“How Major League Baseball Lost its Soul.” Bill Kauffman may be biased, but at least he’s honest: “I highly recommend Homestand, Will Bardenwerper’s new book contrasting the community-enhancing qualities of grass-roots baseball with the soulless corporate product that Major League Baseball has become – and it’s not just because I am a central character therein. The book is at once a beautiful portrait of bleacher-level society and a scathingly effective indictment of the automatons who are destroying the American game.”
“As Musk Prepares to Step Away From DOGE, Lawmakers Aren’t Sure His Cuts Will Stay.” Haley Byrd Wilt talks with Rep. Thomas Massie and others about the lasting effects of DOGE: “‘Congress is supposed to do what DOGE does, so maybe my colleagues will be inspired. But I doubt it,’ Massie told NOTUS. ‘Congress is more just like a vestigial organ of this government. It’s like an appendix. We write strongly worded letters. We express righteous indignation at hearings, and then we just rubber stamp everything we did last year.’ Musk’s work has certainly had far-reaching effects, from ending careers across the federal government to halting health care grants in multiple states to cutting off life-saving medical care abroad after DOGE’s abrupt shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development. But Musk is no closer to accomplishing what he set out to do: slashing government spending.”
“Cargo Cults and the Disorganization of America.” James McElroy considers what decadence looks like in organizations: “Many cultural and political concerns are connected to the unique characteristics of decomposing organizations. Without virtue, monarchy decays into tyranny, aristocracy decays to oligarchy, democracy decays to mob rule, and the organization decays into the cargo cult. The term ‘cargo cult’ originated after World War II to describe a pattern of behavior found among indigenous tribes on Pacific islands. During the war, military airfields were quickly created on remote islands and then abandoned. The inhabitants continued to try and summon planes filled with cargo by recreating structures that looked like airfields. These activities often transformed into a type of religious ritual. Stripped of all sense-making context, the word cargo took on magical meaning. It is easy to think of these cults as a historical curiosity, but they represent a recurring pattern of thinking, and a difficult problem that Americans must solve.” (Recommended by Adam Smith.)
“What if Collapse Has Already Happened?” Brian Miller considers possible responses to societal breakdown: “We could pursue Berry’s vision, that ‘we must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do.’ Or we could follow the lead of the man in China (below) who carefully tends a garden amidst the rubble of an abandoned overpass.”
“Art That Probes the Darkness Sometimes Darkens Itself.” I review Andrew Klavan’s The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness and consider how good art should portray evil: “A persistent source of frustration in reading Klavan’s potted summaries of paintings, books, and films is his assumption that artists merely reflect their culture. If you find a work of art lacking or degenerate, he writes, ‘don’t blame the artist, blame the spirit of the age.’ This is, of course, the villain Edmund’s defense in King Lear when he declares that ‘men / Are as the time is,’ thus rationalizing his murderous deeds. Yet culture is never monolithic; Dostoevsky and Flannery O’Connor situate sin and evil in very different narratives than do Nietzsche or Woody Allen.”
“Listening to the Land.” John-Paul Heil has a radical proposal for responding to our broken relationship with farm land: “I believe the parish’s role can be more than a passive intermediary between Catholics and the land. The parish should instead become a direct means for us to engage with the earth around us. I propose that Catholic parishes open farms.”
“Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College.” James D. Walsh talks with students and professors about the AI tsunami hitting colleges: “Lee thought it absurd that Columbia, which had a partnership with ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, would punish him for innovating with AI. Although Columbia’s policy on AI is similar to that of many other universities’ — students are prohibited from using it unless their professor explicitly permits them to do so, either on a class-by-class or case-by-case basis — Lee said he doesn’t know a single student at the school who isn’t using AI to cheat. To be clear, Lee doesn’t think this is a bad thing. ‘I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating,’ he said.” If I count as somebody, then we aren’t months away from this world.
“The Cult of Doing Business.” In a perceptive review essay, Drew Calvert considers what properly meaningful work should look like: “As every self-help reader knows, the most successful careerists leverage their own unique personalities to achieve results and add value. They work for themselves. They love what they do. They are radiant with a higher purpose. In a word, they are ‘entrepreneurial.’ In his new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, historian Erik Baker calls this self-help ideology ‘the rot festering at the core’ of our national obsession with work.” (Recommended by Gillis Harp.)
“The Missing Branch.” Yuval Levin makes a case for Congress to start doing its job: “Congress is not doing its job, and the vacuum that its dereliction has created is encouraging presidential and judicial overreach. Congress’s weakness is our deepest constitutional problem, because it is not a function of one man’s whims and won’t pass with one administration’s term. It is an institutional dynamic that has disordered our politics for a generation. It results from choices that members of Congress have made, and only those members can improve the situation. It is hard to imagine any meaningful constitutional renewal in America unless they do.”
“How a Social Network is Bringing People Together in Increasingly Divisive Times.” Judy Woodruff talks with several people about Vermont’s basic social network (which has an excellent name). As Paul Lyons explains, “Front Porch Forum is helpful, in that there’s no comments section. The only way you can connect with somebody is to connect with them. It’s not owned by billionaires. It’s not being used to extract time, energy and attention from people.” (Recommended by T.M. Moore.)
