The Homebound Symphony
The Homebound Symphony
Alan Jacobs
I am — let me take a deep breath — the Jim and Sharon Harrod Endowed Chair of Christian Thought and Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program of Baylor University. I’ve been at Baylor for eleven years and before that taught for three decades at Wheaton College in Illinois. I was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. I’ve been married for forty-four years and have a grown-up son. I am an Anglican Christian.
Latest Posts
I am rarely hopeful about politics and culture — in the Milne Typology I am an Eeyore, which is the kind of thing that happens to people who reflect often upon original sin — but even so, much of what’s happening now surprises me. I...
It’s interesting to juxtapose this WSJ story about people building “analog rooms” in their houses with Jason Fried’s account of his parents’ “smart home”: It’s new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It’s amped up with state of the...
Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor: We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact — even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity...
I remember the precise moment I fell in love with Coventry Cathedral. It was on my first visit. As I entered I saw what you see above, which is quite wonderful in many ways. But after I had walked up towards the altar to inspect the...
April 1, 2005, to John Gruber: John, I just wanted to write to thank you for Markdown, which is one of the coolest and most useful tools I’ve come across in a long time. I’m an English professor who does a lot of writing, and one of my...
A few days ago I submitted my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers to my editors at Oxford University Press. I always find this stage of the book-writing process emotionally complicated. At the moment, while I feel gratified that I have told...
Like many (most?) Mac users, I keep my frequently-used applications arranged in my Dock in a logical and easily-remembered order; but a few months ago, my Mac stopped remembering that order and began to display those apps randomly. At...
Diarmaid MacCulloch: The particular appeal of Orthodoxy for a certain sort of young man comes from the fragility of so much of young American masculinity: disoriented by assertions of female equality and the new self-confidence of many...
Men in their latter years fall into three general types, which can to some degree overlap but are nonetheless distinct: Grumpy old men Explorers (“Old men ought to be explorers,” T. S. Eliot said, but this is not common) Wise elders Dan...
I just watched The Egyptian, a 1954 movie. It’s very interesting in a number of respects. It’s not good — the acting is almost uniformly poor, though Peter Ustinov is enjoyable as a roguish servant — but it’s interesting. The titular...
This story about a long-time Apple developer and writer who has been locked out of his account without explanation and without any means of redress has been making the rounds in Apple-user world. And he’s not the only one: scroll to the...
Dorothy L. Sayers’s sequence of twelve radio plays, The Man Born to be King, happened because the BBC asked her to put the life of Christ, distilled from the Gospels, in dramatic form. But Sayers was not content simply to string together...
What If Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do? – The Atlantic: But as a historian trying to comprehend feelings, [Rob] Boddice can’t stand those cute Inside Out characters. Because not only do we imagine other people to have the...
The People Outsourcing Their Thinking to AI – The Atlantic: James Bedford, an educator at the University of New South Wales who is focused on developing AI strategies for the classroom, started using LLMs almost daily after ChatGPT’s...
Almost everything that makes this collection worth reading happens between 1962 and 1964, with 1962 being the year when Kenner and Davenport are maximally stimulating of each other’s ideas — as I think this post demonstrates. Much later...