Peter Biles
The Drones Continue to Hover
Mystery drones have been sighted in New Jersey and other states
In a Changing Media Landscape, Keep the Novel
Novels are unique in their capacity to shed insight into the complexity of our world and human nature
The Absurdity of Our Media Moment
When crimes seem almost scripted to stoke division and speculation
Oxford Word of the Year: Brain Rot
The flood of online content deteriorates our mental and intellectual states
Scott Galloway: Get Men Off the Screens
The conversation revolved around one big question: What happened to men?
Practicing Gratitude: The Antidote to Anxiety
Gratitude reminds us that we are interdependent persons, not isolated machines
Want to Talk to Jesus? Consult a Bot
Is AI changing the way people pray?
In Memoriam: Two Prophets and a President Died This Day
The prophetic artists of the past still speak
Why Do We Have So Many Live-Action Remakes?
Whether a cartoon or live-action, what we really want is a good storyA couple of days ago, I chanced upon a trailer for the live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon. The original film, based on the book of the same name, premiered in 2010 and follows the heartfelt adventure story of a young Nordic lad, Hiccup, and his friendly dragon Toothless (who does, in fact, have teeth). The original movie got great reviews and remains one of my personal favorite animated films. It has memorable and funny characters, a good storyline, and is well animated. So why do we need a live-action version of the movie? A Loss of Originality Disney led the charge with its realistic remakes with live-action representations of Beauty and the Beast, Lion King, and Cinderella, Read More ›
Fighting the Algorithms of Social Media: When Engagement Overrides Ethics
No one is safe from harmful internet content anymore, especially not on algorithm-driven social media sitesNo one is safe from harmful internet content anymore, especially not on algorithm-driven social media sites. It’s no secret that the internet is stuffed with smut, pornography, and other graphic media, but the algorithms that prize engagement over the quality of the content takes the danger to a whole new level. Anthony Bradley, a scholar at the Acton Institute who writes often on fatherhood, masculinity, and religion, warns about the dangers of social media in his latest Substack post. He urges fathers to intervene on behalf of their sons and train them to literally war against these algorithms feeding them total garbage. Bradley writes, While girls are generally recommended content about makeup, music, or social topics, boys are funneled toward Read More ›
What’s Happening to Literature?
Why aren't students reading anything anymore?
As AI Bots Hit the Scene, What Will Happen to Romance and Marriage?
How fares romance and marriage in the 21st century? In America, at least, it's not looking goodIn decades past, people tended to meet each other in their local communities through church, school, family friends, and so on. Go back further and it was common for marriages to be arranged solely for economic purposes. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen was subversive because Elizabeth Bennett risks her family’s economic security by marrying Mr. Darcy purely for love. But, I digress. Trae Stephens writes for Pirate Wires on how the marriage rate has gone down alongside the advent of digital technologies, and how this is, more than likely, not coincidental. Particularly with the rise of AI bots, like the ones published by Character.AI, millions of people are living out romances with digital avatars perfectly tailored to their whims Read More ›
A Big Question: Is Legacy Media Dead?
The rise of citizen journalism and considering what we lose without traditional "gatekeepers"Used to, you had to go through the media gatekeepers to put your work out there. With the advent of the internet and platforms like X, Substack, YouTube, and others, however, the masses can all create personal accounts and honk news and opinions into the world. The competition is no longer just between different outlets, but now extends to individual people. Who can speak the loudest and draw the most attention? Who can create the most effective personal “brand”? The Washington Post saw a massive drop in subscriptions following its decision not to endorse a presidential candidate for the 2024 election. But its influence was already declining. The media giant responsible for breaking the vast background story of the Watergate Read More ›
Free Speech Report at Harvard: Professors Afraid to Speak Up
The elite college still fails to promote free speechPerhaps no sphere of society has become more vulnerable to “groupthink” than the modern American university. Concerns about free speech rights have long circled the discourse over the last couple of years, with cancel culture coming for everyone who even hints at heterodox viewpoints. Rikki Schlott, a writer for the New York Post, recently wrote a report on how some professors at Harvard University, the most prestigious academic institution in the United States, feel hemmed in by the prevailing campus consensus. At a place where the quest for truth is engraved on its founding banner, academics no longer feel comfortable doing just that: professing what they take to be different reflections on what counts as the truth. Schlott writes, Harvard Read More ›
Report: Large Language Models Don’t “Think”
Also, Apple Intelligence might not be so intelligent after allA research team at Apple is now sharing that “state-of-the-art” AI bots are failing basic arithmetic problems according to Los Angeles Times. Michael Hiltzik writes, The Apple team found “catastrophic performance drops” by those models when they tried to parse simple mathematical problems written in essay form. In this example, the systems tasked with the question often didn’t understand that the size of the kiwis have nothing to do with the number of kiwis Oliver has. Some, consequently, subtracted the five undersized kiwis from the total and answered “185.” Human schoolchildren, the researchers posited, are much better at detecting the difference between relevant information and inconsequential curveballs. Apple has recently been rolling out tons of new advertisements promoting the iPhone Read More ›
Are Phones to Blame for a Spiritual Crisis?
Technology is often impersonal magic. It makes things easy, but erodes personal formationPhones block access to spiritual depth. That’s what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in his newest bestseller The Anxious Generation. The frenetic, distractible nature of the screen-based existence most of us live in every day is eroding our ability to pursue meaning, transcending values, and empathy for other people. Haidt was recently joined in conversation by Andy Crouch, a Christian author who has written extensively on technology and culture in books like The Tech-Wise Family and The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World. “My life is full of convenience,” Crouch writes in the latter title mentioned. It is full of transaction, at its best a mutually beneficial exchange of value, a kind of arm’s-length benign use Read More ›
John Stuart Mill: Humans Are Not Automatons
Making rational decisions takes a lot of thought and hard work, says Mill.
The Tolkien Test vs. the Turing Test
Could AI create Middle-earth?