Greetings from the Porch,

This week I finished the first draft of my book on AI and a creaturely anthropology. I'm sure it will go through substantial revisions over the next several months, but it feels very good to reach this stage of the process.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about form, fraud, and suckers.

• Robert Thornett sets readers down in a Chinese Starbucks to reflect on the cultural tensions that intersect in these places: "In this city that almost no one in the West has heard of, where it seems no one on the street speaks English, all the baristas here in Starbucks answer your questions about coffee and the city in English. While a traditional Chinese tea house focuses on ancient traditions, here the focus is the new: new sources of beans, new flavors—like the 'Iced Purple Sweet Potato Oolong Tea Latte with Mochi Bits'—new music, and conversations about new plans and projects."

• K.E. Colombini praises the glories of small towns: "Small towns not only engender local and national patriotism, but they also create the conditions for the arts to flourish."

• Eric Malczewski reflects on ways that places like Yellowstone are made by a culture: "Sight for us is always sensation imbued with affect and meaning, both of which derive from our formative experiences as members of particular communities. The starting point when answering the question what do we see is in the first instance with whom do we see?"

• Evan Patrohay misses the sight of starry skies: "The greater our creations have become, the more hollow they appear in contrast to what was here before us."

• Brandon McNeice ponders what A River Runs Through It has to teach us about friendship: "The book does not hand over a method. It teaches a way of moving through the world: with hands trained by practice, with eyes trained to notice, with patience that keeps the line in the water. It does not remove the grief of loving someone who eludes you. It shows what it can look like to continue anyway: casting again into the same current, trusting that 'all good things—trout as well as eternal salvation—come by grace,' and that grace, when it comes, rarely comes on demand."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about ephemerality this week.

In preparing to lead an afternoon seminar today for a group of 15 students on G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, I was looking through Heretics, which came out three years earlier in 1905. It’s full of Chesterton’s characteristic flourishes and cutting insights. In his conclusion, he notes that those who are not practiced in holding and defending clear ideas are particularly susceptible to fanatical and absurd ideals. Perhaps the denizens of Silicon Valley who pontificate about machines being conscious would benefit from a dose of Chesterton:

The truth is that financiers and business men are a danger to the empire because they can be sentimental about any sentiment, and idealistic about any ideal, any ideal that they find lying about. Just as a boy who has not known much of women is apt too easily to take a woman for the woman, so these practical men, unaccustomed to causes, are always inclined to think that if a thing is proved to be an ideal it is proved to be the ideal. Many, for example, avowedly followed Cecil Rhodes because he had a vision. They might as well have followed him because he had a nose; a man without some kind of dream of perfection is quite as much of a monstrosity as a noseless man. People say of such a figure, in almost feverish whispers, “He knows his own mind,” which is exactly like saying in equally feverish whispers, “He blows his own nose.” Human nature simply cannot subsist without a hope and aim of some kind; as the sanity of the Old Testament truly said, where there is no vision the people perisheth. But it is precisely because an ideal is necessary to man that the man without ideals is in permanent danger of fanaticism. There is nothing which is so likely to leave a man open to the sudden and irresistible inroad of an unbalanced vision as the cultivation of business habits. All of us know angular business men who think that the earth is flat, or that Mr. Kruger was at the head of a great military despotism, or that men are graminivorous, or that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. Religious and philosophical beliefs are, indeed, as dangerous as fire, and nothing can take from them that beauty of danger. But there is only one way of really guarding ourselves against the excessive danger of them, and that is to be steeped in philosophy and soaked in religion.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro