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.

  • 03/15/2023: 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 the unseen. Hope in a better future. Hope in heaven. This is worship. If you hope that hope will carry you through, it will. (You can also write that sentence a different way: If you hope, that hope will carry you through. It will. The first is an instruction and the second one is a promise. They are saying the same thing but also something slightly different which contributes to the liquid boundaries of hope.)

    The reading this past Sunday was one of, if not the passage, that Merton seemed to be relying on for that view:

    Reading II

    Rom 5:1-2, 5-8

    Brothers and sisters:
    Since we have been justified by faith,
    we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
    through whom we have gained access by faith
    to this grace in which we stand,
    and we boast in hope of the glory of God.

    And hope does not disappoint,
    because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts
    through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
    For Christ, while we were still helpless,
    died at the appointed time for the ungodly.
    Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person,
    though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die.
    But God proves his love for us
    in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.

    • More Notions

  • 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: James 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; […]

  • 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: 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

  • 03/24/2023: 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

  • 03/23/2023: 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 […]