Alan Jacobs

Every young academic needs to study Kieran Healy’s Research Workflow chart.

Meredith Hale: As Horbatsch notes in the catalogue, only a small fraction of 15th-century drawings, the earliest works in the show, survive and all extant examples were made as functional objects in the studio.

Man, it feels great to be doing all my online writing at micro.blog.

Saying goodbye to WordPress.

Brad East: One friend in particular reached out to express his shock that I was (at least rhetorically) siding with young earth creationists against Christians who believe in an old universe.

Matthew Butterick says that a key argument of the Big AI companies is That Big AI companies are the only ones who can protect us from the risks that their products create.

A new video by my one-and-only guitar hero Martin Simpson: a cover of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.”

Here’s a fact for you: My maternal grandfather is buried in the same cemetery as Bear Bryant and Sun Ra.

Noah Millman: Perhaps the problem is that we’re desperately trying to turn off the alarm so that we can go back to sleep, when that is not an option.

The famous East Cloister of Gloucester Cathedral, with the earliest known example of fan vaulting.

In God’s mercy, this design for the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral was not chosen.

The weirdest thing about the current AI-may-kill-us-all stories is the tone of the people who work for the big AI companies.

I really need to get back to work, but I am still sorting through the events of the past few days and the memories they have triggered.

Many thanks to those who, here and elsewhere, have offered me condolences on the death of my mother.

Two quick announcements: Turns out my Sayers biography is already available in digital form — if you’re a subscriber to Oxford Academic: see here.

If I don't post much in the coming days and weeks this is why.

I feel that I ought to say something about what Wendell Berry has meant to me, but I am struggling to articulate it — partly because some family health difficulties are consuming my attention, but also because the debt is deep.

Matt Crawford: Momentarily on the back burner in 2020, the global emergency of carbon dioxide could still be summoned as needed.

Paul Kingsnorth: That moral certainty is perhaps the keenest taste left by Berry’s multitudinous writings.

I have a tip for anyone teaching Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.

Green jay on javelina; South Texas represent.

Mark Humphries: “To my mind, the traditional research paper as a tool of differential assessment is now dead.

Morning on campus.

This has been a dark day for me in many respects and now I learn that Wendell Berry has died.

Teri and I are re-watching Better Call Saul Season 1.

If I had a serious professional podcast, the intro music would be “The Super-Natural,” by John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers

I had to give Walter Martin a piece of my mind, such as it is.

Ideal epitaph for my tombstone: GOOD IDEA, POOR EXECUTION

Angus before his bath: For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.

Part of the corkboard over my desk.

It seems that every Premier League match features a commemoration of someone’s death.