Four essays arrived in my inbox this morning, none demanding synthesis. A political commentator wrestling with liberalism’s trajectory. A philosopher declaring reality evil. A novelist defending writing as irreducibly human. A web historian celebrating blogging’s persistence. I read them as one reads morning dispatches from different fronts of the same unacknowledged war.

The war, if we must name it, concerns what remains essentially human when we face forces larger than ourselves.

Noah Smith opens with a vivid thought experiment: imagine being a French liberal in 1815, watching the Revolution’s bright promise collapse into Terror, Napoleon, and conservative reaction. Yet those ideals ultimately prevailed. Smith traces his own journey from 1980s liberalism through genuine victories—expanded safety nets, civil rights, gay marriage—to what he diagnoses as progressivism’s overreach. His conclusion is neither despair nor defection: the summit still beckons, the climb continues, we try again.

I agree with Smith’s diagnosis of political dysfunction while parting company on several specifics. I have no quarrel with trans rights, affirmative action, or resistance to religious incursions into education. But his analytical point stands independent of policy particulars: the left’s rhetorical style, its purity tests, its Robespierrean denunciations have been politically catastrophic regardless of the underlying merits.

What struck me harder was the epistemological substrate beneath Smith’s political analysis. The deeper pathology isn’t progressive overreach—it’s a population that cannot think in gradients. Sciences teach that phenomena exist on continua. History teaches that today’s heresy becomes tomorrow’s orthodoxy. Philosophy teaches us to hold contradictions in tension. The arts teach ambiguity and the unreliable narrator. Strip these from education and you produce citizens who need every issue sorted into two buckets: with us or against us, woke or unwoke.

The gradient thinker evaluates each claim on its merits. The binary thinker asks only: is this person on my team?

Drew Dalton’s essay on thermodynamics offers itself as revelation, but for anyone who absorbed Carl Sagan decades ago, the news isn’t new. The laws of thermodynamics reveal a universe trending toward heat death. Everything consumes and is consumed. Entropy increases. Stars burn out. We are, as Dalton writes, cups destined to shatter endlessly through time.

Dalton’s move is to declare this evil and define goodness as resistance—any act that bends entropy’s thrust back upon itself, however briefly. Medicine becomes good precisely because it fights nature’s tendency toward death.

I find this framing theatrical. Sagan looked at the same cosmos and found wonder rather than horror. The field ecologist who spends decades watching energy flow through trophic levels doesn’t experience the second law as malevolent. It’s simply the situation. And within that situation, here we improbably are, capable of understanding it. The quiet work of monitoring a watershed isn’t striking back at the universe. It’s more like witness than combat.

Yet Dalton’s ethical turn—goodness as resistance to entropy—rhymes unexpectedly with Smith’s political resilience. Both essays counsel persistence against forces that seem overwhelming. The French liberal in 1815 and the physician fighting death share a posture: we try again, knowing we cannot ultimately win, finding meaning in the effort itself.

Cory Doctorow’s piece on writing and AI seems at first to occupy different territory entirely. He argues that students cheat with chatbots because we’ve trained them to write like chatbots—hitting mechanical marks rather than using writing as a thinking tool. Real instruction is relational and transformative. If students experienced that transformation, they wouldn’t outsource the work any more than they’d ask an AI to eat a delicious pizza for them.

Doctorow is right about mechanical instruction producing mechanical cheating. But I sit in a different chair. At seventy-one, with decades of accumulated insight, I use AI as cognitive prosthesis to get thinking into shareable form at a pace otherwise impossible. The ideas remain mine, the revision mine, the editorial control mine. The question isn’t whether tools are legitimate—of course they are—but where the human remains essential in the loop.

The answer I’ve found through daily practice: the life that underwrites the words. You cannot fake thirty-six years at field stations. You cannot hallucinate the specific memory of Sagan lectures at Cornell, the mentorship networks, the sensor deployments that failed in interesting ways. AI can help articulate what I know; it cannot know what I know.

This is where provenance becomes the jewel. Competent prose becomes commodity—abundant, cheap, undifferentiated. What remains scarce is the unreproducible: the particular eye, the lived experiment, the accumulation of a specific life.

Jay Hoffman’s brief meditation on blogging completes the morning’s arc. He recalls Stewart Brand’s observation that information wants to be free, and Molly Holzschlag’s declaration that blogging is an act of courage. The remarkable thing about blogging, Hoffman notes, is how unchanged it remains after twenty years—personal, textual, outside mainstream media, shared messily, still fundamentally about one person willing to put something out there.

Kevin Kelly has recently observed that writers may soon need to write for AI rather than human audiences, since humans will increasingly encounter text through AI intermediaries. This inverts the entire history of rhetoric. We learned to write for human cognition—rhythm, surprise, emotional resonance. What does prose optimized for machine readers look like?

The question haunts me as I write this very essay with AI assistance, for an audience that may encounter it through AI filters, about the experience of doing so. The recursion is dizzying.

But here is what I take from the morning’s reading: the practice matters more than the product. Four essays arrived. None demanded synthesis. Each got its due. The thinking happened not in isolation but in dialogue—with authors who don’t know me, with an AI that cannot fully know me, with whatever readers eventually find these words.

The gradient thinker in an entropic world doesn’t need to synthesize everything into unified theory. Smith’s political wisdom, Dalton’s cosmic pessimism, Doctorow’s defense of relational writing, Hoffman’s celebration of blogging courage—these are four pebbles dropped in the pond, each making its own ripples. The synthesis, if any, happens over time in the accumulation of a life spent reading and thinking.

The morning ritual itself may be the message: showing up to think, out loud, every day. The tool matters less than the habit. The audience matters less than the practice. We persist against entropy not by grand gestures but by small daily acts of attention.

The summit still beckons. The climb continues. We try again.