doing enough with your brain: intelligent magazine articles as a research pathway
or: how to be actually well-educated, a continued roast of some AI writing, advice about how to wander forever in the world of human thinking. part 2 of 7.
![Herrad of Landsberg was abbess of the convent Hohenburg on Mount St. Odile in Alsace. She was the author of the Hortus deliciarum, a massive illuminated manuscript that distilled "the nectar of the various flowers plucked from Holy Scripture and philosophical works," compiled for the edification of the nuns and others at the abbey. The 324-folio volume contained more than 600 illustrations. It was destroyed during the bombing of Strasbourg in 1870, but by then many copies had been made. Philosophy, the Queen, sits in the center of the circle. She wears a crown with three heads labeled ethica, logica, and physica (a traditional Platonic division of philosophy that was common in the early Middle Ages). The scroll she holds reads, "All wisdom comes from the Lord God; the wise alone achieve what they desire." To Philosophy's right is an inscription which says that "seven streams of wisdom, called the Liberal Arts, flow from Philosophy." To her left the inscription asserts that the Holy Spirit inspired seven liberal arts: grammatica, rethorica [sic], dialectica, musica, arithmetica, geometria, and astronomia. The legend on the inner circle tells us "I, Godlike Philosophy lay out seven arts which are subordinate to me; by them I control all things with wisdom." Below Philosophy, seated at desks, are Socrates and Plato, identifed as those scholars of the Gentiles and sages of the world who first taught ethics, natural philosophy, and rhetoric. From Philosophy emerge seven streams, three on her left and four on her right. These are the seven liberal arts, inspired by the Holy Spirit: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Arrayed around the circle are the liberal arts. Three correspond to the rivers which emerge from Philosophy's left and are concerned with language and letters: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. Together they constitute the trivium. The four others, which emerge on Philosophy's right, form the quadrivium, arts which are concerned with the various kinds of harmony: music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Each of the seven arts holds something symbolic, and each is accompanied by a text displayed on the arch above it. Grammar (at 12 o'clock) holds a book and a whip. The text reads: Through me all can learn what are the words, the syllables, and the letters. Rhetoric (at 2 o'clock) holds a tablet and stylus. The text reads: Thanks to me, proud speaker, your speeches will be able to take strength. Dialectic (at 4 o'clock) points with a one hand and holds a barking dog's head in the other. The text reads: I allow arguments to join, dog-like, in battle. Music (at 5 o'clock) holds a harp, and other instruments are nearby. The text reads: I teach my art using a variety of instruments. Arithmetic (at 7 o'clock) holds a cord with threaded beads, like a rudimentary abacus. The text reads: I base myself on the numbers and show the proportions between them. Geometry (at 9 o'clock) holds a staff and compass. The text reads: It is with exactness that I survey the ground. Astronomy (at 11 o'clock) points heavenward and holds in hand a magnifying lens or mirror. The text reads: I hold the names of the celestial bodies and predict the future. The large ring around the whole scene contains four aphorisms and the stages through which Philosophy works (investgation, writing, and teaching): What it discovers is remembered; Philosophy investigates the secrets of the elements and all things; Philosophy teaches arts by seven branches; It puts it in writing, in order to convey it to the students. Below the circle are four men seated at desks -- poets or magicians, outside the pale and beyond the influence of Philosophy. According to the text they are guided and taught by impure spirits and they produce is only tales or fables, frivolous poetry, or magic spells. Notice the black birds speaking to them (the antithesis of the white dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit).](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!o-l0!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F209217ad-7dc0-481f-92ec-77d482849edc_3625x4508.jpeg "Herrad of Landsberg was abbess of the convent Hohenburg on Mount St. Odile in Alsace. She was the author of the Hortus deliciarum, a massive illuminated manuscript that distilled \"the nectar of the various flowers plucked from Holy Scripture and philosophical works,\" compiled for the edification of the nuns and others at the abbey. The 324-folio volume contained more than 600 illustrations. It was destroyed during the bombing of Strasbourg in 1870, but by then many copies had been made. Philosophy, the Queen, sits in the center of the circle. She wears a crown with three heads labeled ethica, logica, and physica (a traditional Platonic division of philosophy that was common in the early Middle Ages). The scroll she holds reads, \"All wisdom comes from the Lord God; the wise alone achieve what they desire.\" To Philosophy's right is an inscription which says that \"seven streams of wisdom, called the Liberal Arts, flow from Philosophy.\" To her left the inscription asserts that the Holy Spirit inspired seven liberal arts: grammatica, rethorica [sic], dialectica, musica, arithmetica, geometria, and astronomia. The legend on the inner circle tells us \"I, Godlike Philosophy lay out seven arts which are subordinate to me; by them I control all things with wisdom.\" Below Philosophy, seated at desks, are Socrates and Plato, identifed as those scholars of the Gentiles and sages of the world who first taught ethics, natural philosophy, and rhetoric. From Philosophy emerge seven streams, three on her left and four on her right. These are the seven liberal arts, inspired by the Holy Spirit: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Arrayed around the circle are the liberal arts. Three correspond to the rivers which emerge from Philosophy's left and are concerned with language and letters: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. Together they constitute the trivium. The four others, which emerge on Philosophy's right, form the quadrivium, arts which are concerned with the various kinds of harmony: music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Each of the seven arts holds something symbolic, and each is accompanied by a text displayed on the arch above it. Grammar (at 12 o'clock) holds a book and a whip. The text reads: Through me all can learn what are the words, the syllables, and the letters. Rhetoric (at 2 o'clock) holds a tablet and stylus. The text reads: Thanks to me, proud speaker, your speeches will be able to take strength. Dialectic (at 4 o'clock) points with a one hand and holds a barking dog's head in the other. The text reads: I allow arguments to join, dog-like, in battle. Music (at 5 o'clock) holds a harp, and other instruments are nearby. The text reads: I teach my art using a variety of instruments. Arithmetic (at 7 o'clock) holds a cord with threaded beads, like a rudimentary abacus. The text reads: I base myself on the numbers and show the proportions between them. Geometry (at 9 o'clock) holds a staff and compass. The text reads: It is with exactness that I survey the ground. Astronomy (at 11 o'clock) points heavenward and holds in hand a magnifying lens or mirror. The text reads: I hold the names of the celestial bodies and predict the future. The large ring around the whole scene contains four aphorisms and the stages through which Philosophy works (investgation, writing, and teaching): What it discovers is remembered; Philosophy investigates the secrets of the elements and all things; Philosophy teaches arts by seven branches; It puts it in writing, in order to convey it to the students. Below the circle are four men seated at desks -- poets or magicians, outside the pale and beyond the influence of Philosophy. According to the text they are guided and taught by impure spirits and they produce is only tales or fables, frivolous poetry, or magic spells. Notice the black birds speaking to them (the antithesis of the white dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit).")
Things tend to quiet down this week, even if like me you are eg Jewish and don’t really ‘celebrate Christmas’ it is wonderful how the season brings stillness and time for reading, thinking and reflecting. So I thought I’d do the second part of my continuing advice on how not to let an AI tell you that your brain is worth less and can do less than it can really do. It was begun in a fury after I saw an AI-written post on how to be ‘disgustingly well-educated’1 that seemed to me to have absolutely the “bigotry of low expectations” about humans, encouraging us all into precisely the horrible trap of doing much much less than we are capable of that I talk about here.
I am a great believer that fury can be very creative, and I’ve used it as a jumping-off point to go “no, don’t give in to the low expectations, don’t let your brain turn to paste.” Last time I did a general “how to use internet searching to find great stuff to put into your brain” and “how to find stuff to listen to that will actually educate you”. That part is here:
But I’ve been reflecting on what it is that drove me bananas about the slop and what I’m talking about. The promise of being “well-educated” is not that we get to impress people at brunch. It’s that our lives feel richer, more meaningful, that every day within our minds we have the company of people who have thought deeply about human life. It is an amazing promise,: “you can stand on shoulders of giants and so sometimes see further than even they could”. What we are trying to do here is learn stuff, think new thoughts and understand new elements of this amazing world we live in. Rather than having an undemanding pappy learning-style experience. (Like a food-style product, something that isn’t toxic but doesn’t actually give you any nourishment.)
And the more I think about it - and I’m loving thinking about it - what I’m talking about is a web of thinking that human beings have been doing for several thousand years now. Writing down what we’re thinking about, reflecting on what others have written. We’re talking about entering into the long conversation of humanity with itself. We will never get to all of it. But it is a place to live and spend our lives. I love the image at the top of this post, women in the ‘garden of delights’ which is not being fed grapes by an oiled servant (sorry) but is peacefully learning.
So what this post is about, really, is research methodology. I realise that it is somewhat based on the things I was trained to do in my Classics MA (which I just passed with a distinction! I will do a big post about that too!). The methodology is:
reading widely
following up references all the way to the source
using those references to guide further reading
That really does apply to everything, and I’m sure I’ll come back to it again and again. In this case, for this post, it’s about reading articles and essays.
learning by reading articles
I have to tell you, this is the bit of that original AI slop that made me so angry that I had to write these posts. It makes me so so angry.
First of all these two truly terrible lines2: “Books are deep dives. Articles are sharp little knives.” Christ alive that is bad writing. It’s so bad you had to make it rhyme. It means nothing, less than nothing. It’s not even the same metaphor unless you like to dive off the high board holding a sharp little knife or two, which I wouldn’t recommend. IT MEANS NOTHING. Articles are also deep dives, usually into smaller subjects! There is nothing to ask about that line, I don’t want to dignify it by trying to make it make sense.
But this, this is what convinced me to write a multi-part angry screed on this subject. Behold, this advice.
“Try this: Read one long-form article every Sunday morning. It’ll ruin brunch conversations in the best way”
No. No, I’m sorry no. Piss off, no.
If you think you’re going to become ‘disgustingly well-educated’ by reading one article a week, you are so far down the Dunning Kruger curve you need to go and read a long-form piece about Dunning Kruger.
I don’t know how to tell you this: these magazines come out once a month, some of them come out once a week and you’re supposed to read the whole thing3.
If you really are planning to read one article only per week, and then spend every Sunday telling your friends and family about what you just read, this is not the way to become “well educated“, this is the way to become an absolute crushing bore. It would ruin your relationships if you tried it, and even worse it would put you off education and reading in a very short amount of time.
I mean, sorry, just imagine it. You become that person who everyone knows reads an article before they see them on a Sunday and then insists on talking about it?! “oh what is Naomi going to be telling us about this week? Has she read one single article about the history of salt and is going to keep on coming up with fun salt facts all morning? Is there any way to put her off? Can we pretend we’ve been kidnapped by pirates?” You’d be ruining brunch in the worst possible way, in fact.
Being well educated, I’m really sorry, does not involve just knowing about one thing and insisting on sharing every single thing you read.
And most importantly, it involves resisting this way in which the world is sliced up into tiny fragments by the internet. Articles don’t exist in a vacuum, they come out of people and publications who have a point of view and which you can get to know. When you read the whole thing - or a good chunk of it - you get to understand what the mind or minds are that are animating that publication. Rather than treating all articles as stand-alone slivers that float past you and are gone, coming from nowhere and returning to nothing.
My friends, try this: get an ISSUE OF A GOOD MAGAZINE once a week. And read the whole thing. I’m going to break down how to use a great magazine as a wonderful guide of entry points to culture but also MY GOD one of the greatest pleasures in human life is sitting on a weekend morning with a cup of coffee and a lovely magazine to read through. I am doing that immediately I finish this post.
Mapu who is actually good at what this stupid AI post is poorly cosplaying at being good at has a great list of suggestions of good places to find things to read. She lists many intellectually serious magazines, they are all good ideas. That post is FREE unlike the AI-generated brain-rot-cheerleading. Here are some brilliant ‘jealousy lists’ of pieces that the writers would have loved to have written.
Oliver Franklin-Wallis’ substack (which I got these from!)
You can pick any of the magazines or publications that they got these pieces from and read an issue of that magazine.
Here is what to do. You would have a bloody good time doing this and at the end of a year you would actually be noticeably better educated. (I am very influenced by what Celine Nguyen talks about in this brilliant podcast about how hard it is to get to understand the normal field of knowledge in the arts and humanities as an adult if you didn’t get that education when you were young.)
Every week, get an issue of one of those magazines and read it from cover to cover. OK fine, if there’s an article in it you really hate about how your school bully became a tech billionaire then fine, I will allow you to skip it. I don’t read articles about sports, we all have stuff we’re just not into. But if you have even a mild level of interest, ideally read it like you’re stuck in a well-provisioned and cosy survival cabin during an Arctic winter and that magazine is your only source of entertainment.
There are 31 magazines on Mapu’s list. You can get most of them via Libby or Borrowbox or Overdrive or other similar library platforms, FOR FREE with a local library ticket which you can usually also get for free. Get one a week, and during holiday weeks get two or three for the week and read the whole thing. After you’ve done that for a year you’ll have read at least two editions of all of them.really enjoy the articles obviously, that’s the first thing. Just have a lovely time.
And. And. When you are reading the articles, if they’re talking about things you don’t understand, go and look up more information (I will allow this while we’re pretending to be in the Arctic cabin as long as you’ve read it properly).
You can finish the article before you start following up the things you have highlighted or jotted down, if you want.
Follow that information up until you have definitely understood the reference or at least until you’ve had a bloody good time.
a worked example
Let’s look at a copy of the New Yorker together to see what I mean. The one for December 22nd 2025 is the puzzles edition, how delightful! Inside this one issue, I have found references to follow up, many many of them. What I’m looking for here is not mostly what the article is about, but things that seem to be taken as ‘a thing a person would probably maybe already have heard a bit about’. Or at least a well-educated rounded person:
a letter talking about Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential
a recommendation of Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine
artists: Nancy Shaver, and in here Robert Rauschenberg, Duchamp, Jean Tinguely, Cy Gavin and Alex Da Corte
in here composers and performers to follow up: Stephen Sondheim, Harold Prince, Arthur Laurents, Mary Rodgers, Lee Remick, Roddy McDowell, Anthony Perkins GOD this column of text alone could give you a month’s movie and music festival just following up the well-regarded things each of these people has made
Broadway musicals: Cats, A Little Night Music, Fiorello!4, Kiss Me Kate5, South Pacific, The Music Man. that’s a pretty good week right there. maybe not the movie of Cats
movies: Sleuth, Psycho, Midnight Madness, the Game, The Last of Sheila
Mozart’s Magic Flute (and here is a study guide for it)
novelists: Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabokov (particularly Speak, Memory), Ian McEwan, Michael Chabon (especially Kavalier & Clay)
the columnist Maureen Dowd and newspapermen William Randolf Hearst and John Temple Graves, WJ Cash and his book “The Mind of the South”
There are plenty of things I hadn’t encountered before there, and I consider myself pretty well-educated. (I’m looking forward to Midnight Madness, the Last of Sheila, Fiorello! and The Mind of the South.) And this isn’t even getting into the review section which will tell you what’s new and good. This is about what’s older and worth knowing about.
I had never heard of John Temple Graves before just now, but now I know he was absolutely awful: a newspaper editor who made a statement defending lynching and denounced allowing African-Americans to vote. I am a tiny bit better educated. I can say that into the 20th century powerful and intelligent men were still defending lynching. I can read his actual words. I can feel my jaw dropping when I do. Now that’s education that will “ruin brunch in the best way”. I read a couple more pieces about him. I find out that his newspaper ran articles about fabricated sexual assaults by Black men on white women which led to the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre. Now I’m getting to know some stuff.
You don’t have to do all this. You can just read the articles! But: are you looking for a wonderfully diverse self-study curriculum? The New Yorker magazine provides you with one you can access for free via your library every week. That’s before you even actually read the articles, which - and I know this is a controversial viewpoint on Substack - are superb because The New Yorker is superb.
I know it is a bit of a joke that everyone has a stack of old New Yorkers that they haven’t got to yet, and this is the reason: they are so densely packed with interesting things. Don’t feel bad if you don’t read every issue, or even not most of them, But get to know these publications as magazines by reading widely within them.
This is how you enter the world of ideas and words. The world of well-educated people. They are constantly dropping crumbs and hints of other references they have in their minds. You can follow those trails now more easily than any generation has ever been able to. You can literally just look any of those things up on Wikipedia and follow the links.
The point is, you don’t want to be the kind of person who turns up to a meal with friends and just regurgitates whatever they read in their one magazine article a week. You want to be a person who uses their reading as a jumping-off point, who follows up threads and gets to understand more than was in that one article that everyone read.
An intelligent magazine or newspaper is your way into all the things you would never have even known to pick up a book about. It is one of the greatest pleasures of life. Don’t let the slop machine persuade you it’s just there to help you show off at brunch.
I originally thought I could do this in three parts but the more I look at it the more I… no, I can’t.
the person who got ChatGPT to write them is laughing all the way to 217,000 subscribers so you know, at least I get to say how bad these lines are
FINE there is no such thing as “supposed to”. But this is what they’re designed for, you know? This is how my grandparents and my parents read magazines. Skip some articles but basically read a LOT if not all of it. Read the ones you didn’t expect to like just in case you do like them. Otherwise why would you pay for that magazine regularly?
how have I never seen this?!
this is going to be on the BBC on New Year’s Eve?! https://www.westendtheatre.com/325107/news/bbc-unveils-christmas-2025-schedule-including-kiss-me-kate-big-night-of-musicals-compilation/
I love this with all my heart. I use the FT Weekend like this, trying to read everything (even HTSI, which this weekend had a great piece on Lucy Boston, whose Knowe series a) I have never read and b) was set in the village next to the one I grew up in). I also just read a (probably AI-derived) line in Instagram, that said our brains are tired from ‘too much knowing’ as in endless news cycles, the non-stopness of the internet. And it struck me, in the context of your piece, that it’s not too much knowing that’s really an issue; it’s being bombarded with the ‘wrong’ (and I use that word with hesitation) type…lots of very shallow AI-driven snapshots and soundbites, that float over us but fill our brains, rather than giving our attention to, and deliberately choosing a few things, like a book, or an album, or a film, one at a time and getting to know them and learn from them.
Thank you for the shoutout :) I absolutely loved this piece! The whole wanting to be “disgustingly well-educated” has been rubbing me the wrong way and you made it make sense. This need to adopt an image without actually putting in the work, the time, and the depth required within them speaks a lot to where we stand at the moment.
There has also been a lot of discourse lately regarding a sort of class division between people that can think critically and the ones who can’t. I do believe this gap will become more and more evident moving forward—especially with AI running rampant—but I find it really interesting how knowledge is turning into status more evidently than it has before. Status symbols always turn into aspirational behaviors, which is exactly what I’m seeing with this superficial need to appear well-educated.
We need as much depth as we need width!!!