Kickoff For March 17, 2025
I've got nothing pithy or mildly interesting to say this week, so let's get Monday started with these links:
The Final Flight of the Airline Magazine — Wherein Lucy Schiller explores why printed publications tucked into the seat back pockets on airplanes are disappearing and going digital, what that means for a certain kind of writing, and what it means for travellers.
From the article:
Perhaps where terrestrial reality sat suspended, magazines were deeply powerful objects—far more so than the ubiquitous jokes about them seemed to indicate. There was The Office’s Michael Scott, a fan of American Way: “They did this great profile last month of Doris Roberts and where she likes to eat when she’s in Phoenix. Illuminating.” And the nickname given to The New Republic, in the nineties—“the in-flight magazine of Air Force One”—originally a jab, but also a nod to its influence.
The Race to Save Our Online Lives From a Digital Dark Age — Wherein Niall Firth looks at the ephemeral nature of the digital what we put into the digital world and at ways in which some people are trying to keep those memories alive in the form of ones and zeroes.
From the article:
Throughout history, the oddest, most random things survived to act as a guide for historians. The same will go for us. Despite the efforts of archivists, librarians, and storage researchers, it’s impossible to know for sure what data will still be accessible when we’re long gone. And we might be surprised at what they find interesting when they come across it. Which batch of archived emails or TikToks will be the key to unlocking our era for future historians and anthropologists? And what will they think of us?
ChatGPT Goes to Church — Wherein Arlie Coles examines the uses and limits of large language models like the popular ChatGPT, and how it's being used (and, inadvertently, abused) by theologians.
From the article:
The fixation on LMs as content generators, tools that circumvent the necessity of thinking together, is symptomatic of a deeper disease, developing out of our failure to integrate our unprecedented technological interconnectedness with the bodily realities that true Christian – true human – interdependence demands. The church uncritically glomming onto the latest LM for its liturgical, educational, or pastoral work will compound the harm in this area already inflicted by the long, lonely slog of the pandemic.
The Arc of Innovation Bends toward Decadence — Wherein Nicholas Carr argues that much of what's passed off as innovation these days is on a smaller scale than the breakthroughs of the past to which they're compared.
From the article:
Let me float an alternative explanation: There has been no decline in innovation; there has just been a shift in its focus. We’re as creative as ever, but we’ve funneled our creativity into areas that produce smaller-scale, less far-reaching, less visible breakthroughs. And we’ve done that for entirely rational reasons. We’re getting precisely the kind of innovation we desire — and deserve.
Strangers on a Train — Wherein Timothy Williamson muses on the nature, form, and need for philosophical dialogue in the modern age.
From the article:
Any healthy intellectual discipline involves rivalry and conflict. But that is compatible with all the participants being engaged in a joint cooperative enterprise. Think again of sports and games. It would be a disaster for the world number one in tennis if all the other players dropped out of the sport in despair, for then no one would be left to play. A chess club is a collaboration between its members, even though they play each other to win. In that respect philosophy is similar, although with a more serious purpose. To do philosophy is to participate in a huge cooperative search for understanding that goes back thousands of years. Philosophical dialogues dramatize that cooperation.
What It's Like to Experience Polar Night in the World's Northernmost Town — Wherein Cecilia Blomdahl tells us about life in Svalbard, a place that experiences total darkness for three months a year, and how the residents not only adapt to the dark but embrace it.
From the article:
I believe the choice people make to live here significantly influences how we approach the various seasons, especially polar night. Those who can’t embrace the extended darkness usually don’t remain here for very long. Longyearbyen is full of individuals who have relocated here for all kinds of reasons, but I’ve found that they often share a deep appreciation for nature. This comes in handy when learning to adapt to life on Svalbard, as the forces of nature play such a powerful role in shaping our daily lives here.