“The Tulsa Honors College: A Cautionary Tale.” The details of the dissolution of the Honors College at Tulsa continue to be quite discouraging. Kayla Bartsch puts together the grim story: “The college increased enrollment by over 500 percent compared with the previous honors program, raised retention rates, brought in several major grants and gifts, revived the study of ancient Greek and Latin on campus, standardized the honors curriculum for all students, and nourished a vibrant student life through the establishment of an honors residence for freshmen. No one could understand why a program with such promise would draw the ax. So what happened? A philistine board, a power vacuum, and an antagonistic administrator created the perfect storm for the Honors College at TU.”
“The Return of the Family Doctor.” Brewer Eberly practices medicine at a clinic whose model was inspired by Jayber Crow: “Jayber, the titular town barber, makes house calls to the farmer Athey Keith in the last months of his life, following a series of strokes, to cut his hair and be with him. Ben said to himself, ‘I want to doctor like Jayber barbered.’ So Ben wrote to Wendell Berry. Berry wrote back, ‘I am always delighted to hear from professionally dissatisfied physicians.’ The Berrys invited Ben and his wife, Liz, to their farm in Kentucky, where they sat around their kitchen table and talked about how one might reform primary care. In 2016, the Fischers founded the clinic in which I now practice.”
“We’ve Seen ‘Designer Babies’ Before.” Charles Camosy draws parallels between pagan practices of infanticide and modern embryo selection technologies: “Swipe right, and your high-IQ embryo is allowed to become a human being; swipe left, and the less intelligent or otherwise less desirable child is discarded. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is a high-tech reversion to Hilarion’s and Alis’s pagan mindset. The only question is whether our civilization can muster the resources to resist it, as the Church stamped out the original.”
“After Civility.” Elizabeth Grace Matthew argues that social mores are easy to criticize but difficult to build: “Today, in relation to phenomena ranging from sex and dating, to marriage and family formation, to sociality itself, there is an erosion of what so recently felt like unimpeachable standards. Perhaps, it turns out, those fumes of the old ways were responsible for the continuance of our baseline humanity, both personal and societal. Perhaps a post-patriarchal, post-religious, post-institutional world turns out to be a post-human world as well.”
“The A.I.-Profits Drought and the Lessons of History.” AI hasn’t been paying off yet. John Cassidy reports on why that might be and if it will have more of an effect in the years to come: “The survey interviews elicited a range of responses, some of which were highly skeptical. ‘The hype on LinkedIn says everything has changed, but in our operations, nothing fundamental has shifted,’ the chief operating officer at a midsize manufacturing firm told researchers. ‘We’re processing some contracts faster, but that’s all that has changed.’ Another respondent commented, ‘We’ve seen dozens of demos this year. Maybe one or two are genuinely useful. The rest are wrappers or science projects.’”
“The Man in the Red Beret: What Curtis Sliwa Brings to New York’s Wild Mayoral Race.” Jesse Walker profiles a viable candidate in New York City’s crazy mayoral race: “While his signature issue will probably always be public safety, there’s a larger worldview lurking behind the crime talk: an instinctive localism that can’t always be contained by those familiar political boxes of left and right or libertarian and statist. Mix that with his offbeat history and his talk-radio style, and you’ve got the most interesting character in the race.” (Recommended by Bill Kauffman.)
“Authenticate Thyself.” Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy consider the apt name—ordinateur—that IBM almost used for its first computer: “Computers authenticate our souls and find our innermost truths. They shape our search for meaning in a disorienting and fragmented world. They foster new forms of political communion and sectarian schism. Above it all, stands the sovereign individual – the embodiment of modern selfdom, served by the ordinateur’s ruthless logic and its power, while it lasts, to manufacture gold out of bits.” (Recommended by Russell Arben Fox.)
“How the Government Built the American Dream House.” Joseph Lawler explains why suburbia has come to dominate America: “Big government, not the free market, is the reason the suburban single-family home has become the symbol of the American lifestyle. Across the United States, it is functionally illegal to build housing like what you find on Elfreth’s Alley, Philadelphia, one of the most photographed residential areas in the country, famous for its gorgeous row houses in the middle of the city. At the same time, the federal government subsidizes the construction of McMansions in greenfield locations miles from the nearest town center.”
“Why Is School Choice So Controversial?” Dixie Lane explains why the push for school choice isn’t going to go away, no matter how much some people may wish it would: “Parental influence on local schooling is waning, but parents’ desire to have influence is not: parents want choices for their children’s education. While some public schools serve some children well, it is clear from the data that they do not serve most children well even on a merely academic level, and it’s not getting any better in most states (with the exception of some exciting reading gains in some parts of the South).”
“At the World’s Biggest Bug Farm, 10 billion Maggots Recycle Food Waste.” Nicolás Rivero reports on the bug farm industry. Black soldier flies are great in small-scale operations to feed chickens, but I’m not sure concentrating billions of them in one facility is a good idea: “In nature, black soldier fly larvae are gifted recyclers, gorging themselves on dead and decaying plants and animals, neutralizing germs and turning rot into a source of protein that nourishes fish, birds and other creatures. The French start-up Innovafeed wants the fly larvae to do the same for human society on an industrial scale, clearing out thousands of tons of food waste and turning it into animal feed on ultraefficient, mechanized farms.”
