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Some high school students, confronted about an essay made by AI, will complain that this is their work, as they wrote the prompt, finessed it, followed it up, etc. Needles to say, this is a vastly smaller volume of work, and number if skills, than writing the paper would have taken -- however, it's interesting that this student has made AI into their student, giving it a prompt (an essay prompt!) to write about, and then "marking up" the draft work for refinement. In other words, the student wants credit for having done what the teacher does, but with AI as their own "student." Something like a member of the soccer team would be who does not play, but wants credit from the coach for recruiting other players.

It reminds me of what someone remembered recently about word processors -- suddenly in the early 90's, we could all italicize and create gutter margins, and typists as such were no longer needed -- and self publishing became a different, bigger animal, and could be done by, well, high school students. One of the weird things that tech can do is allow ever younger people to take on convincing versions of adult roles.

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“You could say the new Golden Rule is: Be nice to goal-directed systems,” [Tufts biology prof Michael] Levin said. “It’s actually not that different from ‘treat thy neighbor as thyself.’ To the extent that that creature cares about what happens to it, you should care about what happens to it. Try to scale your compassion appropriately.”

In addition to the problem of tying compassion to scale, this leaves out still systems.

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This is interesting -- insofar as OCD lines of reasoning are possible but not likely, AI presents a sort of bias toward too much information, i.e., to what's possible.

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If elementary particles, up to the level of molecules, can be said to be the only bodies in nature which are completely identical with at least some other (and in the case of the smaller particles, every other) bodies, does this connect with the extinction of self qua the extinction of uniqueness in a panpsychist framework?

(This notion of identity discounts a few factors, eg, the remaining potential difference between two electrons' spin - and entanglement may complicate even that.)

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"In the beginning, Adam was 'one man.' The Fall had divided him into 'a multitude.' Christ had restored man to unity in Himself."

- Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite

I do not entirely understand what Merton means at this point, but it makes me think, in the Genesis narrative, Eve was divided from Adam, in that Adam's rib was divided from him -- for God chose not to work Eve from whole cloth -- in a garden where everything, of its most essential nature, already divided and grew: "Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed" (Genesis 1.29). The Creation itself was, in one way, such a differentiation from God. And, of course, God intends Adam and Eve to "multiply" like the fruit trees from the start, even if the process becomes more labored after the Fall.

So if Merton sees the Fall as a dividing, it is interesting to note as a dialectical matter that this inner redivision was already happening from "the start." This is not unlike the narratives of Soyinka, or Achebe where the native paradises of ritual-built harmony turn out (like all other societies) to contain the seeds of their own dissolution, a wound which colonialism infects only secondarily.  

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Alain de Botton's contemporary description of a Paris cafe, where he recounts basically never talking to anyone, but feeling social, and feeling comforted by it -- he contrasts it to being in LA, with its famous lack of foot traffic. I think a lot of people, especially males, relish this adult "parallel play," in social spaces or at work, where the cognitive and perhaps even physiological payoff comes from mere proximity to others, and without the need for much, even any, conversation, joint activities, friend-making etc. Americans, in their increasingly desperate way, now set a rather high and multifaceted bar for what socialization is, and the near medicalization of socialization post-COVID does not help; it can sometimes also be an agenda naturally set, as it generally has been, by women -- the stereotype of the woman who begs her husband to get out of the house and come to gatherings. This standard can be alienating -- and it is refuted by some broad modes of life we still see in Europe (minus UK), not to mention in east Asia, with important exceptions there also (Seoul, perhaps).

The typical Parisian cafe as we think of it was bourgeois-new when the English pub was already becoming a way of holding on to a facsimile of the village life of the old world - the cafe was alienated and alienating, a catch all for people who functioned poorly elsewhere, misfits who socialized if at all only as, for example, activists or artists (like the bitchy gatherings in Wyndham Lewis)  - mostly it was a place where people could be next to each other, rather than with each other -- the stereotype of the two person tables, often with just one person at them. 

De Botton's supposed new-old Paris cafe environment shows in contrast to American bars which, in all but the most doggedly working class settings, are not generally places for people to sit solitary at different times of the day. Bars in US cities and towns market themselves to groups of friends or (less often now) co-workers, and dates, as well as events. Solitary drinkers (unless it is singles night ..) are tolerated but in the way, and probably for the good reason that they eat and drink less than groups, while spoiling the vibe; perhaps at the graveyard shift after lunch, they are pitied by the underoccupied staff for a span. There is a graveyard shift in Paris neighborhood cafes as well, but it is not redeemed by the later social evening (no matter how "busy" it may be) in the same way as in the American bar (or even the English pub).

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on Maura Finkelstein's and similar cases

I am all for academic freedom and intellectual diversity, including right wing, even or especially if right wing discourse can be a poor fit for university culture. Neither can you ask profs not to be advocates also -- yet in the age of posting, if you have a shirt on that says "Anti-Zionist Vibes Only,” that is importantly different from imperative sentences saying support this or fight that. I think schools' policies could apply brakes a bit there, for the sake of making students with certain views feel that they aren't just disagreed with, but disliked and condemned, by faculty a priori in a general yet ad hominem way. 

As a faculty member, you can express whatever views you want -- and will find leeway socially and professionally if those views are closely connected to your field -- and students with clashing views who want (or have) to engage with you will have to learn to be in your classroom without feeling that you are "erasing their existence" etc.  However, you as a faculty member expressing the idea "I don't like or condemn people who think x" -- or "fight people who think x," or who ARE x -- works directly against your campus role as a teacher. Such sentiment may be implicit in your views, and it may be too old-fashioned now to insist on a faculty veneer of distanced objectivity (though surely that aspiration still has purpose) -- but you have to keep persons, specific or general, out of those views, in the classroom and publicly anyway.

Students, meanwhile, must again learn to distinguish between "My professor disagrees with the thing X that i believe, or do, and feels in general that one is better off not believing or doing X -- even being prohibited from doing X" ....... versus "My professor, on account of my belief or participation in X, condemns me and in some cases seeks my intellectual destruction and, in extreme cases, my existential and even material destruction."

On the other hand, I guess it was we academics who threw around phrases like "language is violence" without explaining better what Derrida and others meant. They were not speaking of speech creating hostile and unsafe environments.

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unpaid labor and family economics

The old moniker of "unpaid labor" for the traditional domestic union's work of women in maintaining domestic space and especially in child rearing, while its point is well understood, has always had a whiff of fallacy about it as an economic idea. In the traditional hetero domestic union of the working male and the homemaking female, it would be more to say that the female is compensated for her labor out of the male's compensation from his own employment or enterprise -- it is the latter compensation that pays the overhead of domestic work and of course ultimately provides subsistence for the whole family, the female partner and children included. In this model, the working male acts as the female's "employer" in a highly efficient, nimble and convention-strengthened train of transactions. This is true from an economic standpoint, aside from the obvious political and ethical difficulties.

There are, of course, many things to be said about this way of analyzing the relationship: (1) the woman is in a very poor position to bargain over her "wage," having largely to take what the male disburses in whatever way (and the old "joint bank account" type arrangement representing the height of economic liberty). (2) Conversely, the male is often ultimately ready to pay whatever the female asks from his resources, since he also seeks primarily the well being of the domestic space, his partner, and any children above all. In other words, it often happens that the women takes whatever wages she is offered, and the man pays whatever is demanded. This isn't quite as paradoxical as it sounds, and actually works diachronically to foster the back-and-forth of the potentially robust financial arrangement of a traditional marriage (think also of Chaucer's Wife of Bath).

There are also almost numberless things that can go wrong with this idea of the homemaking, child rearing female paid from the male's wages. Where there is no male contributing (eg, in the case of a single mother) then the female does truly find herself working unpaid (whether or not she has actual employment outside the home herself). The same is basically true if the male is separated from his traditional earning power, for any of various reasons. Or if the economy is not oriented to provide the male with wages adequate for these costs (the gradual decline of the solid "middle-class earner" husband has brought with it a decline of the traditional domestic arrangement); similarly, the male may also divert his wages away from his wife's costs, spending too much money outside the home. Or, of course, the female may seek outside employment herself, with or without the constraint of financial need; where there is no financial need, of course, sometimes domestic help is hired and paid from both partner's incomes.

Secondary partial fallacy: that in the case of the traditional union, there is injustice in the sense that the female cannot accumulate wealth beyond the male-derived subsistence resources of the domestic situation; this was Woolf's thesis, and of course that of many afterward, that "women are always poor" in that sense. In the traditional union, this was long true to the extent that the much wealth and earning power came and went with the male partner; however, it has never been the case in the sense that the male also either (i) does not typically build wealth beyond his family's expenses, or else (ii) accumulates and saves in the interests of his family; few men grow rich apart from their households! Again, everywhere there is the prima facie appearance of male control of income and wealth, and to some extent this is true; but in most cases, resources spent or saved away from the domestic situation are economic nonsense for both partners, and there can be little motivation in this direction.

VERY IMPORTANT ADDiTION as far as grey divorce, which tends to be expensive even without children:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/opinion/motherhood-penalty-career.html

The motherhood penalty is nearly the oldest critique there is in this area since careers began to be normalized for women, and yes now there's maternity leave, often paid, but really i suppose the only hope for true equalization over someone's lifespan, in the case of divorce during or after child rearing, is lifetime alimony from the husband/partner, and that doesn't happen. It would change marriage as an institution for sure, as well as possibly decrease its uptake significantly; a more permanently bonded marriage of the type, say, of the devout Catholic conception.

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on AI and college writing

As insane as it is that some students now screen-record to prove that they are not using AI, what is more awful than insane is what a parent friend told me this week -- we were talking about the early-days solutions to AI use, making students only write in-class essays.

I said the obvious, that this strategy had always seemed short-term, that this left out the entire culture of drafting and research that goes with papers longer than two pages, papers worked on over time, out of class.

My friend said his college age child had barely had any longer writing assignments given to them in all their time at school, and that this seemed to be the general trend. (Much has been said in parallel about the decline of reading spans.)

Why is no one covering this aspect? Unless people forgot that this culture was being taught all along. In the late eighties, "the writing process" was everywhere, and has become curricular boilerplate from middle school onward since. And will we ever hear again from those employers who complained so loudly twenty years go that new grads can't write? Perhaps it no longer matters.

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Musicals and music education in high schools etc

After seeing a high school production of a popular musical:

The production was clearly special to the kids, and that's a big part of it. That aside:

- This has been true for some years, but everyone on stage was something none of us ever were on stage - miked. Once you mic kids, you no longer have to worry about whether they can be heard, can project, "can sing" -- anyone with a nice enough tone can have it blasted through the performance space, and sure enough, the students don't learn how to project, no diaphragm -- you hear no vibrato, and sometimes muddy enunciation even among the principals - and unless your school has an awesome sound system, they're actually a bit harder to understand than without mics. If there were truly strong voices in the cast, you might well have no way of knowing. If one wants to mic k-8 students, they should -- at those ages it's about building confidence and having fun and exposure to music. But by high school, it is time to start to teach something about performing. Plus, the mics taped to cheeks and even foreheads (!) are seldom invisible and generally look bizarre.

- that same sound system pumps everyone's voice out through the same speakers, so it can be hard to tell who's speaking at times -- the sound from the stage is not directional, voices don't seem to come from their actors.

- There was barely a set -- there was instead a huge video screen that showed pre-bought animated graphics for each scene, some of it bizarre. So that whole carpentry and painting social scene, the kids who built sets and lighting at our high schools, perhaps now those students must be greatly reduced in number.

- no live instruments = BASICALLY KARAOKE. All the students sung along with a prerecorded soundtrack, instead of the insanely good sight reader faculty pianist that every high school used to retain for this purpose. The kids lost that sense of signalling and responding to an accompanist, and there was no room for them to improvise - they were basically doing an on-stage singalong. (I think I even heard some background vocals supplied by the track, to help prop up the actors.) Consequently, you get a kid who does a song well, but stands there through it like a recital, because they've got no sense that they can move and stretch and shorten bars as they actually act - they're trying to keep up with the recording, or not get ahead of it.

Yes, Broadway and grand opera mics everybody and has for decades, but those theaters are usually very big or huge, and have great directional sound systems - and you also hear the singing discipline that cuts through the piped sound. Disturbing thing is, mics have for some years invaded college a cappella also. Back in the day, there were no mics in that scene, except one stand mic in the center of the stage for soloists (and not even that in the smaller spaces - it was a point of pride). These days, everyone on stage is miked, not just soloists -- and if they are singing in, say, a lecture hall with a poor sound system meant only for the spoken word, the singing gets lost, and there is also recently a great wish to integrate on-stage video that detracts from the performance. And the miked sounds really affects the singing, which at that level is supposed to showcase semi-serious talent. The soloists sometimes therfore have the leisure to mumble through a verse, then hit a few notes in the high points like a rock star, all their friends cheer, and then wait for the big chord-chasing finish. It feel, more or less, like a simulacrum of performances in our earlier day. I’ve heard current college a cappella unmiked too, and the talent is still there, same as ever really, but this all-over culture of amplified sound and video in stage performance ruins things -- it ruins the talent.

Certainly kids also now grow up thinking that this is what high level performance is, because pop stars from the last fifteen years, from St Vincent to Billie Eilish to the stars of “bedroom pop," make popular niches for their music — and sometimes produce good, attractive sounds, possess nice natural tones — by getting right up on the mike and singing in what is essentially a weak voice, as dependent on amplification as an electric guitar. Singers with limited vocal talent are a cliche in pop, of course, but it is particularly hard to think of many post-2005 pop vocalists who don't need amplification to make an impact. (Two interesting exceptions are Beyonce and Lady Gaga - think of the vid of Stefanie Germanotta at NYU before her stage persona, or years later with Tony Bennett.)

This is an artefact of pop music, too -- by contrast, there's never been a weak-voiced famous jazz singer -- jazz vocals used stand mics from early years, but on matter how softly or close up they may croon, the jazz singer's voice can't hide in the amp -- because amplified sound is native to pop but not to jazz.

In a small amount of online debate about these trends, I note one person remarking that, in the case of high school musicals anyway, it's partly parents who want the full amplified Broadway feel when they come to see their kids' shows, instead of the humbler entertainment that earlier generations of parents got (and with which they seemed quite happy, though they also knew what a Bway show was like).

Put one more way - I thought the point of singing from the stage in high school was to be able to project to a large space. I don't think that's standard in music edu curriculum anymore. The vibe may be more, let's have students feel what it's like to put on a production, even if not fully do it in the way that we knew. It's too bad, it was an education in hs for us, for example, marvelling at the handful of upperclassmen who had crazy strong voices.

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healing versus fitness

When we are healing, we are told to ‘listen to our body.’

When we are striving to increase fitness (muscle, aerobic, etc), we are told, up to a point, to ignore the body’s protests, to push through.

There must therefore be conceived an inflection point at which we stop giving one advice and start giving the other, where we are at the point of “baseline” health. (It is like the point which must exist in Fuller [though Fuller does not speculate about it] between morality of duty and morality of aspiration.)

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OCD and reason

Not enough attention is paid to the actual rationales behind OCD. For example, a person who fears germs or other contamination from food and water after these have passed through others' hands, their own lips, etc.; this fear is, of course, perfectly rational in itself -- food is often generally contaminated with surface germs by the time it reaches our stomachs, especially when prepared at home. Similarly, the person who showers and changes clothes after being near smoke, in the subway, in a hospital, etc., is quite right; germs and particulate matter of all kinds, including toxic ones, are carried on clothes and skin.

The clinical question depends not on whether these fears are reasonable, but instead revolves around (1) the classic pragmatic criterion of how much the responses to such fears impede other desirable ways of living -- a balancing question that largely devolves to utility -- and (2) Freud's fundamental insight, too soon and too often ignored, that these OCD-type responses are not wholly alien to "healthy" behavior, but are rather exaggerations of such behavior. Many "healthy" people wash their hands before eating, or take a walking detour to avoid a construction site full of fumes and dust. If the same people do not resort to more extreme measures that characterize OCD, it is because they are psychologically prepared to "take a chance" on the more subtle daily contaminations that plague OCD sufferers - and which are, for the most part, very real. (Many communities are constantly debating exposure to environmental hazards.)

It's been pointed out that as COVID demonstrated, it is a short step from "healthy" habits to OCD-esque rituals of masks, sterilized groceries, etc - we just need to fear the pathogen enough, and for many, COVID was new and unknown and deadly enough to merit such fear. If everyday OCD could thus be assessed in terms of risk tolerance, of anxiety clashing with  social norms, we would see more clearly.

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As much as the “new" run of Doctor Who has done to brilliantly revive a unique series which had come to a rather burnt out end in the late 'eighties, it is still remarkable now to compare an (admittedly perfect) episode of the old series like “Logopolis” with any celebrated (and good!) episodes of the new run — say, “Don’t Blink” and, later on, "Heaven Sent.” Both of these new run eps have an ingenious premise, but a closed one (and to be fair, “Heaven Sent" is literally a “bottle episode”): the solution to each is like a logic puzzle solved using a single given principle; the Weeping Angels cannot move when seen, and the Doctor repeats a pursuit through a castle millions of times. Both premises are smart, scary and visually startling, and the Weeping Angels have something vaguely scientific about them (they are something like macro versions of quantum-level ["quantum-locked," says the Doctor] observed Heisenbergian particles, or close enough for scifi). These premises consume their entire stories, no matter the side dramas, season arcs and other interstitial business woven in. They also have solutions — get the Angels to gaze on each other, and they’re permanently frozen. Get the Doctor to chip at a wall of crystal millions of times, and it will eventually shatter allowing him to escape, in a way which is also a metaphor for his dogged, long-suffering devotion to good causes.

Now the thing about “Logopolis” … the story starts with a wonderful and tragic little playlet about an Australian air stewardess getting a ride to Heathrow from her aunt, breaking down and getting harassed by some dutiful but befuddled policemen -- which story is used to lead into the Doctor’s strange and sudden preoccupation with measuring a plain police box to correct the TARDIS’ camouflage. Why this is important is soon temporarily sidelined as some tortuous business begins with the unseen Master’s TARDIS enclosing and enclosed by the Doctor’s own, a couple murders and the “everyman” stewardess lost in the midst of it, resulting in a supremely eerie five-minute journey through a “dimensional anomaly” which is simply a series of duplicate TARDIS rooms, each more dimly lit that the last - a production coup for the price. The way the anomaly works is only gestured at in scifi generalities, but written so well that the viewer happily believes that it works, and so well performed that the same viewer doesn't care too much about the consistency or science of it -- which does have just a little to do with higher-dimensional shapes and a bit of wave-particle manifestation fantasy. In other words, the Weeping Angels have an airtight system, but the TARDIS anomaly in “Logopolis" (which is only act one or two of several, in a format only slightly longer than the new run) only half explains itself, and to great effect — just as we are never told why there is a modelled medieval stone cloister full of ivy somewhere in the depths of the TARDIS’ otherwise sterile interior (and only later learn what disaster its boomy “cloister bell” is supposed to signal …. sort of), we don't bother too much about how the whole anomaly act of the play worked. Narratively and architecturally, less is more.

Because while Tennant’s Doctor spends the entire episode figuring out the Weeping Angels’ vulnerability, and while Capaldi's Doctor literally repeats his scene over and over to resolve his own story’s premise, “Logopolis" is off to act three and beyond much earlier, much of its previous action all but forgotten; after a comic interlude where the Doctor tries to wash the TARDIS in the Thames, it is time to continue puzzling over the white “Watcher” figure (opaque until the very end), and most of all to get on to the planet of Logopolis itself, where the main drama unfolds with much reference to earlier episodes as well — it's a “season arc" that the new Who run would give an arm for, an arc concerned with more than a single reveal of who is related to whom via what overwrought time paradox, or of the core villain at the end of the season’s long struggle. (To be fair, there is a Master reveal in "Logopolis," though the character had also featured relatively recently in the ep that leads to "Logopolis" ("The Keeper of Traken") -- the reveal has renewed excitement because the Master, believed destroyed, has now taken on the form of that earlier story's protagonist.

The scenes actually at Logopolis bring us to the sci fi visual element. Logopolis appears to be a third grader’s very well done adobe village — apparently intended to look like the surface of a brain — on a planet which is never named (as an anonymous and secret society of universe-maintainers would presumably wish). Up close, the sets have all the claustrophobic charm of classic Doctor Who, with lots of crumbly plaster and styrofoam etc set for the eventual conflict — a chintziness that we completely forget in our fascination with the scientific premise, the full return of the Master, and the gradual revelation that there is something truly apocalyptic about this episode. Whereas the universe is about to be destroyed in about every third episode of the new run, seldom is this premise invoked in the classic series. “Logopolis," again, is a somewhat unfair episode to choose (there are more than few bad stories in the classic run!) because it flaunts fifteen years’ collective understanding of the wonder of the show, and combines the impact of a regeneration ep and a universe-destroyed story to great effect. "Logopolis” gestures towards many ideas, many worlds and possible other stories, just as it gestures (only!) to multiple sci/scifi ideas (block transfer computation, our universe as a low-entropy pocket of cosmic history, alternate universes, recursion, higher dimensional shapes) which will echo backward and forward through the episodes before and after. In comparison, we feel a bit suffocated by the jewel-box cleverness of “Don't Blink” or “Heaven Sent.” And visually, those latter two stories are spectacular — something which can be said of nearly all new run episodes, using the tech available to them to great effect, with big lenses, wild colors, and all manner of shots not really available to the earlier production.

But again, all in service of something that wraps up too neatly. "Logopolis" starts from loose ends and ends with them (cut cables … as well as the Master’s re-escape, what the Watcher (a persona not used before or since in regeneration stories) actually represented, and of course, the faulty regeneration which ends the spectacular last act played out on an Earth telescope antenna. (The antenna's scenery would not remotely pass muster in the new show, but again, you just don't care, your imagination has kicked in.) About the same time as “Logopolis” was broadcast, nighttime chat shows on BBC were having a chuckle at Alec Guinness’ turn in the deadly serious adaptation of Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which was not only very complex to understand, but had so many “cold open” scenes that it was often incomprehensible to anyone who had not read Le Carre’s novel at least a few times, and at a time when people did not record tv serials to re-watch. (Frye and Laurie did a silly and brilliant parody of this style of spy story a few years later.) “Logopolis" has something of that quality as well, a trademark of BBC creative freedom of the time that one sees also in the old All Creatures Great and Small serial (and not in the new one).

In general, the new run has gotten progressively more visually wild and fast. The interior set of the TARDIS has also generally added color, almost candylike surfaces, and walls and pillars that look like they belong in a Beijing opera house. The show’s lenses are often huge and wide (as they are also, again, in the new All Creatures, where outdoor shots look better suited to a desert epic than to farmers’ fields). And all in digital video, which has too high a frame rate for our sense of reality. (There is an interesting parallel with the last decade of the old run where, while the sets remained relatively sober, the Doctor’s outfits and accessories grew increasingly colorful and cartoonish.) In the old series, the scenery was famously cheap, but it kept a visual and even cognitive calm that spared more attention for thought, and for the performances: the TARDIS cloister, the dim tedious corridors of Gallifrey, the claustrophobic compartments of spaceships. These are not wondrous sets, but they leave room to build worlds.

Appropriately, the Logopolitans in their story turn out to have been slowing critical entropy in their universe by opening its access to other universes; this is a nice piece of genuine physics theoretically applied, and it also reminds us that “Don’t Blink” and "Heaven Sent,” by contrast with “Logopolis," are closed systems with a limited life.

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The wide ranging love of Lego minifigures — in the old days, Legos were great because of what you could build, figures were secondary. Now, for many, the minifigures are needed to give life to whatever is built, and almost fetishized for this. Perhaps sometimes almost to the extent that people forget to build.

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Dormers, as little gable roofs, project out of the hipped (non-gabled, roofed) side of gable roofs, which project out of (or cut away) hip roofs, which are the whole, original "starting plenitude" of roofing - roofs keep sprouting from one another at (typically) right angles; so a hipped gable ..

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givings away books

Re recent talk in the Guardian about giving away one's books. One of the great disincentives to do so, these days, is that one sometimes fears that no one will want certain of their favorite books, that these books are too esoteric, antique, narrow in their audience, and so on; give them to a library book sale or thrift shop and they may be thrown away in fairly short order. The book owner's wish is that their books may survive to do some good for others, even a very few others, even just one.

I've discovered this in the last few years, working with family to sort and give away some books. As far as donation, some places now won't accept many kinds of books, including some that are most interesting to us, and for which we would wish a good new home; unless maybe a book is typically on a school reading list, most thrift stores, charities, etc, seem mostly to want mass market paperbacks, classic, self help, certain areas of nonfiction (autobiography, military), and business - and sometimes libraries, for their own annual sales, even reject all books published before a certain date. Only old-fashioned rummage sales, where these still exist, may for a short time indiscriminately put out a great variety of donated books for purchase (and at the best prices by far ...).

For these less donatable books, though, seeking out and selling them to dealers is probably the best way to move them on. Shopfront used book stores are increasingly rare, but behind every Amazon-listed used book dealer there is a warehouse, barn or storage unit, and these proprietors can be contacted off-Amazon. They are often looking to increase their stock with precisely the unusual, the antique and so on (whether monetarily valuable or not). The evidence for this is that, however obscure the book one is giving away, at least a few copies of it can typically be found in third-party Amazon listings, and that is because of these dealers, buying and accumulating books that libraries, charities, etc, often do not feel they can sell. But book dealers play the long game, and so provide a likelier path for less widely desired books to find their ways to new readers.

(And if one is ready to donate such books anyway, then it makes sense to take whatever price a dealer offers, and have the satisfaction, less of the few extra dollars realized, but more of knowing that what one has let go may find a new home.)

As we well know, most of these dealers are also relentlessly squeezed BY Amazon, if they list there, as most need to. It's been said many times, but one should order direct as much as possible, or at least off-Amazon (even Alibris or other consolidators might be better).



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someone's quotation:

Montesquieu, for example, famously remarked that “[c]ommerce . . . polishes and softens barbaric ways.” This doux-commerce thesis reappeared in David Hume and Adam Smith and others in the Scottish Enlightenment. More recently, it figured prominently in Emile Durkheim ...

How much this reminds me of the same thesis about education, by Carlyle? someone else?

The idea that education and commerce can can both mould the passions, sand their edges.