Nathanael Yellis

Things often aren't what they seem to be.

Early LLMs, when asked to create any kind of promotional or interest-capturing text, would mostly open with the wordsdelve 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.

My brother gave me, for Christmas, a book on my to-read list. There's no way he could've known that it was there. I'd seen, some months before that there was a new biography of the great Peter Matthiessen and I'd noted it in my private list. Matthiessen is an interesting case: his bookThe Snow Leopardis good, a classic, but the devil is in its details, or as the Straussians might say, the meaning is in what the book doesn't say. His wife has died, says the book, but her terminal diagnosis came only just before they were to break up the marriage, the book does not say, for the cause of his unfaithfulness. He misses his son, whom he has left in boarding school, just before Thanksgiving, as he journeys to Tibet. The book doesn't include his own upper class abandonment as a child, which the biographer nudges us to think of as life-defining. There's a curse of the parents coming down upon the grandchildren here. Back to the book, though, and its writing of his trek is some of the best natural spiritual writing of our time. For example:

I think about the James Carville line that Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Alabama in between when we drive to the mountains of western Maine to ski. Our route takes us north along the coast from Newburyport to Portsmouth, along Kennebunk and coastal York County, then through Portland and Freeport. In none of these places would boat shoes, embroidered belts, and Saab convertibles be out of style. In other words: New England gangster. We turn west at a town where the private liberal arts college charges just over $90,000 a year. Eventually, we arrive at a place where the lots of land cost over half a million, but between Waterville and Carrabassett Valley, it's Alabama.

They play ESPN in the common areas at work. Some days, it's delightful: you'll catch a baseball game in the afternoon or, this week, the gloriously green Masters golf tournament. Most days, it's boring: a studio show of people talking about sports. To make such shows interesting, they either focus on the gambling or try to make one of the hosts say artificially controversial things. Stephen A. Smith is their best contriver of controversy. But it's all in his delivery, not his actual opinions. Most of what he says—the Patriots weren't ready for the Super Bowl, Tiger Woods is too old and too broken to compete at a high level, this or that star is a whiny diva—are correct and thus the prevailing view. While they all try to be outlandish, almost none of the talkers hold a view that a majority wouldn't agree with. Try as they might, the takes are not very hot.

Thanks to a generous sharing of great reading by my not-very-online brother, I spent my train rides the past few weeks reading some truly wild profiles of people, like theballerina Mormon wifeconstantly talked-over by her husband, thehacker who doxedall of of Finnish patients in virtual therapy, and this profile of one of theweirder people in Hollywood, Kevin Costner. (Fun fact: this little email began when I found the now-deprecated service Revue and had seen a few link roundup posts from this same brother on Tumblr.) When reading about the maniacs and monsters of the world, it's pretty easy to sit separately from them, in indisputable judgment. How could people behave like this?

In Arthur Brooks's recentpodcast about leisure, he talked about taking it seriously. We don't relax well because we don't relax purposefully, we don't devote ourselves to it. We're either all-on, for professional work and life logistics, or we're all-off, for sitting on the beach or Netflixing an evening away. The podcast initially struck me as classic "type A": the kind of people who want to plan to the nth degree a vacation, in order to see everything. While Brooks certainly tends in that direction, I think he was advising something different: a true understanding of leisure.

After writing about clowns and books and skiing, I'm returning to the reason you read this email: hot takes on AI.

The other day I had this shared experience with a room full of people. Maybe two hundred of us started a day-long corporate meeting. You know the drill: we're there to hear from some leaders about our tactics, learn a bit about how we should be working, and to find the camaraderie missing on endless Zooms and Looms. Maybe it was due to global travel's time zone chaos or just the way these things go, but midway through the first morning, the room was lifeless. There was so little energy, even genuine laugh lines weren't really hitting (one panelist rightly accused the others of "blathering on for so long I forgot the question" to only a few chortles). That was our shared experience: a kind of lifeless lack of energy despite a few hundred gathered people. My challenge was that my panel was next.