Last Tuesday, Apple released two new significant updates to its lineup of iPads. First, it brought the M2 chip to the 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models. Those units also get a new hover mode feature for Apple Pencil. Here’s how Apple describes that feature:

Apple Pencil is now detected up to 12 mm above the display, allowing users to see a preview of their mark before they make it. This also allows users to sketch and illustrate with even greater precision, and makes everything users do with Apple Pencil even more effortless. For example, with Scribble, text fields automatically expand when the pencil gets near the screen, and handwriting converts to text even faster.

In addition, Apple also introduced a new 10th generation iPad (no suffix). This model brings the newer iPad design language to the iPad: uniform bezels and flat edges. As with the iPad Air, the Touch ID sensor has been moved to the Sleep/Wake button. As with all of its no-suffix forebears, the 10th generation iPad is limited to first generation Apple Pencil compatibility. With the 10th generation iPad, Apple also introduced the new Magic Keyboard Folio. Compatible only with the 10th generation iPad, the Magic Keyboard Folio is a two-piece design. It has a back cover with an adjustable stand and a detachable front cover that, on the inside, sports a trackpad and keyboard. In a first for an Apple-branded iPad keyboard case, there’s even a row of function keys. People have accused Apple of copying the Microsoft Surface keyboard case for years, and the Magic Keyboard Folio is certainly the most Surface-y iPad keyboard accessory yet. The 10th generation iPad also moves the front-facing camera to the landscape edge of the iPad, something no other iPad has ever had.
— Read on yourappleupdate.substack.com/p/is-the-new-ipad-lineup-confusing

I’m excited you’ll be reissuing the first Storm Corrosion album this year. I know you get asked this a lot, but…have you and Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt talked recently about making another album?
It is the 10th anniversary, so we’re doing a new version, and we’re gonna get together and do some press to promote it. We even talked about recording a new track for the new edition, but we said, “If we’re gonna do that, why don’t we just do a new record?” So the subject certainly has come up. I think we would love to do something else together. I don’t think we’d do a follow-up to that record. I think we want to do something quite different again. I don’t know what that would be, but I know that’s the way he is and what I am. That record is so perfect and definitive in what it tries to do and what it achieves. It’s a little diamond, I think. And I think a lot of people missed out on it because it’s not what they expected us to do. But I know that for some people that it’s their favorite thing that either of us have done. I’ve heard that more and more. There’s a little cult growing up around that record.
— Read on www.spin.com/2022/06/steven-wilson-porcupine-tree-reunion-interview/

An extraordinary man by any measure, Owen Barfield (1898-1997), one of the least known of the Inklings, published his first book, History in English Words, in 1926, at the very young age of 27 or 28. One of the finest books I’ve ever read, History in English Words is an in-depth examination of the history of Western civilization as seen through the eyes of English speakers, measuring a significant number of words through their individual journeys and evolutions.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2022/08/owen-barfield-history-in-english-words-bradley-birzer.html

Granted, I love the American West. I love open skies, I love mountains, and I love cool, dry air. Even given all these personal loves, I still think Yellowstone is something truly special. Everywhere you look—in addition to seeing families—you see an abundance of nature, God’s creation at its most glorious. Mountain ranges, vast meadows, deep canyons, pine tree forests, dynamic rivers and waterfalls, boiling and steaming geysers, petrified trees. The landscapes in Yellowstone are as varied as they are vast. As my younger children noted, many of the landscapes in Yellowstone rivaled anything in a fantasy novel (specifically Narnia) or a painting.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2022/08/yellowstone-150-bradley-birzer.html

Yellowstone National Park is something truly special. Everywhere you look, you see an abundance of nature—God’s creation at its most glorious: mountain ranges, vast meadows, deep canyons, pine tree forests, dynamic rivers and waterfalls, boiling and steaming geysers, petrified trees… (essay by Bradley Birzer)
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2022/08/yellowstone-150-bradley-birzer.html

Yet, there are many problems with this. Aside from the critical fact that half of the states, prior to the Civil War, didn’t have slavery, and free labor radically outproduced slave labor (thus, leading to the conclusion that America and capitalism were really built on free labor, not on slave labor), perhaps the biggest problem resides in our very Founding and the documents that define it. In particular, it is worth considering the Declaration of Independence, passed on July 4, 1776, and signed on August 2, 1776. In it, Jefferson first defines the nature of the universe and man’s role within it. That is, “when in the course of human events….” In the following paragraph, though, Jefferson made a statement that astounded the world. But, to Jefferson and Congress, they were merely stating the obvious: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” To be sure, this has to be one of the most powerful sentences in the history of the world, especially in its non-religious history. Critically, the statement claims that “all men”—not some men, not non-Catholics (see, for example, the 1689 English Bill of Rights), or not non-whites—are created equal. The founders could have easily tempered this statement, but they didn’t. Indeed, it exists in a world of glory, and it became, as Martin Luther King, Jr., so profoundly understood it, a promissory note. Just because Americans did not live up fully to the statement in 1776 did not mean that they never would.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2022/07/americas-anti-slavery-legacy-bradley-birzer.html

What does it take to make a living as a musician in the modern economy? Our reporter goes on the road with genre-bending rock band Bent Knee.
— Read on www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Music/2022/0722/Almost-famous-With-merch-tours-and-hope-this-band-rocks-on