Salvatore Quasimodo (translated by Allen Mandelbaum)

“Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all.” - G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

we've spent the last decade obsessed with finding edge by being fast. that's over. the next decade is going to be about the slow, the glacial, plans that are measured in centuries, ecological timescales, low frequency trading, the craftsman, slowing down the clock speed of life

If I could be more precise, we’re narrative machines. The brain writes and rewrites stories, even while we’re asleep, to make sense of the world around us. Ironically, the humanities subject perhaps most looked down upon—heroic epics—is what I believe will allow us to reach AGI.

“What will you do now?” “What I’ve always done. I’ll live in adoration of her.” La Grande Bellezza (2013) by Paolo Sorrentini

I worry every day we become less human when we turn to AI for comfort. Part of the process when one is suffering must involve relying on others and all the disappointments that come with it: when you’re vulnerable with people, you make it far more difficult to deceive yourself.

In Fahrenheit 451, the abolition of reading began with tech companies simplifying books into summaries that you could read in five minutes. Because people no longer engaged with the texts, they forgot how to think. Then came the book-burnings.

I launched a Substack! Come join me at breakinggems.substack.com if you: 1. Love Breaking Bad 2. Want to know what it's like to build a luxury line from zero 3. Neither, but would enjoy authentic commentary on chasing beauty in a world sinking under the weight of its own inventions

Ingmar Bergman poses the difficult question: is unflinching faith in the divine necessary to find the great Beauty?

Always Ada Limón ♥️

I maintain that the reason why many people are easily blown away by “the quality of writing in AI” is because they have never read or understood poetry.

I do think there’s a lot more to Miyazaki’s line on AI than gets acknowledged, even minding how often it’s shared around here – “we humans are losing faith in ourselves”. That’s the great sadness.

Summer; somewhere in northern Italy

My ballot, and already I regret not including: No Country For Old Men, Boyhood, Manchester By the Sea, In the Mood for Love, Amelie…

Not pouring your whole soul into your work is anti-life. In art, in business, in all endeavours alike. Do you think Dostoyevsky ever had to use the Pomodoro technique to get himself to write The Brothers Karamazov? Do you think Steve Jobs, when he created the Macintosh, was

Sunday, somewhere along the Italian Riviera

C.S. Lewis, do you feel the longing?

As someone forever in awe of what our minds do with language—and what language, in turn, does with our minds—of how thought emerges through linguistic intentionality, I find it increasingly difficult to make sense of how easily we have chosen to outsource this part of ourselves.

I've been eating a ton of peaches and reading a lot of poetry – here's a personal favourite, The Glass Essay by Anne Carson.

Caught between Scilla e Cariddi