Greetings from the Porch,

It's been a busy season of life, so I'm very much looking forward to a slower pace this Thanksgiving week and eating plenty of good food with family and friends.

• In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about literacy, roux, and tobacco.

• In the second part of her blockbuster essay, Alisa Ruddell explores an Illichian paradigm for thinking about pregnancy: "I am drawn to the botanical paradigm of early pregnancy precisely because it reveals what the metaphors abortion is healthcare and abortion is murder have in common: a desperate need for control, and the willingness to use technology and legal bureaucracy to acquire it."

• Glen Sharp reviews Rebecca McCarthy’s unusual biography of Norman Maclean: "Rebecca McCarthy was extremely fortunate for her early adulthood to have been so influenced by Norman Maclean as both friend and mentor, and we are fortunate, too, for her sharing that gift with us. McCarthy’s biography of Norman Maclean helps to remove the rose-colored glasses through which we tend to regard a favorite writer, allowing us to see the whole man while at the same time also watching our appreciation of him deepen."

• Nadya Williams peers into the hidden world beneath the couch cushions: "Hiding objects there is a game, but it is also a dream, a manifesto, a proclamation of the sort of beautiful world that the authors of the best children’s literature like to envision. It is a full-hearted admission that this world is enchanted to its core, no matter how ordinary it may look to the naked eye."

• Emily G. Wenneborg draws on two recent novels to consider what it might mean to play an infinite game well: "Both Todd the Programmer and Lois the Baker have discovered something that is, for them, an infinite game: something that is played for the purpose of continuing to play. In other words, something worth doing for its own sake rather than for the sake of some other end."

• Suzanne Smith reviews Joel Miller's new book on books: "The world of books is tacitly conceived of as a homey yet elevated sphere analogous perhaps to Tolkien’s Shire. How did books become what Joel Miller calls 'the forgotten technology'?"

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about transcendence, of many varieties, this week.

Nick Bostrom is a strange philosopher. He’s perhaps most famous for his paper clip thought experiment: “Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.” In his book Deep Utopia—which, for the record, I do not recommend—he presents a series of meandering lectures and assignments and student chit-chat pondering how sentient beings might find meaning and purpose in a solved world, a world where we don’t need to do anything. This genre allows him to avoid making any claims for which he can be held responsible. As he says in one aside, “(My actual views are complicated and uncertain and pluralistic-leaning, and not yet properly developed.)” (To which I would respond: If they are not yet properly developed, why inflict them upon readers?) At root, Bostrom assumes humans should maximize pleasure, and this view of humans as pleasure machines should elicit the line of questioning that Wendell Berry proposes in his ever-more necessary book What Are People For? Here is Bostrom praising the possibilities of virtual reality:

I expect that virtual world will be experienced as decidedly more real than the physical world—more vivid, engaging, fruitful, relevant, and psychologically impactful. Many of us already spend more of our time and attention in the worlds of thought and imagination than we do focusing on the objects before us in our physical surroundings—and we find these mental conjurings quite sufficiently “real”, much of the time, even within the limitations of our current primitive cognitive and technological methods of mise-en-scène. (And I’m not even referring to the simulation hypothesis here.)

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro