Spencer Klavan

1 week ago | americanmind.org | Spencer Klavan

Has anyone actually read The Handmaid’s Tale? Maybe Margaret Atwood has. But it seems unlikely that many of the demonstrators who hauled out their red cloaks yet again last weekend have done more than watch the HBO TV show based—rather loosely—on the 1985 novel. Thomas Aquinas was supposed to have said, “I fear a man of only one book.” These are people of only one streaming miniseries. Margaret Atwood doesn’t seem to mind them very much.

2 weeks ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Spencer Klavan

Dad,There’s a painting I think about a lot called The Betrayal of Images, by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. It’s famous: a picture of a pipe with the caption Ceci n’est pas une pipe, “This is not a pipe.”I think this is in some sense a diabolical painting. Magritte was a wonderful artist, but he knew what he was doing when he called this piece The Betrayal of Images. He was saying two things: that images can betray you, and that the painting is an act of betrayal against imagery itself.

2 weeks ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Spencer Klavan

Dad,Most college kids who want to travel go backpacking through Europe; my version of this, as you may recall, was to sing my way around the world in Cole Porter’s old choir. That is a real thing which occurred. My first time in Athens, I was staying in an apartment owned by this lady who looked like a cross between Elaine Stritch and one of the villagers from Mamma Mia! We knew her because her nephew was a friend of a friend, a guy called—wait for it—Dionysius.

3 weeks ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Spencer Klavan

It’s funny how new tech makes all the old questions urgent again. AI chatbots have rendered a lot of modern teaching methods basically useless, so many teachers are returning to the ancient and medieval practices of memorization, handwritten essays, and in-person viva voce exams.

3 weeks ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Spencer Klavan

The ancient rabbis had a saying about the Tower of Babel. What’s the problem, they asked, with a global family all speaking one language in perfect unity? Well, a community with only one language is like a man with only one wine cellar: “He opens one barrel and finds it gone sour. A second—sour again. A third—sour.”The builders in Babel keep repeating the same words in different forms: “let us build brick after brick, and fire them with fire.” When you do that with words, they get stale.