“I Tried to Protect my Kids from the Internet. Here’s What Happened.” Jean Twenge describes the challenges that individual parents face in trying to set reasonable limits on children’s access to the darker parts of the web: “In the U.S., you must be at least 16 to drive alone and 21 to buy alcohol, and age is verified. We don’t expect parents to bear the entire burden for keeping younger kids from driving or drinking, yet we have that expectation for online safety. If adult content and social media sites were required to verify age (say, 18 for pornography and 16 for social media), many of these problems would go away. This is far from an impossible request; there are so many companies that verify age online that they have their own trade association.”
“Well, Here We Are. Announcing the Launch of Creed & Culture.” Nobody told Jeremy Beer that people don’t read books anymore. So he’s launching a new publishing venture: “Creed & Culture is going to publish titles for those readers Barnes & Noble and so many presses don’t seem to care much about. History from non-progressive perspectives. Biographies of people we need biographies of. Moving, truth-telling memoirs. Social and cultural analysis of things non-progressives care about. (Yes, I’m trying hard not to use the word conservative. I don’t want to get into definitional controversies, nor would all our authors—or editorial advisors—use that word to describe themselves.)”
“The Berry Family’s Founding Myth.” I review Berry new novel and reflect on the interplay between history and fiction: “Berry is interested in the difference that stories make in particular places. Casting this one in fictional form highlights its status as myth; not myth as unreality but as a story that orients a community. Repeatedly in Marce Catlett Berry returns to what the novel’s subtitle calls “the force of a story,” and particularly the force a story like Marce’s devalued tobacco crop has when it’s remembered in the place it occurred.”
“The Smile That AI Can’t Fake.” Jason Peters doesn’t think AI will improve our world: “when we agree, as with our thoughtless capitulation to AI we apparently have, to replace ourselves with any and every labor-saving device available—when, that is, we consent to our own abolition—we evict from our very lives all meaningful accomplishment. And when we do that we evict with it all the joy that comes with meaningful accomplishment, at which point we will be hard-pressed to name one thing worth smiling about. We will be hard-pressed to name one human act worthy of a real human smile.”
“Letter From the Farm, No. 3.” Brian Miller continues his series of letters from the farm: “You’ve heard me sing my ‘fall song’ before, but I do love this season on the farm, now that the peak of the garden and fruits is past. The tractors have been getting heavy use cutting all the fields for winter. We are weed-eating all the fencerows, putting them in shipshape for the colder months. The tulip poplar leaves are beginning to lose their grip, and that closed-off landscape of the summer months is opening back up. In another month we will be able to see the western ridge beyond our immediate, foliage-dense landscape.”
“Needing Help Is Normal.” Agnes R. Howard reviews Leah Libresco Sargeant’s The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto and praises the way it helps us imagine how to live well as dependent creatures: “The hinge connecting those arguments most directly is women’s proximity to dependence. All humans start life by depending on a female body for gestation, protection, and nourishment. Assuming independence as a norm degrades all but especially women, because biology and culture regularly situate women in service of others. As women care for the young, old, or sick, they depend, in turn, on others to assist them.”
“Tyler Robinson and the End of Place.” Peter Savodnik mourns the consequences of the erosion of places and their cultures: “There no longer is such a thing as ‘place.’ There is no escaping from the digital swarms, the terrible ideas, the social contagions, the propaganda, the memes, the snarky, smirky, Wojak-Pepe-the-Frog irony layered upon irony layered upon irony, the fake community meant to compensate for real community, the hijackers of our prefrontal cortex. Your place has been subsumed by Silicon Valley. It is not your place anymore. That is the lesson of Tyler Robinson.”
“OpenAI is Launching the Sora App, Its Own TikTok Competitor, Alongside the Sora 2 Model.” Speaking of the erosion of place and embodied life, Meta and OpenAI have both released new AI-generated video feeds. The opportunities for harm—whether brain rot or malicious bullying, scamming, and deceit—are endless. AI companies promise that these technologies will help us tackle big problems and be more productive, but apparently generating AI slop is where the money’s at. Here’s Amanda Silberling’s report: “The launch of a social platform will require significant user safety measures from OpenAI, which has struggled with the same issues in ChatGPT. While users can revoke access to their likeness at any time, this sort of access can easily be abused. Even if a user trusts someone they know with access to their AI likeness, that person could still generate deceptive content that could be used to harm that person. Non-consensual videos are a persistent problem with AI-generated video, causing significant harm with few laws explicitly governing platform responsibility.”
“The Legend of Zohran.” When James Pogue publishes a blockbuster essay, I read it. I haven’t been disappointed yet: “He talks like this a lot. Raise taxes but every single business will stay. Confront power but leaders will see themselves better. It will all work out. It probably says more about the Democratic Party than it does about Mamdani that he has shaken the party’s establishment as much as he has. Many people who came to support Mamdani are simply fed up to the point that they are no longer interested in hearing dire predictions of what might happen if his tax increases drive wealthy residents to Florida. And the irony is that if this does happen—a whole genre of memes being passed around tech and finance circles these days has pictures like one of Mamdani with Bernie Sanders and AOC captioned with things like ‘The last thing you see before your business moves to Miami’—it may be that few of his voters actually care.”
“The Marvel of Apple Trees.” Tara Couture ponders the wonderful idiosyncrasies of each apple tree: “I don’t want courses or gurus or weekend retreats to fix me. I want old apple trees anointed by the touch of God. Trees that wrap themselves around me and trees that gasp the last of their life force into a lovely little apple, round and perfect, that I may eat.”
“A New Environmentalism?” Steven F. Hayward opens a Law and Liberty forum on how environmental policy can be reformed: “Let’s start with a basic axiom: the environment is too important to be left to environmentalists. Ever since the first Earth Day in 1970, which can be said to mark the birth of the modern environmental movement, environmentalism has been wedded to a narrow and often fanatical policy architecture that can accurately be described as demanding billion-dollar solutions to million-dollar problems, almost always choosing strategies that maximize political and legal conflict. The result is a kludgy regulatory regime and ongoing political gridlock. Sometimes, policy delivers perverse results in the form of worsening some environmental conditions.” (Recommended by Aaron Weinacht.)
