You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it. What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.

Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will... See more

those with verbal talent are going to have a more important skill set to offer the world in the coming decades, as the AI revolution takes hold—I think that those who are able to give expression to and speak to the deepest desires of the human heart will be the voices the world needs most.

What about culture? How different would the future look if current efforts to use AI to replace human cultural outputs were stalled by a renewed affection for our own capacity to create meaning, to tell the world’s stories, to invent new forms of beauty and expression, to elevate and ornament the raw animal experience of living? What if, instead of... See more