Alan Jacobs, a humanities professor, writes short essays on reading, attention, technology and ideas.
HN commenters link it for his writing on rereading and longform thoughts on Twitter, and for context in a debate on the Benedict Option.
Unless someone shows up who'll defend BenOp, I'm not looking further into it. As far as cursory surfing reveals (I have only been able to find a table of contents online whose chapter headings are not helpful) not only does Dreher not bother with the separatism of plain religions in the US, nor the experiences of other more heavily persecuted, more melaninly enabled, christian churches in the US, his doctrine doesn't accord with any of his[1] religions, nor does it, according to secondary criticism, seem to have been informed much by actual Benedictines[2]. Indeed, he's even been accused of rooting the whole project in reaction to Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015)[3].
[1] protestant, catholic, and orthodox, in that order. One is reminded of the person who is constantly looking for the New Shiny Library/Language instead of writing their app with the ecosystem they have at hand. (cue GKC quote on difficulties untried, Benedict on Sarabaites)
For more similarities to open source schisms, consider https://blog.ayjay.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/BenOp-788x1200.png and replace the christian references with geeky projects such as "building a modern operating system", "immanentising the crypto eschaton", "welcoming our new GPT-N overlords", etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0BpfwazhUA
[2] who are still around to ask. There's a non-benedictine abbey near me which celebrated its 1'500th birthday a while ago, and at least a handful of benedictine which are probably…
From: https://blog.ayjay.org/re-reading-2/
"I have to think that “Against Rereading,” by Oscar Schwartz, is a massive troll, because the alternative — that Schwartz believes himself to be so omnicompetent a reader, so perfect in his perception, so masterful in his judgment, that he absorbs all that even the greatest book has to offer with a single reading — is unpleasant to contemplate. Or maybe there’s one more possibility: that — like Kafka’s hunger artist, who never found a food he liked — Schwartz has never been sufficiently interested in a book to return to it.
But surely he makes one important point: the problem with our culture today is definitely all those people who don’t want ceaseless novelty. Definitely. I’m almost certain he’s just trolling, though."
Wow, one day after this post: https://blog.ayjay.org/two-quotations-on-the-brief-dream-of-the-human-intellect/
Twitter is awful for longform, but it's where the eyeballs are.
https://blog.ayjay.org/thread/