Friday Rundown 05.16.2025
Some good reads for the weekend
A while back I recorded something I called a “Sunday Rundown,” thinking that it would be easier to produce spoken-word pieces than written ones and that I could therefore make it a weekly thing. Well, maybe because I’m no tech savant, it turned out to be quite a bit of work, so I’m back to writing. My goal once again with this “rundown” idea is to make it a weekly thing, a way to share some favorite things I read or watched or listened-to during the week. So without further ado, and in no particular order…
The Lore of the World
This was my favorite read of the week. I love the insight here that one job of parenting is to share the “lore of the world” with your children, to help them fill their up “codex of reality, one entry at a time.” And in the process, you (the parent) “re-explain the world, and therefore see it afresh yourself.” This last observation is something I often share when people ask me what I enjoy about being a dad, but to think of it it terms of lore and a codex makes it beautiful and magical.
The Broke Little Things
My other favorite read of the week (though published a few years ago). The author takes some sharp and deliciously snarky shots at the kajillionaire class, but the author’s take is strangely heartening at the same time, via his insight that the ultra-privileged are as just trapped as you and me in three-dimensional space, awkward physical bodies, and linear time. And even these people, who can purchase any experience of happiness that their minds could imagine, still spend a ton of time basically just scrolling on their phones like the rest of us.
We’re afflicted with cultural illness. Thankfully, there’s a cure.
Key quote: when trust in institutional authority collapses, we don’t stop needing authority, we just crown new ones. This piece clicked with my obsession with the epistemic crisis that plagues modern society. My only real quibble is the author’s characterization of Douglas Murray, who is no champion of discernment and reason IMO, despite recently saying some good and important things in defense of those things on Joe Rogan.
AI Is Replacing Jobs. People Are The Problem.
This topic has become somewhat of a trope already, but I appreciated the emphasis here on how the problem is not AI itself but rather the corporate imperative to deploy it. This imperative is the crux of our current paradigm, which the author calls “globalized earth-raping human-rights-destroying race-to-the-bottom winner-take-all late-stage hyper-capitalism.”
Thinking is being outsourced to AI
Speaking of AI, this is one piece of several I’ve come across recently describing about how ChatGPT has changed students and learning. It paints a depressing and frightening picture of students who increasingly lack critical thinking and writing skills and have increasingly less interest in them. Unsurprisingly, Sam Altman seems to think this is cool:
The author notes that “Teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills.” Therefore I predict that schools and pedagogy will find ways to neutralize or circumvent students’ overreliance on AI, but it will take some time. Meanwhile, the cohort of students who graduated from high school during COVID remote school days and entered college during the rise of AI might be irrevocably lost.
The Joy Is Not Optional
In the church town I grew up in, we used to talk about preachers’ kids or “PKs” as representing a particular brand of rebellious youth. We all rebelled against our home regimes, but since their homes were the strictest, they rebelled the hardest. The author of this piece is not a PK, but she was raised (and homeschooled) under a strict Christocratic regime called “Growing Kids God’s Way.” She’s now a sex worker and a heck of a writer. Here she shares harrowing stories of the hardcore obedience culture of her childhood.
Conservative Victimhood Culture is Ruining America
There’s a frustrating double-standard in how conservatives see (and indulge in) victimhood, and this piece nails it.
Why MAGA Defends Everything Trump Does
I’m reaching the point where I’m no longer interested in understanding MAGA, but this is a question I’ve had a hard time letting go of. I’ve seen countless attempts to answer it, and I think this one is the best.