The Homebound Symphony
Alan Jacobs
I am — let me take a deep breath — the Jim and Sharon Harrod Endowed Chair of Christian Thought and Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program of Baylor University. I’ve been at Baylor for eleven years and before that taught for three decades at Wheaton College in Illinois. I was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. I’ve been married for forty-four years and have a grown-up son. I am an Anglican Christian.
August 2026
September 2026
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All posts (116)
Jesse Singal posted the other day about an academic named Peter Coviello who denounced David Brooks for saying something silly when in fact Brooks was outlining a position that he disagrees with. (Follow the link for the details). Singal says, Either Coviello has a real reading comprehension problem — one that would...
I’ve tried all the major note-taking apps in the Apple ecosystem. For some years, starting more than a decade ago, I used Simplenote, then Drafts, then Bear. I used Ulysses for a while, though that’s really more of a text editor than a notes app. Obsidian, yep. Notion, yep. I tried Day One to take […]
Edward Mendelson, writing in 2013 on two apparently very different novels, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: I have no way of knowing whether Pynchon has ever read Virginia Woolf, but it seems clear that both chose a similar problem and found a similar solution. Each...
Brian Eno, interviewed by Ezra Klein, recalled a moment some years ago when he was talking with the engineers at Yamaha about one of their synthesizers. Like most synthesizers, this one came with a series of preset tones but was also programmable, and Eno told the engineers that they should make the synthesizer...
Lauren Walsh: Thomas Mann’s four-part novel, Joseph and His Brothers (1933-43), a tremendously important book to [Albert] Murray’s thinking, enacts this mix of gravity and lightness, in this case even desolation and resilience. In the titular character, who was sold into slavery, Murray saw a rascally figure of the...
John Ruskin, from Unto This Last (1860): THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to […]
Any serious reader of Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, and of the many controversies appertaining thereunto, will repeatedly face a certain kind of problem. I will explain by reference to one example, though I could choose dozens of others. In late 1845, when Newman had recently swum the Tiber, “the editor of a...
Ars Technica: In an April 28, 2025, appearance on Dr. Phil Primetime, an audience member asked Kennedy what he would do about “stratospheric aerosol injections,” which she claimed are “continuously peppered on us every day.” Kennedy responded: “It’s done, we think by DARPA [a research agency in the Department of...
The NYT asked a number of people to share their favorite moments from Thomas Pynchon’s fiction. Yikes. I have so many. The problem is that not one of the greatest passages in his glorious body of work makes complete sense to out of its rich and densely-woven context. I’m gonna break the rules and choose […]
Daring Fireball: If your opinion of a work art changes after you find out which tools were used to make it, or who the artist is or what they’ve done, you’re no longer judging the art. You’re making a choice not to form your opinion based on the work itself, but rather on something else. […]
Jean: You have a right to have an ideal. Oh, I guess we all have one. Charles: What does yours look like? Jean: He’s a little short guy with lots of money. Charles: Why short? Jean: What does it matter if he’s rich? It’s so he’ll look up to me. So I’ll be his ideal. […]
Dear Colleague, I understand that you wish me to participate in your protests against the Trump administration’s proposed “compact” with American universities. I will do so on one condition: that you openly acknowledge (a) that you were completely comfortable with the Obama and Biden administrations’ use of “Dear...
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