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We were excited to record and share this conversation with Matt Dinan, a professor who teaches in a Great Books program at St. Thomas University, a liberal arts college in New Brunswick, Canada. It brings together longtime preoccupations of the show — Saul Bellow's late novel, Ravelstein, Allan Bloom, Straussian political philosophy — with the fraught emergence of LLMs like ChatGPT. This past semester, Dinan took a fairly radical approach to confronting AI in the classroom, and it seemed to work. We consider the art of teaching, the qualities of great teachers, and what it all reveals about an insidious technology's effect on how we live and learn as citizens in, at least for now, a democratic republic.

Listen again: "Unraveling Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow," June 21, 2021

Sources:

Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (2000)

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987)

Matt Dinan, "Saul Bellow's Ravelstein," Hedgehog Review, Spring 2025

— "Permission Structures," Prefaces, Dec 10, 2025

— "It's Not Just a Calculator," Prefaces, Aug 28, 2024

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Lottery in Babylon," Collected Fictions (1999)

Jonathan Malesic, "ChatGPT Is a Gimmick: AI cannot save us from the effort of learning to live and die," Hedgehog Review, May 21, 2025

— "Taming the Demon: How desert monks put work in its place," Commonweal, Feb 2, 2019

Great Books and the AI Apocalypse (w/ Matt Dinan) [Teaser]