Mechanization creates a disruption in which anything that can be automated will be. But creative freedom is precisely the sort of thing that can’t be automated.
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Those who worry about AI eliminating jobs have failed to learn the lesson of history, which has seen countless jobs eliminated time and again, and each time more jobs created.
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Could a modern writer come along and produce Orwell’s work, using AI? Possibly, but someone actually had to be Orwell first — to experience those events and write them down.
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We must put technology in its place, as with all works of human hands. And, as with all human works, when they become idols, we are called to topple them.
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Many people can write well without AI but the publisher must pay them. They are slashing staff and using AI instead because people aren’t reading as much.
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The magician can show you something extraordinary. But only your mind can decide what you’ve seen, what it means, and whether it rises to Wow!
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An older perspective on the arts offers a respite to those who might be starved for something that outlasts the controversies of the age.
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For those who want to grow and develop as thinkers and communicators, writing is still a time-tested option.
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Why had no one tried using an AI detector on Orélien’s—and everyone else’s—work as a *condition of entry* into the writing contest?
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The End of Oak Street never answers the God question and never directly contradicts Carl Sagan but it raises nagging questions.
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Simmons is, among other things, a disaster preparedness expert. He portrays the growing panic in and around Chicago as word of a potential nuclear blast leaks out.
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If in today’s culture, modern art is soul-destroying and solely based on “a name”, then think twice about the next time you make your bed and tidy your room if you believe fame is on the horizon.
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Weddings, funerals, breakups at 2 a.m. — one song always shows up: “I Will Always Love You.” Whitney Houston sent it into the stratosphere. Lorelai Gilmore poured it out on Gilmore Girls. Yet it arose out of Dolly Parton’s soul in 1974, pure emotion turned into melody, lyrics, and musical history. So it’s Dolly’s song, right? It’s hers, she wrote it, she can license it, she can get paid for it. Right? Not according to attorney Stephan Kinsella. His 2025 article, “The Problem with Intellectual Property,” argues that Dolly shouldn’t have any rights to her own song. By that logic, she owns the paperclip holding her sheet music more than she owns the song itself. The movement to abolish your Read More ›
Before AI companies buy up all remaining physical copies of older, rare, out-of-print, obscure, or nearly forgotten books, we can buy our own copies.
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Art cannot have helped make us more human if we did not start out that way. And that in turn could not have happened without some impetus that was simply not granted to any other life form.
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Box office failures are a staple in the film industry, but every so often, a movie tanks so badly that it causes one to wonder whether Hollywood is drastically misjudging the country’s pulse and interests.
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YouTubers are quickly replacing the A-list celebrities, and while I’m surprised to see the studios going along with this trend, I’m not at all disappointed, and, for the first time in a long time, I’m hopeful for the future of entertainment.
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In March of 2026, the horror novel Shy Girl was pulled from publication after the author was suspected of using AI to help her write it.
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On Saturday, I looked at Matt Johnson’s thoughts on George Orwell’s vital but comparatively unknown 1946 essay, “The Prevention of Literature.” Orwell, famous for Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), wanted to “make political writing into an art.” He was well aware that most competitors for public attention simply wanted to make political writing a reliable form of mass brainwashing. He hoped to find a public that sought an alternative. He published “Prevention” (longish, at 5500 words) in Polemic, a short-lived British intellectual magazine (1945–47), which featured work by such notables as Henry Miller, Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer, and Dylan Thomas. Intellectual freedom as “violence” Intellectual freedom, as we have always been told, is only ever one generation Read More ›
Perhaps it isn’t coincidental that this kind of longform writing is having trouble at the same time that the online news cycle gets ever more ephemeral.
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