Just write

He was a graceful writer and stellar reviewer. He was an inspiration in how he dealt so gracefully with catastrophic late-life health crises, too.

"Just write, get better, keep writing, keep getting better. It's the only thing you can control."
Roger Ebert, born on this day in 1942

https://www.threads.net/@reboomer/post/C8WtpQ7udpi/?xmt=AQGzgil-iv9blp74Mjnu3ND3Fp0QBFoFgg7N4AkdaTq7SA

“a sense of the future… a direction”

Edward Stone, 88, Physicist Who Oversaw Voyager Missions, Is Dead

"…[Space exploration] provides us with a sense of the future. When we stop discovering new things out there, the concept of the future will change. Space reminds us that there is something left to be done, that life will continue to evolve. It gives us direction, an arrow in time."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/science/space/edward-stone-physicist-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

John Kaag's A.I. experiment

Now You Can Read the Classics With A.I.-Powered Expert Guides
Margaret Atwood and John Banville are among the authors who have sold their voices and commentary to an app that aims to bring canonical texts to life with the latest tech.

For the past year, two philosophy professors have been calling around to prominent authors and public intellectuals with an unusual, perhaps heretical, proposal. They have been asking these thinkers if, for a handsome fee, they wouldn't mind turning themselves into A.I. chatbots.

John Kaag, one of the academics, is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is known for writing books, such as "Hiking With Nietzsche" and "American Philosophy: A Love Story," that blend philosophy and memoir... (nyt, continues)

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The backstory:

I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again
Margaret Atwood, Marlon James, Lena Dunham, Roxane Gay: We’ve all agreed to be turned into AI reading companions by a mysterious company called Rebind. I report from the inside.

...He also suspected there were a lot of people who, like him, wanted to read hard books—maybe not Being and Time, but let’s say Moby-Dick. “You read the first 40 pages and you put it on the shelf, right?” By then he was reading William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience and loving it, and thought: Who’s the William James guy? It turned out to be John Kaag, who’d written a book called Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life, a mashup of memoir and philosophy. Which is exactly what Dubuque thinks people want: not scholasticism, but to know how to connect great books to our lives.

WHEN KAAG GOT an email from Dubuque, he almost didn’t answer, but they eventually talked on the phone and hit it off, as Kaag told me over Zoom: “He turned out to be one of the most curious, thoughtful people that I’ve ever encountered.” The two joined forces to develop Rebind. Kaag brought on his friend Clancy Martin. They have similar profiles: untraditional philosophy professors who’ve written eclectic books, including about their struggles with depression. (Clancy’s most recent book is titled How Not to Kill Yourself.)

Kaag’s mother, who raised him on her own, was a substitute English teacher. At age 12 he was a bad reader with a stutter; his mother would sit with him at the kitchen table and they’d read through his assignments together—essentially an Oxford-style tutorial. It’s what he tried to replicate with his own commentary for Rebind on Thoreau’s Walden: relating the book to his own experiences and difficulties, which include a heart attack at age 40 followed by bypass surgery. (Thoreau, who died of tuberculosis at age 44, wrote movingly about fearing that bad health had prevented him from leading a meaningful life.) If a reader journals about their own life difficulties in the chat, AI finds the places where Kaag shares something similar. Now the two are in conversation. Seeing that back-and-forth happen as they tested out the prototype, Kaag and Dubuque got really excited—they were creating, they thought, a new way to read...

Wired

https://www.wired.com/story/i-am-laura-kipnis-bot-and-i-will-make-reading-sexy-and-tragic-again/

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The Rebind backstory: rich plumbing supply wholesaler from St. Louis (former High School classmate of OpenAI’s Sam Altman, btw) sells his company for big bucks, hires an Oxford prof to tutor him on Being and Time, then picks up VRE, discovers AI, and asks “Who’s the William James guy? It turned out to be John Kaag”... 

Should we be more worried about the future of AI, or more intrigued and hopeful? Both, maybe? What would WJ say? I think he’d be clear that, at least so far, we have no reason to think there’s anything like a subjective self-aware consciousness lurking in the technology. As a pragmatist he’d be cautiously open to deploying this new tool, but also concerned to remind us (in Jaron Lanier’s phrase): “you are not a gadget.” And gadgets are not really intelligent. Not yet. But Ray Kurzweil says we’re still on track for the Singularity...

Cole Porter

"All the world loves a clown!"

Cole Porter, the composer and songwriter behind beloved Broadway standards like "You're the Top", "Let's Misbehave", and "Anything Goes", was born on June 9, 1891 in Peru, Indiana.
https://bit.ly/3w8ONB3

The end of our exploring

"Here we came to study that moon and yet, it was this gorgeous earth rise, this colorful, delicate-looking planet coming up that, in my view, was the most spectacular view of the whole flight."

Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, who captured the iconic "Earthrise" image during the first manned mission to orbit the moon, passed away this weekend at the age of 90.

https://www.threads.net/@americanexperiencepbs/post/C8CtjsLqXn6/?xmt=AQGzUdNYwUmqJQtDjqAE4kiCl4UId0A3Ec8B-bDuLdVS_w

American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty that Shaped a Nation

https://www.youtube.com/live/XhThp1SDWo8?si=c4U_8Ha-EvfzCSSW

D-day

What was it like for the soldiers fighting on Normandy's beaches on June 6, 1944? Hear their stories → https://to.pbs.org/3yOMh9z

Zoot Suit Riots

On the evening of June 3, 1943, the city of Los Angeles exploded in what would come to be known as the "Zoot Suit Riots", as servicemen on shore leave began attacking Mexican-American youths wearing "zoot suits".

Explore the complex racial tensions and the changing sociopolitical landscape that led up to the violence in ZOOT SUIT RIOTS, streaming now on YouTube and the @PBS app → https://bit.ly/3V6q7H6

American Bloods

 American Bloods is a long family saga that eventually gets to B.P. Blood. A reviewer* says:

At long last, the Blood family produced its own philosopher: Benjamin Blood. This Blood became a beacon of hope to none other than American pragmatist William James. “Not unfortunately, the universe is wild,” Blood wrote; “Nature is miracle all.” “Your thought is obscure — lightning flashes, darting gleams — but that is the way the truth is,” James responded. On his deathbed, James repaid the intellectual debt he owed Blood by recommending him as an “author of rare quality” and comparing him to Nietzsche.

From this motley crew of thieves, theorists, and seers, Kaag extracts a Blood family philosophy: “Ever not quite.” Whether they were stealing jewels, rejecting pieties, participating in John Brown’s unfinished project of racial reckoning, or helping America’s own philosophers learn how to be American, the Bloods were always, Kaag claims, guided by a “practical idealism — pluralistic, creative, dangerous.” It all makes a kind of wild, unruly sense. “Activity, heroism, and sheer willingness — bordering on madness,” Kaag writes, “is what all the Bloods, beginning with the jewel thief Thomas, were after.”

“Learn how to be American”... I’m still learning, I think. It’s a challenge these days, to embrace that identity. Isn't it?

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AMERICAN BLOODS: The Untamed Dynasty that Shaped a NationBy John KaagFarrar, Straus & Giroux, 273 pp., $28

*Lydia Moland teaches philosophy at Colby College and is the author of Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life

Boston Globe

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NOTE: This will be placed on reserve Jy '24 for MALA 6050, Americana: Streams of American Experience

Tulsa massacre-American Experience

103 years ago today, a white mob burned the thriving Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma to the ground, in one of the worst racially-motivated massacres in the nation's history.

https://bit.ly/3oB0VMG