If there ever comes a true accounting of the costs we’re racking up for making, using, and discarding our mobile (de)vices, we will be obliged to admit that there has been no net gain. The withdrawals from the account exceed the deposits in both number and in sum.

We might at least keep in mind the importance of proximity and presence and real encounters of flesh and blood. For the messy business of politics let us have Chesterton’s quip: “It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.”

Organized community events bring people together and are an integral part of forging strong communal bonds in a place. Like the law, they serve a purpose in a community’s ecosystem of relationships.

You don’t have to be normal. You don’t have to be weird. You just have to be a person – which is a moral ideal, not a fact of nature – and let the chips fall.

To love and learn from each other in our communities is what good gossiping accomplishes.

If we choose to befriend our many obligations—to connect with other people, to love, to serve, to create, to borrow, to lend, to repair, to celebrate, to support—instead of buying a product or a service—then we are cultivating fertile ground for a healthy form of gendered cooperation to (perhaps) re-emerge.

Maybe, in the end, a home library does what a long-inhabited home does: charts a middle ground between the chaos of the world and the hyper-rationality of modernity.

It is a reality not frequently enough acknowledged: like so many other things in life, the love of reading is caught, not taught.

So the core of We Have Never Been Woke is persuasive, and it's hard not to see his thesis in operation in all kinds of fields, once you look at the world his way.

Joshua Hren’s new novel, Blue Walls Falling Down, releases today. We’re happy to share the following excerpt with FPR readers.

I heard it then, followed by a man’s agonizing cry. I hear it now in every Franco-Norman word we unknowingly pronounce: that arrow piercing King Harold’s eye.