John Dickerson

John Dickerson is co-anchor of "CBS Evening News" and anchor of "CBS Evening News Plus." He is also a Contributing Writer to The Atlantic and is co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest.

  • 03/25/2023: A Voluptuary under the horrors of Digestion

    The Met has a wonderful write-up of all that is going on in this etching:

    A Voluptuary Under the Horrors of Digestion, James Gillray (British, London 1756–1815 London), Hand-colored etchingJames Gillray’s famously brutal caricature of George, Prince of Wales encapsulates the effects of uncontrolled self-indulgence upon the heir to the British throne. Sprawled in his chair after a lavish meal, the prince picks his teeth with a meat fork; his lack of gentility is underscored by the over-flowing chamber pot at his elbow used to anchor unpaid bills. Just thirty years old, his accumulated ailments can be inferred from remedies piled at right – pills and potions to treat “stinking breath”, “piles” (hemorrhoids), venereal disease and poor digestion. A portrait on the wall suggests a more effective remedy – depicting Luigi Carnarro, a Venetian nobleman whose life was famously saved by going on a strict diet. By including “Voluptuary” in the title, Gillray invoked contemporary worries that traditional British masculine virtues were being enervated by a culture obsessed with luxury.

    Click here to get a very close up view of the etching. Gillray had a troubled and fascinating life which I should like to know more about. Or, if you prefer…about which I should like to know more.

    • More Notions

  • 03/25/2023: A satisfying GPT exchange

    A lot of the coverage of change GPT has been about the learning and development of artificial intelligence. What I wonder is how we, as humans, are going to slowly learn and acculturate to the kinds of exchanges with ChatGPT and its cousins. What I’m thinking about is the psychological closeness that will accrue in […]

  • 03/24/2023: Chat GPT on the difference between how to think about important issues.

    There is a gap in American public conversation between what gets covered and what is objectively important. Presidential campaigns exacerbate this gap. I asked Chat GPT to list the important stories and then I asked Chat GPT to list the stories about issues that impact the greatest number of Americans, which is a rough proxy […]

  • 03/24/2023: This is how we beat the robots

    I’m not kidding. When artificial intelligence becomes so good at copying human behavior, we will need to get really good at head fakes. Remember this simple rule: head fakes beat deep fakes. This is how we will beat Chat GPT. https://t.co/CZoZUpjYBk — John Dickerson (@jdickerson) March 24, 2023

  • 03/24/2023: We Have Three Questions on Prime Time

    https://johndickerson.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/CN-PT-JOHN-DICKERSON-_17_16x9_JD_SOCIAL-DELIVERABLE.mp4

  • 03/23/2023: Beethoven's Grit and Gut

    You’ve probably seen the stories about how scientists used strands of Beethoven’s hair to examine his DNA. They did so in the hopes of trying to learn more about the cluster of illnesses that troubled the composer throughout his life. He was a mess. I knew that he was afflicted–most notably by a loss of […]

  • 03/22/2023: John McPhee on reading out loud.

    From The Paris Review. INTERVIEWER Is reading your work aloud still important? MCPHEE Certainly the aural part of writing is a big, big thing to me. I can’t stand a sentence until it sounds right, and I’ll go over it again and again. Once the sentence rolls along in a certain way, that’s sentence A. […]

  • 03/22/2023: Historical Shade and political anti-intellectualism

    Governor Ron DeSantis gave this response to Donald Trump’s nickname “Ron Sanctimonious” in a recent interview: “I don’t know how to spell the sanctimonious one. I don’t really know what it means, but I kinda like it, it’s long, it’s got a lot of vowels. We’ll go with that, that’s fine.” The nickname thing is […]

  • 03/21/2023: How Imprint helps me beat the morning and makes the day richer

    For those of you who have read my Atlantic essay on recapturing my day, you know about my daily fight to beat the morning. I have found an extremely useful tool: The Imprint app. I have developped a pretty good routine for keeeping focus while at my desk (thank you Calk Neport, Marshall Goldsmith, David […]

  • 03/18/2023: Writing: The leaving out

    I’ve written a lot in this space about the space in which art takes place. In the writing I’m working on now I’m working on that puzzle. How to say what you need to say, and how to evoke and how to carry along a reader without giving them too much. I don’t want to […]

  • 03/15/2023: Faith and Hope

    At the end of 2020 I wrote about that pandemic year so I wouldn’t forget what it was like. I wrote about hope and Thomas Merton: “By hope…the abstract and impersonal become …intimate conviction,” wrote the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. “What I believe in faith, I possess and make my own by hope.” Hope in […]