Early LLMs, when asked to create any kind of promotional or interest-capturing text, would mostly open with the words delve and dive. HubSpot's email subject line generator still often tells me I ought to invite you to read my emails with such words. For today's it recommends, "Discover Depths: Essays & Stories Await You, Friend." The words usually start with "D" and say the opposite of what AI actually gives us. Delving and diving into depths suggests there's something far below the surface, worth reaching, but AI writing is only the slim surface. It's the path of least resistance, for us, where instead of doing the mental work of reading, thinking, and putting pencil to paper, we ask a computer program to allow us to gloss along the surface of a given subject.
I am not here to judge: for the person whose job it is to promote the sort of thing that no one would be interested in unless they were paid to be, by all means take the path of least resistance. On the other hand, if you assume what you write is worth neither reading nor writing, why bother at all? All the delving and diving in the world won't be of any use in a really shallow pool.
What does it mean to actually delve? The words imply some depths worth plumbing: that the careful and complete examination of a thing, resulting in understanding, is worth doing. What does it mean to dive? I like this word, because it gives us a mental picture of the scuba diver. The metaphor implies the surface or first layers encountered are not where the valuable experience will be. Scuba divers bring us coral reefs and shipwrecks and sea caves and creatures of the deep, not the feet of water just below the surface. These implications suggest the opposite of the AI summary Readwise sends in its emails and puts on the side of your saved articles. Delving and diving, for the reader, is to do the mental work of actually engaging in the text and emerging from it with your commonplace quotes and your own carefully written summary.
What does it take to actually delve? The word was originally associated with a literally spade working in the earth. It suggests excavation. When I made my backyard pizza oven, I started by digging through the topsoil, past some pottery shards and other hundred year-old debris, through to the subsoil (glacial till, perhaps) where the gravels and rocks were well-compacted. From that dug hole, I could build back up the layers of foundation for the few hundred pounds of masonry comprising the oven. That was some work! All manner of stones had to be unearthed before I could have some certainty the oven would stay put once built. If that's literal delving, the mental equivalent is similarly hard: delving into a topic or a book takes curiosity, focus, and time.
Delving requires attention, which is the thing AI lacks to such a degree that it teaches us not to have it, too. (Who hasn't received the email that includes an AI asking the sender if its draft was ok? We're not even reading what we "write"!) At least when I read Cliffnotes throughout college I was paying the book some attention. Delving also requires a surface area of facts worthy of our attention: the very thing AI obfuscates. Its nonsense is a facts-averse surface. All that to say, when AI asks us to delve and dive, it offers an 18" deep pool. We're breaking our necks.
When we actually delve into something, we see what computer programs cannot. We find a subsurface life not dissimilar from the otherworldly fish in the depths of the ocean visible only to the scuba diver. We see the universe in its details.
For the reading this week: some real delvers and what they found.
Reading
Notes on Afghanistan
In Fall 2025, I spent three weeks in Afghanistan traveling through Kabul, Bamiyan, Ghazni, Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-i-Sharif. The following is a recounting of the interesting parts of my travels and readings on the country.
The Business of Being a Rare Book Dealer
How Downtown Brown Books compares to YouTube's biggest antiquarian book star
New Orleans's Car-Crash Conspiracy
High-speed accidents, crooked lawyers, and poor people desperate for cash—it was the kind of scheme that could have been cooked up only in the Big Easy.