“An Ancient Wealth.” Eric Miller pens a beautiful review of Wendell Berry’s new novel and reflects on the stories and structures that hold sustaining cultures in place: “Structurally, that culture survived due to the nimble and purposeful actions of the association’s leaders and the federal program that stood behind it. ‘There is no denying the dependence of local culture upon local economy and local work,’ Andy avers. But there was another factor in this vitality, just as crucial, and even more central to this telling of the story: the collective memory of the injustice of the 1907 tobacco sale. ‘In its time that story was suffered by nearly everybody on the farms and in the country towns,’ Andy says. ‘Because they remembered it, there was an extraordinary mutuality among them.’ It provided the ‘force’ that led to the reimagining and maintaining of the Burley Association.”
“A Quarrel With the World.” Alan Jacobs reviews a new collection of poems that Czesław Miłosz wrote in the difficult years following World War II: “If you read the poems collected here in chronological order, what you will see, primarily, is a man thinking about hope—what sustains it, and what happens when you lose it. The practitioners of ketman have of course abandoned hope, but there are so many of them that the one who refuses ketman may not be more hopeful than they.”
“Colleges Are Preparing to Self-Lobotomize.” Michael Clune has some words of wisdom for educators worried about AI: “Before embarking on a wholesale transformation, the field of higher education needs to ask itself two questions: What abilities do students need to thrive in a world of automation? And does the incorporation of AI into education actually provide those abilities? The skills needed to thrive in an AI world might counterintuitively be exactly those that the liberal arts have long cultivated.” (Recommended by Tom Bilbro.)
“These Companies Want to Block the Sun to Cool the Planet.” What could go wrong? Nicolás Rivero reports: “For as little as $1, you can dim the sun — just a tiny bit — to save the world from climate change. At least, that’s the promise sold by a California start-up called Make Sunsets. Your dollar will pay for founder Luke Iseman to drive a Winnebago RV into the hills half an hour outside Saratoga, California, to release a balloon loaded with sulfur dioxide, an air pollutant normally spewed by volcanic eruptions. He and his 1,000 paying customers hope the balloon will burst in the stratosphere, releasing particles that will block sunlight and cool the planet.”
“Butz and Berry in Debate.” Joan Zwagerman listens to the 1977 debate between Earl Butz and Wendell Berry and ponders who is winning some forty-eight years later: “That long view seems to be bearing fruit. Today, more people are asking some of the same questions that Berry had been posing for decades. What are we doing with this inheritance of land? Why are we doing it? What is the truest and deepest value of our actions?”
“Dying to Work.” Colin Miller reads Byung-Chul Han to highlight the wisdom of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement: “By being ‘irresponsible’ with her money and her physical safety, Day was refusing the lie that we must try to ensure our lives turn out right by submitting to the current economic order. Her refusal to abide by the dictates of economic efficiency and to let her life be run by ‘risk’ are training in martyrdom. She reminds us that the early Christians were not simply martyred for a ‘religious belief’ detachable from their daily lives; they went to their deaths prepared by an alternative social life that spurned the fear of death.”
“A Game with No Referees.” Justin Bonanno critiques the strange rhetoric of inevitability that surrounds new AI tools: “We are in a strange economic game where certain competitors are both referees and players. Or, if we are to take them at their word in their appeals for absolute deregulation, what they want is a game with no referees whatsoever. How would you like to play a game with no referees? Maybe you’d thoroughly enjoy it. Maybe you’d detest it. In any case, it would depend on how big you are and how many players you have and what you get when you win.” (Recommended by Rob Grano.)
“Demolition Day.” Steven Kurutz drives back to his childhood home to watch a row of run-down houses be demolished and describes the challenge of watching a place you love slowly wither: “When you grow up in a rural community like mine, you are surrounded by history and family. You attend school with kids whose parents went to school with your parents. You take a summer job, as I did, in a pizzeria that half a century earlier was the A&P your great-grandfather managed. You drive past the cemetery where your ancestors are buried. Even locals who aren’t blood feel like relatives because they know your life story, and you know theirs. Townspeople could look at my features and mark me as a ‘Kurutz boy.’ In my teens this could be stifling, but almost immediately after I moved away, being back home was like being held in a warm embrace. Now, if more than six weeks pass without a visit, the longing—almost physical—begins. When we got married, my wife Cara resigned herself to a third party in our marriage—Renovo.”
“Could Massachusetts Become the First State to Undo Legal Weed?” Now let’s do sports betting. Josh Code talks with Kevin Sabet about efforts to rollback recreational use of a potent drug: “The bottom line is we have really learned to turn people into commodities. That’s why we have Big Tobacco, that’s why we have Big Alcohol, and that’s why we have now Big Marijuana and why we have Big Pharma—because we’ve become experts at it, and we’ve allowed our politicians to essentially be bribed into being okay with it. It’s part of our political system.”
“Economic Problem of the Southeast.” Chase Steely wonders if it’s possible to develop a region without steamrolling it: “Abstraction erases the very things that give a place its meaning. A region becomes a zone, a section, a market. A community becomes a labor force. A farm becomes an inefficient use of acreage. A home becomes a unit of consumption. A tradition becomes a barrier to progress. The people become inhabitants, units in tables. A place that lives by particular attachments becomes, in the hands of experts, a problem to be solved. When a place is interpreted through aggregated data alone, its history disappears.”
