Spencer Klavan

1 week ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Spencer Klavan

Pops,I can tell you made a big impression on Aristotle back in the day, because he actually responded to your concern about the golden mean in a passage at the beginning of his Nicomachean Ethics. It might be my favorite thing he ever wrote. And he didn’t even credit you in so much as a lousy footnote. Jerk. Anyway I like this passage so much, and I think it’s so important, that I spent some time yesterday getting into the Greek and translating the key sentences myself.

1 week ago | thenewjerusalem.substack.com | Spencer Klavan

Video games can be art. Whenever I say this, I am told that they’re addictive, or that many of them are brainless trash. I accept these points, but they’re irrelevant. To say that something can be art doesn’t mean it always is, or that it’s always healthy. “Art” is not a synonym for “good” or “good for you,” as Plato would be the first to point out were he alive to agree with me—which he surely would. Great art, though, is another matter. Great art expands the soul, renews the mind, informs the heart.

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

Dad,One of the under-appreciated things about AI language generators like ChatGPT is that they justify my policy of ignoring most emails I receive. Every day my inbox gets firehosed with marketing campaigns that sound just like a robot wrote them: strings of pre-formulated phrases stitched together into something that resembles English without requiring even a moment of original thought.

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

I’ve heard it said that in the agonies of World War II, Winston Churchill saved Britain’s body while C.S. Lewis saved its soul. Since Lewis was a soldier in the first war and a foster guardian for London’s child refugees in the second, and since Churchill was one of Lewis’s only contemporary rivals for rhetoric and manful sentiment, I’d say they each labored mightily in both domains.

3 weeks ago | lawliberty.org | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Spencer Klavan |Richard Alan Ryerson |Alex J. Pollock

The addresses collected in We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsynwere written by a man on the run. The earliest is his Nobel Prize lecture, printed in 1972 after he sent it to Stockholm in place of a live appearance. Given the way his novels depicted Soviet Russia, he worried that if he traveled to Sweden in person, he might never be allowed back. He was probably right.