five quotes (6.20.25)
five things I read in the twenty-fifth week of 2025
I used to say I was born in the wrong generation, but I was mistaken.
For I do everything I say I hate. Exchanging hobbies for Hinge,
truth with TikTok, intimacy with Instagram, sanity with Snapchat.
I have become self-aware. Almost worse than being naive. I know it’s poison, but I drink away.
The character behind the phone screen has become self-aware.
—Kori Jane Spaulding, “It Was the Damn Phones” (After Babel)
A lament as old as time. Why do I do the evil I seek to avoid and fail to do the good I wish to do? Anyway, I am not a big spoken word poetry fan, but this one was making the rounds. It affirms something I have long intuited about this rising generation: they feel absolutely screwed over by a world they never chose. And now, like this young woman above, they feel trapped.
When I called Karo and Ritter and told them that I had many friends but was still somehow lonely, they told me this is one of the most common complaints they get from listeners. Men, says Ritter, “wake up at 30 or 40 and say, ‘I have no friends.’ They actually have a lifetime of friendships. But really, the issue is that they haven’t put in the effort they’ve needed to. Guys forget that friendship is a relationship — it requires watering.” Among the watering techniques they suggest: “TCS,” which stands for “text weekly, call monthly, see quarterly.” “The great hack about having a regular event,” Karo says, “is you don’t have to worry about calling — it happens automatically.”
—Sam Graham-Felsen, “Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?” (New York Times)
I love the balance of this article. One of the problems for a lot of men in our culture is that they are only offered a repackaged, modernity-friendly, and rebranded Stoicism that promotes a weird blend of self-help and get-your-sh*t-together encouragement/ browbeating for these men. Graham-Felsen documents his own fall under the sway of David Goggins and his relentless “carry the boats/stay hard/don’t be a little b*tch” preening. It is enticing. There is something about these alphas flexing their alphaness that attracts men. However, it’s garbage. I don’t want my sons to turn out like David Goggins. The type of friendship documented in the above paragraph is what I want for my boys (and what I am blessed to have myself, to a certain degree). This rah-rah, chest-thumping, protocol-optimizing stuff doesn’t lead to what men really need: friendship with other men.
Nested in James’s understanding is also a servicable definition of art. In its objective state, van Gogh’s “Starry Night” is daubs of paint on a canvas. On the moon, without an audience, it would be debris. It is only when I give the canvas my attention (bringing to it the cargo of my particular past, my knowledge of the world, my way of thinking and seeing) that it becomes an art work. That doesn’t mean that van Gogh’s feats of genius are imagined, or my own projection. It means only that an art work is neith a physical thing nor a viewer’s mental image of it but something in between, created in attentive space. The Brazilian art critic and political activist Mario Pedrosa wrote of the experience as a dialogue between form and perception.
—Nathan Heller, “The Battle for Attention” (The New Yorker)
I love this. It sounds slightly subjective but our experience of art is slightly subjective. Objectively, “Starry Night” is paint splotches on a canvas. That is what it physically is. But we know it’s more than that when we see it. Van Gogh’s intentionality as an artist, combined with our own experience of attentively gazing at the work, make it the enduring piece that it is. This is why attention is so fundamental and why its loss is so bemoaned. Without attention, there is no art. Without attention, there is, in the words of Mary Oliver, no devotion.
This idea that students find reading ineffective and stressful comes up again and again in conversations with faculty members. It likely ties into the foundational challenges students have with reading comprehension. If you trip over words, don’t understand how the parts of a chapter or academic article fit together, or are unclear what your professors want you to glean from a reading, then the act of reading can lead to confusion rather than clarity. It stands to reason that a summary generated by a chatbot would at least give you an orientation toward what your professor wants you to know. . . Increasingly the answers to this question have shown that people simply don’t read in-depth or see their parents read. Instead, Spier says, students are overstimulated through reading almost exclusively on their phones.
—Beth McMurtrie, “The Reading Struggle Meets AI” (Chronicle of Higher Education)
I don’t know how people can read anything substantial on their phones. I know people who claim to do so, even people that I love, but I don’t buy it. I am so older-millennial that if I want to read a long magazine piece (such as the Heller article quoted above) I have to print it out. I just can’t track on a screen in the same way. Nothing sticks. McMurtrie isn’t covering new territory here—”students can’t read” has been a constant lament even before OpenAI plunked ChatGPT down—but her argument here is unassailable. When we call a person literate, we have to mean more than that he or she can merely decode the words on a page. They must be able to make sense of those words, analyze them, and synthesize them alongside other things they have read. Nothing in the way we teach our children prepares them for this type of deep reading, for what might constitute true literacy.
Then focus on making superintelligence cheap, widely available, and not too concentrated with any person, company, or country. Society is resilient, creative, and adapts quickly. If we can harness the collective will and wisdom of people, then although we’ll make plenty of mistakes and some things will go really wrong, we will learn and adapt quickly and be able to use this technology to get maximum upside and minimal downside. Giving users a lot of freedom, within broad bounds society has to decide on, seems very important. The sooner the world can start a conversation about what these broad bounds are and how we define collective alignment, the better.
—Sam Altman, “The Gentle Singularity” (Blog)
Oh boy! I sure am glad that the CEO of OpenAI thinks that the digital singularity that’s coming will be “gentle.” If recent events assure me of anything, it is our ability to “harness the collective will and wisdom of people” and to use our freedom wisely. I look forward to the worldwide conversation about these things that will undoubtedly be fruitful, humane, and balanced.