Friday Takes: On the Links Edition

Another week has gone way too swiftly by. My mental calculations did not include Friday arriving with such overpowering speed. This weekend all the Binghamton University students arrive back in town. A lot of them live right around me, so my street will get a lot more buzzy and full of life by Sunday evening. I have two kids starting there this year—a junior and a sophomore—but the sophomore is skipping the first week of classes to go to half of a Level One Catechesis formation. She is understandably stressed to miss so much important material, but also, she really wants this training. I expect it will be all right in the long run, though she hourly assures me it will not. Also my “Individualized Home Instruction Plan” is due to New York State today so I guess I will finally do it, even though I don’t want to. In the meantime, let me see, are there any Takes lying around here?

While I was reading all the chatter this week (some of which I produced myself) about the Governor of Massachusetts and that fate of the unborn child, I also came across this article over on Substack about how Montessori stuff is still all the rage. There are some very nice, very expensive items you can buy for any children you do have, which is not quite what Maria Montessori was expecting would happen when she first began to study children. Whereas, this writer points out, a lot of parents do what is good for children without needing to have the fancy stuff:

My theory, which I hope gives parents sufficient benefit of the doubt, is that the parents adopting half-assed Montessori-ism understand on some intuitive level that children yearn for meaningful work. Taking things apart and putting them back together. Glimpsing the adult world, grabbing some component of it, turning it over in their hands, seeing how it’s made. Being gifted some responsibility for the stuff of daily life––the meals, the clothing we wear, the keeping of our spaces––and being able to playact as adults in order to better understand what the world around them is made of. Children don’t need the weight of the world placed on their shoulders, but thoughtfully meting out little pieces of the adult world can be a real joy for them––especially if their “teachers” (parents) can help them make sense of it all, setting appropriate expectations, and onboarding them to the tasks in an age-appropriate way.

Consider the 4-year-old’s excitement at helping diaper the baby, or the 3-year-old’s interest in checking out at the grocery store. Our Montessori revival is good evidence of the fact that the philosophy intuitively makes sense to many parents.

But Montessori-ism requires taking risk.

And, tragically, our culture is so very risk adverse, which is why we have so many of the problems that we do. Read the whole thing!

I also did watch this clip of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez trying to “walk back” a little of the “crazy” of “Woke One.” I’m sure you’ve already seen it:

According to TMZ, who, I’m sure, are never wrong about anything, Mlle. Ocasio-Cortez broke up with the person she had been planning to marry a long time ago:

There’s a reason Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t mentioning her fiancé Riley Roberts when she talks about freezing her eggs ... TMZ has confirmed they broke up.

AOC and Riley actually split roughly two years ago, and called off their engagement, according to Puck’s Chief Washington Correspondent Leigh Ann Caldwell ... who was first to report the couple’s demise.

Honestly, I feel very sad for Mlle. Cortez. I don’t really want her to be president, but, honestly, I don’t anyone to be. I hope she can find someone who will not be a disappointment to her, if that’s what she’s looking for.

I confess, I did spend a lot of time watching youtube videos (in spite of the ads) about Jason Arday while I tried to beat back the chaos. Here is Nigel Biggar on this exciting scandal:

The centre of gravity in the Arday Affair has shifted. Public discussion no longer focuses on evidence that Cambridge University’s youngest black holder of a professorial chair plagiarised considerable portions of his PhD, embellished his c.v. with three academic appointments at institutions that now deny it, and claimed to be the author of a book that was never written. The focus has moved on to the question of why he was appointed in the first place, and what that tells us about the state of academe.

This is good. For Jason Arday himself I feel somewhat sorry. Yes, he’s been serially dishonest. And yet, from what I’ve observed, he really believes his own lies. In brushing aside critics as “racially motivated”, he sounds as if he sincerely means what he says. He’s trapped in a world of fantasy. Whatever his personal guilt, there’s a tragic quality to his predicament. For, when reality does finally break through, Nemesis will enter, too. A terrible reckoning will cause the self he’s constructed to disintegrate. I fear for his life.

And that makes me angry—but not with his critics. It makes me angry at all the adults who failed to call him out. Who indulged him. Who lowered the threshold so he could clamber over it. Who encouraged him to dismiss criticism as expressions of ‘eurocentric’, colonialist, racist bad faith. Who aided and abetted the elaboration of his fantasy, year after year.

Of much less importance is the fact, allegedly, that men who like cats are not attractive to women. There was a study done, of course, and the New York Times has a whole long, rambling, uninteresting piece about it:

“Men holding cats,” the study said, “were viewed as less masculine; more neurotic, agreeable and open; and less datable.” (I’m not sure why “agreeable” and “open” are perceived as negative traits.)

In the study, if men had a profile photograph without a cat, they attracted 38 percent of the women for a potential date or possibly even an actual relationship. Yet when women saw a picture of the same man holding a cat, the percentages dropped, with a sizable number saying they absolutely would not date a man who had a cat.

After I saw the stats, I felt grateful that when my wife and I met, I had not yet identified as a “cat person” — perhaps the only logical explanation why she married me. Otherwise, science assumes I’d be a forlorn cat bachelor, wads of fur on my sweater vest, living in a basement apartment filled with kitty condos, yarn toys and my only real friends: Snowball, Mr. Waffles and Samson J. Fluffinuffigus. Which may be closer to the truth than I care to admit.

I like men who like cats. Matt likes cats though he won’t admit it. The ancient feline, Lucy, whom we inherited through death, likes to stand on his shoulder and howl at him while he works. It is most charming.

I feel a touch conflicted about this, because the person writing, or whatever you call it, this next piece is open about how he “uses” AI—the name of the Substack, after all, is “Slow AI.” But he does have good advice about how to protect yourself from accusations of using AI, which will, he says, come to us all no matter who we are and how much we protest. He has 8 things you can do to make sure when you’re accused you can prove you are innocent. Here are a few of them, but go check out the whole piece:

1. Write somewhere that keeps its own history. Google Docs keeps full version history for free, and so does Word with AutoSave on. Substack’s own editor keeps drafts and revision timestamps, so if you draft in the app you already have more than you think. Version history is the single strongest artefact you can hold, because the timestamps are set as you go. You can’t manufacture three weeks of edits after an accusation arrives.

2. Keep the ugly early drafts. Do not overwrite. Save dated copies at real milestones: the first mess, the structural rewrite, the version you sent to a friend. Five saved drafts across three weeks say more than any detector output ever will.

3. Keep your raw input, whatever form it takes. This might be the photograph of a notebook page, a voice memo in the car, a scribbled outline, or the twenty-eight-tab research session you had open. Keep it.

4. Log the AI, specifically. If you use AI in your writing process than keep a single running file per project. One line per session, copy this shape:

Go read the whole thing!

I had a really funny thing I wanted to put here but I just can’t get the embed thing to work. But this is quite good too:

And here is Paul writing about AI Slop, and here is SDG correcting the historical record, and here is David writing about the upcoming trial of Archbishop Wood.

And here is a song for the week—it’s the Hymn I walked down the aisle to, 25 years ago. It’s only organ, here, but we sang all the verses, which are all wonderful.

And now I must rush because I’ve got so many things to do. Have a lovely day if you’re into that sort of thing!