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Whether or not it is useful to think about fiction in terms of realism and anti-realism is debatable. (Very likely it is not.) This is nonetheless how I’ve chosen to position my newsletter: as a futile, contrarian document opposing one of contemporary literature’s most dominant forms. “The novel is nothing without ‘real life,’” the critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1963. Just as often it is nothing with “real life,” either. The realist novel’s baroque machinery — settings, scenes, lifelike characters, dialogue, etc.

Even if you accept that the antidebate is interesting, it’s not clear whether it’s important. You can and should read on without pausing, but everything I am about to say will be easier to appreciate if you have watched two short videos by Katie Teague. The first is called Living in the Metacrisis: In that video, I define the metacrisis as follows: The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty, and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding, misvaluing, and misappropriating of reality.

Thanks for checking out Nuclear Meltdown. You have nothing to lose by sharing this post with your entire email contact list. Share I’m breaking my usual publishing schedule with an off-week post today because I wanted reflect on a few random things that seem worth discussing, but which maybe aren’t entire posts on their own. Here we go: This week, one of the Try Guys was exposed for cheating on his wife.

In this newsletter, I have written the following columns:  So it stands to reason that it should be possible to craft a delicious cocktail that combines all three ingredients — and ideally, only those three ingredients. Indeed, as I was working on the recent newsletter about Bénédictine, I realized that it was incumbent upon me to produce such a drink. And so I gave myself an assignment — call it the Apple Brandy-Cynar-Bénédictine Challenge.

Dear Friends, Step into my study. Shall I fill you a pipe? Pour you a dram? Excellent! I sometimes get into trouble, or at least create something of a furor, when I do commentary on or reviews of music. But it is that time again, only this time I don’t have any real criticisms to give. I have mentioned to you before the band The Arcadian Wild (pictured above). Particularly, I recommended their EP Principium, a poetic retelling of the biblical creation and fall story.

In episode 75 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Riley Goodside. Riley is a Staff Prompt Engineer at Scale AI. Riley began posting GPT-3 prompt examples and screenshot demonstrations in 2022. He previously worked as a data scientist at OkCupid, Grindr, and CopyAI. Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pub Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast:  Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSS

You’ve heard the advice before: “Always eat dinner as a family.” There is interesting research to show that eating a meal together each day brings a family closer together, that kids thrive and get better marks, that a consistent family dinner routine correlates to greater professional success in life. Harvard Graduate School of Education reported, “Regular family dinners are associated with lower rates of depression, and anxiety, and substance abuse, and eating disorders, and tobacco use, and early teenage pregnancy, and higher rates of resilience and higher self esteem.

I wonder how many of you remember contact sheets. A single 8in x 10in (or later 8.5in x 11in) black and white print showing everything contained on a roll of film. An enduring print evidencing every frame produced by your camera. I still have every contact sheet I printed myself. In fact, I stopped using Ilford HP5+ 35mm film completely when they decided to put a barcode on the negative edges.

Welcome to the premium edition of Graham’s newsletter! Graham’s newsletter is now reader-supported and this article is one of the many perks paid subscribers have access to. This week’s article is a deep-dive into the $500 Million man Ben Mallah, distilling years of his insights on real estate, business, and adding value to people’s lives. At first glance, Ben Mallah is one of the loudest and most abrasive personalities you would ever meet – but if you spend a little time listening to him, you’d realize that beneath the tough exterior, there’s a burning desire to add value to people’s lives and share his extensive knowledge of real estate.