Musings & Links for February 13, 2026
Memory, music, and miscellanea
Hi friends,
After a brief, unannounced hiatus, I’m returning to you with some more links and musings from my reading around the web. The Saps spent the last week and a half in California, where we spent some much needed time catching up with family and friends, going to the beach, eating good food, and exploring old stomping grounds. OC is a beautiful place with people I love deeply, but it also feels good to be home.
Here are some things I’ve read and enjoyed over the last few weeks.
Ruth Gaskovski over at School of the Unconformed explores the consequences of and remedies for our outsourcing of memory. The primacy of “critical thinking” and “skills” in education over “rote memorization” is commonly treated as an axiom, one that I’ve rarely examined. However, if you don’t retain knowledge, you can’t really think analytically about anything because you lack the building blocks with which to reason. If you’re anything like me, you probably rely heavily on Google and, increasingly, AI tooling, over recall for a number of tasks. But this outsourcing comes with a cost, and I wonder how much of my own cognitive fuzziness is a symptom of these practices.
Ellen Mote, a friend of the Saps, wrote some suggestions for returning to creative work after a hiatus. Item 1, “Don’t sweat the rocky start”, is something I consistently need to remind myself as I return to writing regularly this year.
Alan Jacobs questions the reign of quantity as the highest metric when it comes to cultural production, particularly as it pertains to AI adoption. I’ll rarely complain about prolific writers/artists/musicians, but to me it’s only impressive when the quality of their creations is (mostly) consistent. Additionally, Alan speculates about the future of live music as the proliferation of slop accelerates — that the chasm between the two will only increase the value of/demand for (at least among certain audiences) live performance. While in California, I had lunch with a musician friend who noted that the financial model for live shows and albums has flipped: you used to tour in support of an album, now you release an album to promote a tour. My take is that AI will only accelerate this trend.
I wrote about how the guidance of C.S. Lewis at the outbreak of WWII could help technologists (and others) reason about the accelerating landscape of technological changes. Specifically, I contend that nothing is fundamentally changing, but that the perceived chaos we’re seeing just amplifies the uncertain nature of life to our own awareness. I’m more convinced than ever of the need for people (especially in tech) to engage with the humanities in the classical tradition, and this essay is a stab at doing just that.
That’s all I have for this week. Thanks for reading, and have a restful weekend.
Robbie