Friday Fotos: To and from an egg-white omelette

Tulip garden in Hokkaido

Tulip Garden, Hokkaido, Japan🇯🇵 pic.twitter.com/LtOimE2BC7

— World's Amazing Things (@Hana_b30) May 6, 2026

Trump’s transactional view of the world

David French, True Believers Blow Trump’s Mind, NYTimes, May 7, 2026.

At the core of Trump’s worldview is a belief that the world is a fundamentally transactional place, and that everyone has a price.

The Republican Party has done nothing to disabuse him of the notion. Even the religious leaders around him are fundamentally transactional. As they’ve demonstrated, they’ll put up with virtually any behavior from Trump so long as he delivers on a few, simple promises. And now — especially when it comes to abortion — he doesn’t even have to deliver on those. For some it seems as if access to power alone is compensation enough. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

The key to Trump’s power isn’t just that he accurately sensed that much of the Republican establishment paid lip service to principle but really cared about power — it’s that he knew millions upon millions of voters possessed similar values. Their commitments to character or ideology took a back seat to the simple desire to defeat their opponents. The most important thing was to win. Anything else was a luxury.

And, in a strange way, they appreciated him for his brazenness. In this cynical view, all politicians are, deep down, just like Trump. They were faking their dedication to principle. As for Trump, he was the honest crook. He was like the mob boss who didn’t insult our intelligence by pretending to be in the sanitation business.

Like calls out to like, and over time Trump has built one of the most purely transactional coalitions in politics. It should surprise no one that prosperity gospel pastors were among the first Christians to answer Trump’s call. Their entire religion is transactional — with God dispensing health and wealth in direct response to the financial donations of the faithful.

Nor should we be surprised that such a substantial proportion of the nation’s tech moguls found their way to MAGA. Forget culture, their politics are downstream of commerce, and Trump has promised crypto and A.I. riches to all those who fall in line behind him.

Alas, Trump is wrong about that:

Not everyone is transactional. Some people — for better and for worse — actually have beliefs that they’re willing to die for, and Trump is painfully, obviously baffled when he encounters belief like that.

It’s embarrassing, for example, to watch him flail his way through the Iran war, shifting strategies, objectives and timelines sometimes by the day. It’s obvious that he thought Iran would be another Venezuela. In Venezuela, he was able to capture the leader and then more or less bend the remaining regime elements to his will, at least for now.

But in Iran, he helped Israel decapitate virtually all of the nation’s senior leadership, and the rest of the regime seems to have become more intransigent and less willing to negotiate. Even worse, he also seems to have enabled the most fanatical elements of the regime — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — rather than the slightly more moderate clerics.

In response, Trump plays the only cards he knows how to play — alternating between threatening death and destruction and proposing business deals.

And then:

Ukraine’s zealous defense of its own liberty and independence is heroic and deeply virtuous. So is Denmark’s defense of its own sovereignty in the face of Trump’s bullying. In fact, much of Western Europe was transactional with Trump until they realized the price of dealing with Trump was simply too high to pay.

They thought they could hunker down and weather another Trump term, but he created a crisis so grave that Europe had to stand if it wanted to preserve any shred of dignity and independence.

The pope’s steadfast adherence to Catholic doctrine is yet another example. One gets the sense that he’s almost amused at the idea that Trump’s bellicose rhetoric should have any influence at all on his public professions of Christian faith.

The messiness of American politics:

One of the most fascinating aspects of the last 10 years of American political life has been the way that Trump has exposed layers of differences in American life beyond right versus left. In fact, in many ways right versus left has been the least consequential aspect of the American divide. The Republican Party bears little ideological resemblance to the G.O.P. of even the very recent past.

Instead, it’s been between decent and indecent. Honest and dishonest. Transactional and principled.

There's more at the link.

Corner window

Uncertainty about the future as a factor in declining fertility

Anna Louie Sussman, Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All. NYTimes, May 7, 2026.

The collective reluctance to procreate is perhaps most glaring in the Nordic countries. With their stable economies, strong social safety nets, robust family policies and equitable gender relations, they maintained relatively high birthrates through the early 2000s. In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, however, sometimes referred to as the Great Recession, births in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland declined, and then declined some more, even as their economies recovered throughout the 2010s. Little about those nations’ family policies had changed, and as far as anyone could tell, men were still doing their share of the dishes. The same downward trend held in the United States, where births have fallen by about 23 percent since 2007, despite high rates of immigration until last year. Births have also been declining in East Asian countries, even though governments in the region have thrown buckets of money at the problem. And in France, despite its longstanding pronatalist policies.

This is not simply a matter of affordability, the buzzword so often invoked to explain why people are choosing to have smaller families. Government support for parents can help, but overall, people are having fewer children both in countries that offer very little and in those renowned for their generous family benefits; moreover, the trend holds among those who are struggling to make ends meet and among those who, like the Riveras, have advanced degrees and salaried jobs. What unites these disparate cultures, policy environments and demographics, researchers are now realizing, is young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Call it the vibes theory of demographic decline.

The future has never been assured, but it feels as though we are living in a time of spectacular uncertainty. In the United States, job tenures have contracted and income volatility has risen. Life expectancy, once on an inexorable march upward, has fallen for less-educated women and men. Many of the forces our economy is built on — A.I., immigration, global trade — feel distressingly volatile; disruption, once a byword for a disturbance or problem, is the governing ethos of a terrifyingly powerful sector of our economy.

There's much more at the link.

Some other flowers

Invention and Greatness: Jevons, Linnaeus, Darwin, and Pound’s typology [MR-Aux]

I was curious about the fact that Jevons is barely even mentioned in Cowen’s recent book, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? I decided to ask the A.I. linked to the marginalism book about that. That led me to introduce a typology of literary accomplishment that Ezra Pound introduced in the A B C of Reading (1960). After having the A.I. sort the great economists into Pound's categories, I concluded by asking it to apply that typology to two of the biologists Cowen mentions in Chapter Three, Linnaeus and Darwin.

* * * * *

Cowen clearly gives Jevons primary credit for the marginal revolution, and it is the marginal revolution which underlies modern economics, at least until quite recently. But Jevons is not one of the GOATs in Cowen’s book about the great economists. He’s barely even mentioned. I find that rather puzzling.

The tension is real and worth examining. Tyler's book on the great economists — Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today (published in the UK as Stubborn Attachments — actually no, let me be precise: the great economists book is a separate volume where Tyler profiles figures like Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Mill, Marshall, Keynes, Hayek, and others) — focuses on economists whose ideas remain directly usable for contemporary policy and thinking. That's a different criterion than historical importance to the discipline's internal development.

Jevons is a victim of his own success in a particular way. Marshall absorbed and domesticated Jevons's marginalism so thoroughly that Marshall became the usable, teachable, policy-relevant version of the revolution Jevons started. If you want marginalist thinking applied to real economic problems, you go to Marshall, not Jevons. Jevons gets credit for priority but Marshall gets credit for transmission and application — which is exactly the pattern Tyler identifies in the book we're discussing. [See text: Ch.2 · Jevons as systematizer whose work was absorbed ...]

There's also the matter of Jevons's intellectual range working against his canonical status. His contributions scatter across economics, logic, statistics, meteorology, and the coal question. He's harder to summarize as a usable thinker than someone like Keynes or Hayek, whose big ideas attach to recognizable policy debates. And Tyler's framing in this book — that Jevons contained the seeds of marginalism's own destruction — makes him a fascinating historical figure but perhaps an awkward candidate for GOAT status. You don't typically canonize the man who built the thing that is now declining. [See text: Ch.2 · Jevons's marginalism containing seeds of its ow...]

I’ve always been fond of Ezra Pound’s typology of literary accomplishment from A B C of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960). From Chapter 2, pp. 39-40:

When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:

1 Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.

2 The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.

3 The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well.

4 Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. ...

5 Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch.

6 The starters of crazes.

Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees.’ He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library ... but he will never be able to sort out what he knows or to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old.

Jevons would seem to be an inventor. How many of Tyler’s six GOATs are inventors? Is Mills an inventor of economic ideas?

Pound's typology maps onto the history of economics with uncomfortable precision. Working through Tyler's GOATs: Smith is clearly an inventor — not because he discovered any single mechanism but because he assembled the first coherent vision of the economy as a self-regulating system. Ricardo is probably also an inventor, giving us comparative advantage and the systematic use of abstract models to derive non-obvious conclusions. Malthus is an inventor in Pound's sense — the population trap was genuinely new and has haunted economic thinking ever since, even when wrong.

Keynes is the interesting case. Tyler clearly regards him as a master in Pound's sense — someone who combined existing elements (Wicksell's interest rate theory, Marshall's framework, Fisher's quantity theory) into a new synthesis that was more powerful than any of its components. The General Theory is a combinatorial achievement as much as an inventive one. Hayek similarly — his business cycle theory and his knowledge argument draw on earlier Austrian work; he's a master who pushed existing processes further than his predecessors. Marshall is almost definitionally a master: he took Jevons's invention, smoothed it, systematized it, made it teachable, and produced the apparatus that ran economics for fifty years. [See text: Ch.3 · Marshall absorbing Jevons while refusing to ful...]

Mill is the genuinely hard case, and your instinct to single him out is right. Mill synthesized Ricardo and Bentham and Smith into a coherent Victorian package, but it's difficult to point to a process he invented. He may be Pound's category four — a good writer fortunate to work when the literature was in healthy order — or even category five, a brilliant expositor and systematizer without a truly original mechanism to his name. Tyler's inclusion of Mill in a GOAT list would implicitly be a vote for the master over the inventor, which is itself an interesting judgment about what economics is for. [See text: Ch.2 · Jevons as polymath inventor working across mult...]

Interesting. It would be interesting to apply Pound’s typology to the various creators Tyler discusses in Chapter 3, but that would rattle on and on. At the moment I’m thinking about biology, so how do you think Tyler would apply that typology to Linnaeus and Darwin?

Linnaeus is a clean case and almost a pure example of Pound's first category — but with a twist. His invention wasn't a new theory of how nature works, it was a new process for organizing knowledge about nature. Tyler is quite explicit about this: the Linnaean contribution was a classification system, a filing cabinet, a searchable keyword structure for plant names. [See text: Ch.3 · Linnaeus creating a searchable classification s...] The content of botany didn't change; what changed was the infrastructure for accumulating and trading botanical knowledge. That's an invention of a peculiar kind — a meta-process rather than a substantive discovery — but it's an invention nonetheless, and Tyler's point is that it unleashed an explosion of subsequent work precisely because it gave everyone a common framework. Pound would recognize this: Linnaeus found a new process, and you can date botanical science from before and after him.

Darwin is more complex and Tyler's treatment of the precursors complicates the simple inventor narrative. Hutton had glimpsed natural selection. Lyell's geology gave Darwin the deep time he needed. Malthus gave him the pressure mechanism — competition for scarce resources driving differential survival. [See text: Ch.3 · Darwin absorbing Lyell's geological framework w...] In Pound's terms Darwin looks like a master: someone who combined a number of existing processes and used them better than the inventors of each component. Darwin himself acknowledged this, telling Lyell that his books came half out of Lyell's brains.

The interesting wrinkle is that Darwin also invented something genuinely new — natural selection as a complete mechanism, not just a glimpsed possibility. Hutton's passage that Tyler quotes is suggestive but it's not the theory; it lacks the Malthusian pressure, the variation mechanism, the geological timescale, the consilience of evidence. So Darwin may be Pound's rarest figure: someone who was simultaneously a master and an inventor, combining existing processes into a synthesis that itself constituted a new process no predecessor had actually articulated. Tyler's chapter implicitly supports this reading by showing how much Darwin absorbed while also showing that the synthesis was irreducibly his own.

Will AI increase the value of traditional credentialing?

I will also take the other side of this bet.

As things stand, AI will increase the value of traditional credentialing, especially elite ones.

Will colleges do a good job teaching what they should? Different question but I bet the elite credentialing path will adapt well enough. https://t.co/IBhi8AYOKq

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) May 6, 2026

The irises have arrived!

A God that’s useful for pastoral purposes is different from the theologian’s God

I recently had a long conversation with Claude that started with the anthropic principle and worked its way through Copernicus to cosmology in general to the idea that we live in a generative universe and that led to this question, which I presented to Claude:

So how has the Christian concept of God changed from rank to rank? In the medieval world there was a whole population of angels and archangels doing real conceptual work. And all those higher beings, up to and including God, seemed to have been conceptualized, at least in part, in some contexts, as “compact” beings existing in some higher “space.” Both heaven and hell we real places out there somewhere. I’d think that started dissolving after the Reformation and then with the Higher Criticism of the 19th century I’d think a lot of that fell away, at least for the more sophisticated theologians.

That Claude’s answer then led around to this:

What's left for sophisticated 20th century theologians like Tillich or Rahner is remarkably thin compared to Aquinas — God as “the ground of being” or “the horizon of transcendence.” Almost entirely evacuated of content, performing a kind of minimal structural function. Keeping the word while the referent has become nearly unspecifiable. Which is either profound apophatic wisdom or the last gasp of a framework that's lost its generative capacity, depending on how you look at it.

However useful such a conception might be for theological purposes, it struck me as being all but useless in the practical business of ministering to a congregation. So I asked Claude about that. I’ve placed the ensuing conversation below the asterisks. My prompts are set in bold; Claude’s replies are plain face.

* * * * *

Sermons and Counseling

Tillich’s “ground of being” may be useful in theological discussion and in the education of clergymen, but I’m not sure how useful it would be in the practical business of ministering to a congregation. It might be of some value in counseling someone who’s wrestling with their faith in a basic and abstract way, but I don’t see that it would be much use in counseling someone who is grieving the death of someone close or in counseling a teen who is beginning to deal with their sexuality. Nor do I see it of much use in sermons, maybe here and there as an aside or a framing device, but you couldn’t carry much of a sermon on it.

I’m thinking, for example, of Chester Wickwire, who was chaplain at Johns Hopkins when I was there. I mention him in a document I’ve just uploaded to the project, “Beyond Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Diverse Thoughts on Religion.” I’m pretty sure he knew Tillich, and other theologians as well. He went to Union Theological in New York. But he didn’t preach sermons. He did something rather different on Sundays.

Or consider the Priest-in-Charge at All Saints in Hoboken, where I’ve been attending services. She’s black and has some of the theatricality inherent in vernacular black preaching. She’s very direct in her style, stands close to the congregation, and often looks people in the eye. But she has a Master of Divinity Degree from Duke Divinity. I’d be surprised if she weren’t literate in contemporary theology, but that’s not how she preaches.

What you're describing is a real structural feature of religious institutions — they operate simultaneously at multiple levels that can't substitute for each other. The academic theology at the seminary level and the practice of ministry in a congregation are doing fundamentally different things, even when the minister is fully literate in both.

Wickwire is a striking case because he essentially abandoned the conventional form entirely — no scripture, no sermon, no choir — and replaced it with something that did the same communal work through entirely different means. Jazz, civil rights speakers, anti-war activism, a soul review from a local prison. He was practicing what the Social Gospel actually meant in the flesh rather than preaching about it. The sacred space remained but what filled it was immediate, particular, alive. That's a kind of genius — understanding that the function of Sunday morning is community formation and orientation to what matters, and then finding ways to do that function that didn't require the inherited theological vocabulary at all.

The priest at All Saints represents the other solution — carrying the theological training but deploying it through an embodied, vernacular mode that operates at a completely different register. The Duke Divinity background presumably informs her framework for what she's doing and why, but what actually reaches people is the proximity, the eye contact, the theatricality. She's working the attractor that actually moves people rather than the one that satisfies the academy.

And your observation about grief and adolescent sexuality is exactly right — those pastoral situations require presence and witness more than they require correct metaphysics. "The ground of being holds you even now" is not what a grieving parent needs to hear. What they need is someone who can sit with them in the reality of the loss without flinching and without false comfort. That capacity doesn't come from Tillich. It might come from having genuinely wrestled with Tillich and arrived somewhere beyond him — using the ladder and then throwing it away, which is precisely what your Wittgenstein title is about.

So, for pastoral purposes Tillich’s ground of being becomes the idea that Christ is within each of us. That’s something we can work with.

Yes, and that's a translation that actually has ancient roots — it's not a modern softening of doctrine but a retrieval of something that was always there. Paul's "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians), the Johannine tradition of indwelling, Meister Eckhart's "the ground of the soul is the ground of God and the ground of God is the ground of the soul" — Eckhart is almost doing the translation in reverse, taking the experiential reality and pushing it toward metaphysics, while what you're describing goes the other direction, taking the metaphysics and pulling it back into something liveable.

What makes it pastorally workable is that it relocates the sacred from out there to in here — which is exactly what you need when you're sitting with a grieving person or a confused teenager. You're not pointing them toward a distant abstraction; you're pointing them toward something they can actually find in their own experience. The ground of being becomes accessible as an inner reality rather than a cosmological posit.

It also handles the theological diversity of a congregation gracefully. People sitting in those pews have wildly varying metaphysical commitments — some genuinely believe in a personal God who intervenes, some are essentially humanists who find value in the ritual and community, some are like you, drifting in and out of the service with a complex and hard-won relationship to all of it. "Christ within" can land differently for each of them without being dishonest to any of them. It's capacious enough to hold the range.

And for someone like yourself, sitting at All Saints and thinking about what you can contribute — that framing might actually be more available than the external God it ostensibly derives from. You've spent a lifetime attending to what's generative in human experience. That's not so far from what the tradition is pointing at with that phrase, even if you'd reach for entirely different language to describe it.

Latour’s Modes of Existence

I think Bruno Latour has something useful to say. I’m thinking of his little book, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (2010), where he talks modes of existence. Each mode has its own “felicity conditions,” as he calls them. The felicity conditions for science are quite different from those for religion. Here’s a passage from a blog post I’ve written about that book:

Felicity conditions (p. 100):

Truth production in science, religion, law, politics, technology, economics, etc. is what I have been studying, over the years . . . Systematic comparisons of what I call “regimes of enunciation” or “modes of existence” are what I am after, and if there is any technical argument in what follows, it is from this rather idiosyncratic comparative anthropology that they will come from. In a sort of weak analogy with speech-act theory, I’ve devoted myself to mapping out the “conditions of felicity” of the various activities that in our cultures are able to elicit truth. . .my problem concerns how to become attuned to the right conditions of felicity of those different types of “truth-generators.”

I take it that truth here does not (necessarily) mean a Tarskian correspondence between some proposition(s) and some state in the world, though it may mean that for this or that mode of existence. The point is that there is no ONE mode of existence with one TRUE DISCOURSE devoted to it (along with many untrue ones). There are many modes of existence, each with its own discourse (or perhaps no discourse at all?). Each mode has its own felicity conditions, its own indices of validity. This is a PLURALIST view of the world. [...]

Korea sells “one-a-day” banana packs

Did you know Korea sells “one-a-day” banana packs?

Instead of every banana ripening at once, each one is at a different stage.

One is ready today.

The next one is ready tomorrow.

The last one is still spiritually in college, “experimenting.”

Simple. Genius. Solves the entire… pic.twitter.com/f3r5lXhm5J

— Sovey (@SoveyX) May 4, 2026

Contrasting reflections

Pretty Woman [Media Notes 179]

I’ve seen Pretty Woman (1990) at least three times, once when it came out, once before on streaming, and just last night. I like it. It’s a nice romantic comedy and something of a fairy tale, but that’s OK, I suppose.

It is very much a story of its time. Richard Gere plays a corporate raider, Edward Lewis, but not one so ruthless as Michael Douglas playing Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987). Julia Roberts plays a Hollywood street walker, Vivian Wood. Lewis picks her up, because he knows where his hotel is, but also because she seems to know something about the car he’s borrowed from his lawyer (a Lotus), and ends up engaging her for the week. She accompanies him to several business meetings, but also to a night at the opera. They fall in love, of course; he relents on the deal he’s been chasing; and she goes back to New York with him where, we are to presume, they live happily ever after.

The world, of course, is not like that, not quite. And I doubt that anyone over twenty who saw the movie believes that. But it’s a nice alternative to the  self-glorifying  Gordon Gekko. I can even believe that Gordon Gekko would have liked it, or if not Gekko himself, perhaps his understudy, Bud Fox (played by Charlie Sheen). Corporate raider types are not long on self-knowledge, no more than today’s Silicon Valley tech bros, and so are as vulnerable to fairly tales as to tales of Viking raiders.

And perhaps that’s why I like it. It’s as though Gordon Gekko is so reprehensible in his thralldom to Homo economicus that Hollywood just had to show us an antidote. It picked a perennial, the Hooker with a Heart of Gold, disguised, in this case, as a hooker who knows how to drive a stick shift and carries a rainbow assortment of condoms in her thigh high boots. Which is to say, the film acknowledges that we need some kind of Homo ludens alternative, even one that includes a bunch of rich folks stomping divots on a polo field, not to mention that Mr. Lewis betrays his soulfulness by noodling on the lounge piano in the wee hours of the morning.

The movie resonated with the public and made Julia Roberts a star. From the Wikipedia entry:

Pretty Woman received mixed reviews from critics upon release, but widespread praise was directed towards Roberts' performance and her chemistry with Gere. It had the highest number of ticket sales in the US ever for a romantic comedy, with Box Office Mojo listing it as the number-one romantic comedy by the highest estimated domestic tickets sold at 42,176,400, slightly ahead of My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) at 41,419,500 tickets. The film grossed US$463.4 million worldwide and at the time of its release, was the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time worldwide, behind only E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial ($701 million at the time), Star Wars ($530 million at the time), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ($474 million at the time), and Jaws ($470 million at the time). It was also the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time (surpassing Rain Man) until it was surpassed by Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991, but remained the highest-grossing R-rated film released by Walt Disney Studios (surpassing Cocktail), holding the record for 34 years until Marvel Studios' Deadpool & Wolverine surpassed it in 2024.

From critic snippets Wikipedia:

Pretty Woman received mixed reviews from critics, with positive reviews praising the stars' chemistry and the dialogue. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 64% based on 78 reviews. The website's critical consensus states, "Pretty Woman may be a yuppie fantasy, but the film's slick comedy, soundtrack, and casting can overcome misgivings." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 51 out of 100, based on 18 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.

The film's detractors criticized the overuse of the "hooker with a heart of gold" trope.[14] Others opined that the film sugarcoats the realities of sex work. [...]

Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "D," saying it "starts out as a neo-Pygmalion comedy" and becomes a "plastic screwball soap opera", with the "kinds of characters who exist nowhere but in the minds of callowly manipulative Hollywood screenwriters". Gleiberman conceded that with the film's "tough-hooker heroine, it can work as a feminist version of an upscale princess fantasy." [...] 

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave a positive review, praising how the film is about "a particularly romantic kind of love, the sort you hardly see in the movies these days". He added it "protects its fragile love story in the midst of cynicism and compromise. The performances are critical for that purpose. Gere plays new notes here; his swagger is gone, and he's more tentative, proper, even shy. Roberts does an interesting thing; she gives her character an irrepressibly bouncy sense of humor and then lets her spend the movie trying to repress it. [...]

The New York Times' Janet Maslin wrote: "Despite this quintessentially late 80's outlook, and despite a covetousness and underlying misogyny [...] 'Pretty Woman' manages to be giddy, lighthearted escapism much of the time. [...]

Carina Chocano of The New York Times said the movie "wasn't a love story, it was a money story. Its logic depended on a disconnect between character and narrative, between image and meaning, between money and value, and that made it not cluelessly traditional but thoroughly postmodern." In a 2019 interview, Roberts expressed uncertainty over whether the film could be made today due to its controversial premise, commenting, "So many things you could poke a hole in, but I don't think it takes away from people being able to enjoy it".

I’m with Ebert on this one.

Beyond Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Diverse Thoughts on Religion

New working paper. Title above, link, abstract, contents, and introduction below.

Academia.edu:  https://www.academia.edu/166252443/Beyond_Wittgensteins_Ladder_Diverse_Thoughts_on_Religion

Abstract: First, a record of thoughts and incidents in the author’s life which span a field of religious application and inquiry. Then a series of dialogs with Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot, which probe the limits of human thought and experience, asserting a metaphorical correspondence between a succinct assertion of Christian doctrine and a statement about man’s place in the cosmos from Neil deGrasse Tyson and deriving theological assertions therefrom, and a look at the continuum between belief and disbelief eventuating in idea that the Silicon Valley conception of A.I. is idolatrous.

Contents

Introduction: Am I becoming religious? It feels weird to think so. 2
Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus? 5
What Cannot Be Spoken 18
From the Baby Jesus to Neil deGrasse Tyson 21
Effing the ineffable 25
From Atheism to Idolatry 32    

Introduction: Am I becoming religious? It feels weird to think so.

The universe is that which ever exceeds us and in that way both resists and gives way.

If, a decade ago, you’d told me that one day I would attend church services regularly, I’d have said, “No way.” If you’d asked me that a year ago, my answer would have been the same. Yet here I am, attending All Saints Episcopal in Hoboken. It’s only been three months, but that’s already more than I’ve attended a church service the entire time from my early teens up through the end of last year – the Sunday Experience (pp. 7 ff.) at Johns Hopkins in the 1970s doesn’t count since that didn’t happen in a church, not so important, and was not grounded in any religious doctrine, more to the point. I’ve just recently posted comments in a discussion of Christianity at the Brainstorms online community. And then we have the articles making up the rest of this document, at article posted to 3 Quarks Daily, “Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?” and several posts from my New Savanna blog.

To be honest, just earlier today I felt twinges of uncertainty at the possibility that people might think of me as being religious? Really? Nor have I ever been one of those people who presents themselves as spiritual, but not conventionally religious. I just haven’t thought of myself in those terms, though I must admit that I’d recently been flirting with the idea that I’m a secular mystic. That never seemed quite right to me, but it wasn’t quite wrong either.

Why did I decide to start attending All Saints? I decided that I needed to meet people, to be among others in a way that isn’t, for example, a bowling league, a reading group, a musical group, or a neighborhood association. I am I looking for, you know, fellowship?

When I’m sitting there in the nave of All Saints I do wonder what others might think of me. I don’t participate in all the standing and sitting that an Episcopal service entails, nor do I recite the Nicene Creed, nor take communion (on Easter, with larger than usual attendance, I noticed another person, a woman, who didn’t take communion). But no one has said anything. I do think such things while sitting there. But I also think about how old these stories are, these Biblical stories, and how remarkable it is that some many people over the years have organized themselves around these stories. And just WHAT do the others here actually believe? I suspect the range is wide.

That’s one thing. But there’s something else, something that I’ve only just realized in the last week or so. There’s AI, artificial intelligence. Oh, I’ve known about AI most of my adult life and I’ve done research in a kindred discipline, computational linguistics. I’m currently engaged in research about LLMs (large language models) and have blogging a lot about AI and LLMs since the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022. I’m even working on a general-audience book about it: Play: How to Stay Human in the A.I. Revolution. But I’ve only just now realized that that is probably what’s behind my interest in matters religious.

It’s clear that A.I. poses profound philosophical problems and will force us to restructure our entire ontology. That effort is drawing me into religious waters. For it seems to me that the view of A.I. that dominates Silicon Valley is idolatrous, as I bring up later in this document (pp. 37 ff.). Or consider this passage from a doctrinal note by Pope Francis:

105. However, the presumption of substituting God for an artifact of human making is idolatry, a practice Scripture explicitly warns against (e.g., Ex. 20:4; 32:1-5; 34:17). Moreover, AI may prove even more seductive than traditional idols for, unlike idols that “have mouths but do not speak; eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear” (Ps. 115:5-6), AI can “speak,” or at least gives the illusion of doing so (cf. Rev. 13:15). Yet, it is vital to remember that AI is but a pale reflection of humanity—it is crafted by human minds, trained on human-generated material, responsive to human input, and sustained through human labor. AI cannot possess many of the capabilities specific to human life, and it is also fallible. By turning to AI as a perceived “Other” greater than itself, with which to share existence and responsibilities, humanity risks creating a substitute for God. However, it is not AI that is ultimately deified and worshipped, but humanity itself—which, in this way, becomes enslaved to its own work.

I’m not at all sure that I want to endorse those words – in some sense I’m pretty sure that I do not – but something like that in a way that I cannot now specify, that seems plausible to me.

I suppose, then, that this is where I am, between those words of the Pope and a need for fellowship. Where I’ll do, I won’t know until I move along.

* * * * *

Here’s what’s in the rest of this document. Except for the illustrations, the first of these pieces is completely mine. The rest involve a dialog with Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot.

Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus? – Incidents, thoughts, vignettes, events from my life, from age six to yesterday, all somehow bearing on religious belief and experience.

What Cannot Be Spoken – Comments about Wittgenstein’s framing of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

From the Baby Jesus to Neil deGrasse Tyson – The possibility of constructing a theological argument spanning the conceptual distance between a cosmological belief I entertained as a young child and an observation Neil deGrasse Tyson made about man’s position in the cosmos.

Effing the ineffable – About the many ways the world exceeds human language and experience. As Claude observes: “The mystic, the philosopher of language, and the cosmologist end up at adjacent campsites, each having climbed a different face of the same mountain. None of them can quite describe the view.”

From Atheism to Idolatry – In a way, this is about the boundaries of religious discourse. It also suggests that Silicon Valley doctrine about artificial intelligence is idolatrous.

Is Laufey jazz? [cultural hybridization]

YouTube:

Laufey is the world's most famous living jazz musician (according to Spotify streams). What does that mean for jazz?

A very interesting and well-informed post about cultural hybridization.

The City and the River