Dorothy Day, Tanya Berry, and Ludwig Wittgenstein

“This Farmer-Owned Meat Processing Co-op in Tennessee Changes the Game.” Isaac Wood talks with Lexy Close about a new meat processing facility that aims to support local food economies: “The new slaughterhouse is the first farmer-owned cooperative to be established in the state in more than 50 years. It has already doubled the region’s USDA-approved processing capacity. For the APC’s farmer-members, processing no longer takes months; there is currently zero wait time, and the whole process takes just two to four weeks.”

“The Handyman Can.” Mel Livatino marvels at the qualities that enable someone to fix a problem: “What Pavel and my father and the pressmen in printing plants actually did every day was solve problems that I, someone who taught at the college level for 36 years, couldn’t have solved. These handymen and mechanics weren’t free to take a C and scoot to the next course, as my students were. Every day these tradesmen had to fix fiendishly difficult problems: no scooting, no excuses, just figuring out and fixing, day after day after day. What lives inside a person that makes him or her able to endure the havoc of such problems, overcome the fear that comes from not knowing exactly what’s wrong, and find the will to stay in place and figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it?”

“What One Urbanite Learned from Wendell Berry.” Jim Wildeman ponders what he’s taken from Berry’s writings despite his apparently normal, modern urban lifestyle: “As I reread what I have written, I doubt Berry would be impressed with what I have said. Maybe he would feel that all he has written has been for naught—if his influence is to be judged by my response to his work. He might see my suggestions as “half-measures,” at best. But, admitting that possibility, I must conclude that Wendell Berry’s writing has opened my eyes. His works have made me aware of many of the problems of modernity and my own contribution to those problems. And isn’t awareness of a problem one step—even if a very small step—toward improving the world in which we live?”

“Is Social Media the New Big Tobacco?” Maya Sulkin and Frannie Block report on a new lawsuit that argues Big Tech overrode concerns about the dangers of their products in order to pursue profits: “The explosive core allegation is that TikTok, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat, and Google’s YouTube not only knew that they were deliberately exploiting children’s attention for profit but that their business strategy fueled a mental health crisis and destabilized schools. This might not seem surprising at all to parents who have seen their children disappear into smartphones, swiping for hours, never sated. But it has never been proven in court. The companies are trying to get the case thrown out before it goes to trial. Both sides will fight that out at a crucial hearing next month.”

“A Big Disconnect.” Kiley Bense and Peter Aldhous report on where Pennsylvania’s fracking waste ends up: “The state’s outdated, disconnected and largely unaudited systems mean that no one — including DEP — knows how much oil and gas waste there is or where it is going, said David Hess, the agency’s secretary from 2001 to 2003. Without accurate tracking, he said, it’s difficult to enforce regulations around spills, leaks, transport and dumping on roads or in public waterways. Contaminants in this waste can include radioactive material, heavy metals and carcinogenic chemicals.”

“A Cooked Ascetic.” Brad East reviews Kingsnorth’s new book, situating it in the broader conversation of which it is a part and finding much to commend in Kingsnorth’s words even if he judges the book itself rather harshly: “For a book as confident and assertive as Against the Machine, it is full of ambivalences. One of Kingsnorth’s greatest strengths has always been his aptitude for self-criticism. His writing is recursive, turning over and over on itself and exposing its own inconsistencies. This disarms the reader, because the would-be prophet does not sound entirely sure of himself. Like Moses and Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah, his speech is fragile, his lineage questionable, his lips unclean ‘in the midst of a people of unclean lips’ (Isaiah 6:5).”

“Religio Medici.” Kristin M. Collier contemplates the practice of medicine predicated on a creaturely view of persons: “if Christians believe what we say we believe about the human person—created, fallen, ultimately redeemed—then we cannot leave these convictions at the clinic door. We are part of a larger story, one that does not begin with our first conscious choices or end with our death certificates. Medicine, too, must be part of that story if it is to serve transcendent supernatural ends.”

“Oligarchy XIV: Thoughts on the Anarchism of Dorothy Day.” David S. D’Amato ponders Day’s enduring wisdom: “Her political outlook was grounded in and expressed through the sharing of everyday acts of kindness, through up-close relationships rather than philosophical abstractions. Yet she was extremely well-read and capable of the most insightful and skillfully articulated engagements with advanced ideas.” (Recommended by Bill Kauffman.)

“Tanya Berry’s Work and Wisdom.” Gracy Olmstead’s lecture on Tanya—a taste of her longer project to write about this remarkable person—has now been posted online by the Berry Center. You can watch or read it: “Tanya’s life has been an adventure. She was raised by artists and academics in both California and Kentucky. She moved constantly back and forth between these two locations as a child and teenager. As a young woman, she studied art, French, flute, cello, oboe, piano, dance, and literature, among other things. She married Wendell and traveled the world for a while. But after Wendell had started working at New York University, Tanya helped him make the decision to move back here to Kentucky. The couple decided to make a home together in this place.”

“Walking, Wittgenstein, and God.” Chris Arnade writes about a cancer diagnosis and the posture of humility he’s been learning to take up: “This is different from a nihilistic fatalism, because you can impact your immediate surroundings, and change your own circumstances, but there are still forces far larger than you (both in the here and now, and beyond) that you cannot change and acceptance of that opens up a wealth of obtainable and inexpensive avenues to happiness. Such as walking twelve miles a day with a backpack jammed with books, and stopping halfway to watch the American Mink (who I see every day and have named Basil) enact their purpose.”

“Writing in Place: An Introduction.” Andrew Baker and William Thomas Okie introduce a new issue of Agricultural History by considering how historians might adopt a place-centric approach: “So where did agricultural history happen? As the above paragraph suggests, the answer is ‘all over the place.’ Yet the very richness of these possibilities raises questions about how historians navigate questions of scale, setting, framing, and geography. This introduction and the articles that follow take up the intellectual question of Where? with an ostensibly simple, almost tautological, answer: In place. We argue that agricultural history does not happen ‘all over the place’ so much as it does ‘in all types of place’—in particular sites with particular characteristics.”

“Why We Threw Out the Broken Food Pyramid.” I’m not sure how much government guidelines affect how people actually eat. DoorDash is depressingly popular. But Marty Makary and Kyle Diamantas explain the new “eat real food” guidelines, and you can read responses by other nutritionists and doctors as well.