What I read today

Posted on by albrooke

Hope for the mind; mining SF for authoritarianism; seeing the obvious.

Billy Brennan, “Why Do some Dementia Patients ‘Return’ Just Before They Die?” The New York Times (July 14, 2026) [link], examines the scientific research into “paradoxical lucidity,” in which patients with dementia may display a recurrance of mental function even when the brain has deteriorated for years:

  • paradoxical lucidity seemed to offer an opportunity to scientifically investigate “the most fundamental question that we as humans have to grapple with”: the relationship between the body and the mind — and the nature of consciousness itself.

Ali Rıza Taşkale, “Silicon Valley has a science fiction problem,” Aeon (July 14, 2026) [link] looks at the science fiction narratives that the tech billionaires have cited for inspiration and proposes that their readings are narrow–supporting claims for authority, but ignoring their visions of unchecked technological optimism. Thus

  • Elon Musk and Star Trek, Blade Runner, Foundation,
  • Mark Zuckerberg and Snow Crash
  • Jeff Bezos, The High Frontier
  • Peter Thiel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, The Lord of the Rings

Taşkale’s theme is that these fictional narratives do not present their technological futures as desirable, but that part is lost in the tech visionaries’ inspiration:

  • Perhaps nowhere is this more legible than in the naming of Palantir Technologies. J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1937-49) is one of the great works of 20th-century literature precisely because it is an extended meditation on the corrupting nature of power. Written in the shadow of industrialised warfare and imperial extraction, it insists on the value of the small, the local and the unglamorous against the totalising ambition of industrial force. Its central moral is not that evil can be defeated by the right hero wielding the right weapon – it is that power itself corrupts, that the Ring cannot be used for good by anyone, and that the only salvation lies in relinquishing the will to dominate entirely. Tolkien’s fictional race of hobbits prevail not because they are powerful but because they are outside the logic of power.

Joe Posnanski, “The Obvious Answer,” Substack (July 16, 2026) [link] connects a wonderful story about casual English watchers of baseball and casual American watchers of soccer: “Sometimes the obvious answer is the right answer.”

Out of class

Posted on by albrooke

Most Americans are proud of not being class conscious like we think the British are.

David Brooks, ever perceptive, ever irenic, warns about the dangers of (largely) voluntary class segregation, noting that in the United States we tend to stay in our own groups:

  • Last year a group of researchers published a study in the journal Nature in which they surveyed leaders in 30 fields, including law, media, politics and so on. They found that not only had nearly all of society’s power brokers gone to college, 54 percent of them went to the same 34 elite schools. That’s segregation on steroids. . . . In his 2019 book, “The Meritocracy Trap,” Daniel Markovits writes that the academic gap between the affluent and less affluent is greater today than the achievement gap between white Americans and Black Americans in the final days of Jim Crow. I’d like to let that sink in. Nearly all of us were raised on the conviction that Jim Crow was rancid. We’ve effectively recreated it on class lines.

David Brooks, “America’s New Segregation” The New York Times (Aug. 14, 2025) [link].

I think there are at least three places where the “classes” still mix — churches,* ballparks,** and concert venues. If you live and work in one setting, maybe your best bet to get out of your group is to listen to music with a crowd, cheer on your team, or worship God.

Not a bad way to do your civic duty.

*Also synagogues and mosques, but I didn’t want to write the insufferably bland “houses of worship.” **Yeah, yeah, arenas, stadiums, pitches, too.

Election musings

Posted on by albrooke

Via Lore Ferguson Wilbert (sayable.com) [link], Henri J.M. Nouwen’s thoughts seem relevant:

  • “Hope is not dependent on peace in the land, justice in the world, and success in the business. Hope is willing to leave unanswered questions unanswered and unknown futures unknown. Hope makes you see God’s guiding hand not only in the gentle and pleasant moments but also in the shadows of disappointment and darkness. No one can truly say with certainty where he or she will be ten or twenty years from now. You do not know if you will be free or in captivity, if you will be honored or despised, if you will have many friends or few, if you will be liked or rejected. But when you hold lightly these dreams and fears, you can be open to receive every day as a new day and to live your life as a unique expression of God’s love for humankind. There is an old expression that says, “As long as there is life there is hope.” As Christians we also say, “As long as there is hope there is life.”

Via Alan Jacobs and The Hedgehog Review, Joan Didion’s words “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” might be applicable, but probably not the way we thought when first we read them:

  • That is, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” because there is no story outside of our minds: “We live entirely . . . by the imposition of a narrative line on disparate images” (emphasis mine). Our endless telling of stories is, then, the product not of delight but of despair: of our inability to face the chaos of what is. If people knew the context of the sentence, they wouldn’t be putting it on T-shirts. Instead, they’d be driven to therapy, to alcohol, or to church.

Alan Jacobs, “Stories to Live By,” The Hedgehog Review (Nov. 4, 2024) [link].

But there is hope and God is still on his throne, though (like Job), we often aren’t aware of what is going on behind the scenes.