900+ and still going strong
A really venerable parish church bathed in Autumnal sunshine and currently acquiring a new roof.
Quote of the Day
”The great tragedy of our age is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
- Isaac Asimov
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Bach | French Suite No.3 in B Minor, BWV 814 – 3 Sarabande | Keith Jarrett
Long Read of the Day
Say it, don’t show it
Lovely essay by Neal Stephenson.
I’m generally not very interested in meta-writing, which is to say, writing about how to write. But for the last few years I’ve had a single sentence from Dickens hanging around on my desktop in a tiny text file, which I open up and re-read from time to time. It’s a moment from The Pickwick Papers. The titular character is attempting to board a stagecoach. It’s crowded and so he has to get on the roof, which is a bit of a challenge because he is old and portly. A passing stranger, seeing his predicament, offers to give him a hand. What happens next is described as follows:
‘Up with you,’ said the stranger, assisting Mr. Pickwick on to the roof with so much precipitation as to impair the gravity of that gentleman’s deportment very materially.
If you’re a fluent reader of the Dickensian style of English, these few words will conjure up a whole short film inside of your head…
Do read on. Among other things, it explains why so many people still read Dickens, Jane Austen & Co.
Books, etc.
For at least some of us, Dan Wang’s book is unputdownable. The TL;DR summary of it is that it’s a comparison of two superpowers — the “Engineering State” (China) and the “Lawyerly State” (the US). An (exceedingly crude summary) of that underlying idea is that China is able to ‘build’ important stuff like infrastructure, because its government is dominated by engineers; whereas the US is a society dominated by lawyers who are skilled at stopping or slowing down initiatives that their clients dislike.
It’s a vivid contrast, but because so many people are disenchanted by the lack of state capacity in liberal democracies they may be tempted to draw the wrong conclusion from the TL;DR summary. Wang’s searing accounts of the cruelty of the ‘one-child’ policy and the brutal way the Xi regime screwed up Covid should be enough to give any China-boosters pause.
The conclusion that I’m drawing as I read is that a world in which we have to choose between two such dysfunctional Leviathans is not one to look forward to.
My commonplace booklet
Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions
Interesting Pew survey.
In many countries around the world, a fifth or more of all adults have left the religious group in which they were raised. Christianity and Buddhism have experienced especially large losses from this “religious switching,” while rising numbers of adults have no religious affiliation, according to Pew Research Center surveys of nearly 80,000 people in 36 countries.
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