Front Porch Republic
The Front Porch Republic Curse?
You are probably familiar with the concept of the “Sports Illustrated cover jinx.”
The Localist at the Capitol: A Conversation with Marie Glusenkamp Perez
"I don't particularly call myself an environmentalist. I love the Pinchot National Forest. My specific woods, the land that my family is from..."
Kill Your Epistemic Arrogance
When the algorithm identifies someone as a “gang member” based on human-generated criteria, the model’s “ground truth,” however flawed, becomes a stand-in for reality.
Of Furniture and Formation
The furniture of the old churches and chapels formed the habitus of those who worshipped there regularly.
News, Notes, & Podcasts
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Markets, Slop, and Alyosha
Jen Pollock Michel describes what she’s learned while caring for her aging mother.
Pints, Children, and Libraries
“Food Is Not Magic.” Garth Brown probes the oddities that ensue when people conscript food into an ideological project: “Contradictions and superficiality do not discredit the claim that the modern…
Identity, Mundanity, and Vaccines
Matthew Crawford points out that much new technology today only adds layers of friction rather than actually solving a problem.
Ivan Illich, Byung-Chul Han, and Cloning
Bianca Bosker dives into the weird and disturbing world of making creatures.
More Articles
The Times Can’t Tell Us What We Should Do
How do people maintain the illusion that “the times” are on their side?
What We Lose When We Lost the Plot
He who has a piece of ground to call his own is not truly bereft, no matter what else is lost.
Dissonance, Harmony, and Expectation: On Music and Life
Sometimes in life, silence pervades our stories. The dissonance has passed, and we wait. We wait for resolution; we wait for harmony.
Choosing Wildness
Even if I cannot patch every leak, I still may carry some water. After all, a leaking bucket is not necessarily an empty bucket. I guess I will have to refill it as often as I can.
Books and Blessings: The Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life
We do not need more thought leaders, but more thoughtful human beings.
The Ignored Faces of Homelessness: A Review of There Is No Place for Us
When people are trying this hard and still end up sleeping with their children on the floor of a storage room, something has gone seriously wrong with our society.
The Land Ethic for AI
We have long drawn a dividing line between technology and humans, imbuing one with ethical responsibility and treating the other as merely contingent— therefore, technologies are “neutral” and it’s simply how they are used that matter.
The Abolition of the Human
AI is a technology that eliminates process. It offers the grail without the quest.
Birmingham in June
Colby said the two men settled their dispute like men, but they looked more like buffoons than men to me.
An Agrarian Prayer
If you have ever prayed the Lord’s prayer, then you have prayed for the soil and its earthworms—even if you didn’t intend to.
From the Archive
Narnia Against the Machine: Deep Magic for the Modern Age
Witnessing the ascendancy of the Machine, Lewis understood what was at stake. He watched this ideology sweep across his society and take hold in its schools, and he keenly felt…
Spiritual Secession: A Conversation with Paul Kingsnorth
" None of your readers need me to tell them that the useful work is practical, particular, small and careful: to get away from screens as much as we can, get…
Cultivating the Skills that Freedom Requires in Matthew Crawford’s Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road
Human driving requires unending mutual predictions and constant accommodations for each other. It is in such experiences that we end up with something meaningful for life in the physical world…
The Whole Hog
Alexandria, VA They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can sometimes tell how the book’s designers wanted the book to be judged at first glance.…
Working with Words
Our relationship was still in its early swoon when Nate came to pick me up from work one night. He was so obviously excited to see me that even my…