📚 I Am a Strange Loop was quite a bit more personal than G.E.B. (about which I wrote a one-sentence blurb here; it is due for a proper review, after a re-read), and it’s easy to pile on Hofstadter since he’s made himself so vulnerable, but there are moments when he is way off base. Yes, there is a something to the analogy between the sense of selfhood and a self-referential (“strange”) loop, and yes different animals have different levels of self-perception, but no, I would not hail Mother Theresa as the pinnacle of humanity, nor Martin Luther King, Jr. for that matter: sorting people’s souls by a single metric is a slippery slope.

The second issue is with his idea of our own loops containing those of others, and people’s identity persisting in others' minds. That is true only to the extent that other people 1) know themselves, and 2) let others learn what they know about themselves, and not many would pass through both filters.

Dave Winer (@dave) is right, except for one thing: X should have enabled inline links to go alongside the walls of text. I never did care for Twitter cards, but how can you have an interNET without links? Mastodon and Threads, inexplicably, have the same problem.

📺 Season 3 of Only Murders in the Building was their best one yet; I wrote as much last week. Meryl Streep deserves all the awards, Martin Short was at his best, even Paul Rudd was tolerable. The mystery itself was better set up than last year’s, which had too many last-minute revelations for my taste.

If there is one nit to pick it is this: ever since Game of Thrones started going all-out in the second to last episode, actual season finales of many shows have become anti-climactic. The Afterparty is a much bigger offender there, but Murders… do suffer from the same ailment, especially since the last few episodes before the finale itself were so over-the-top good.

📺 Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake has more swearing, gore, death, despair, and general dreariness than the original run. In a way, it grew up with its audience, replacing childhood magic with metaverse mythologizing. Still more delightful than most, just not for my 4-year-old.

Today’s episode of Conversations with Tyler with the historian of the Renaissance Ada Palmer shoots straight to the top of this year’s best-of list for any podcast. Here is a long excerpt to whet your appetite:

Imagine for a moment that you are the French ambassador, and you’re on your way to Rome to meet with the pope because the French king always needs this. Now, if you’re an ambassador, you’re, at minimum, the son of a count because only aristocracy can be ambassadors. On your way south, you’re stopping off in different cities, including Florence.

Now, you already have a terrible opinion of Florence because Florence is a pit of merchants, scum, and villainy. Florence, in order to prevent noblemen from taking over the republic, literally executed everyone in this city who had a drop of royal blood or noble blood. So, it’s just commoners. There’s not a single person in this city who is of sufficient right to be worthy to talk to you. In addition, Florence has such a terrible reputation for sodomy, homosexuality, and perversion that the verb to Florentine is literally the word for anal sex in five different European countries, including in France.

So, you’re on your way to this city, and it’s full of merchant scum and they’re all perverts and there isn’t even anyone there who’s worthy to host you on the way. You’re going to stay with your dad’s banker because he’s the only Florentine whose address you’ve got. You show up in the city, and you reach the city, and suddenly, wait a minute, it’s full of these gorgeous ancient Roman bronzes. Wait a minute, they can’t be ancient Roman bronzes. They look like they’re new, but that technology doesn’t exist. That technology was lost centuries ago.

Then you go to the banker’s house, and he greets you humbly at the door saying, “I’m sorry, my house is unworthy to host your excellency,” and he invites you inside, and you look around the courtyard, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before, with these round circular arches that let enormous amounts of light shine in on the gardens and the statues. You’ve never seen this before. Wait, you have seen this before. It looks like the ruins of the Roman villa in the backyard of your father’s castle where you grew up, but that doesn’t exist anymore. Those arts were lost.

In the middle of the courtyard, there’s a gorgeous statue, an ancient Roman statue of Bacchus or Dionysius, and next to it, there’s a brand-new statue that’s obviously new because it hasn’t even turned green yet. The bronze is still ruddy. But that technology, you know, doesn’t exist.

In the corner, there are some men dressed in strange robes speaking a language you’ve never heard, and you say, “What language are they speaking?” The banker says, “Oh, they’re speaking Ancient Greek. They’re Plato scholars.” And you say, “But Ancient Greek is lost, and Plato is lost. How do you have this?” “Oh, we have lots of Ancient Greek here. Look, here’s my grandson, Lorenzo. He’s just written a sonnet in Ancient Greek about the three parts of the soul.” And then, here’s a little boy reciting a sonnet to you about the nature of the soul in Ancient Greek.

You’re like, “Where am I? All of this stuff is impossible.” And that’s the moment that your host, Cosimo de’ Medici, turns to you and says, “Would France like to make an alliance with Florence?”

You should listen to any podcast with attention to get the most out of it, but this one actually does deserve your fullest attention. Pull to the side of the road if you have to, or else just read the transcript.

And she writes Hugo-nominated science fiction? Ada Palmer is the Renaissance woman.

Update: Of course that she would have a blog: Ex Urbe. Though points deducted for not having posted anything in almost a year.

By the way, these were just the lectures that interested me. The entire NIH calendar of lectures and courses is freely available to everyone, and the ones that are videocast and/or provide CME are marked as such, so feel free to make your own autodidact list.

Some wise words from Thomas Basbøll:

It is not whether what you are saying is true, but how you respond when someone tells you that you are wrong, that determines whether you’re an academic (or at least what kind of academic you are.)

He blogs at Inframethodology, which is a wonderful resource for academic writers.

🍿 If there is such a thing as a cinematic soulmate, Scott Sumner is mine. He has just published a batch of reviews that includes his best ever in each genre which all but confirmed it: both Singin' in the Rain and Mulholland Drive are there, and deservedly so. (ᔥTyler Cowen)