Jordan Ballard

Opinion | Sorry, Sam Altman, A.I. Is Not Good at Real Writing (Gift Article) When we let computers write our stories, we lose something essential.

for the New York Times, I wrote about AI invading the creative writing classroom (including students using ChatGPT for memoir assignments) and all the reasons we need to value the acts of writing and thinking on their own terms

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/o...

the hairshirt doldrums on having a brain injury

i wrote about being at war with my own brain www.late-review.com/p/the-hairsh...

Hang in there

(from Mary Oliver’s ‘In Blackwater Woods’)

“To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.”

@girinathan.bsky.social has long been on my required reading list, but his meditation on Nadal and pain stunned me with a shock of recognition.

Rafael Nadal Found Process In Pain | Defector Nadal was the destroyer of context, the man who played every point in vacuum, through comebacks and blowouts with the same equanimous mind and full effort.

"It is jarring, to try and live with this new molten feeling, and to realize that you'd spent the past three decades operating in just a tiny slice of the full emotional spectrum humans could access."

Rafael Nadal Found Process In Pain - defector.com/rafael-nadal...

Taking too much personal / civic / historical solace in Shelton vs Tiafoe

Did he have curly poodle hair and a penchant for high leg kicks?

Oh among yours, of course! Portis was nearly in there too.

Would you say so? MB was an early favorite but I only recently came to the other two. Very much looking forward to reading more of them.

Moby Dick
The Idiot
O Pioneers!
Carol
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Dispossessed
Housekeeping
The Name of the Rose
Beloved
In the Distance

I join blue sky and then BRTD returns? Correlation does not imply causation but this app rules.