“The Good Life, According to Gen Z.” Maya Sulkin talks with several Gen Zers who, in good Porcher fashion, left the big-city corporate rat race to move back home: “In college, Zosha’s goal had always been to move to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter, with her high school sweetheart, Whitaker, in tow. Instead, the young couple were buying a three-acre plot in Perry County, Indiana—the place where they both grew up. ‘This sounds bad,’ she told me sheepishly, ‘but we thought we were better than this. We wanted to move away and prove ourselves.’”
“Finding Lights in a Dark Age—or, Writing ἀποκάλυψις.” Chris Smaje describes the book he’s recently completed and his reflections on the value of writing: “The apocalypse we’re entering, however disastrous, is a revelation or uncovering of what we’ve been getting wrong, and we need to look unflinchingly at that if we’re to avoid worse disaster. What we’ve been getting wrong is not fundamentally things like the carbon we’re putting into the atmosphere, the fossil fuels we’re burning, the meat we’re eating, the excess water we’re using, or the endless habitats and wild species we’ve been obliterating. These are more symptom than cause. What we’ve been getting wrong is culture. What we’ve been getting wrong is our spiritual orientation to place and to meta-place.”
“Now I Know What My Mother Was Saying.” Elizabeth Bruenig muses on how being a mother herself has deepened her appreciation for her mother’s love: “The comedy of maternal love is that its seismic intensity is expressed, most of the time, in totally mundane drudgery.”
“Saving the Farm: How One Southern Family Has Long Championed the Radical Power of Rural Life.” Jason Kyle Howard talks with Mary Berry about her work with the Berry Center: “When our agrarian life began to fall apart here—meaning we lost the tobacco program, we were losing small dairies, things were so unsettled—then differences between people—political differences, differences of opinion about social issues and so on—suddenly were big problems. When the population became unsettled, then those political differences became the most important thing. We didn’t have enough in common anymore and I think that is representative of what’s happening in the entire country. People are unsettled, and when people get unsettled they get scared.”
“AI Will Change What It Is to Be Human. Are We Ready?” In a rather milquetoast essay, Tyler Cowen and Avital Balwit ask the right questions and then fail to really address them: “the most fundamental, existential question we will soon face: What does it mean to be human in an age of superintelligent machines? What exactly is special about our minds? What is there left for our species to do?” After a lot of “one view” says this, “the alternative view” says that hem-hawing, they conclude that the overall results will be good because all technological progress is basically good: “Powerful AI will transform our world. But our world has transformed many times—and few of us would choose to be on the other side of those transformations.”
“A Matter of Words.” For a much more intelligent and bracing essay, see Megan Fritts’s call for us to be clear about the purpose of human writing: “Keeping up with advances in AI technology is not the biggest challenge we face. To come up with a good AI policy for a university, a department or even a household, one first has to have an idea of which skills and formative experiences they are prepared to lose for the sake of AI use, and which ones they will fight to retain. And it’s here that we have discovered that consensus is most importantly lacking.”
“America Should Sprawl? Not If We Want Strong Town?” Charles Marohn specifies the kind of housing development that America needs: “The real path forward isn’t to pretend a retreat into endless outward expansion is possible—it’s a return to building places that grow stronger over time. That means building incrementally. It means creating neighborhoods that can evolve and adapt, where each new investment reinforces the ones that came before it.”
“Branding Day in Nebraska.” Hunter Armstrong attends a community work day and tries to discern what makes for resilient ranching communities: “Here in the heart of the Nebraska Sandhills, forty people from eight cattle ranches have gathered at S. Ranch for this morning’s work. With the help of neighboring ranches, a cattle operation can do its spring branding in a single go, marking hundreds of calves. These ranchers have been holding this event every year for decades, spending much of May working at each other’s branding days.”
“There Are Ways to Die With Dignity, but Not Like This.” L.S. Dugdale articulates how assisted suicide bills are the wrong response to a medical industry that can prioritize the mechanical continuation of a body’s functions: “Some years ago, I began to advocate a revival of the medieval practice of ars moriendi, or the art of dying — a more accepting, less fearful, more community-based approach to the end of life. I believe that in many cases, it is wise to forgo life-extending interventions for the sake of a higher quality of life and a better death. Given my views, you might expect that I would celebrate the Medical Aid in Dying Act recently passed by the New York State Assembly and now awaiting action in the New York State Senate. But this bill, like similar legislation that facilitates dying in places such as Oregon and Canada, is not about dying well. It is about relieving society — government, medical systems, even families — of the responsibility to care for those who need the most help: the mentally ill, the poor, the physically disabled.”
“Morning Song.” Brian Miller is already harvesting cauliflower from his garden. I’m just getting my first radishes: “I sit with my coffee, as I have so many mornings on this same porch for the past quarter-century, and try not to think but simply take pleasure in being part of this small world.”
“Working the Factory Floor.” Brandon Daily considers the benefits and challenges of repetitive, factory labor: “While this work could be boring and a very Sisyphean endeavor, it kept me busy, physically fit and I found (in agreement with Eric Hoffer) that it freed my mind up for deep thought.”
