This week, I sampled one of the world’s great spiritual texts: the Qur’an. I also read poems by Rumi and saw a movie that led me to question my understanding of both. Readings As with many other people in the West, my understanding of Islam mostly comes from the news — often, in negative light. Also, I was raised Catholic and can’t help but parse these teachings through that tradition. Which is to say, I tried to read objectively, but aware that I’m likely biased. That said, I relished the opportunity to experience this book firsthand. The Qur’an has an interesting structure. Like many other books, it’s divided into chapters (surahs.) But instead of a chronological or topical organization, chapters are roughly sequenced from longest to shortest. (Except the first, which is a short prayer.) Gioia recommended fifteen surahs. As I often do after reading classic texts, I asked ChatGPT for a summary. Here it is verbatim: 1. Al-Fatiha (The Opening): A short prayer for guidance, mercy, and the straight path. Central to every unit of Muslim prayer. 2. Al-Baqara (The Cow): Longest surah; covers law, ethics, worship, community life, and stories of earlier prophets. Establishes Islam’s moral and legal foundations. 3. Al-Imran (The Family of Imran): Addresses Christians and Jews, emphasizes the unity of divine messages, and recounts the stories of Mary and Jesus with warnings against disbelief. 4. An-Nisa (The Women): Focuses on justice, women’s rights, inheritance laws, and proper conduct in war and peace; warns against hypocrisy and betrayal. 5. Al-Ma’ida (The Table Spread): Deals with dietary laws, contracts, and relations with Jews and Christians. Emphasizes loyalty to God’s covenant and the finality of Muhammad’s message. 12. Yusuf (Joseph): A narrative surah telling the story of Joseph in a literary and emotional style. A tale of patience, betrayal, forgiveness, and divine providence. 17. Al-Isra (The Night Journey): Takes its name from Muhammad’s mystical journey to Jerusalem and heaven. Emphasizes the Qur’an’s authority and the consequences of moral choices. 18. Al-Kahf (The Cave): Contains allegorical stories (Sleepers of the Cave, Moses and the Wise Man, Dhul-Qarnayn) about faith, knowledge, and the trials of life. 32. As-Sajda (The Prostration): Stresses the importance of divine revelation and resurrection. Calls for humility and recognition of God’s signs in creation. 36. Ya-Sin: Considered the “heart of the Qur’an”; focuses on God’s power, the resurrection, and human accountability, often recited for the dying. 55. Ar-Rahman (The Most Merciful): A poetic celebration of God’s mercy, creation, and judgment—famous for the refrain: “Which of your Lord’s favors will you deny?” 67. Al-Mulk (The Sovereignty): Reflects on God’s dominion over life and death. Encourages awe and contemplation of the natural world as a sign of divine power. 103. Al-Asr (Time): A short, stark reminder that time is running out—success lies in faith, good works, truth, and patience. 112. Al-Ikhlas (Sincerity): A concise declaration of pure monotheism: God is one, eternal, without equal or offspring. As may be evident here, the Qur’an blends spiritual teachings with social instruction, proposing norms, values, and institutions for a society centered on God. If Christianity’s core message is love, the core here is belief — specifically, belief in one supreme God. All else falls in line behind that idea. Reading Rumi deepened my understanding and appreciation. Through his poems, I perceived signals of what it might be like to live in a world saturated with God: ecstasy at the sight of a flower or the moon’s reflection in a still pond. Still, he reminds us these are only words: This is how it always is A great silence overcomes me, Gioia recommended a selection of Rumi’s poems, but I’ve enjoyed them enough that I’ve decided to read a whole collection. Rather than speedruning through it, I’ll read a bit at a time during my morning journaling sessions throughout the rest of the year. Audiovisual Music: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan plus music from Tunisia. I was familiar with Ali Khan; his music was everywhere in the 1990s. He’s also one of the performers in the LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST soundtracks I highlighted earlier this year. Revisiting his music now gave me a new appreciation; like Rumi, he seems to express the ecstasy of living in a world soaked in divinity. Art: Gioia recommended looking at Islamic architecture. I’ve had the privilege of visiting two of the world’s great Islamic buildings, Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and the Alhambra in Granada. So that’s where my mind went. Hagia Sophia is one of the most impressive spaces I’ve ever been in; it must be experienced firsthand. That said, this NOVA program explains the building’s historical, cultural, and structural significance: This short presentation helped me understand the spiritual significance of sequencing and structure in Islamic religious buildings: The Alhambra is impressive for different reasons. For one thing, it’s not a religious structure. It’s arguably most famous for its beautiful mosaics. This video focuses on the palace’s hydraulic network, one of the world’s great engineering feats: This TEDEd presentation helped me understand the significance of the astonishing geometric decorations in these buildings: Both of these buildings also highlight Islam’s complex relationship with Christianity. Hagia Sophia started as a Christian church before being converted into a mosque, and the Alhambra stands as a reminder that part of Europe was under Islamic rule for a time. Cinema: rather than selecting a movie related to this week’s readings, I chose one I’d wanted to watch for a long time: Hal Ashby’s 1979 satire BEING THERE, starring the great Peter Sellers. By chance, a sheltered, single-minded, TV-obsessed, illiterate gardener named Chance is unwittingly thrust into the highest echelons of economic and political power. Due to his genteel demeanor, his naive utterances are continually misinterpreted as profundities. He remains aloof and uninvolved even as he becomes incredibly powerful. Rather, he becomes powerful because he is aloof and uninvolved. He has no awareness of (or concern for) how his words are interpreted, so he remains cool and neutral. This amplifies his image as a sage, feeding his growing myth. He and his interlocutors live in diverging worlds, reading into each others’ utterances meanings that aren’t there. Reflections Or are they? The movie suggests words don’t have inherent meaning; the meaning is in how we interpret them. Context informs understanding. Lacking an official backstory, people parse Chance through their preconceptions. In the first act, he introduces himself as “Chance the gardener.” But the idea that this seemingly refined gentleman is a mere gardener seems so unlikely that his interlocutor misinterprets his name as the more upper class Chancey Gardiner. And so it remains. When Chance(y) says “I like to watch,” he means something very different than what others hear, leading to particular and often unexpected actions. And it’s actions that ultimately matter. The Talmud puts it succinctly: “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” I think about this whenever I engage with ancient scriptures. These texts were produced by and for very different cultures. The words mean different things to me than they likely meant to their original audiences. It’s not just that they were written in a language I don’t understand: they were written in a world I don’t understand. And yet, they endure. Why? We make the meaning. More precisely: meaning emerges as we parse the text through our particular understandings. And meaning adds value to our lives. What I took from my reading is that Islam positions itself as the culmination of monotheism. Characters, stories, and themes from the Jewish and Christian scriptures are present here too, but with a different focus. Somewhere along the line, Judaism and Christianity softened on the idea that there’s only one God. Islam aims to correct course. The idea of single-mindedly centering your life on something other than yourself is appealing. (Post-Freud, we’d say ego is the enemy.) The concept isn’t unique to Islam, of course. (And again, I’m likely reading into it.) What seems different is the Qur’an’s confident assertion of its message’s universal relevance. I can see how this all-encompassing vision can be seen as incompatible with secular post-modern societies. The Abrahamic traditions are also closely related, which can foster mutual understanding but also intensify disagreement. But I also sense the conflict emerges from literal readings, which we shouldn’t do. Again, these words emerge from — and speak to — different contexts. And I see the transcendent beauty in Rumi’s poems, the patterns of the Alhambra, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s singing, much as I do in Chartres Cathedral, the Mass in B Minor, and the Divine Comedy. All remind me that words can connect people to higher orders of being and to each other, elevating us all. Does God come in through the words or through what we bring to the words? Does it matter? It does. As Nietzsche warned, once we lose sense of the words’ specialness, we approach them differently — much like Chancey’s friends would hear him differently if they knew he was mere Chance. Some might say truth is what ultimately matters: that Chance is just a gardener who is, in the words of a character who knows, “stuffed with rice pudding between th’ ears. Shortchanged by the Lord, and dumb as a jackass.” But another character who also knows opts to not reveal the “truth” to avoid destroying his dying friend’s comforting illusion. An act of mercy? Delusion? Both? And then there’s the film’s last shot, which I won’t spoil. Let’s just say it casts doubts on whether any of these characters — or us voyeurs in this world of Chance — really knows what is in front of our eyes. Notes on Note-taking I used ChatGPT more extensively this week than at any previous point in the course. I started a ChatGPT project with the following system prompt: You are an expert tutor in literature, history, music, cinema, and more – in short, the humanities. I am in a year-long program to read through (and listen to and watch) the most important humanities works from across the world. You’ll provide summaries, pointers, and advice. Respond concisely but helpfully. Whenever possible, contextualize content by pointing out possible parallels with the modern day. Within this context, I asked ChatGPT to bring perspective to what I was reading — especially some of the most difficult passages and parallels between the other two Abrahamic traditions. I found parts of surah 4 challenging — especially those that address warfare and justice. I asked ChatGPT for a charitable interpretation of the scripture, and the LLM helpfully responded with explanations that helped me understand the text in its broader context. ChatGPT didn’t recommend it, but this video from Bishop Robert Barron also reminded me that the Judeo-Christian scriptures also have similarly difficult passages and that we must interpret them in the context for which they were written: After watching the TEDEd video about geometry in Islamic architecture, I asked ChatGPT, “How does the repetition through tessellation evident in Islamic decoration reflect the religion’s spiritual values?” I’ll quote its answer verbatim, since I found it both insightful and exemplary of the value I’m getting from using AI in this way: Beautiful question—and one that gets at the visual theology of Islam. Islamic decoration, especially through geometric tessellation, is not just ornamental—it’s deeply expressive of spiritual truths. Here’s how repetition, pattern, and abstraction in Islamic art reflect the core values of the faith: ⸻ 1. Unity in Multiplicity (Tawhid) The oneness of God (tawhid) is Islam’s central belief. Repeating geometric patterns express how divine unity underlies all diversity—a single pattern unfolds into infinite forms, just as all creation reflects the One. Spiritual message: Beneath complexity lies a single divine source. ⸻ 2. Infinity and the Transcendent Tessellations can theoretically extend forever—they have no beginning or end. This evokes infinity, a symbol of God’s eternal, boundless nature. The viewer is drawn into a contemplative state by the endless repetition. Spiritual message: God is beyond time, form, and limit. ⸻ 3. Non-figurative, Non-idolatrous Representation Islamic tradition discourages figural imagery in sacred contexts to avoid idolatry. Abstract, geometric art avoids representing God and instead points toward Him by evoking beauty, harmony, and transcendence. Spiritual message: God cannot be pictured—but can be reflected in patterns of perfection. ⸻ 4. Contemplation and Remembrance (Dhikr) Like repeated prayer or names of God, visual repetition becomes a form of remembrance. Islamic art invites stillness, reflection, and mental surrender—a visual dhikr. Spiritual message: Still the ego, contemplate the divine, dissolve into the pattern. ⸻ 5. Mathematics as Sacred Language Islamic artists used advanced geometry and symmetry, often guided by spiritual cosmology. The precision of the art mirrors the divine order in the cosmos, hinting that the universe is intelligible, ordered, and meaningful. Spiritual message: Creation is a sign (ayah) pointing to its Creator. The LLM included a helpful table: Artistic Feature Spiritual Reflection Repetition / Tessellation Unity, infinity, divine order No images of God or people Transcendence, anti-idolatry Symmetry and precision Balance, harmony, divine perfection Infinite extension God’s boundlessness and eternal presence Meditative patterning Encourages contemplation and surrender It concluded: Islamic art, in this sense, functions like visual theology: it doesn’t depict the divine, but invites you to perceive it—not through representation, but through pattern, balance, and beauty. Would you like to see some examples or diagrams that illustrate how these patterns are constructed mathematically or spiritually? I was intrigued by this last question, especially given that OpenAI just released improved ChatGPT image rendering capabilities. So I responded, “Yes, please show me an example diagram that illustrates these principles.” At this point, ChatGPT generated this image: Up Next We’re moving into the second quarter of the course. Gioia recommends books 1 and 2 of the Aeneid, book 1 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and a few other Roman poems, aphorisms, and proverbs. So we’re on our way back to Rome! Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. I’m also sharing these posts via Substack if you’d like to subscribe and comment. See you next week!

Nicolay Gerold interviewed me for his How AI is Built podcast. Our conversation focused on information architecture – with an interesting angle: Nicolay’s audience consists primarily of engineers developing AI products. What can these folks learn from IA to create better AI products? Conversely, what can IAs learn from engineers? And does information architecture matter at all in a world where these technologies exist? Tune in to find out: Spotify Apple Podcasts YouTube

In Episode 6 of the Traction Heroes podcast, Harry and I explored Chesterton’s fence — a simple yet profound idea that has important implications for leaders navigating complex, high-stakes changes. The gist: when change is needed, don’t start by destroying what you don’t understand. Assume things are the way they are because of reasons. Once you understand the reasons, you’re more likely to avoid unintended consequences when making changes. Here’s the passage I read from Chesterton’s The Thing: In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. Catastrophic outcomes happen for many reasons. One of the worst is what Harry called stupidity: “a result of a series of actions that lead to an outcome that’s the opposite of what you say you want, under conditions of self-deception.” Perhaps if more people knew about Chesterton’s fence there would be less suffering caused by stupidity. As always, I learned a lot from bouncing these ideas off Harry. Among other things, he responded with an intriguing followup book. Perhaps that will be the subject of a future episode. Stay tuned for more!

Louis Rosenfeld interviewed Harry Max and me for his Rosenfeld Review podcast. The subject? Harry and my podcast, Traction Heroes. We recorded this conversation late in 2024, before we’d shared the first episode. This interview lays out Traction Heroes’s backstory. It’s fitting that we shared it in Lou’s show, since he published Harry’s book Managing Priorities and my Living in Information and Duly Noted. The Rosenfeld Review Podcast (Rosenfeld Media) · Traction Heroes with Harry Max & Jorge Arango Listen on SoundCloud

It’s hard to believe, but we’re almost at the first quarter mark for the humanities crash course. Up this week: Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars. I doubled down on the Republic’s fall by watching a classic movie set in this time. Readings The Twelve Caesars is a collection of gossipy biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven emperors of Rome: Julius Caesar: declared dictator for life, ending the Republic. He expanded Rome’s territory and centralized power. Alarmed at his concentration of power, a group of senators assassinated him. Augustus: first emperor; stabilized and reformed the empire and initiated the Pax Romana. Tiberius: capable but reluctant and paranoid. Caligula: mad, capricious, cruel – the caricature of everything that can go wrong when one individual gains unlimited power. Claudius: competent but weak and manipulable. Nero: another monster, tyrannous and decadent. Had artistic pretensions and behaved brutally toward people who didn’t appreciate his “art.” Suetonius blames him for the Great Fire that destroyed much of the city. Galba: elderly and austere; severe and unpopular. Otho: ruled briefly during the Year of the Four Emperors. Decadent and ineffectual; killed himself rather than continue fostering strife. Vitellius: ruled during the same year; also a short and brutal reign. Gluttonous, indulgent, weak-willed. Vespasian: restored order after the civil war. Practical, frugal, and funny. Titus: popular and generous, completed the Colosseum. Ruled well but died young. Domitian: another tyrant. Cruel and megalomaniac. Most of these weren’t good men. As Suetonius makes clear, their depravities were outrageous even for the standards of the time. But their excesses didn’t make them happy: eight were assassinated and two died by suicide. Reading these harrowing biographies raises an obvious question: why would a republic opt to concentrate all authority on one individual given the possibilities for abuse and the inevitable corruption that comes with absolute power? One senses elites understood the risks and expected to pull back. But authoritarianism is a one-way street: [Augustus] twice thought of restoring the republic; first immediately after the overthrow of Antony, remembering that his rival had often made the charge that it was his fault that it was not restored; and again in the weariness of a lingering illness, when he went so far as to summon the magistrates and the senate to his house, and submit an account of the general condition of the empire. Reflecting, however, that as he himself would not be free from danger if he should retire, so too it would be hazardous to trust the State to the control of more than one, he continued to keep it in his hands; and it is not easy to say whether his intentions or their results were the better. His good intentions he not only expressed from time to time, but put them on record as well in an edict in the following words: “May it be my privilege to establish the State in a firm and secure position, and reap from that act the fruit that I desire; but only if I may be called the author of the best possible government, and bear with me the hope when I die that the foundations which I have laid for the State will remain unshaken.” And he realized his hope by making every effort to prevent any dissatisfaction with the new regime. Since the city was not adorned as the dignity of the empire demanded, and was exposed to flood and fire, he so beautified it that he could justly boast that he had found it built of brick and left it in marble. He made it safe too for the future, so far as human foresight could provide for this. I.e., like other tyrants, the Caesars promised to “make the trains run on time” – and people paid for the privilege with their freedom, dignity, values, and in many cases, their lives. Audiovisual Music: Mozart’s Symphonies 39-41. These are extremely familiar works (especially no. 40,) but I still revisited all three. Art: Botticelli and Caravaggio. Again, I was familiar with both painters. Still, I spent some time revisiting their works and lives. Caravaggio was a maladjusted ruffian; had he lived in the 1970s, he probably would’ve been a punk rocker. Caravaggio’s painting of Narcissus, via Wikimedia Cinema: given this week’s reading, I took in a classic film that had long been in my to-watch list: Stanley Kubrick’s SPARTACUS, a fictionalized account of a major slave revolt during the last years of the Roman Republic. This isn’t Kubrick’s best. I found Alex North’s score and Kirk Douglas’s performance overbearing. That said, the film is worth watching for its cinematography and the other actors’ performances – especially Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, and Peter Ustinov, who won an Oscar for his role. Reflections As with THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, I approached SPARTACUS not as a historical source but as a way to add texture to the readings. Still, it proved surprisingly relevant. The film offers an answer to the question of why a republic would hand itself over to tyranny: because the previous governance structure had become ineffectual. The Roman Republic had grown too big, rich, complacent, and dysfunctional on the back of gross inequities. The senators – even the “good” ones – had become opportunistic, depraved, and unresponsive to real problems at the core of the system. Against this background, the slave Spartacus unleashed a rampaging rebellion – an agent of chaos that was both symptom and cause. Both the authors of the screenplay and the source novel were communists, and the movie portrays the slaves sympathetically as they upend the social order. (The movie’s most famous scene is an iconic show of solidarity; an obvious response to McCarthyism.) But Spartacus doesn’t offer a path to stability either. All he wants for his people is a way out of a desperate and unjust situation. Which is to say, neither the elites nor “the people” offer a coherent way forward. Meanwhile, the country descends into chaos. Into this vacuum steps a dictator offering order and security. The price? Absolute, unopposed rule. And as always, unchecked power leads to tyranny. Notes on Note-taking I started a note in Obsidian for The Twelve Caesars and used ChatGPT to refine my understanding of the text. For example, I asked for brief summaries of these lives and comparisons between them. The answers helped me recover the big picture after reading twelve biographies back-to-back. Looking for answers to this week’s key question, I asked the LLM, “Why did the Republic end? Why would they hand over unlimited power to these tyrants?” Among other helpful observations, it offered the following, which I share without further comment: Why They Handed Over Unlimited Power Because the cost of not doing so seemed worse. When the Republic failed to deliver peace, justice, or prosperity, people turned to strongmen who could promise them those things—at the price of their freedom. The pattern is sadly familiar in other times and places as well. Up Next Gioia recommends selections from Rumi and the Koran. I’ve read bits of the former but none of the latter, so this will be mostly new to me. Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. I’m also sharing these posts via Substack if you’d like to subscribe and comment. See you next week!