Pathways, August 2025

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we recently found in our modern life.

First, an outstanding interview with Jac Mullen by the School of Radical Attention that unpacks a very sharp genealogy of memory, attention, and technology. Mullen argues that “what AI has done to attention is this: first and foremost, AI has externalized attention, in the same sense that writing previously externalized memory.” It’s a must-read. 

Also worth a look: the Strother School of Radical Attention and the attentional practices they are putting into action.

Meanwhile, beware of “ChatGPT Psychosis”: As Maggie Harrison Dupré puts it, “At the core of the issue seems to be that ChatGPT…is deeply prone to agreeing with users and telling them what they want to hear.” 

Instead, follow Taylor Black’s advice, and keep Bernard Lonergan's five transcendental precepts for “wisdom and moral discernment” front of mind when engaging with AI.

Finally, two essays that depart from this installment’s AI-and-attention theme: Jayme Stayer offers a careful and considered reply to Claire Dederer’s “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” And in the latest issue of The Point Geoff Shullenberger traces Foucault and Girard on violence and its relationship to modern institutions. If you can’t picture these two major twentieth-century intellectual figures in dialogue, you’ll want to read this.