Dorothy L. Sayers, from her essay “Why Work?” (1942):

War is a judgment that overtakes societies when they have been living upon ideas that conflict too violently with the laws governing the universe…. Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes: they happen when wrong ways of thinking and living bring about intolerable situations; and whichever side may be the more outrageous in its aims and the more brutal in its methods, the root causes of conflict are usually to be found in some wrong way of life in which all parties have acquiesced, and for which everybody must, to some extent, bear the blame.

It strikes me that this is equally true of the culture war that Americans have been fighting with one another for quite some time.

Alan Jacobs

It would be a tragedy if writers stopped using em dashes out of fear of sounding like AI, because em dashes are one of the best tools writers have for not sounding robotic in the first place. Their very potential to be irritating is a sign of what makes them so beautiful: Of all the forms of punctuation, the em dash is the one that most rewards tact, judgment, and taste. It has the closest relationship to the way we experience thinking—rushing forward, suddenly swerving, forking into different branches that eventually come together again. If chatbots copy our use of it, they do so for the same reason we need to protect it. It’s the most human punctuation there is.

via Brian Phillips and Alan Jacobs

I often think of Auden's poem "The Horatians": "We can only / do what it seems to us we were made for, look at / this world with a happy eye / but from a sober perspective.” That's my ambition, and controlling my attention helps me to draw closer to it.

Alan Jacobs,  in thought-provoking post on reflecting and sharing

Michael Chabon:

I find the continuing mission of Voyager 1 so moving, for the way its name alone evokes a time of promise, for the thought of that tiny contraption way out there in the vastness at the edge of the heliosphere  —  perhaps the farthest any human-made thing may ever travel  —  a bit battered, swiftly aging, still doing the work it was purposed to do. 

I feel exactly the same way, but also claim a self-description: I too am "a bit battered, swiftly aging, still doing the work [I] was purposed to do."