Welcome to the new subscribers who've signed on over the last few weeks. Great to have you on board and I hope that you stick around for a while. As for those of you who've been reading this letter regularly, thanks for your continued attention!

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

How Diplomats See the World — An interesting peek into how American diplomatic workers ingest, analyze, synthesize, and present information that can have wide-ranging consequences if they get it wrong.

From the article:

The accurate version of a story is usually the complicated one. The rules of the job force diplomats to capture complexity. A diplomatic cable has to get sign-off from different embassy offices — including the political or economic sections who see the same host-country issues from a different angle — as well as the ambassador, who might see people in the sector you wrote about at a reception later that week. Back in DC, many more offices will read it: labor and population desks, the economic growth teams, human rights offices. If your account is one-sided, you look out of touch. You must write the version that holds up from every angle.

Cathedrals and the Silicon Soul — A chronicle of the early attempts to use technology as medium of, and tool far, artistic expression and why those efforts petered out.

From the article:

By enshrining the rigid and the mundane rather than the fluid and the sublime, art dies twice: first as an object of creative expression, and second as a catalyst for invention. Like the Canaanite god Moloch, Goodhart’s Law demands sacrifice. What can save us from a bureaucracy that asks for proof is patronage that offers faith.

Godzilla: The Kaiju That Remembers — A meditation on both the fictional creature and the metaphors in the real world that it represents.

From the article:

Godzilla became a kind of Trojan horse: big and cool and entertaining, and then, for those who looked closer or were told where to look, there was what had always been inside it.

Plato’s Warning Has Been Vindicated — Another warning about AI, about how we gain and retain knowledge and information. Or won't do that to the same degree as we did just a generation ago.

From the article:

Just as humans had become less reliant on memory as they mastered literacy, so now they were finding that that could abandon the habits of close and sustained reading. The practices and knowledge acquired through deep literacy were being traded for the more superficial and instrumental skimming and plucking that is the hallmark of what we now call post-literacy. And, with the handheld supercomputer, people now possess the perfect tool on which to hone their post-literate skills.