"The people who want AI to be off-limits are right that technology changes how you think and write."

"I am old enough to have done creative writing in longhand and then on a typewriter, before I got my first computer. Something was lost in each transition, because the slowness and forced rewriting of the old methods improved the text in certain ways. But they also raised the cost (in time and effort) of making changes, and ultimately most writers decided the new ways were worth it.... There will be artisanal holdouts who reject all those possibilities, but I doubt they’ll be a majority. So for the foreseeable future, the rest of us will be figuring out where to draw the lines, knowing that some lines will be crossed by others, if not erased entirely. The best we can hope for is that in the struggle to draw and redraw them, we’ll learn where they belong...."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "I told the internet I use AI. Boy, was it mad. Artificial intelligence helps you work harder, instead of just outsourcing your brain" (WaPo).

ADDED: I write so I can see what I think. I asked Grok, "Has anyone ever said, verbatim, 'I write so I can see what I think.'" The answer, I'm told, is no, but there's a similar expression, examined in the Quote Investigator article, "Quote Origin: I Do Not Know What I Think Until I Read What I’m Writing."

Notably, Flannery O'Connor wrote, in 1948: "What you say about the novel, Rinehart, advances, etc. sounds very good to me, but I must tell you how I work. I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again." So there was this mythic "old lady" who seems to have been regarded as a fool. In 1927, E. M. Forster wrote of an old lady who said, "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?"

Why am I writing this as a postscript to McArdle's discussion of A.I.? It's because it explains something about how I've been using A.I.

"Learning cursive will provide New Jersey students with 'the skills they need to read our nation’s founding documents'...."

Said New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, quoted in "Cursive Makes a Comeback in New Jersey Schools/In one of his final acts in office, Gov. Philip D. Murphy signed a bill on Monday requiring third, fourth and fifth graders to learn cursive" (NYT).

Proponents of cursive cite studies that link handwriting to better information retention and writing speed, and say — as Mr. Murphy did in a statement released as he signed the bill — that knowing script can help people read the original U.S. Constitution....

On Tuesday, Gabrielle and Kurt McCann, of Lebanon, N.J., were waiting to break the news to their 9-year-old son, Atlas McCann, when he got home from school. “I think it is important that kids are able to use that refined motor skill,” Ms. McCann said in an interview shortly after a meeting where she said she had taken all her notes in longhand.

But Atlas, she said, was thinking, “What’s the point of having to sit here and torture myself?”

The poor boy has the weight of the world on his shoulders. And now, this additional burden — handwriting! What for? Who reads the Constitution in the original handwriting? It's not even cut-and-paste-able. It's not searchable in handwritten form. Atlas will grope forward, if the time ever comes, asking AI what constitutional clause goes with whatever is the issue of the day. What constitutional clause deals with transgender women in girls sports? What constitutional clause gives cis gender girls the right to undress at public school in a single-sex locker room? The ancient handwriting will not say. AI will.

Let's consult not a politician but an expert:

“Oh, God,” Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at the University of Southern California, said when he learned of the New Jersey law.... He attributed the renewed affection for the style’s curlicues and squiggles to “boomerish nostalgia,” and said he was struck by cursive’s bipartisan appeal, with states as different politically as Arkansas and California requiring its instruction. Conservatives, the professor said, promote its utility for reading old documents; liberals like it for its beauty as an art form....

Fight the decline lest the day come when we cannot read the documents. Then what?

"I learned... what people write. Cultural references, jokes, weather conditions, or the difficulty of an ascent. Sarcastic comments..."

"... about needing to quit smoking or arriving stoned. A lot of humorous begging for a helicopter ride down. Catalogs of wildlife spotted or lamentably not. A lot of misspellings (which I’ve retained). A lot of thanks to God."

From "Why Do We Leave Notes on Top of Mountains? It’s Personal/For centuries, people have left all sorts of notes in summit registers. I looked through 100 years of love letters and spontaneous exaltation, including my own family's, to find out why." (Outside).

You can see trends in handwriting styles (neat cursive, like the kind taught by nuns, giving way over time to chicken scratch), as well as music and literature (lots of Grateful Dead and Dharma Bums). Some writers refer to previous entries. Most seemed not to have thought about what they’d write until they arrived. Instead, the words left in registers are simply tactile evidence that someone was there at a certain point in time: alone, with friends, or with the people they love.

One register entry found by the author: "If you are a single woman and made it this far to read these scribblings: I love you!! Marry me!"

And — this isn't in the article, but — here's a quote from "The Dharma Bums": "Oh my God, sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind."

"But is Zuckerberg’s claim that 'fact-checkers have just been too politically biased' correct?"

Asks Nate Silver, at Silver Bulletin:

In my view, it’s at least pointing in the right direction, in line with my Indigo Blob theory about how the lines between nonpartisan institutions and partisan actors have become blurred. In the B.T. days — Before Trump — journalists who were appointed (or who appointed themselves) as fact-checkers tended to be experienced generalists with a scrupulous reputation for nonpartisanship — a sharp contrast to edgier and less experienced journalists in the Trump era who would later claim to own the disinformation beat. Perhaps because demand for fact-checking was coming overwhelmingly from the left... the journalists who selected into the subfield tended to be especially left of center.... 

"A California beach town is banning residents from smoking inside their own homes, saying the health benefits outweigh concerns over government overreach."

"Carlsbad, a surfing hot spot near San Diego, has decided to prohibit people from lighting up inside apartments, condos and other shared buildings where multiple families live.... At least 84 of California’s 483 municipalities — including Beverly Hills, Cupertino and Pasadena — have enacted similar bans in multi-family private residences, according to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation."

The London Times reports.

Yes, sometimes I get my news of what's happening in the U.S. from a U.K. paper.

Here's another one: "California’s TikTok generation must learn joined-up handwriting/US state is the latest to adopt rules that require cursive writing to be taught in schools." I'd never seen the expression "joined-up handwriting." By the way, I didn't see the term "cursive" back when I was learning it. It was just called "writing" — as opposed to "printing." Somewhat later, before "cursive," I saw "script." But "joined-up handwriting" is completely new to me, and it really makes it seem silly: Whatever was so important about not lifting the pen up when going from letter to letter? It was once believed to be faster, and there was so much time to be saved.

One Californian proponent of the new requirement (a Democrat) asserted that "there’s a lot of research that shows that cursive handwriting enhances a child’s brain development, including memorisation, and improves fine motor skills."

"He eschewed computers, often writing by fountain pen in his beloved notebooks."

"'Keyboards have always intimidated me,' he told The Paris Review in 2003. 'A pen is a much more primitive instrument,' he said. 'You feel that the words are coming out of your body, and then you dig the words into the page. Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.' He would then turn to his vintage Olympia typewriter to type his handwritten manuscripts. He immortalized the trusty machine in his 2002 book 'The Story of My Typewriter'.... Such antiquarian methods did nothing to slow Mr. Auster’s breathless output. Writing six hours a day, often seven days a week, he pumped out a new book nearly annually for years...."

From "Paul Auster, the Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn, Dies at 77/With critically lauded works like 'The New York Trilogy,' the charismatic author drew inspiration from his adopted borough and won worldwide acclaim" (NYT).

You can see by the headline that the obituary stresses the place — Brooklyn (even though Auster was born in New Jersey).  It quotes the author and poet Meghan O’Rourke:

"[Ralph] Nader told us that his longtime favorite pens, Paper Mate Flair Felt Tip Pens Medium Point (0.7 mm), had started drying out too quickly."

"He wanted to know why. Nader needed answers. Well, we didn’t have any. And neither did Paper Mate—Nader said the company waved away his concerns with a standard corporate non-answer about standing behind the pens’ quality.... 'For years I’ve been using felt pens, mostly red and black but sometimes purple, to mark up The New York Times,' Nader told me in a phone interview last year. 'I go through every page of the Times, and I mark up different articles and send them to different people. And I do that with The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.' When Nader says years, he means years. We found a black-and-white photo of him using what appears to be a Paper Mate Flair in 1972...."

From "We Sent Ralph Nader Some of Our Favorite Pens. He Dismissed Them All" (NYT).

1972! Why, I remember when Flair pens first came out. It was 1966. Before that, there were no felt-tipped writing pens. There were markers — specifically, the Marks-a-Lot — with thick points and permanent ink that were great for making posters on oak tag, but would bleed through writing paper and had a strong smell. So the Flairs, with their sharp points and dark but not overpowering ink, seemed miraculous. I felt very lucky to get my hands on a Flair back in 1966. And if you had multiple colors — purple! — you were a celebrity.

"When you finally get to the phrase that needs improving, you have to rotate the platen downward in order to squeeze fresh words above it...."

"Because of this awkwardness, the tendency of the typer, as opposed to the writer (in Truman Capote’s famous distinction), is to move ever forward, ever faster. Why waste thirty seconds revising an obscure clause, when you can tack on an explanatory sentence in five? Hence paragraphs come out longer than they should be, and an accretion of verbal debris weighs the typescript down. Such debris, of course, can be cleared away in revision. But the tolerance that permitted it in the first place tends to lower critical standards the second time around. The pen, on the other hand, is an instrument of thrilling mobility. Its ink flows as readily as the writer’s imagination. Its nib flickers back and forth with the speed of a snake’s tongue, deleting a cliché here, an adjective there, then rearing up suddenly into white space and emitting a spray of new words.... Unlike the electric typewriter, it does not buzz irritatedly when motionless, as if to say, Hurry up, I’m overheating. It sits quietly in the hand, comforting the fingers with acquired warmth, assuring you that the sentence you are searching for lies somewhere in its liquid reservoir...."

From the essay "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Smith-Corona" — written in 1981, before writers used word processors.

The essay, by Edmund Morris, is collected in "This Living Hand: And Other Essays" (commission earned). 

I added the link on "Truman Capote's famous distinction." My link goes to Quote Investigator, which looks into whether Capote really said — about "On the Road" — "That’s not writing, that’s typing."

"I tell four four-year-olds that I am writing a poem of what ever they say. When one makes a statement like 'you are 1,006' or 'I am a 'W'..."

"I write it slowly and read it outloud as I’m writing it. Then I read it outloud to make sure I have it right. The four K kids love to see handwriting come out of my hand. They are interested in how writing can save something in a way that allows it to be said and read repeatedy, exactly, multiple times...." 

This is the brilliant comics artist Lynda Barry:

 

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A post shared by Lynda Barry (@thenearsightedmonkey)

ADDED: If you like that, I highly recommend the book "Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry" by Kenneth Koch. (That's an Amazon link, so I earn a commission if you use it.)

"They’re unable to see properly, they’re confused, they’re having hallucinations. And we’re talking about scary hallucinations; it’s nothing that’s fun."

Said Darren Roberts, quoted in "How Can Tainted Spinach Cause Hallucinations? A food recall from Australia sheds light on an unusual aspect of brain chemistry" (NYT).

The belief is that there's some other plant in there with the spinach and that it's "'anticholinergic syndrome,' a type of poisoning mainly caused by plants in the Solanaceae family, which includes nightshade, jimson weed and mandrake root."

"By my lights, it is about as important for modern kids to learn cursive as it is for them to know their Roman numerals."

"The latter are kind of fun, and you have to know them to … well, for me they were for reading what the year was on 'Looney Tunes' opening credits, and I guess one might want to be able to know what year a building was constructed without having to ask someone. But just as those aren’t enough to impose learning Roman numerals on all schoolchildren, cursive’s time is up, now that all people will spend so much less time writing by hand."

Types John McWhorter, in "What’s the Point of Teaching Cursive?" (NYT).

"He had been a high school dropout whose early higher education consisted of correspondence courses, and when he took his first teaching job.... His entree into the world of Orwell..."

"... was similarly implausible. He demonstrated his ability to accurately transcribe a barely-legible original manuscript of Orwell’s dystopian novel '1984' by disporting his skills in paleography, the study of ancient and antiquated writing systems. Earlier in his career he deciphered Elizabethan manuscripts.... As a result of his dogged research, publishers had to withdraw incomplete, incorrect or obsolete earlier editions of Orwell’s works. In 'Animal Farm,' Orwell... had originally written that pigeons bombarded Mr. Jones and his men with their 'dung' when they attacked the farm, but the text was amended to say more gracefully that the pigeons 'muted on them.'"

 From "Peter Davison, Orwell Scholar on a Monumental Scale, Dies at 95/A 'super scholarly sleuth,' he devoted 35 years to editing 30 volumes of the author’s books, essays, letters, diaries and manuscripts" (NYT).

Muted on them? I checked the OED, and was delighted to find the bird-specific verb "mute":

Students these days "don’t have a big relationship to their hands. I’ve had to show them how to cut a circle out of paper...."

"You keep the scissors there and you move the paper like this, and they’re like, 'What?' There’s so much dexterity that they, by and large, do not have.... [They] start keyboarding in kindergarten. Handwriting, that thing that we think is no big deal, there’s so much dexterity in it. Not just in the hand you’re writing with, but the nondominant hand is always in action, moving the paper, paying attention. I mean, there’s a reason people gesture while they talk. If somebody is trying to explain something complicated, and they have to sit on their hands, it’s much harder for them to explain it.... [With a phone] you’re no longer where you are. You’re no longer in the room. You’re no longer anywhere. The opportunities to have an interaction with the things around you are taken away. I just see the world as richer without the phone.... So something that closes you off to the world that you’re in — I mean, I could be on TikTok all night long. I keep deleting that app because I love it so much. But something that takes you out of your environment, you pay a high price...."

Says Lynda Barry, quoted in "A Genius Cartoonist Believes Child’s Play Is Anything But Frivolous" (NYT). Barry is a professor of "interdisciplinary creativity" at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.

"You don’t have to just be a stay-at-home mom, you can aspire to be a young child-free woman and not work."

"I spend my hours doing what I want and have time to look after my body, cook nice meals and spend quality time with friends."

Says Emily de Rean, 37, who "previously worked as a financial analyst, but now lives off her boyfriend’s money after realizing she was unhappy climbing the corporate ladder," quoted in "I quit my job to be a full-time girlfriend: Get fit, cook and you can too" (NY Post). 

She had already quit her finance job — and switched to being a nanny — when she met this rich boyfriend who "encouraged me to stop working and become a stay-at-home girlfriend, so I could have time to do something more productive."

"Watching Dershowitz work, it’s like this: Ink wires itself onto the page, in the wash of his gimpy scrawl."

Nutty caption in the Esquire article, "21 Hours With Alan Dershowitz/Over the course of one week, Tom Chiarella watched Donald Trump’s TV-loving lawyer prepare for his biggest argument to date. He still can’t make sense of it."

Nothing.

I keep reading this in the tone of “Frère Jacques”

I want no-thing
I want no-thing
I want no
Quid pro quo 🎶 https://t.co/LqE8RQrZmZ

— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) November 20, 2019

Context:

"There's no news. Have you noticed that?... There's no news. How much better a President can you be than to make the news go away?"

"This is something no President has ever done before.... Name another President who's so good, he made the news go away."

I listened to that yesterday, and I'm remembering it this morning and choosing to post it because I'm looking for news to blog and I can't find anything.

ADDED: I am still looking. I was picking over stories and the closest I got were: 1. Somewhere they're teaching cursive writing again, 2. Some people don't watch "Game of Thrones" (and can be called "Never Throners"), 3. Bibi Andersson died, 4. Some people aren't good at riding electric bikes, and 5. Criticizing Ilhan Omar might endanger her.

"Who Still Buys Wite-Out, and Why?"

They're asking the rite question at The Atlantic.

But correction fluids are not only surviving—they appear to be thriving, with Wite-Out sales climbing nearly 10 percent in 2017, according to the most recent public numbers. It’s a mystery of the digital age....

Yeah, Mike Nesmith's mother... Liquid Paper... We needn't go back into that history. I'll just say Wite-Out is to Liquid Paper as Oreo is to Hydrox. Back to the question at hand: Why are people still buying a lot of correction fluid?

Even as paper sales dip, up-market stationery is one sub-segment that is expected to grow, thanks to a Millennial affection for personalized stationery. Tia Frapolli, president of NPD’s office-supplies practice, pointed to bullet-journaling and hand-lettering as paper-based trends that could breathe some life into correction fluids....

[T]he attraction to the material is the same as any other hand-made or small-batch product: The physical act of covering up a mistake is imperfect but more satisfying than simply hitting backspace. There’s also a poignancy to a screwed generation gravitating toward Wite-Out.

You can’t erase the past anymore than you can erase a printed typo or written error—but you can paper it over and pretend it didn’t happen.

That's interestingly written. I should name the author: David A. Graham.

It should be noted that correction fluid is useful aside from the written word. It's a standard art supply for those who use pen on paper — especially if you don't begin with a pencil draft (to be erased after it's inked in) and if the work will be distributed as a reproduction (such as a comic strip).

Oh, but wait... From Comic Tools:

Wite out is the horrible, foul smelling goop made by Bic for making small corrections to typing and letters. It's not archival, isn't terribly opaque, bleeds and isn't easy to draw over.

WHITE-out is another word we cartoonists use for what is really a specialized guache for correcting ink drawings. It's super-opaque, has very high quality pigment, is archival, and when applied at the right thickness can be drawn over almost (though not quite) as well as paper....

Here — you can buy the recommended Deleter White-Out. At Amazon, where it looks like this:

"Commodity for both sexes"!

"The dimensions of American office paper are standardized so thoroughly, they seem almost naturally occurring — something inherent in the idea of office paper (that is, until you go to Europe, where letter paper is longer and narrower)."

I'm reading "Just-So Tech Stories: How the 8.5" x 11" Piece of Paper Got Its Size/The unfortunate size of office paper is why we double-space our documents" (in The Atlantic) because I bought a made-in-France Clairefontaine spiral notebook and wondered why it wasn't 8 1/2 by 11 inches — it's 8 1/4 by 11 3/4. I felt so awkward with it. It seemed perverse. I really did have that sense that 8 1/2 by 11 is "naturally occurring."

But — according to this article —  8 1/2 by 11 really isn't naturally good for reading. A magazine that wide would use 2 or 3 columns per page to help the eye get from the end of a line to the beginning of the next line. And that's why we double space, to make the beginning of the next line easier to see.

Why do we use a paper size that is so unfriendly for the basic task of reading? According to a very interesting post by Paul Stanley, the rough dimensions of office paper evolved to accommodate handwriting and typewriters with monospaced fonts, both of which rendered many fewer characters per line. "Typewriters," he explains, "produced 10 or 12 characters per inch: so on (say) 8.5 inch wide paper, with 1 inch margins, you had 6.5 inches of type, giving ... around 65 to 78 characters." This, he says, is "pretty close to ideal."

Of course, I'm using my spiral notebook for handwriting, and I produce about 30 characters per line. That should be perfectly easy to read, but I'm less interested in how easy it is to read than in whether my arm feels normal when I'm reaching up to the top lines. That suggests that notebooks should come in different sizes the way men's shirts come with different sleeve lengths.

MORE: Wikipedia has an article "Letter (paper size)." Excerpt:

Ronald Reagan made this the paper size for U.S. federal forms in the early 1980s; previously, the smaller "official" Government letter size, 8.0 by 10.5 inches... was used in government, while standard 8.5 × 11 inch paper was used by most other offices....

The precise origins of the dimensions of US letter size paper (8.5 × 11 in) are not known. The American Forest & Paper Association says that the standard US dimensions have their origin in the days of manual paper making, the 11" length of the standard paper being about a quarter of "the average maximum stretch of an experienced vatman's arms."

Ah! So it is about arms! An experienced vatman's arms. You can see why that extra 3/4 of an inch feels awkward to me, since I am not an experienced vatman.

Writing fast or slow.

Robert A. Caro, in a new interview in the New York Review of Books:

My first three or four drafts are handwritten on legal pads. For later drafts, I use a typewriter. I write by hand to slow myself down. People don’t believe this about me: I’m a very fast writer, but I want to write slowly.

When I was a student at Princeton. I took a creative writing course with the literary critic R.P. Blackmur. Every two weeks, I’d give him a short story I’d produced usually at the last minute. At the end of the semester, he said some complimentary words about my writing, and then added, “Mr. Caro, one thing is going to keep you from achieving what you want—you think with your fingers.”

Later, in the early 1960s when I was at Newsday, my speed was a plus. But when I started rewriting The Power Broker, I realized I wasn’t thinking deeply enough. I said, “You have to slow yourself down.” That’s when I remembered Blackmur’s admonition and started drafting by hand, which slows me down.