From the Washington Post – Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Demon Copperhead’ may be the best novel of 2022 By Ron Charles — October 25, 2022 at 2:08 p.m. ET It’s barely Halloween. The ball won’t drop in Times Square for another two full months, and more good books will surely appear before the year ends. But I … Continue reading Midweek Book Review
Good grief! The two images below look like professional quality photographs, but no camera made them. No person or object posed for them. Nor did a human artist paint or draw them. Well, not exactly. Humans produced them. One set of humans, software developers, made the tool, called DALL-E2. One other, tech columnist Kevin Roose, … Continue reading Stunning New Artificial Intel Programs Are Here Now—Look!
The Column: 08.19.22 Garrison Keillor Aug 19 It was a week of crazy change, a couple of big wallops, and here I am still standing, head bowed but marching forward. An ace ophthalmologist broke the news that my dimming eyesight is the result of glaucoma, which makes me grateful that I’m 80 because if I … Continue reading Damn. Garrison is Definitely Losing it. I’ll Let Him Break the Bad News
NOTE: I was not much of a fan of Frederick Buechner, a writer who died last week at 96. I tried his quartet of novels about a semi-charlatan-but-maybe-a-saint preacher in Florida, but Buechner lost me with his character’s name, Leo Bebb, which is bar none the most uneuphonious & off-putting monicker in my experience of … Continue reading Frederick Buechner: Religious Novelist
There’s not a direct connection between the two items excerpted here. Garrison Keillor is definitely religious, in his low-key, often self-mocking way. But like others of his (& my) generation, he’s watched in bemusement as the generations behind him have been mostly quietly, but steadily dumping religion. Following Keillor, pastor-researcher Ryan Burge takes a look … Continue reading Twofer Thursday: Garrison Keillor at (almost) 80; and the Decline of Religion in the U.S.