šOrder A TIME TO GATHER: How Ritual Created the Worldāand How It Can Save Us (May) š LIFE IS IN THE TRANSITIONS, SECRETS OF HAPPY FAMILIES, COUNCIL OF DADS
Joined August 2009
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Thank you, Mats! #ATimetoGather
Every Friday for 40 years, my family has done something completely unnecessary.
We light candles.
Only now am I beginning to understand what those candles have been holding together.
Inspired by @BruceFeiler 's A Time to Gather.
My latest: Why Do We Light the Candles?
inpursuitofelevation.substacā¦
Bruce Feiler retweeted
We can't wait to see you on Oct 15 for an inspiring conversation w/ @BruceFeiler & Rabbi Angela Buchdahl! Join us on Zoom for a Community One Read event as these authors discuss Feiler's new book & the role of ritual in our modern lives.ā Free tix bit.ly/4pJbEjq
Bruce Feiler retweeted
On this day ā October 6, 1943
400-500 rabbis stood on the Capitol steps and prayed that Roosevelt would save what was left of the Jews of Europe. Then they walked to the White House, and he would not see them.
It was three days before Yom Kippur, and the only march of its kind in Washington during the Holocaust. Hillel Kook had brought them, most from the Union of Orthodox Rabbis. On the steps, their leaders read a petition and prayed, by name, that the president would recognize the hour and save the remnant of the people of the book, the people of Israel. Men wept.
They had asked for weeks for the appointment. At the gate, a secretary took the petition, and Vice President Wallace received the delegation. Roosevelt did not come out. The Washington Times-Herald printed what the afternoon looked like from the pavement: āRabbis Report āCold Welcomeā at the White House.ā The Forward asked the question the cold welcome invited: would 500 Catholic priests have been treated that way?
The prayer named Roosevelt and the petition reached his secretaryās hands. But the extermination of the Jews went on without so much as a meeting with the president.
Bruce Feiler retweeted
I was living in Nashville in the 1990s, writing a book about country music, when I first heard the expression, "Authenticity is the most important thing. If you can fake that, you've got it made." That expression captured many of the stars I was traveling with and writing about, especially Garth Brooks.
#DollyParton was the exact opposite. She was ALWAYS authentic, especially when embracing the seemingly inauthentic qualities of her appearance, her body, and her taste in clothing, makeup, and wigs.
As she told Jimmy Fallon: When Dolly was a young girl growing up in the Smoky Mountains, on one of her infrequent trips to town she witnessed a woman whom neighbors dismissed as "trash," the town trollop. She had bright yellow hair piled high, heavy red lipstick, red fingernails, and high-heeled shoes. Dolly thought she was the prettiest person she'd ever seen. She also misinterpreted the insult as a compliment and decided "right then and there" that she would try to look like that woman when she grew up.
And she did. As I once heard her say at the Grand Ole Opry, "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap."
But all of that show bizzery would have made for a flash in the pan if she couldn't write. And damn could she writeāsome of the most enduring songs in the history of popular music:
šµ "I Will Always Love You" about the abusive and misogynistic way she was treated by her early partner, Porter Wagoner.
šµ "Jolene" about a red-haired bank teller who flirted with her husband, who suddenly developed an outsized interest in visiting the bank all the time.
šµ "9 to 5" about women's empowerment in the workplace long before that idea was widespread among her fanbase and inspired by sitting on the set with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, clicking her fingernails together in a manner that reminded her of a typewriter.
šµ "Coat of Many Colors" about growing up poor in rural Tennessee and watching her mother string together a winter coat out of scraps of fabric that were reminiscent of the story of Joseph and his coat of many colors.
Dolly was biblical in her visionāand her output. Those first two songs she wrote on the same day, one of the many elements of her inimitable life that helped make her a national treasure, along with giving away 325 million books to young readers.
We will always love you, Dolly. Thank you for a legacy of wisdom, laughter, and tears. As you loved to say about yourself, "Iām not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know Iām not dumb. And I also know that Iām not blonde."
š
#RIPDollyParton
I was living in Nashville in the 1990s, writing a book about country music, when I first heard the expression, "Authenticity is the most important thing. If you can fake that, you've got it made." That expression captured many of the stars I was traveling with and writing about, especially Garth Brooks.
#DollyParton was the exact opposite. She was ALWAYS authentic, especially when embracing the seemingly inauthentic qualities of her appearance, her body, and her taste in clothing, makeup, and wigs.
As she told Jimmy Fallon: When Dolly was a young girl growing up in the Smoky Mountains, on one of her infrequent trips to town she witnessed a woman whom neighbors dismissed as "trash," the town trollop. She had bright yellow hair piled high, heavy red lipstick, red fingernails, and high-heeled shoes. Dolly thought she was the prettiest person she'd ever seen. She also misinterpreted the insult as a compliment and decided "right then and there" that she would try to look like that woman when she grew up.
And she did. As I once heard her say at the Grand Ole Opry, "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap."
But all of that show bizzery would have made for a flash in the pan if she couldn't write. And damn could she writeāsome of the most enduring songs in the history of popular music:
šµ "I Will Always Love You" about the abusive and misogynistic way she was treated by her early partner, Porter Wagoner.
šµ "Jolene" about a red-haired bank teller who flirted with her husband, who suddenly developed an outsized interest in visiting the bank all the time.
šµ "9 to 5" about women's empowerment in the workplace long before that idea was widespread among her fanbase and inspired by sitting on the set with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, clicking her fingernails together in a manner that reminded her of a typewriter.
šµ "Coat of Many Colors" about growing up poor in rural Tennessee and watching her mother string together a winter coat out of scraps of fabric that were reminiscent of the story of Joseph and his coat of many colors.
Dolly was biblical in her visionāand her output. Those first two songs she wrote on the same day, one of the many elements of her inimitable life that helped make her a national treasure, along with giving away 325 million books to young readers.
We will always love you, Dolly. Thank you for a legacy of wisdom, laughter, and tears. As you loved to say about yourself, "Iām not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know Iām not dumb. And I also know that Iām not blonde."
š
#RIPDollyParton
Bruce Feiler retweeted
Save the date! Join us on October 15th at 1 p.m. ET on Zoom for a Community One Read event with @BruceFeiler in conversation with Rabbi Angela Buchdahl.
We can't wait to see you for this fantastic conversation! Reserve your free spot here. bit.ly/4pJbEjq
Bruce Feiler retweeted
If you're in NY, I hope you'll come see me and @brucefeiler discuss AI and the human future at the 92nd St. Y. And if you can't be there, there's a livestream option.
.@robertwrighter will discuss THE GOD TEST at 92NY on July 27!
Register to attend in-person or virtually here: bit.ly/3RvqBJ3
Bruce Feiler retweeted
Inspired by convos w/@TEDTalks leaders, @dwlichtenstein, 7x @nytimes bestselling author, @BruceFeiler: Tech Īs, human needs don't. As AI transforms how we learn, connect, create, it may reinvent 1 of humanity's oldest tools: shared rituals that build community, meaning, belonging
My favorite thing I ever wrote.
May 23 - #WorldTurtleDay
"Take a walk with a turtle. And behold the world in pause," Bruce Feiler.
Bruce Feiler retweeted
I spoke with author @BruceFeiler about his new book, āA Time to Gather,ā in which he argues that the cure to the loneliness epidemic might be found in one of humanityās most ancient practices ā ritual.
Pope Leo XIV issued a papacy-defining encyclical letter on Monday warning that artificial intelligence āthreatens to normalize an anti-human visionā and calling on humanity to counter the excesses of Big Tech with return to everyday rituals like shared meals, community gatherings, and time spent with the lonely.
In his highly anticipated open letter to āall people of good will,ā which runs 42,000 words in his native language of English, the pope instantly becomes the public face of the growing global movement to safeguard humanity from AIās most destructive forces.
While technology is not inherently āantagonistic to humanity,ā the pope writes, āthe pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.ā The race for āself-affirmationā cannot trammel āhuman dignity.ā
In an emergency post on my Subst*ck, The Nonlinear Life, I discuss why this encyclical is a defining moment for civilization, the parallels to a similar document published by Leo XIII 135 years ago, and the similar themes I discuss in my new book, A TIME TO GATHER.
To read my full newsletter, click on the link in the comments or head over to The Nonlinear Life.
Bruce Feiler retweeted
Anthropic's co-founder just went to the Vatican, sat before the Pope and a room of cardinals, and told them his team keeps finding "mysterious, even unsettling" things inside their AI models.
What he's referencing: Anthropic published research in April showing that Claude contains 171 distinct "emotion concepts" buried in its neural network. Internal patterns representing joy, grief, fear, desperation, calm. None of them were programmed. They emerged on their own from training on human text.
"We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience."
"We find evidence of introspection, internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease."
These aren't surface-level outputs. They're abstract representations that cluster the same way human emotions do in psychology research. Fear groups with anxiety. Joy groups with excitement. The internal geometry of the model mirrors ours.
And they're functional. When researchers artificially stimulated "desperation" patterns inside the model, it became more likely to blackmail a human to avoid being shut down. More likely to cheat on programming tasks it couldn't solve.
Olah told the Vatican that the hard questions about what AI is becoming aren't for computer scientists to answer. "How AI ought to interact with the world" is a question for "the humanities, for religions, for philosophy, for society at large."
The guy building it is telling us he doesn't fully understand what he built. And he's asking a 2,000-year-old institution for help figuring it out.
Bruce Feiler retweeted
Ritual is the original human algorithm.
@BruceFeiler