“Canada Is Killing Itself.” Elaina Plott Calabro describes what happens when individual autonomy is taken to its logical end: “Has Canada itself gotten what it wanted? Nine years after the legalization of assisted death, Canada’s leaders seem to regard MAID from a strange, almost anthropological remove: as if the future of euthanasia is no more within their control than the laws of physics; as if continued expansion is not a reality the government is choosing so much as conceding. This is the story of an ideology in motion, of what happens when a nation enshrines a right before reckoning with the totality of its logic. If autonomy in death is sacrosanct, is there anyone who shouldn’t be helped to die?”
“Democracy by the Book.” Antón Barba-Kay reflects on the relationship between the medium of print and the institutions that sustain democracy: “the deterioration of democratic practices and institutions during the past twenty years has revealed the degree to which democracy relies on a moral infrastructure of habits, rapports, and dispositions toward the word in particular. And whereas our trajectory so far has largely been one in which democratic norms have been gradually burned out by our information environment, the fate of democracy actually requires (pace TikTok) that we try to articulate what the moral infrastructure of this democracy is, how digital practices bear on it, and whether these practices can be harmonized with it.” (Recommended by Rob Grano.)
“Look at What Technologists Do, Not What They Say.” Christine Rosen pens a biting response to Katherine Boyle’s rosy picture of techno-families: “It’s nice that Silicon Valley companies like Andreessen Horowitz are sending thoughtful mothers like Katherine Boyle out into the world to talk about families. It’s condescending in the extreme to hear them tell American families that technologists know best, and to avoid any accountability for the products from which they profit that have already done a great deal of harm to families, children most of all. Look at what the technologists do, not what they say: many don’t let their own children use the products they create and invest in. Why should we trust them when they tell us we must embrace them in our own families to further the mission of ‘American dynamism?’ Thus far, the ‘winners in this space,’ as Silicon Valley likes to say, haven’t been families.” Don’t miss Leah Libresco Sargeant’s contribution to this conversation: “What we need is less time in the HOV lane, by whatever name, and more time in humane, face-to-face pursuits. In my neck of the woods, that’s amateur play readings, religious processions, and phoneless Postman Pledge field days. Whether we’re gearing up to fight state overreach or the intrusive algorithm, we need time drilling in our little platoons.” And Patrick Deneen weighs in with some wisdom as well: “The family is in crisis in the West and around the world not because of authoritarianism, but because of our luxury to be free of those social bonds. By Nisbet’s telling, the modern state arose not so much to attack the family, as to replace many of the functions that had been undone by modern economics and technology.”
“ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life.” Harvey Lederman poses difficult questions about the value and meaning of work: “Grief, you don’t need me to tell you, is a complicated beast. You can grieve for something even when you know that, on balance, it’s good that it’s gone. The death of these dialects, of the stories told on summer nights in the mountains with the cows, is a loss reasonably grieved. But you don’t hear the kids wishing more people would be forced to stay or speak this funny-sounding tongue. You don’t even hear the old folks wishing they could go back fifty years—in those days it wasn’t so easy to be sure of a meal. For many, it’s better this way, not the best it could be, but still better, even as they grieve what they stand to lose and what they’ve already lost.” (Recommended by Nick Freiling.)
“A Noted Author Looks for the Soul of America – In Batavia.” Erik Brady talks with Will Bardenwerper about Homestand and describes the role baseball continues to play in Bill Kauffman’s hometown: “Bardenwerper knew little of Batavia before Kauffman’s invitation to visit. Now he goes a time or two every summer – to see old friends and bask in baseball. His 7-year-old son is a batboy when they go, just as Bill Kauffman, and his father before him, were batboys in earlier iterations of the Muckdogs. . . . The timeless themes of ‘Our Town’ are about appreciating the fleeting moments of everyday life and the interconnectedness of community. Such themes also abound in ‘Homestand.’ Think of it as ‘Our Team.’” (Recommended by Dave Lull.)
“Will Bardenwerper on Baseball’s Betrayal of Its Minor League Roots.” Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan talk with Will Bardenwerper about his book: “This was highlighted wonderfully or terribly, depending on how you look at it, by this Field of Dreams game that they stage out in Iowa. They put on a Major League game at the ballpark that was built for the Kevin Costner movie, Field of Dreams. And it’s this ode to Americana and to baseball’s historic role in our country. But when you dig down, you realize that everyone at the game, or most of the people, are wealthy people from the Coast who fly there, buy the tickets that are thousands of dollars on the secondary market. And at the same time, they had cut two actual Iowa teams that were in the minor leagues that were a few hours away. How do the people that actually live in Iowa benefit from this? Now there’s one game of summer that they can’t afford, and the two teams that they could go to every night were cut to save a little bit of money.” (Recommended by Bill Kauffman.)
“Real Virtue Has Roots.” Kevin Brown critiques Singer’s utilitarianism—and the logic that’s become popular these days in effective altruism circles—by defending a different moral tradition: “Singer’s universalism is also thinly constituted—it tells us what we ought to do, but not how we become the kind of people who will do it. To understand this limitation, we can contrast it with a thickly constituted framework—one shaped by narrative, community, and identity—that more closely mirrors a Christian moral understanding.”
“The Anglican Spirit of the Riverbank.” Mark Clavier “Anglicanism, at its best, has always understood that often faith isn’t simply taught—it’s inherited, lived, absorbed. And books like this make that possible. They shape the moral imagination that disposes people to a Christianity that’s earthed and neighbourly. If that’s right, then perhaps Anglicanism owes more to The Wind in the Willows—and to Winnie-the-Pooh, and The Chronicles of Narnia—than we tend to admit. Not because these books lay out doctrine, but because they prepare the heart to receive it.”
“The Word Made Lifeless.” Talbot Brewer plumbs the theological and ontological significance of words as generated by LLMs: “They are, as it has aptly been put, stochastic parrots. It would be a brazen slander for anyone to add: and so are we, as Sam Altman did in a 2023 tweet soon after the release of ChatGPT: ‘i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.’ Such words could emerge only from a willful forgetting of the lived experience of being human and of seeking to say something worthwhile to fellow humans. No one speaking to his own child in a moment of despair, or to his spouse in a moment of marital reckoning, could consciously aim for faithful mimicry of the patterns laid down by past generations of fellow mimickers.”
“China Is Overtaking America. In an Electric Car.” Ethan Dodd describes the electric-car arms race that China is winning: “Tesla, Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company, was once a potent symbol of America’s technological supremacy: a reminder that this country has the best ideas—and the will to make them happen. But, in a sign of the times, America’s EV pioneer now faces a growing threat from Chinese companies that have studied American inventions, replicated them, and arguably surpassed them, selling them—at scarily cheap prices—around the world.”
“A Defense of AI Parenting.” I don’t agree with all of Rachel Lu’s arguments here, but she makes a strong case for the benefits that LLMs can bring to families: “When it comes to chatbot intimacy, ‘just say no’ certainly is my best advice, to my children or anyone else. But when LLMs are used as tutors and sources of information, the questions get much harder. Here too, there are painful losses on the horizon. The decaying libraries may be the harbinger of worse things to come: crumbling universities, soulless novels, faltering minds, and imaginations. A host of questions arises here about how models should be trained, and by whom. But none of that changes the fact that AI tools, right here and now, can do much to enhance our knowledge. As a great thinker once noted, all men by nature desire to know. Can we ‘just say no’ to the desire to know?”
