Wednesday Links
Pope Leo’s AI encyclical, Caro Claire Burke’s “Yesteryear,” David Stuttard’s “Hubris,” Japan’s allergies, and more.
Good afternoon! We’re hard at work putting the next issue of Portico together, so I am running a bit late today. In that next issue, by the way, we have a wonderful essay by Nic Rowan on visiting Rome, John Shelton Reed on his favorite New Orleans restaurants, a short story from New Yorker regular Jim Shepard, reviews from Victoria Moul, Melanie McDonagh, Valerie Stivers, Daniel Ross Goodman, and others, plus poetry from Aaron Belz, Morri Creech, Stuart Dybek, George Murray, Wendy Videlock, David Yezzi, and more. If you haven’t subscribed, why not give it a try. Paid subscribers to this email get $20 off a yearly subscription.
Pope Leo has published an encyclical on AI. Margherita Stancati and Sam Schechner report:
Pope Leo XIV warned that artificial intelligence “threatens to normalize an anti-human vision” and said that the concentration of immense digital power in the hands of a few private actors must be countered.
The pontiff’s encyclical letter—a text that is poised to define Leo’s papacy—reads like a sharp warning to Silicon Valley executives and humanity more broadly about the future of civilization as new technologies rapidly advance.
The risk, he said, is that humans will be reduced “to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”
Leo used two biblical images to describe the choice humanity faces. “The primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem,” he wrote.
Matthew Walther, writing in the New York Times, thinks the encyclical doesn’t go far enough:
Leo XIV is not quite what Sylvia Townsend Warner once called an “old harmless pope,” but he certainly has a way of keeping headlines innocuous. He’s from Chicago, he likes the White Sox, he’s against the war in Iran — a year into his papacy, this is more or less what people know about him.
The mildness extends to his theological views. Unlike his recent predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Leo is not an academic theologian. Temperamentally, he is more cautious than Francis was. The questions that seem to interest Leo most are practical and pastoral. He is suspicious of grand, programmatic approaches even to the most serious questions — including that of artificial intelligence, the subject of his first encyclical letter, “Magnifica Humanitas,” which was presented on Monday.
Even by the standards of modern papal encyclicals, with their uninspired phrasing, frequent auto-plagiarism and stultifying length, “Magnifica Humanitas” is disappointingly measured and cautious. (The least guarded language in the document — Leo’s dismissal of just war theory as “outdated” — has nothing to do with A.I.) Despite voicing concerns about the dangers that A.I. poses to humanity, the encyclical nonetheless seems to envision a world in which it is simply a tool, rather than an evil that all people should reject.
Anthropic’s co-founder Chris Olah spoke, at the Pope’s invitation, at the presentation of the encyclical on Monday. His remarks are here.
Cade Metz talks to the technologists in Silicon Valley: “Mr. Nixon said the papal encyclical might mean something to the world’s Catholics, but he doubted that it would have an effect on Silicon Valley. The only reason that Silicon Valley even paid attention to the event, he said, was that Leo invited Mr. Olah to speak.”
In other news, James Murdoch buys New York magazine and Vox.com:
In an email to staff members, Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff wrote that the company would cleave into two. A new Murdoch-owned company, run by Bankoff, will include New York, Vox.com, and the podcast network. Another company, run by Vox Media President Ryan Pauley, will get a new name and comprise brands not included in the purchase: Eater, Popsugar, SB Nation, the Dodo and the Verge.
The company said that the deal is expected to close in four to six weeks. Vox Media and Lupa Systems did not respond immediately to a question about the sale price. “Separating into two distinct companies best sets up our brands, shows, businesses, talent and teams to continue to lead and prosper in the changing media landscape,” Bankoff wrote.
The big trend in contemporary art, Emily Watlington writes, is “systems art”: “The term ‘systems art’ wasn’t the most popular moniker among the many new art-world labels that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s. But it has grown much richer with age. . . . Many of today’s most prominent artists are focused on rendering vast, abstract, and often invisible systems perceptible—often by scaling them down to something more sensible while still gesturing toward their magnitude.” The “art” looks terrible.
Julia Yost takes stock of Caro Claire Burke’s bestselling novel Yesteryear:
One of the year’s bestselling books contains a pivotal sex scene in which a time-traveling tradwife finds her impotent husband transformed into a domineering patriarch. She is terrified and unwilling and, wouldn’t you know it, satisfied for the first time in her life. In Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke presents antifeminist gender norms for our condemnation and titillation. You could say she pioneers the genre of tradsploitation. Our tradwife gets what she asked for, good and hard. She must pay for her betrayal of her sex, and of the future. The future, of course, is female.
The plot turns on a nifty conceit. Natalie Heller Mills is a tradwife influencer, a “good Christian woman” who runs a nostalgic hobby farm in Idaho with her husband, the scion of a political dynasty. The aesthetic is prairie dresses and sourdough starter. They have chickens and cows and scads of kids. A gigantic pantry hides the modern conveniences. Natalie’s whole life is a performance—for her TikTok, for herself. She despises her husband, resents her kids, and urges herself, “Don’t forget to smile!” One day she wakes up on the same farm but apparently in 1855, and the past she cosplayed gets real.
Yesteryear is being hailed as a sharp satire of the hypocrisies of tradwives, the manosphere, and Christian nationalism. But it’s hard to square the critics’ sense of cathartic critique with the staleness of the ironies. Did you know that tradwife influencers are also businesswomen? That social-media accounts can have producers behind the scenes? That wealthy families employ nannies? That the most redpilled men are the biggest losers? That sometimes, within a Christian marriage, the woman wears the pants?
Charles Lane reviews American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed:
According to legend, it took rough and rugged characters to tame the early American frontier: men like Daniel Boone, the trailblazer, or Mike Fink, the brawling river boatman. Also according to legend, there was a mild-mannered, nurturant, exception: John Chapman, the itinerant Swedenborgian Christian preacher and horticulturalist better known as Johnny Appleseed. . . . Despite the book’s subtitle, Mr. Fitzgerald does not actually travel on foot for the whole trip or even most of it. That proves infeasible when he realizes, amid heavy snowfall, that the first stretch, Massachusetts’ 34-mile Johnny Appleseed Trail, is not a forest path but a paved highway unsuitable for pedestrians. Mr. Fitzgerald re-creates Appleseed’s peregrinations mostly by car but roughs it, Appleseed-style, by camping out at every opportunity.
That’s consistent with some verified facts about Chapman: that he seems to have had no fixed address, wore second-hand clothes—though not, pace legend, a tin cooking-pot hat—and often slept outdoors or accepted what shelter friendly settlers would offer.
However, this nomad only looked like a pauper. In fact, he was a successful entrepreneur. In Ohio, land companies would sometimes grant wilderness tracts to homesteaders on the condition that they sow orchards as proof of their long-term commitment. Chapman’s business model was to start planting in anticipation of the homesteaders’ arrival. “Rather than randomly scattering seeds across the land as the legends suggest,” Mr. Fitzgerald explains, “Chapman strategically established nurseries—fencing them in to protect the saplings from animals—and partnered with local caretakers who would look after the trees, often selling them on Chapman’s behalf long after he had left town.”
Richard Norton Smith reviews Craig Fehrman’s This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark:
The author’s own discoveries include Clark’s college notebook—that he attended college at all is here revealed for the first time—and an eyewitness account of Lewis’s violent encounter with members of the Blackfeet tribe that challenges previous reporting of the incident. Flipping traditional chronology, Fehrman reminds us that long before the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of his country, Thomas Jefferson had a “lifelong obsession” to know what lay beyond the mountains faintly visible from Monticello. From the books in his library Jefferson might have surmised that the trans-Mississippi region was filled with active volcanoes and blue-eyed Indians who spoke Welsh.
Operating in secret, Jefferson obtained a congressional appropriation of $2,500 to fund the ambitious enterprise variously sold as a trade mission, a scientific survey, and a chance to become better acquainted with Jefferson’s Mandan, Lakota, and Nez Perce constituents. (Fehrman calculates the final tab for the trip at $100,000 or more—roughly $2.8 million today.) The president’s stated objective was to find a direct water route to the Pacific, a modern variant of the fabled Northwest Passage long sought by European explorers. His larger goal was to frustrate any foreign power from contesting his vision of the United States as a continental republic. Lewis and Clark were advance agents of Manifest Destiny.
Spencer Klavan reviews David Stuttard’s Hubris:
The title of David Stuttard’s Hubris: Pericles, the Parthenon, and the Invention of Athens may have been chosen to provoke. Or maybe it just happened by accident to touch a nerve that’s been rubbed raw in recent years. Normally, it would be unremarkable or even cliché to accuse the ancient Athenians of abandoning themselves to pride as their prestige and power grew. It was an accusation their enemies made of them constantly; they made it often enough of themselves. Plutarch wrote that Pericles, the leading politician of Athens’s supposedly democratic heyday, became “superior in power to kings and tyrants.” This part of Stuttard’s thesis is not exactly news.
Recently, however, academic presses have been glutted with smug broadsides that fixate on the shortcomings of the West’s great civilizations as though they were unique discoveries of our enlightened liberal age. Curtis Dozier’s The White Pedestal, which I reviewed in these pages in February, is a perfect example of the genre. Last year’s Classicism and Other Phobias, by Dan-el Padilla Peralta, of Princeton, is another. Many readers find it tedious and grating to see this kind of juvenile whingeing passed off relentlessly as scholarship. So some people were understandably a bit on edge as Stuttard’s book launch approached. “Is the implicit corollary of this book that we ought to dislike our present civilization,” asked one observer, “because it traces its past to a ‘tyrannical democracy’ rather than a ‘Golden Age’?” In the present climate, it’s unfortunately a reasonable question.
What a nice surprise, then, that Hubris is actually a very good book. It’s not a wholesale condemnation of Athens but an eloquent retelling of the most justly famous period in its history, from the establishment of its democracy to the disastrous implosion of its empire at the end of the fifth century B.C.E. Stuttard, a fellow of Goodenough College, London, has written two other books that cover overlapping periods. They are Phoenix (2021), about two heroes in the wars against Persia, and Nemesis (2018), tracking the disastrous career of Pericles’s once-promising young ward, Alcibiades (the title refers to the downfall that inevitably follows hubris). Together they make up a loose trilogy, and though their subject matter isn’t exactly novel, it certainly never gets old either.
Why is TikTok in a book published in 2006?
“You guys want to come over and watch this cool TikTok I found?” This line, from a recent reprint of Sara Shepard’s young adult thriller Pretty Little Liars, drew criticism online this spring after a reader said it “ruined the whole book.”
In the original edition, from 2006, the same passage referred to the reality show “Fear Factor.” The updated version, from 2022, replaces it — and other early-2000s markers — with references to Instagram, Snapchat and artists like Billie Eilish and Doja Cat.
In publishing, the practice of updating cultural and technological references in older books is called modernization. It is most common in, but not exclusive to, middle-grade and Y.A. fiction, and is distinct from sensitivity editing, which targets language deemed offensive and became a subject of debate following revisions to Roald Dahl’s novels.
“It’s giving new life to the book,” said Kari Sutherland, an agent at KT Literary Agency and a former HarperCollins editor who worked on Shepard’s books. (She was not involved in the reprint.) Authors, editors and agents are generally open to updating cultural references, she said in an interview, “because what was very popular among teens in the early 2000s is no longer on their radar decades later.”
But the backlash to Pretty Little Liars suggests limits to that logic. Should readers expect their favorite books to change? And where, exactly, do publishers draw the line?
Adam Roberts on Beckett and Camus: “What is Endgame about, after all? It is about meaninglessness, absurdity, yes yes, no question. But it is about play, a play about play, about the end of the play. Chess pieces are stylised figures that are moved according to limited rules about a simplified board. Endgame suggests that our reactions (for in Beckett we always react and we never proact) to suffering are as ritualised and constrained, which they probably are. Theatrical performance entails learning lines and repeating them, on cue, whether or not you want to, whether or not you understand them, just to fill up the time allotted; and life, says Beckett, is the same. ‘Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!’ enthuses Hamm.”
Japan’s allergy crisis: “Hay fever – also known as allergic rhinitis – has now become a national crisis in Japan, with an estimated 43% of the population experiencing medium to severe symptoms. This compares to 26% in the UK and 12-18% in the US. . . . ‘After World War Two, many of Japan’s mountains became barren, causing disasters in various regions,’ says Noriko Sato, a professor and forestry researcher at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. . . . Aiming for rapid reforestation, the government chose to plant reams of only two different native, fast-growing evergreen species that could quickly reforest landscapes and provide wood for future use in construction: the Japanese cedar, sugi, and the Japanese cypress, hinoki.”
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The next issue of Portico sounds great! I wouldn't go as far as Walther, but the encyclical didn't do much for me.