Sunday Morning Reading

A brief breather at home before travels resume, so there’s a full plate for this week’s Sunday Morning Reading including some nostalgia that shouldn’t be, some very interesting reading on AI, a defiant Chicago, and even a bit on gambling and baseball. Enjoy.

Chicago is under threat from a madman and you can feel the tension in the crisp fall air. Dan Sinker has written an excellent Benediction for Chicago On the Eve of Occupation. You don’t hear thoughts and prayers in the check out lines at the grocery store,  just a growing sense of defiant preparation.

The pendulum seems to be swinging wildly in the opinion wars about Artificial Intelligence now that some are actually able to sift through the hype bubbles and see what’s what. EmptyWheel has an excellent 4-part series that is more than worth your time. It begins with A Normal Person’s Explainer On What Generative AI Is And Does and continues with The Other Half Of The AI Relationship, Proteins, Factories, And Wicked Solutions, and concludes with LLMs Are Lead.

Follow that excellent series with The Tech Industry Has a Dirty Secret: The More People Learn About AI, The Less They Trust it by Victor Tangermann. For what it’s worth, I’m also seeing AI naysayers riding the pendulum back the other way as they find ways to make some of the tools of this tool work for them. No AI could ever sort this out with a summary.

The Power We Use and The Power We Give is a brilliant piece by Philip Bump. As he transitions from his former job with The Washington Post he’s talking about where choosing to land next and why making the right choice about where to exercise what power the words you use live. This is a complicated moment in history on so many levels, well illustrated in this one man’s piece.

Also, here’s an excellent piece from Bump on the goings on in Chicago called Trump Wants To Make War On Chicago. He Picked The Wrong Fight.

Speaking of complexity, David Todd McCarty wonders why so many men find themselves alone later in life in Boys Don’t Cry, Men Don’t Bond.

Chris Armitage says It’s Time For Americans To Start Talking About “Soft Secession.” I take the point about the term and the concept. I’m not criticizing either or Armitage’s piece when I say this, but hell, when the president of the country mockingly riles up everyone with a threat to declare war on a city, I’m not sure there’s anything “soft” about anything anymore.

NatashaMH tackles political amnesia is what I think is a timely piece worth revisiting more than once. Our capacity to forget or set aside so much, so often, is astounding. Check out Inside The Fortress, Outside The Fire. Here’s the money quote:

As often as I can, I remind them how history is a reminder of the lives we lost and of how stupid we really are. “Senseless to the core. And once we’re done with the bloodshed, we write poetry.”

To clear the palette a bit, check out Tim Newcomb’s piece about how A Remarkable Discovery of A Document Shatters One of Shakespeare’s Biggest Mysteries. 

Fact checking may be a dying art, given that most of the world has decided we can each have our own facts. Zach Helfand as a wonderful long piece on The History Of The New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Check Department. Too damn bad we have to file this under nostalgia.

Speaking of nostalgia, check out Bettor Up by J.R. Moehringer about gambling and baseball. Yes, it’s about gambling and baseball, but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to the good sports writing (especially about baseball) that I grew up with.

(Image from Roman Kraft on Unsplash.)

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.