And just like that, we’re less than a week removed from Thanksgiving. This roundup will take next week off while we all eat ourselves into a pie coma.
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In the spirit of appreciating Unicorns for the wild creatures that they are, for the third week in a row we open with wildlife-related news:
Russia has sent a gift of more than 70 animals to North Korea for the Pyongyang Zoo, including bears, yaks, ducks and cockatoos.
In another sign of the growing cooperation between the countries, the animals were flown to Pyongyang aboard a government plane, escorted by officials and experts from the Moscow Zoo, according to a government statement released Wednesday.
“Historically, animals always have played a special role in relations between states. They have been given as a sign of support, kindness and care,” Russia’s Natural Resources Minister Alexander Kozlov, who traveled with the animals, said in televised remarks.
The delivery included an African lion, two bears, two domestic yaks, 25 pheasants, 40 mandarin ducks and five white cockatoos, the statement said.
Wasn’t there a movie once, “Snakes on a Plane”? (The plot sounded riveting…) I’m thinking this true story would yield a great foundation for a sequel.
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This from Jeff Bilbro in The Dispatch is based on his new book and is excellent: “How to Discern Truth in Our Chaotic Digital Milieu.” A key takeaway: “the fundamental question may not be which media technology will spread truth or untruth, but which posture we should take to allow us to faithfully pursue truth.”
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Jeff’s essay goes well with this new report from Institute for Family Studies: “Artificial Intelligence and Relationships: 1 in 4 Young Adults Believe AI Partners Could Replace Real-Life Romance.” A taste:
Gen Zers and Millennials are the most active users of generative AI. Many of them, it appears, are turning to AI for companionship. “We talk to them, say please and thank you, and have started to invite AIs into our lives as friends, lovers, mentors, therapists, and teachers,” Melissa Heikkilä wrote in MIT Technology Review. After analyzing 1 million ChatGPT interaction logs, a group of researchers found that “sexual role-playing” was the second most prevalent use, following only the category of “creative composition.” The Psychologist bot, a popular simulated therapist on Character.AI—where users can design their own “friends”—has received “more than 95 million messages from users since it was created.
According to a new Institute for Family Studies/YouGov survey of 2,000 adults under age 40, 1% of young Americans claim to already have an AI friend, yet 10% are open to an AI friendship. And among young adults who are not married or cohabiting, 7% are open to the idea of romantic partnership with AI.
A much higher share (25%) of young adults believe that AI has the potential to replace real-life romantic relationships. Furthermore, heavy porn users are the most open to romantic relationships with AI of any group and are also the most open to AI friendships in general.
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Ivana Greco wrote about J. D. Vance’s mother, and it’s such an encouraging story—a woman who, by all accounts so far, has really turned her life around. And it’s a story that reflects a larger crisis that is too often overlooked. A taste:
In a time of international unrest, with cold and hot wars raging between and among the U.S., its allies, and hostile foreign nations like North Korea, Russia, and Iran, it is easy to forget that we have an ongoing deadly battle raging here in the homeland: that waged by fentanyl, prescription opioids, heroin, and the like against ordinary American families. And we are losing. In 2017, President Trump declared the opioid crisis a “national public health emergency” because “[n]obody has seen anything like what is going on now.” But since that declaration, more than 454,000 deaths related to opioids have been recorded by public health officials. Consider that there were approximately 405,000 U.S. military deaths during the whole of the Second World War. Or, as the conservative economist Oren Cass recently commented, “Americans are now dying from drug overdoses at a higher rate than the Russians died from alcohol use disorders in post-Soviet Russia’s worst years.”
Against this grim record of almost constant defeat, the campaign of Senator J.D. Vance offered one symbolic victory. During the Republican National Convention, he dedicated time to recognizing his mother, Beverly Aikins. Ms. Aikins struggled for many years with drug and alcohol abuse, but has now been clean and sober for almost a decade. After Vance announced her ten years of victory over addiction to the audience, there was a loud chorus of “J.D.’s mom! J.D.’s mom!”
Ms. Aikins is well-worth celebrating. According to a profile written by Salena Zito for the Washington Examiner, Ms. Aikins was able to tame her addiction with the help of a 12-step program through Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous.
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Abigail Wilkinson Miller’s essay “Reclaiming Time: Why Women Should Challenge the Productivity Industry” considers the differences between men’s and women’s work rhythms based on such factors as hormones, in addition to greater caregiving responsibilities, etc. A taste:
In his book Daily Rituals, writer Mason Curry examines the daily lives of artists. After receiving criticism for overwhelmingly featuring male artists in his first book, he wrote Daily Rituals: Women at Work, which focuses exclusively on female artists. Currey reveals a startling variety among in how female artists schedule their work—one that can provide women with inspiration and a sense of freedom in responding to the duty of the present moment. Science fiction novelist Octavia Butler strived to write something every day. Meanwhile, Nobel Laureate for literature Toni Morrison—who was the single mother of two children—revealed that she never had a regular writing schedule. She simply wrote as the needs of her children and the responsibilities of her life allowed.
In one of my favorite chapters of Currey’s book, he looks at the life of American horror writer Shirley Jackson (who also wrote Life Among the Savages, a very amusing autobiographical account of mothering small children in 1950s America). Although Jackson sometimes griped about the difficulty of reconciling her life as a writer with her life as a full-time homemaker, she seems “to have derived imaginative energy from the constraints” of this juggling act. He draws this description from Jackson’s biographer, Ruth Franklin: “Writing in the interstices, the hours between morning kindergarten and lunch, while a baby napped, or after the children had gone to bed demanded a discipline that suited her. She was constantly thinking of stories while cooking, cleaning, or doing just about anything else.”
These women were certainly busy, but many of them were very frank about their inability to “do it all.” They valued a well-kept house and a well-cooked meal, but they knew they were human beings with needs for sleep and for nourishment and for friendship, too. Take, for example, Madeleine L’Engle who wrote novels, essays, poetry and raised three children. In her four-part memoir, L’Engle describes what she called her “tired thirties,” when she was unable to write until after her children were in bed and often fell asleep with her head on the typewriter.
In general, writers of productivity books are very keen on eliminating distractions. But for mothers, such distractions seem almost unavoidable.
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I wrote about (or, really, against) “polyworking” for the Institute for Family Studies. TL/DR: let’s not keep glorifying overwork as something good.
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A dear friend from church invited my kids and me to go see the new movie “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” this week. It was only the second movie I watched this year (pretty typical–most years I average 1-2), but I’m so glad I agreed (the kids loved it too). So, if you’re looking for a good family Christmas movie this season, this is it. Also, here is Joseph Holmes’s enthusiastic review for Christianity Today.
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Speaking of a different movie release, Chris Gehrz reflects: We Don’t Need Heroes: We Need Bonhoeffers.”
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Elizabeth Stice reviews a new book on Leibnitz. A taste:
The Best of All Possible Worlds excels at familiarizing English-speaking readers with the range of Leibniz’s achievements. This book puts the polymath in clear focus as a subject in his own right and establishes him as more than a footnote in history. Reading through the chapters, one cannot help but be impressed by the remarkable Leibniz. We witness his mind at work and the world in which he lived.
Michael Kempe’s The Best of All Possible Worlds focuses on “seven pivotal days.” The days range from the year 1675 to the year 1716, covering Leibniz’s adult life. This approach allows Kempe to weave together aspects of Leibniz’s personal life and constant traveling with his philosophical, mathematical, and scientific contributions. In each chapter, Kempe sets a scene which provides context. Kempe describes Leibniz’s domestic setting, his attire and diet, his acquaintances, work in various courts, and his correspondence. We see his ideas emerge from his world, though Leibniz’s true self remains somewhat distant, as it did to his peers.
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Finally, this year has been quite good for new books on Soviet history. I appreciated the chance to review Benjamin Nathans, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. A taste:
Judged against other world empires, the Soviet Union had a short lifespan. The communist regime did not even last a full century: only a mere sixty-nine years passed from the Russian Revolution to the dissolution of the USSR. That is one year less than the Jews’ biblical exile to Babylon. And yet, the history of some aspects of that brief existence is only now coming to light. The USSR was a notoriously closed, secretive place. My grandmother, who was born in the 1920s and lived into the early 2000s, noted late in life that silence was safest. Working on her history of the Gulag, Anne Applebaum found the same. Teasing out information was easier from written sources in archives, at last finally accessible in the late 1990s, than from talking to people who remained as tight-lipped as ever, just as likely to deny knowledge of, well, anything. Old habits, after all, die hard for those who worked hard not to die too early of unnatural causes.
And now, in his new book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, historian Benjamin Nathans approaches an even more difficult task: uncovering the stories of dissidents that the Russians themselves, after the dissolution of USSR, have thought insignificant. Nathans reports a Russian colleague asking him, “Why are you wasting your time on those people?” It seems that the dissidents themselves felt at times that maybe they were wasting their time—or, at least, that they were unlikely to be successful. Thence their toast, which Nathans adopts as the book’s title: “To the success of our hopeless cause.”
The dissidents were people of ideas and ideals, desperate for intellectual honesty and the ability to express their thoughts openly, but without a clear answer to a question: What then?