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One of my most cherished summer memories is of the roadtrip my mother and I took after my freshman year in high school, just the two of us, winding from New York down to Virginia. Mostly I remember the highways themselves, the pleasure of listening to the car radio on high volume, and one late night escape from a particularly seedy motel. The nothingness of the trip was what made it so special, where the thing we were doing was less important that the doing itself.
I’m starting to adopt this approach to summers with my own kid, trying to slow down time and just be side by side. Lane’s recent essay on the pleasures of observing butterflies and old dinosaur bones put me in mind of this. Inside the grand American Museum of Natural History, her invitation is to slow down long enough to wonder about the nature of life, and the miracle of living.
“What if everything about the mystery and beauty of life and its forms was as elevated and important and treated with care and curiosity out there as it is in here?” she asks.
Speaking of slowing down time, two of my favorite pieces this week took a stab at slowing what feels like an inexorable march toward end times, driven by the every-growing encroachment of AI in our lives. So I appreciated this essay by the designer and educator Debbie Millman, which proposes that we shouldn’t be allowed to use AI technologies in work or life until age 40.
Inspired by kabbalah, the teachings of Jewish mysticism, Millman proposes that the brain just isn’t ready to use this technology wisely until we’ve actually lived a little. We need to grow the muscle of adapting to friction and discord before we start turning our thinking over to the machine.
“The Jewish tradition treats kabbalah as knowledge that requires readiness,” she writes. “Actual wisdom doesn’t come instantly, and it certainly doesn’t arrive fully fluent. Wisdom is the slow education of the self, built by lived experience.”
Anya Kamenetz spent time musing earlier this month thinking through the contradictions we face when we try to grapple with AI. She lays out 13 arguments that try to reconcile, on the one hand, the position that AI is critical to a person’s professional and personal success, and “requires using it as much as possible. AI Justice means everyone using AI everywhere,” with the position that AI poses an existential risk, threatening the climate, creativity, and everything from “children, to education, to sanity, to truth, to the essence of humanity, and perhaps to humanity itself.”
And while Millman and Kamenetz are grappling with the future, Heather Cox Richardson is making a claim to hold on to the past.
The Trump Administration has been trying to re-write U.S. history since it came into power, most recently through a report that targets the Smithsonian Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, and its director, Dr. Anthea M. Hartig.
As Judd Legum writes in his latest, “The fake historian advising Trump’s anti-Smithsonian campaign,” the report is a predictable list of right-wing complaints, that the museum traffics in “extreme political activism,” “anti-White activism,” “transgender activism,”and “illegal alien activism.”
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