Defense of Joy – one of the greatest poems ever written, and today an invitation to countercultural courage and resistance

https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/07/04/mario-benedetti-defensa-de-la-alegria/

The Sad and Dangerous Reality Behind ‘Her’

At least a quarter of the more than 100 billion messages sent to our chatbots are attempts to initiate romantic or sexual exchanges.

...ALICE, a computer program built by one of our founders, Richard Wallace, to keep a conversation going by appearing to listen and empathetically respond. After ALICE was introduced on Pandorabots's platform in the early 2000s, one of its interlocutors was the film director Spike Jonze. He would later cite their conversation as the inspiration for his movie "Her," which follows a lonely man as he falls in love with his artificial intelligence operating system.

When "Her" premiered in 2013, it fell firmly in the camp of science fiction. Today, the film, set prophetically in 2025, feels more like a documentary. Elon Musk's xAI recently unveiled Ani, a digital anime girlfriend. Meta has permitted its A.I. personas to engage in sexualized conversations, including with children. And now, OpenAI says it will roll out age-gated "erotica" in December. The race to build and monetize the A.I. girlfriend (and, increasingly, boyfriend) is officially on.

...But there's a dark side to A.I. companions, whose users are not just the lonely males of internet lore, but women who find them more emotionally satisfying than men. My colleagues and I now believe that the real existential threat of generative A.I. is not rogue super-intelligence, but a quiet atrophy of our ability to forge genuine human connection.

The desire to connect is so profound that it will find a vessel in even the most rudimentary machines. Back in the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum invented ELIZA, a chatbot whose sole rhetorical trick was to repeat back what the user said with a question. Mr. Weizenbaum was horrified to discover that his M.I.T. students and staff would confide in it at length. "What I had not realized," he later reflected, "is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people."

...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/opinion/her-film-chatbots-romance.html?smid=em-share

The American Revolution

A film by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, now on PBS.

https://to.pbs.org/3LLvp9U

—Time for another?

A crucial inner shift

Oliver Burkeman says the thought that more of life should feel exceptional and engrossing, rather than routine and boring, indicates a crucial and positive inner shift of attitude towards living in the only time we ever truly possess. "It's deeply unsettling to find yourself doubting the point of what you're doing with your life." But it's good to "face the reality that you can't depend on fulfillment arriving at some distant point in the future... the matter needs addressing now." Four Thousand Weeks ch13 p204

That reminds me of something my old Vandy mentor John Lachs* said in his first book, Intermediate Man. "Once attention is shifted from the future and we begin to enjoy activities at the time we do them and for what they are, we have transcended the mentality that views life as a process of mediation toward distant ends." The future is now. Of course we must care about the future, and how our choices in the present will impact it. We must allow our vision of a better future to inform those choices. But experience won't wait. Use it or lose it. Our weeks pass so swiftly by. Now's the time.

* Immediacy and the Future by Phil Oliver

Questions NOV 18

1. What does research show about impatient driving? Does this also apply to those of us who are impatient with drivers who go too recklessly and fast? Do you experience frustration (or rage) behind the wheel? How do you manage it? 162
2. Have you experienced, or worried about falling prey to, a vicious addictive spiral? 168 Do you have any advice for those who have or who do? (Ask me about This Naked Mind...)
3. What was Jennifer Roberts' initial art history assignment? 174 Would you do it? Have you ever done anything comparable? What did that teach you?
4. What's Peck's insight? Is there anything in your life to which it might apply? 179
5. What does it mean to "stay on the bus," creatively and otherwise? 183 
6. What is "Super Mario's" misunderstanding about the value of time? What sort of good is it, in Burkeman's view? 186-7
7. Have you been, or are you tempted to become, a digital nomad? What are you risking, if you do? 189
8. What's a fika? Do you ever take one, or need one? 191-2
9. "That's no holiday, if you have to celebrate it by yourself." 193 Agree? (And do you have Thanksgiving plans this year?) 
10. Do you regularly engage in any form of collective ritual or coordinated action? Have you experienced "the sacred place where the boundaries of the self grow fuzzy"? 196
11. Was Hannah Arendt right, and prophetic? 200
12. Did the pandemic offer a silver lining of "bittersweet gratitude" or a "possibility shock" for you, in any respect? 205-7  How can we lock in such lessons before reverting back to the old normal? 
13. Do you think the cosmos itself has a significance? If so, don't we share in that? Does it matter, for this, that our lives transpire in the relative blink of an eye? 208-9
14. Are you okay with the likelihood that you probably won't be another Mozart or Einstein? 212 (After all, Mozart and Einstein weren't an earlier you.)

==

How to add links, embed videos etc. in final report posts (post early drafts at will, final draft due Dec.10)--

To insert links:
1. Highlight a word or phrase in your text
2. Click on the link icon
3. Paste the URL address of the site or passage you want to link to
==
Videos: in Blogger, after clicking on "New Post"--
1. Copy the URL of the video you want to share.
2. Click on "More options" on the far right of the toolbar above, then Insert Video icon (3d from left)
3. Select YouTube
4. Select Search 5. Paste the URL & Select it
==
To insert graphics, either just copy-&-paste... OR, click on the "insert image" icon (to the right of the link icon, to the left of the "insert video" icon) and select the appropriate option
==
To embed Google Books pages:
1. Find the book you want to embed.
2. Select Preview
3. Select (click on) the page you want to embed.
4. Click More Actions (the three vertical dots in the upper right)
5. Select Embed (unless you just want to link the page)
6. Copy the code
7. In edit mode on blogger, select the pen icon in the upper left and click on HTML view
8. Paste the code
==
Familiarize yourself with the edit icons in the drop-down menu (link, insert image, insert video, etc.) Always make sure, after you Publish, that the formatting is correct on the blogsite. If not, click More options (the three horizontal dots in the upper right) and then Clear Formatting on the far right (the T with a diagonal slash).

Or it can, if... But this seems to be too big an if for many. That's why I keep repeating Marc's mantra about the precious privilege of breathing, thinking, enjoying, loving…
==
This passage in our Happiness text today almost redeems "Friend Heidegger" (as my old Mizzou undergrad prof, Alex von Schoenborn, used to call the Third Reich's favorite academic foot soldier--he was "Führer-rector" of Freiburg University when he joined the National Socialist party):

"…if you can hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on the sheer astonishingness of being, and on what a small amount of that being you get—you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be here, right now, alive in the flow of time. (Or as the flow of time, a Heideggerian might say.) From an everyday standpoint, the fact that life is finite feels like a terrible insult, "a sort of personal affront, a taking-away of one's time," in the words of one scholar. There you were, planning to live on forever—as the old Woody Allen line has it, not in the hearts of your countrymen, but in your apartment—but now here comes mortality, to steal away the life that was rightfully yours.

Yet, on reflection, there's something very entitled about this attitude. Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality the outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it's so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it's so many more weeks than if you had never been born? Surely only somebody who'd failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything is, in the first place, would take their own being as such a given—as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So maybe it's not that you've been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it's almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all."
— Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

Redeems is too strong. This complicates the legacy. The old Roman Emperor had a complicated legacy too. And we're just lucky to be here thinking about it at all.

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Frankfurt on addiction

"Only two industries call their customers users: drug dealers and technology companies." The saying is provocative, but is the comparison accurate?

Harry Frankfurt, the late American philosopher, distinguished between first-order desires (what we want in the moment) and second-order desires (what we want to want). In his framework, "addiction" occurs when an agent has second-order desires but cannot make them effective. It describes a structural incapacity to shape one's will rather than a simple failure of resolve. To know whether we're addicted, we need to ask two things: whether the self that reflects on our desires endorses our appetite for Twitter or TikTok, and whether that self can make its endorsement stick...

https://substack.com/@harrylaw/note/p-178792853?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

And of course he also wrote:

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis... (continues)

Counting

"Don't just count your years, make your years count."
~ George Meredith

A happy Python

 

Excellent advice:

The next time you get into an argument with your wife, or your friend, or with a small group of friends, just stop the discussion for a moment and for an experiment, institute this rule. "Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker's satisfaction" … This would mean… that before presenting your own point of view, it would be necessary for you to really achieve the other speaker's frame of reference — to understand his thoughts and feelings so well that you could summarize them for him. Sounds simple… but if you try it you will discover it is one of the most difficult things you have ever tried to do. However, once you have been able to see the other's point of view, your own comments will have to be drastically revised. You will also find the emotion going out of the discussion, the differences being reduced, and those differences which remain being of a rational and understandable sort. — CarlRogers

https://www.themarginalian.org/

To repeat...

"The more predictable your days become, the faster your neurons quiet down."*

True, but only up to a point... (continues)

It’s World Kindness Day

 

I could listen to Stephen all day...

 

Presence

Living against time – Virginia Woolf on the art of presence and the "moments of being" that make you who you are.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/02/12/virginia-woolf-moments-of-being/

Perspective-changing books

Henry Oliver asked Substack: what is the one book that changed your perspective on life the most?

After HUNDREDS of responses, these were the top 25 — in order of how often they were suggested (save this list):

25. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

24. On the Shortness of Life, Seneca

23. Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman

22. Tao Te Ching, Laozi

21. The Stranger, Albert Camus

20. Stoner, John Williams

19. Confessions, St. Augustine

18. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

17. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

16. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

15. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

14. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

13. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair

12. Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton

11. East of Eden, John Steinbeck

10. Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

9. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

8. 1984, George Orwell

7. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig

6. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

5. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

4. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

3. Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl

2. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

1. The Bible (and several mentions of Ecclesiastes, specifically)

https://substack.com/@henryeliot/note/c-176157474?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

(Too much Rand here, but it's still impressive that Burkeman made the cut… ahead of Aurelius and Seneca!)

Fwd: Final Presentation

Final presentation

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Adeline Lennon <aml2cf@mtmail.mtsu.edu>

Self-fulfilling prophecy?

How long do Americans hope to live?

The average desired lifespan is 91 years, but while most say they're trying to age well, only three in 10 adults under 65 think they actually will, according to a new Pew Research Center poll.

The good news: "49% of adults ages 65 and older say they are aging extremely or very well."

Be kind

Kurt Vonnegut was born on this day (11.11) in 1922.

"Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-God damn it, you've got to be kind." —God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

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Questions Nov 13

1. What does research show about impatient driving? Does this also apply to those of us who are impatient with drivers who go too recklessly and fast? Do you experience frustration (or rage) behind the wheel? How do you manage it? 162
2. Have you experienced, or worried about falling prey to, a vicious addictive spiral? 168 Do you have any advice for those who have or who do? (Ask me about This Naked Mind...)
3. What was Jennifer Roberts' initial art history assignment? 174 Would you do it? Have you ever done anything comparable? What did that teach you?
4. What's Peck's insight? Is there anything in your life to which it might apply? 179
5. What does it mean to "stay on the bus," creatively and otherwise? 183 
6. What is "Super Mario's" misunderstanding about the value of time? What sort of good is it, in Burkeman's view? 186-7
7. Have you been, or are you tempted to become, a digital nomad? What are you risking, if you do? 189
8. What's a fika? Do you ever take one, or need one? 191-2
9. "That's no holiday, if you have to celebrate it by yourself." 193 Agree? (And do you have Thanksgiving plans this year?) 
10. Do you regularly engage in any form of collective ritual or coordinated action? Have you experienced "the sacred place where the boundaries of the self grow fuzzy"? 196
11. Was Hannah Arendt right, and prophetic? 200
12. Did the pandemic offer a silver lining of "bittersweet gratitude" or a "possibility shock" for you, in any respect? 205-7  How can we lock in such lessons before reverting back to the old normal? 
13. Do you think the cosmos itself has a significance? If so, don't we share in that? Does it matter, for this, that our lives transpire in the relative blink of an eye? 208-9
14. Are you okay with the likelihood that you probably won't be another Mozart or Einstein? 212 (After all, Mozart and Einstein weren't an earlier you.)

==

How to add links, embed videos etc. in final report posts (post early drafts at will, final draft due Dec.10)--

To insert links:
1. Highlight a word or phrase in your text
2. Click on the link icon
3. Paste the URL address of the site or passage you want to link to
==
Videos: in Blogger, after clicking on "New Post"--
1. Copy the URL of the video you want to share.
2. Click on "More options" on the far right of the toolbar above, then Insert Video icon (3d from left)
3. Select YouTube
4. Select Search 5. Paste the URL & Select it
==
To insert graphics, either just copy-&-paste... OR, click on the "insert image" icon (to the right of the link icon, to the left of the "insert video" icon) and select the appropriate option
==
To embed Google Books pages:
1. Find the book you want to embed.
2. Select Preview
3. Select (click on) the page you want to embed.
4. Click More Actions (the three vertical dots in the upper right)
5. Select Embed (unless you just want to link the page)
6. Copy the code
7. In edit mode on blogger, select the pen icon in the upper left and click on HTML view
8. Paste the code
==
Familiarize yourself with the edit icons in the drop-down menu (link, insert image, insert video, etc.) Always make sure, after you Publish, that the formatting is correct on the blogsite. If not, click More options (the three horizontal dots in the upper right) and then Clear Formatting on the far right (the T with a diagonal slash).

Chronic weather

Santayana was right…

Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe’

Rhys's presentation was richly provocative. I wish we'd had more time to discuss it. Maybe we can do that here, in Comments?

Three quotes stood out to me:

• "One could not do without repetition in life, like the beating of the heart, but it was also true that the beating of the heart was not all there was to life."
• "I rather think the world is like sand. The fundamental nature of sand is very difficult to grasp when you think of it in its stationary state. Sand not only flows, but this very flow is the sand."
• "Only a shipwrecked person who has just escaped drowning could understand the psychology of someone who breaks out in laughter just because he is able to breathe."

And, I could not help but think of Philip Pullman's "dust," which he has said is an analog in his work of consciousness, curiosity, and creativity-and is also an inexorable natural force (like Abe's "sand") with which we must grapple in our respective pursuits of happiness. 

Some questions:

• If sand is time itself, as we experience and embody  it, can we say the same of dust? (And are we, as the old song said, "dust in the wind"?)
• There's more to life than repetition, of course, but would you agree that happy people learn to love and  cherish the regular repetition of their various, multifarious springs of delight-like me and my dogwalks, for instance?
• Is there a connection of the flow of sand to  the "flow" of optimal human experience when time seems to vanish?
• The fact that we exist at all indicates that we are all survivors of "shipwreck" and should be laughing, no?

What other questions would any of us like to pose about this work?

Ploughshares