Less we forget

On the significance of Jane Austen

Henry Oliver, Why we love Jane Austen more than ever after 250 years, The Common Reader, Dec. 13, 2025.

From the article:

Why is Jane Austen quite so popular?

The reason is simple.

She invented the modern novel in order to answer fundamental questions about how to be good, happy, and flourishing in a commercial society. Her novels are about questions that are still central to our lives. How to live a good life in a commercial society? What is a moral education in the modern world? Who should we marry?

Jane reigns supreme because no other novelist else invented such important narrative techniques or had so much to say to readers about their lives and what it means to live in modernity.

Austen and the modern world:

Austen invented the modern novel at the moment when the modern world began. She was born as the world was entering a new epoch: Enlightenment, prosperity, liberty.

The year after Austen’s birth, The Wealth of Nations was published, and The Declaration of Independence was issued. Thirteen years later, the French Revolution started. In Germany, new ideas about subjectivity and personal development were being developed by Kant, Schiller, and Goethe.

It was a time of great evil: colonialism was rising to a peak, slavery and the slave trade had expanded, and penal laws were vicious and unjust. But it was also a time of a moral reformation. Christianity created the abolition movement. Enlightenment thinkers insisted on the obligations of human rights. Early feminist ideas were circulating. Theories of sympathy were becoming central to ethics.

Whatever we want to call this period—the decades that hinge around the year 1800—whether we say Enlightenment, Romanticism, Modernity, the Great Enrichment, the Industrial Revolution, the birth of liberty—these ideas became the assumptions and conditions of our era.

There's much more at the link. 

Note: I discuss Pride and Prejudice in my article, The Evolution of Narrative and the Self (1993). In the terms I lay out there the novel is a Rank 3 form of narrative. Oliver is, in effect, arguing that Austen is a (the?) prototypical Rank 3 novelist, perhaps the first to get it all together in one text.

AI and biology: It's going to take awhile

Everyone’s hyped about “AI for Science.” in 2025! At the end of the year, please allow me to share my unease and optimism, specifically about AI & biology.

After spending another year deep in biological foundation models, healthcare AI, and drug discovery, here are 3 lessons I… pic.twitter.com/p6EOlymxio

— Bo Wang (@BoWang87) December 31, 2025

The final paragraph of the tweet:

We won’t make progress by treating biology like text. We’ll make progress by building AI that behaves more like a scientist : skeptical, iterative, and willing to be wrong.

Nor, I would add, is biology like chess, a finite, closed world.