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Jonah Goldberg on why OUR KID is more important than others.
Jonah
Hey, About a month ago, Bridget Phetasy posted on Twitter that it’d been two years since her dog passed away. This was my reply:
The great thing about dogs — one of the great things at least — is the rules that govern ranking other things don’t apply to dogs. I have never doubted that someone was telling the absolute truth when they said their dog was the best dog ever, even though I know for a fact that I’ve owned two of the best dogs ever and my current dogs will one day join them on Mount Rushmore as the four greatest dogs ever. It’s just not like mountains or money. There’s only one tallest mountain or richest person. But the number of obviously best dogs ever is almost infinite. I bring this up not to talk about dogs, though I think you know that I am happy to be thrown in that briar patch. I bring it up to talk about something that dogs are a good illustration of.
So, against all my better judgment, let’s stick with dogs for a moment longer. The replies to my tweet were more edifying than most, and not just for the conspicuous absence of antisemitic bile. People got what I meant. It’s not like I persuaded anybody. They already agreed before I said anything, because people who love their dogs understand that the realm they share with them is outside of the realms in much of the rest of their lives. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons I like posting stuff about dogs—they don’t care about politics or “influence” and their indifference is contagious. I find that deeply comforting in this time of stupid, ugly politics.
Humans and dogs are very different in all sorts of obvious ways: number of legs, mathematical aptitude, etc. But one difference I think about a lot may not be so obvious. Telling your dog you love it is pretty futile; you have to show it. I know dog owners who will disagree with this. The ones who aren’t entirely wrong will say that dogs can pick up on your voice, mood, etc. Fair enough. But even so, that’s more showing than telling. The words alone are the “blah blah blahs” from The Far Side cartoon. We show our love in all of the mundanely obvious ways. We feed them, we play with them, and we just hang out with them. The hardest parts of dog ownership, by far, are the ones where our love seems like punishment: taking them to the vet, retrieving delicious but dangerous things from their mouths, giving them pills, and, worst of all, having to decide to say goodbye to them (though you’re doing that wrong if it seems like anyone but you feels punished).
Which brings me to parenthood. Children and dogs are very different, and I think it can be a mistake to be confused on this point. People frequently ask me why, in my tweets in which Pippa talks to people, she refers to me as “thumb guy” and my wife as “the special lady.” Part of it is just a long-running silly joke about how, when we’re in the park, I’m using my phone to take her picture on the thumb machine I’m always using. But the more serious reason is that I don’t want to contribute, publicly, to the “furbaby” discourse in which we talk about dogs as if they are human children. I don’t want Pippa referring to me as “daddy” or to the Fair Jessica as “mommy.” I won’t claim we stick to this rule in private, but that’s sort of the point: That’s private. You can quibble with the reasoning of my rule of thumb (guy), but I’m sticking with it.
For all the massively important and real differences between human children and dogs, those differences are, in some respects, narrowest when our kids are babies. That’s because when they’re babies, words don’t matter very much. Yes, talking to babies is good for their development and all that, but the imperative is to show your love more than tell it. Among the worst experiences in my life were the times I had to take my preverbal daughter to a doctor or hospital for her own good, because I couldn’t explain that it was for her own good. I had to do it anyway. Because that’s what parents have to do. Because we love our children. We’ll come back to that.
Nikole Hannah-Jones has generated a lot of buzz over her revelatory essay about deliberately sending her kid to a bad school. Some would describe her pensée as “soul searching.” I’m not inclined to do that, because I don’t think she searched as deeply as she wants to suggest. Charlie Cooke covers a lot of my thoughts on the matter.
He focuses, rightly, on something Hannah-Jones said in 2024: “My daughter is not worth more than any other child.” This is wrong. It’s wrong in profound ways. It’s also a very old and shockingly common idea.
In 2013, Melissa Harris-Perry was featured in one of MSNBC’s old “Lean Forward” agitprop ads in which she said public education was underfunded “because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children ‘your kid is yours’ and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are ‘our children.’” Her solution: “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”
Hillary Clinton said in 1996, “As adults we have to start thinking and believing that there isn’t really any such thing as someone else’s child.”
The first-wave feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman stated it more starkly. “There is no more brilliant hope on earth to-day, than this new thought about the child … the recognition of ‘the child,’ children as a class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state; instead of our previous attitude toward them of absolute personal [that is, parental] ownership—the unchecked tyranny … of the private home.”
I think this is gross. It’s no less gross if you are willing to grant that it is well-intended, something I struggle to do at times. We’re all familiar with the way good intentions can pave a path we don’t want to go down. Indeed, I find it fascinating how anyone can simultaneously treat The Handmaid’s Tale as almost a form of secular prophecy and entertain this line of thinking. After all, nationalizing, or socializing, the raising of children seems like a necessary first step down the path of good intentions leading to a kind of hell.
Before I get to my fundamental objection, I should offer a lesser one. This is bad public policy. One of the best ways to identify when the government is failing is not when we vote at the ballot box, but when we vote “with our feet.” There are few better examples of what social scientists call “revealed preferences” than packing up and moving someplace else—for better schools, lower taxes, or, in the case of people fleeing despotic regimes, for simple freedom. Watching a video of Germans trying to escape East Berlin, or of Vietnamese boat people, or anyone else fleeing countries with a more “collective notion” of raising children, will teach you more about those regimes than any textbook.
Our system works on the assumption that parents care more about their children than anyone else. I’m not saying it works great, and sometimes that’s because parents don’t care enough. But a system designed around the assumption that parents not only don’t but should not care more about their kids is a recipe for a system that would make “the tragedy of the commons” a real tragedy. Imagine a school system where parental feedback did not exist, save as some sort of sentiment about children as an undifferentiated, commodified mass of future workers.
But my point isn’t about public policy per se. It’s about parental policy, for want of a better word. Hannah-Jones didn’t vote with her feet, she voted with her child. She made her daughter an instrument of her politics, a flesh-and-blood virtue signal. And she did it based, at least in part, on her “values,” which take it as a self-evident truth that her child is not worth more than any other. Now, seen from the perspective of an education bureaucrat or a politician, this is a more defensible claim than some are willing to concede. The job of public officials is to care about all of the kids under their supervision more or less equally. I say “more or less” because I think even here some distinctions can and should be made. The students who really care about doing the work should be rewarded with the ability to do it without having to navigate bullying, violence, or disruption by students who don’t. That doesn’t mean the bad apples should be written off. It just means that choices always have to be made. Having a whole class held hostage to the worst-behaved troublemakers is a choice, just as removing those troublemakers is a choice. To govern is to choose. There are no policy solutions, only trade-offs, and all that.
But Hannah-Jones isn’t an administrator or politician. She’s a parent. And her kid is hers—and her husband’s—and no one else’s. It’s a bit like the Marine Rifleman’s creed: “This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.” Except a child is not a rifle, it is a human being that is dependent upon its parents to become the best, happiest, and healthiest person possible. It’s hard. Every parent fails to one degree or another. But the failures are all relative, and with love, hard work, and, alas, a good deal of luck, the failures are modest.
But what is essential is the idea—no, not the idea, because ideas are just theories held in the mind—the passion, the conviction, the certainty that your child is worth more than all the others, to you. That’s the realm that children are supposed to live in. It should follow them around like a force field as they navigate the world around them. My parents are in my corner. They may get things wrong, they may make mistakes, they might “just not understand” this or that, but that they love me is unquestionable. I’m trying not to cannibalize my book in advance of it (eventually) being done. But the category error that Hannah-Jones makes is importing the logic of the external order, what Friedrich Hayek called the “macrocosm,” into her “microcosm” of the family. It’s the same mistake all of the people who want our children to be raised collectively make. They think the rules of our private realm of sacrifice and solidarity, familial loyalty and collective purpose, can and should be extended to the whole of society. But the political order in a liberal system—and ours is still a liberal system, for now—is for political things. Again, a politician can and should ideally work from the assumption that all children are of equal worth, because in a liberal system all humans are of equal worth. That is the core idea of liberalism: We are all equal in the eyes of God and government. But a parent isn’t a politician. A parent is a jealous guardian of their child or children. Vast swaths of good parenting are captured by the statement, “I don’t care what the other kids are doing. They aren’t my kids.”
And I should say, this is true in nonliberal systems, too. No society has ever been constructed where the attachments of family have been completely erased. Many have tried, with horrific successes at the margins. But total victory has always been impossible because love of children is written on the human heart, not in law books.
That’s because the microcosm is the cosmos we are born into. We can be torn from it, and trained to see the state as our parents, in some real-world version of Plato’s republic or some cockamamie postliberal “common good” or “social justice” utopia. But in the real world, we call such efforts the very definition of totalitarianism. That microcosm is where children and, yes, dogs live. The difference between dogs and children is that dogs never leave the microcosm. They stay in the pack of the little platoon forever. Where all we can do is show love without being able to explain it.
Children always keep one foot in the microcosm, ideally. But they also learn how to live in the macrocosm by first being formed in the microcosm. And eventually, the idea is that they create a new microcosm of their own.
I’m not saying what Hannah-Jones did was totalitarian or a crime. I’m not saying that she doesn’t love her child. She obviously does. I’m saying her attachment to politics broke the force field that is supposed to surround her child. As the line—often misattributed to Talleyrand—goes, what she did was worse than a crime. It was a mistake.
When Hannah-Jones explained that she voted with her child to her child, she “just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.”
“‘So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?’ she said, hurling her words. ‘Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?’”
Hannah-Jones seems to realize her mistake: “Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the ‘best’ school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.”
But the primary mistake wasn’t that she didn’t send her child to the “‘best’ school” (there’s so much going on in those scare quotes by the way). That’s secondary. Najya’s shoddy education can be remedied, to some degree. But that’s a symptom. The real mistake, the actual betrayal, was in showing—and then telling—her child that she wasn’t worth the world, compared to all the other children in it, to her.
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People's UNIQUE intelligence vs. AI's GENERAL intelligence.
The unique experience every human has is what sets it apart from AI—and what we must not lose sight of.
John Warner, as usual, with great thoughts on this:
biblioracle.substack.com/p/resist-…
This is true because everyone in this room is not generally intelligent like AI, but uniquely intelligent, and that intelligence has been developed through experiences, like eating extremely delicious cinnamon rolls.
Personally, I find unique intelligences far more fascinating than general intelligence, no matter how intelligent that general intelligence may be. I also believe that the best route forward in an uncertain world such as the one we live in – and have always lived in to tell the truth - is to develop the capacities that allow you to stand out from the crowd as that unique intelligence, and the only way to do that is to learn stuff.
School, particularly college, should be a good place to learn stuff, but I am not so naïve to believe that learning is always central to the work we do in school. For sure, society in general an colleges in specific could to a better job of aligning the work of school with learning, but in the end, no matter the conditions, the responsibility for learning comes down to the individual learner, the possessor and developer of that unique intelligence.
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"I'm not an alcoholic"
I thought that my drunkenness was a rare, unpleasant variation on my generally controlled drinking, and that it was just a matter of time before I figured out how to cease doing the not-fun part of drinking so that I could continue doing the fun part. Giving it up altogether was not an option; the idea of going out to dinner and not drinking seemed like going to a pool that had no water in it and just walking back and forth along the bottom instead of swimming. So there was a lot at stake in figuring out how to do it right.
both my drinking and my efforts to drink less were forms of self-abuse.
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The Real Work
More Wendell Berry – resonating as I find my mind churning and baffled in a life-giving way, and I feel compelled to write to work it out.
The Real Work by Wendell Berry
It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
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Gates on AI -- and "human reserve"
“Some jobs should stay off limits to AI, not because a robot couldn’t do them, but because something would be lost if it did.”
Bill Gates on AI… Some jobs should stay off limits to AI, not because a robot couldn’t do them, but because something would be lost if it did. Bill Gates argues the AI transition will hit faster than the shift from farms to offices, wiping out entry level jobs across law, customer service, and manufacturing within a decade rather than generations, while automated attacks on hospitals and power grids grow easier to launch than to defend against. His fix isn’t to slow AI down, since he doubts anyone credibly can, but to tax robots and AI tokens the way we tax human payrolls, and to carve out a category he calls “Human Reserved,” roles like elder care and delivering a terminal diagnosis that we choose to keep human even when a machine could do them. The real risk isn’t that AI fails to deliver benefits, it’s that those benefits accrue to a wealthy few while everyone else absorbs the disruption.
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How Dolly Parton Gave
Give It While Alive
The most effective form of charity might just be cash, handed directly to people and trusted to do the right thing with it. Dolly Parton built a $141 million foundation not through galas or naming rights, but by mailing $500 checks to graduating seniors, a move that helped cut her home county’s dropout rate from 35 percent to 6 percent. She sent $1,000 a month to families burned out of their homes by 2016 wildfires, put $1 million into early Covid vaccine trials at Vanderbilt before major funders had, and shipped 305 million free books to kids through her Imagination Library. Her giving wasn’t about polish or prestige, it was about spotting a need early and filling it before anyone thought to ask.
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I love this! How to be a Poet
I love this! How to be a Poet
How to Be a Poet BY WENDELL BERRY (to remind myself) i
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.ii
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.iii
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came. -
Berry: To conserve requires limits. Limits are rooted in purpose.
“But to look more closely at Berry’s words and his work is to see that his views are rooted in a fundamental conservatism, in the traditional sense of that term, despite the fact that he rejected that label. (That term, like so many others, has become almost meaningless in present-day politics.) Nevertheless, Berry’s essential conservatism can be seen in an interview published in 2012 in which he said, “To have good farming or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits. Capitalism doesn’t acknowledge limits.”
To conserve requires limits. Even good things — perhaps, especially good things — must have limits. And limits are rooted in purpose. "
– from Tribute by Prior: religionnews.com/2026/09/0…
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What we need is here - by Wendell Berry
What we need is here - by Wendell Berry Love the last lines especially. Contentment, eyes open.
– Horseback on Sunday morning, harvest over, we taste persimmon and wild grape, sharp sweet of summer’s end. In time’s maze over fall fields, we name names that rest on graves. We open a persimmon seed to find the tree that stands in promise, pale, in the seed’s marrow. Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.
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Wendell Berry: "Some Further Words"
Ending graf – which rings true days after turning from safari:
Think of the genius of the animals, every one truly what it is: gnat, fox, minnow, swallow, each made of light and luminous within itself. They know (better than we do) how to live in the places where they live. And so I would like to be a true human being, dear reader-a choice not altogether possible now. But this is what I’m for, the side I’m on. And this is what you should expect of me, as I expect it of myself, though for realization we may wait a thousand or a million years.
– Whole Thing:
Let me be plain with you, dear reader. I am an old-fashioned man. I like the world of nature despite its mortal dangers. I like the domestic world of humans, so long as it pays its debts to the natural world, and keeps its bounds. I like the promise of Heaven. My purpose is a language that can pay just thanks and honor for those gifts, a tongue set free from fashionable lies.
Neither this world nor any of its places is an “environment.” And a house for sale is not a “home.” Economics is not “science,” nor “information” knowledge. A knave with a degree is a knave. A fool in a public office is not a “leader.” A rich thief is a thief. And the ghost of Arthur Moore, who taught me Chaucer, returns in the night to say again: “Let me tell you something, boy. An intellectual whore is a whore.”
The world is babbled to pieces after the divorce of things from their names. Ceaseless preparation for war is not peace. Health is not procured by sale of medication, or purity by the addition of poison. Science at the bidding of the corporations is knowledge reduced to merchandise; it is a whoredom of the mind, and so is the art that calls this “progress.” So is the cowardice that calls it “inevitable.”
I think the issues of “identity” mostly are popppycock. We are what we have done, which includes our promises, includes our hopes, but promises first. I know a “fetus” is a human child. I loved my children from the time they were conceived, having loved their mother, who loved them from the time they were conceived and before. Who are we to say the world did not begin in love?
I would like to die in love as I was born, and as myself, of life impoverished, go into the love all flesh begins and ends in. I don’t like machines, which are neither mortal nor immortal, though I am constrained to use them. (Thus the age perfects its clench.) Some day they will be gone, and that will be a glad and a holy day. I mean the dire machines that run by burning the world’s body and its breath. When I see an airplane fuming through the once-pure sky or a vehicle of the outer space with its little inner space imitating a star at night, I say, “Get out of there!” as I would speak to a fox or a thief in the henhouse.
When I hear the stock market has fallen, I say, “Long live gravity! Long live stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces of fantasy capitalism!” I think an economy should be based on thrift, on taking care of things, not on theft, usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.
My purpose is a language that can make us whole, though mortal, ignorant, and small. The world is whole beyond human knowing. The body’s life is its own, untouched by the little clockwork of explanation. I approve of death, when it comes in time to the old. I don’t want to live on mortal terms forever, or survive an hour as a cooling stew of pieces of other people. I don’t believe that life or knowledge can be given by machines. The machine economy has set afire the household of the human soul, and all the creatures are burning within it.
“Intellectual property” names the deed by which the mind is bought and sold, the world enslaved. We who do not own ourselves, being free, own by theft what belongs to God, to the living world, and equally to us all. Or how can we own a part of what we only can possess entirely? “The laborer is worthy of his hire,” but he cannot own what he knows, which must be freely told, or labor dies with the laborer. The farmer is worthy of the harvest made in time, but he must leave the light by which he planted, grew, and reaped, the seed immortal in mortality, freely to the time to come. The land too he keeps by giving it up, as the thinker receives and gives a thought, as the singer sings in the common air.
I don’t believe that “scientific genius” in its naïve assertions of power is equal either to nature or to human culture. Its thoughtless invasions of the nuclei of atoms and cells and this world’s every habitation have not brought us to the light but sent us wandering farther through the dark. Nor do I believe “artistic genius” is the possession of any artists. No one has made the art by which one makes the works of art. Each one who speaks speaks as a convocation. We live as councils of ghosts. It is not “human genius” that makes us human, but an old love, an old intelligence of the heart we gather to us from the world, from the creatures, from the angels of inspiration, from the dead— an intelligence merely nonexistent to those who do not have it, but to those who have it more dear than life.
And just as tenderly to be known are the affections that make a woman and a man, their household, and their homeland one. These too, though known, cannot be told to those who do not know them, and fewer of us learn them, year by year, loves that are leaving the world like the colors of extinct birds, like the songs of a dead language.
Think of the genius of the animals, every one truly what it is: gnat, fox, minnow, swallow, each made of light and luminous within itself. They know (better than we do) how to live in the places where they live. And so I would like to be a true human being, dear reader—a choice not altogether possible now. But this is what I’m for, the side I’m on. And this is what you should expect of me, as I expect it of myself, though for realization we may wait a thousand or a million years.
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Learning to trust
Lore Wilbert: on how trauma makes you viigilant and struggle to truly trust people. But practicing a new way…
ahttps://lorewilbert.com/p/re-membering-the-fractured-self?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=289080&post_id=207790458&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=1j8nh&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
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Tim Keller: Lessons to be learned — for Christians in politics
Lessons to be learned — for Christians in politics
- Christians can’t wholly support or “buy into” any of these ideologies. Considered biblically,
Some of these ideologies put too much emphasis on systemic, structural factors in dealing with racial and economic injustice and others put too little. Some put too much emphasis on individual responsibility and some too little. Some are too individualistic and others are too collectivistic. Some are too distrustful of the market and too trusting of institutions and government, while others are the reverse. Both nationalism and socialism ironically make group or race or class identities absolute—in different ways—even though the ideologies are great enemies. Some are anti-religious while others tend to use religion for political purposes. Some say you are free to do with your sexuality whatever you want but not your money; others say you are free to do whatever you want with your money but you must hold to traditional sexual ethics. Some tend to idolize the traditional family and exaggerate gender differences while others subvert the traditional family and work hard to blur gender distinctions. Some wrongly believe that science can provide moral values for public policy while others distrust science far too much. Some tend to valorize the poor and others tend to demonize the poor. Some refuse to reform the criminal justice system at all while others want to dismantle it.
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On "longing for home" -- and why we're never satisfied. Moore's reflections on The Odyssey.
www.christianitytoday.com/newslette…
Some of us are pulled toward nostalgia, looking to something better in the past. And some of us are pulled toward discontentment, looking to something better in the future. Regardless of where we turn, we all recognize something is missing. And all kinds of people—politicians, marketers, tech lords—are there to say, “You want to get home, and I can get you there.” But it never works. That’s because homesickness points in contradictory directions all at once. In “Homesick,” songwriter Noah Kahan sings of being stuck in a Vermont hometown of winter “hibernation” that is so slow “I feel my organs failing,” yet he is too disillusioned to find the will to leave. “Spend the rest of my life with what could have been,” he sings. “And I will die in the house that I grew up in. / I’m homesick.” Homer imagines a man desperate to get home. Noah Kahan imagines a man desperate to leave home. Those sound like opposite longings. They’re actually the same. We’re either trying to get back to something (to re-live some place or situation where we once were happy) or trying to get away toward something (a new job, a new love, a new identity that will fill the void of the emptiness we feel). We become bored of what’s familiar and scared of what’s not. For Paul at Mars Hill in Acts 17, the pagan poems demonstrated that, deep down, we already recognize that something’s missing in all our attempts to find and create meaning, whatever our rhetoric. The ancient problem says “I can’t get home.” The modern problem says “I got home—it isn’t home.” One longs for return, and one longs for escape. These are not two problems but one. No matter which way we turn, we don’t know what home is. That’s why Homer still rings true, even in the era of IMAX and SpaceX. And that’s what makes the Christian story stranger than the pagan ones. Odysseus spends 20 years trying to get back to Ithaca. Jesus has spent 2,000 years (so far) telling us to stop mistaking Ithaca for Eden. The Bible is full of odysseys: Abraham leaves Ur. The Israelites leave Egypt. The apostles set out to “the ends of the earth” (Acts 13:47). When describing examples of faith, the Book of Hebrews says none of them “received the things promised” (11:13, ESV throughout). These pilgrimages were not about answering the longing for home with a return to something past. We want a place prepared for us, a place to belong, a place to be known, a place to be loved. But our longing for that can sometimes leave us nostalgic for the wrong thing. The Israelites hungered in the wilderness. They responded to that with nostalgia for slavery: “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic” (Num. 11:5). The longing wasn’t wrong. As a matter of fact, God said the hunger was necessary. The emptiness was in order that “he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8:3). As C. S. Lewis reminded us, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water.” All of that should lead us to ponder: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Identifying the ache is not the end, but it’s a start. The Odyssey, Homer’s and Nolan’s, assumes the greatest human tragedy is losing the home you once had. The Bible says Abraham was looking for a city he had never seen (Heb. 11:13–14). The Odyssey doesn’t answer the question; it reminds us how to ask it. And that’s not nothing. But once we start asking those questions, we might find a whole Trojan horse full of meanings about which we could never start to ask or even think (Eph. 3:20). Asking those questions just might lead us somewhere else, to a better story than even Homer or Hollywood can tell.
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Oskar Eustis - Public Theater – on model of nonprofit theater. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/2…®i_id=65067095&segment_id=223523&user_id=f072b8cd33fd7a4bada76d1ea460dee7
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Neighbors drawing near…and changing a life.
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The question used to be whether to use AI. Now it’s how to live alongside it. co-existence.ai
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AI on writing - Ethan mollusk on his new book .
AI on writing - Ethan mollusk on his new book .
“AI is not a great long-form writer. It has difficulty telling good stories, it has instantly obvious textual tells, and it is kind of dull to read too much of. For all of those reasons, I wrote every chapter draft myself, with all the parentheticals and dumb jokes you expect from my writing. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t use AI in the book writing process; I just used it carefully and with judgement. I had AI readers go through each chapter for feedback (as did my human readers and editors), I had a council of AI models check my facts (and yes, I read every paper or citation), and I used AI to unstick me when I hit dead ends. I think the book is better as a result. But gains came with losses—not only the intellectual struggles I may have resolved too quickly, or the possibility that my thinking was subtly redirected, but simpler things as well. My last book contained 128 em-dashes (maybe the one in the last sentence made you suspicious?) but this time I used far fewer in a desperate attempt to continue to prove the text was human..”
…
“I can tell you that working with AI that is sometimes better than you, and sometimes hilariously worse, is not a problem you solve once. It is a relationship you negotiate, and re-negotiate, as the models get ever better. That negotiation is what Co-Existence is about. You can read about it in the book (which would be great), but I think we are going to live through it either way.”
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Family Owned Busienss - identity issue
The Survival Math
According to long-cited Kellogg research, only 30% of family businesses survive into the second generation. By the third, 12%. By the fourth, just 3%. The math is brutal — and rarely because the business isn’t strong. Family Business Advisor Kile Graves has spent the past several years working closely with dozens of family-owned enterprises navigating this exact handoff, and his argument is that these aren’t really succession conversations. They’re identity conversations. He’s hosting a free 60-minute webinar for family business leaders at any generation on June 23 and July 7. Everyone who registers gets a copy of The Torch, his framework guide. Click the link to register. Cornerstone (Sponsored)
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Great commencement speech: Six Strings
Six Strings
Country singer Eric Church returned to Chapel Hill and delivered the rarest of commencement speeches, one that wasn’t really a speech, it was a guitar lesson. Church organized his address around the six strings of a guitar, mapping each to a principle for the Class of 2026, with faith as the deep low E and family as the A, working up through heart, ambition, community, and a sense of self. His sharpest line was aimed at the smartphone generation specifically, that they face “a temptation no generation before has ever faced. The temptation to perform to everyone and belong to no one,” and the prescription was to plant themselves somewhere, learn actual names instead of usernames, coach the team, build the thing the community needs. At a moment when most graduates are being told the future is portable, optimized, and increasingly virtual, a Carolina kid stood at Kenan Stadium and told them the most subversive thing they could do is grow roots.
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AI and religion and ethics
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Shared joy is double joy. Shared sorrow is half sorrow.
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Christian Humanism and AI
“What Christian humanism offers, with its assertion that humans are made in the Imago Dei, is a choice other than Silicon Valley extremism or remainder humanism. If what makes humanity special is not our capabilities—automatable or not—but the notion that we spring from a transcendent source, then what the robots can or cannot do is in some sense irrelevant. ChatGPT was not made in the image of God, no matter how impressive its facsimile becomes. A secular humanism that cannot find a similarly deep line of reasoning is one that may not be adequate to defend human dignity in the AI era.”
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Do I Have to Post More on Social Media to Grow My Agency?
Almost every agency owner asks me this at some point:
“Do I have to post more on social media to grow my agency?”
No, you don’t.
In fact, I discourage it for most agency owners.
The instinct is good. Behind the question is a real truth: growing a business usually takes more or better marketing.
So what is “marketing?”
The clearest explanation I’ve heard comes from a book that isn’t even about marketing: For the Culture, by Dr. Marcus Collins. He says “marketing” literally means “to bring to market.” And a “market” is “a set of players who interact in pursuit of exchange”. So to grow an agency, it makes sense that you need to reach a bigger set of players in pursuit of exchange for you to interact with.
Posting more on social media can help with that. But the real reason agency owners jump to it so fast is that it’s the only kind of marketing they know.
About 5.8 billion of the 8.2 billion people on Earth have at least one social media account. That’s roughly 70% of the world. So most people already know what it feels like to be marketed to. It seems logical: if you want to reach more people, go to the places that hold the most people. But that’s a trap. The biggest crowds also make the most noise. As the saying goes: everyone’s selling something.
To stand out in all that noise, you have to build a presence and grab attention. We have a word for that: “going viral.” But going viral is way harder than it sounds. Even the creators who teach you how to go viral don’t do it every time. They can pull in big numbers, sure, but one post gets 50K views while the next gets 5M. If they really knew the secret formula, wouldn’t every post hit the top number? They don’t, because attention is always moving. The real skill is reading those waves and riding them as they shift.
The advice you always hear is to post a lot and post consistently, so you can keep learning where attention is at any moment. A common starting point is posting 5 to 10 times a week for a full year. Top creators like Alex Hormozi have talked about posting around 250 pieces of content per week across multiple platforms. In his words: “To get 5× the results sometimes you have to put in 50× the effort.” Is that the game you want to play?
Whenever I bring this up, I hear the same pushback: “I don’t need a million followers or hundreds of millions of dollars. I just need a small piece of that.”
Ha.
That’s like saying, “I don’t need to swim across the whole lake. I’ll just swim a quarter of it.”
If you’re only going to swim a quarter of the lake, why swim it at all?
If your plan is to post once a week, you probably won’t reach enough people to grow your agency in a way that makes a difference for you.
Again, the instinct to market more or better is a good one. But picking social media as the way to do it is a mistake.
The goal isn’t to find the biggest market. The goal is to find the biggest market where you can actually be seen and heard.
I think other kinds of marketing work much better for agency owners than social media.
The proof is in the numbers.
You can run a $1M agency with about 10 clients who each pay you around $100K a year.
Let’s use a conservative win rate of 10%. If you win 10% of the projects you go after and you need 10 clients a year, then you only need to talk to 100 clients that year to hit your goal.
If you only need to talk to 100 clients, why are you posting to platforms with billions of users every day?
Yes, your 100 potential clients are probably on LinkedIn or Instagram. That’s not the problem. The problem is they’re buried among hundreds of millions of people who are not your potential clients.
Where can you talk to your 100 potential clients without also shouting at hundreds of millions of people who aren’t?
That’s the magic question.
The strongest marketing I know for agency owners is to make a list of 100 potential clients and send each one a well-written pitch. Yep, 100 emails, written by you, a real human, sent to another real human. In my experience, this is by far the best way to get more clients with the least effort.
(The fancy term for this is ABM, or “account-based marketing,” if you want to do more research.)
“100 custom emails? That’s so much work,” agency owners whine.
That’s because they’re doing two things wrong: they’re underestimating how much work other marketing takes, and they’re not scoping it out properly.
How many posts do you need to write in a year to do social media well? 5 posts a week × 52 weeks = 260 posts. At the very least. That’s way more than 100 emails.
Break it down. 100 emails a year is 25 a quarter. Or about 8 a month. Or 2 a week. Or 1 every 3 days. I know you can write 1 email every 3 days.
So why don’t more agency owners try this? Because it’s hard in two very different ways.
First, it’s hard creatively. You have to think hard to do this. Where do you even find 100 people for the list? That’s not easy. But if you can track down a specific screw at your local hardware store or a dress on Etsy that fits just right, you can do this too. It takes creative work. And that’s the tricky part: it requires you, the design agency owner who clients pay to be creative, to confront the idea that you might not be as creative as you think.
Second, it’s hard emotionally. When you email a real person, a real person can reject you. A real person can ghost you. A real person can insult you. That’s scary to think about, and it stings when it happens. Even though social media takes more work, the rejection there feels more dull. If a post flops, you can blame the algorithm. You can shrug it off because it’s “just a post.” No big deal, because “not every post is a banger.”
But the fact that it’s hard is exactly why it works. Sometimes it works because it’s hard. Since it’s hard, most people won’t do it, which makes it rare, which makes it valuable. That’s the whole point of a service business: doing something for someone that they can’t or won’t do themselves.
Strategist Alex M. H. Smith says it well in his article “If you make content online, here’s the problem:”
The key thing to understand about content creation and thought leadership in the post-saturation economy is…: If it’s not difficult, it won’t work. The entire reason it’s stopped working is because it’s become too easy, letting too many people into the market. So the trick to making it work again is to make it hard again. A better question than “should I post more on social media?” is “Am I willing to do a hard, scary thing that actually works?”
Make a list of 100. Write a real pitch. Send it to a real person. Get rejected by a real person. Repeat.
Somewhere in that cycle, a “no” turns into a “yes.”
When I first opened my agency, I made a list of 300 people to reach out to to ask for work. I got through 30 and was booked for 6 months.
—Dan
P.S. - I’m building a self-paced video system for agency owners who just need the frameworks without the coaching, community, and accountability. Reply “BETA” if that’s you and I’ll send you early access when it’s ready.
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Soft Fascination
In the LA Times last year, environmental neuroscientist Marc Berman (his 2025 book is called Nature and the Mind) had a lovely explanation of why nature is ‘softly fascinating’:
“You don’t often hear people say, ‘Oh, I can’t look at that beautiful waterfall anymore. It’s just too interesting to look at. I’m too tired’ … When you look at that waterfall, it doesn’t capture all of your attentional resources. You can still mind-wander and think about other things while you’re looking at the waterfall. If you’re in Times Square, it’s also super interesting. It captures a lot of your attentional focus, but it does so in an all-consuming way. The kind of stimulation that gives you this restful, restorative experience has to be softly fascinating and not harshly fascinating.”
I love this distinction between harsh and soft fascination. What if we integrated more soft moments into our modern and harshly scheduled days? For some of us, even our breaks (meant to be relaxing!) have a sharp edge.
We close our laptops…but then scroll on our phones. Or, we go for a walk…but listen to a podcast as well. In my case, a morning jaunt with the dog turns into an opportunity to optimize for steps (and the best coffee) rather than calming surroundings. Just chill out, Lady!
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