my latest masterpiece
Austin
Currently reading: The Big Relief by David Zahl 📚
Currently reading: Waterloo by Karen Olsson 📚
Finished reading: How to Know a Person by David Brooks 📚
Brooks' recent work has really resonated with me, and this one was no different. I love the moral/spiritual trajectory of his work…happy to be along for the ride.
Finished reading: Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill 📚
Read this across the two flights from Austin to San Diego. A postmodern novel written in short paragraphs by the “wife” and essentially about her marriage. An enjoyable read that had me laughing out loud at multiple points on the plane. Even with the non-traditional mode of storytelling, you do gain a compelling window into the psyche of the writer.
Finished reading: Weird City by Joshua Long 📚
Interesting study about how the “Keep Austin Weird” slogan has been both utilized by locals as a means of creative resistance to their threatened sense of place and co-opted by business and government in order to attract talent.
Cove @ La Jolla
AI will be the consummation of bureaucracy as regime-type. The official, Weberian appeal of bureaucracy is that it takes discretion out of the hands of individuals, who may abuse it, and subjects decisions to procedures that will be fair and neutral. It depends on having a comprehensive representation of the field to be governed, so one can subject its various parts to a rational calculus. But the conceit that one has such a representation in hand is almost always a fiction, nicely illustrated by the effectiveness of “work to rule” strikes. […]
Bureaucracies build their legitimacy on the idea that they have rendered the field of forces perfectly legible, and can therefore exert a perfect mastery over them. It ain’t so.
Currently reading: Zero at the Bone by Christian Wiman 📚