Alan Jacobs is a distinguished professor of humanities in the honors program at Baylor University and a senior fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. A prolific essayist, reviewer, and blogger, he is the author of Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, “The Book of Common Prayer”: A Biography, and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, among others.
A new book finds Auden negotiating and renegotiating his relationship with the island on which he was born.
Pynchon diagnosed our idolatry of the inanimate.
The only way out of this prison of self-deception and self-justification is to love and seek the truth.
Ehrenerklärung—public acknowledgment of false accusations—is not one of the options offered by our social media culture.
I envision a world in which the increased fragmentation of our media scene leads, over time, to the rise of new institutions that are built on stronger foundations.
The complexities of social media ought to prompt deep reflection on what we all owe to the future, and how we might discharge this debt.
To the arguments of Huxley and Tyndall against traditional religion, Yeats had no answer until literature and the other arts came to the rescue.
If politics is your life, then you must tell yourself a political story in order to live.
Every country needs triangulation in order to achieve self-understanding and prudent decision-making.
I don’t like this collapse of trust; I don’t like being in a technological arms race with my students.
What looks like a disastrous collapse in students’ literacy may be simply a reversion to a kind of mean.
A murder mystery that is also an impressive sociological imaginary.
What pleasure, what gratification, can we offer to people that exceeds the pleasure of hating?
The language of self-censorship removes the question from the moral realm in which it properly belongs.
Every graduate student in the humanities should be required to take a course in the English Bible.
The literature classroom is an unusually fit environment in which to pursue “the deepening and sharpening of emotional powers.”
The good cop, bad cop routine of the digital age.
Are we both perpetrators and victims of the Elon Effect?
The primary social forces disrupting American society today are modern versions of two false religions.
The cultivation of taste, in morals as well as in art, is neither snobbish nor elitist.
Hope Mirrlees is interested in what happens if the power of Fairyland cannot be wholly excluded.
Jean-Luc Godard, like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Heidegger, is worth paying attention to even when we think his work is bad
Are we willing to undertake the long, slow work of persuasion in a time of the politics of personal destruction?
Any attempt to create a monoculture is necessarily self-defeating.
We have been trained by social media to use our brains as servers.
We’ll have to confront the chasm between our self-conception and our actual behavior
It is true that a thin plastic device that displays pixels doesn’t make much of a mess, but then, it is also true that life is messy.
Zoom is a medium that offers constant permission to be distracted.
Perhaps computers are so bad at conversation because it is something like prayer.
I myself stopped using the term a while back.
Perhaps the older Auden merely wants to have the humility to accept the terms on which agape offers itself.
That means, first, that I have to love my neighbor—my colleague—above my own productivity.
The question I want to ask is simply this: Is the writing of a Life a game that, in our current moment, can be played?
Sometimes irony is a painful awareness of our own absurdity.
If you get out in your yard with a push mower, everyone who passes wants to talk with you about it.
Like the tenants of the Bishop of Worcester, they know that in a tightening job market they have leverage.
What if the more successful political commentators on Substack, or music teachers on YouTube, or masters of the podcast interview, began to teach their craft to others?
Well known free speech advocates may not always be free speech absolutists.
“Quality of life” calculations leave out far too much that matters for human flourishing.
Call them warlords or the manorial elite, our massive transnational tech companies will protect us only when they believe it is in their interest to do so.
The problem with scale is that we don’t understand it.
What in the world does the division of labor have to do with campus protests, the curse or blessing of “wokeness,” or the populist movement centered on Donald Trump?
Monisms are tweetable and retweetable.
Herzen won’t stop striving for social transformation with every ounce of energy he has, but also won’t pick up Chernyshevsky’s axe.
By forcibly breaking some of our technological habits, Covidtide creatively destabilizes others.
To make promises, to stand by one words, to be answerable for them, is to open oneself to blame.
Time to adopt a new hero: Lew Archer, private detective.
Ghost stories and other tales of horror concern unpredictable, sometimes ambiguous or indescribable, forces that display hostility or at best indifference to us.
If you listen to the machine telling you how to get out of it you only get sucked into it more, like a con artist that lulls you into trust by telling you he is conning you. The promised liberation from technology is usually just another technology that you don’t recognize as such. This is one reason why a fuller appreciation of our diverse techniques is so vital.
Humility, laziness, true confessions, and The Karate Kid—an interview with Alan Jacobs on his 79 Theses for Disputation.
Once you start to think of technologies as having desires of their own you are well on the way to the Borg Complex: we all instinctively understand that it is precisely because tools don’t want anything that they cannot be reasoned with or argued with. And we can become easily intimidated by the sheer scale of technological production in our era. Eventually we can end up talking even about what algorithms do as though algorithms aren’t written by humans.
The resources of the household are indeed limited, and the steward does indeed have to make decisions about how to distribute them, but such matters do not mark him as a “sovereign self” but rather the opposite: a person embedded in a social and familial context within which he has serious responsibilities.