Ça faisait des années que j’avais l’intention de lire cette bande dessinée, et j’ai enfin trouvé un exemplaire en français il y a quelques semaines, grâce à mon beau-frère.

On a tellement l’habitude de diaboliser l’Iran aux États-Unis qu’il est même facile d’oublier qu’il y a de quoi diaboliser ! L’histoire personnelle de Satrapi est très émouvante, et je suis bien content de l’avoir lu. Je vois pourquoi c’est une classique parmi les bd.

More money for libraries, less for LLMs.

If I didn’t like the first book in this series as much as I remembered but was generous in my rating because I appreciate what it’s doing, I liked this second book more than I remembered but am harsh in my rating because I don’t appreciate what it’s doing. This book reads less as an extended conversation with 2 Nephi than as a wide-ranging, largely apologetic treatment of Latter-day Saint theology that happens to frequently reference 2 Nephi.

I love it when different books I’m reading come together in interesting ways. That happened recently while rereading Joseph Spencer’s 1st Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction and restarting (this, time, in English) Jacques Ellul’s The Humiliation of the Word. In this post, I want to take up a distinction that Spencer makes in his book, suggesting that:

Question’s about the Book of Mormon’s truth tend to be of two sorts. First, we want to know whether it all really happened. Second, we want to know whether it really shows us who God is.

There’s a really interesting quasi-theological question at the heart of this book, and I’m rereading it for the first time in over a decade because I think it will be useful for a sermon I’m scheduled to give in a couple of months. What “imaginary versions” of Jesus do we create for ourselves and how do they get in the way of our connecting with the heart of Christianity.

There’s also a goofiness to the book that almost works. I don’t think it quite lands, coming off as what I imagine a trying-too-hard youth pastor might deliver, but if it did land, it would be right up my alley.

It is September 13th. I am already buying myself a tea advent calendar and hating myself for it. I am thinking about how much more offensive capitalist Christmas should be to Christians than secular Christmas.

I remembered liking this book a lot when I first read it five or so years ago, so it was actually kind of disappointing to reread it now. There was a lot of it that didn’t feel relevant to me or that I felt I disagreed with. That said, I appreciate Spencer’s work a lot, and there are some great observations in here, so I’m trying to give it some grace in my rating.

If there’s one cause I truly aspire to be more radical about, it’s non-violence.

Good overview of recent Grok nonsense.

Better grab these while I can.

I frequently disagree with Rand Paul, but when he’s right, he’s usually really, really right.

Wild read. It’s as if the right is an alliance between the most dangerous coddling of Big Tech and the dumbest criticisms of it.

Ugh, this article makes it sound even worse.

What a depressing story.

TFW a webcomic punchline is more or less your actual theology.

For reasons I don’t have to get into here, summer is one of the hardest times of year in mental health terms, and over the course of the past few months, I’ve had my fair share of existential dread and feeling adrift. As I wrote last week, that meant that I was hesitant to start reading the comics series Ice Cream Man, because I was afraid that it would further fuel that dread.

There are many worse things happening in our country right now, but also: this is petty and embarrassing.

This is good! It’s another book that I took too long to read, so it’s hard to review when I took breaks for other books between sections.

It’s a very Doctorow book. I mean this in three ways: First, it makes an impassioned plea for a niche-but-important tech cause. Second, it overlaps with his fiction writing in really obvious ways. Third, it reads like an extended blog post (which I mostly mean as a compliment).

Did not realize that dashcam surveillance was a thing. I hate that it is, and I hate that Flock is going here.

This is horrifying. Reading the headline is one thing, but reading some of the details is stomach-churning. I’m not a lawyer, and as disgusted as I am with this, I don’t know what legal liability should look like here. I feel more comfortable describing this as ethically bankrupt, though. I think I would have many fewer concerns about generative AI if it weren’t a platformized consumer product. Whatever the right legal response to this is, OpenAI has some moral responsibility for this sort of thing.

Good article (here’s a gift link), and one worth adding to the right kind of syllabus.

Don’t need the NYTimes to say this to recognize that it’s happening, but it’s helpful to have all of these examples gathered in a single place. Gift link.

If this is so great for the community, why won’t the company even identify itself publicly?

Helpful reminder that data center problems are not just hypothetical—they’re potentially local.

Very interesting piece.