“This Rural Congresswoman Thinks Democrats Have Lost Their Minds. She Has a Point.” James Pogue, one of the best journalists writing today, profiles a Washington representative with an unconventional approach: “Her worldview is widely held in rural America but almost completely unrepresented in national politics — neither reactionary nor exactly liberal; skeptical of big business and big government alike. She believes our society ought to be oriented toward working with your hands, living in nature and fostering deep and considered connection to a community. Her two biggest influences, her former senior adviser guessed, are the Bible and the ruralist Kentucky farmer-author Wendell Berry.” Pogue nods to FPR as an example of this approach, and he cites the conversation that Adam Smith conducted with MGP last summer. (Recommended by Jeff Polet.)
“Resurrecting the Party of Bryan and Ryan.” Gillis Harp looks to some historical models in making his recommendation for an American version of “Blue Labor”: “Rather than cultivating a secularized, deracinated and cosmopolitan Left, Democrats should embrace and commend the religiosity and localism that have long characterized blue collar culture. Their failure to do so since the 1970s helps explain their declining portion of the blue-collar vote.”
“Gluttons for Punishment.” Lila Shapiro reports on a strange teacher with a strange method of getting students to read. McDaniel doesn’t sound like a healthy man, and cults of personality are also unhealthy, but I’m always intrigued by these Ernest-Shackleton-style sales pitches that seem compelling in a milieu where many students are desperate for someone to give them a challenge: “In his popular class Existential Despair, the students gather one evening each week for seven or eight hours to read an entire book in total silence, then discuss it in a darkened classroom. Some had never read a whole novel before. ‘I’d be lucky if I got through one every four years,’ said a recent graduate named Ryan, who has floppy hair parted in the middle and a marketing degree from Wharton, Penn’s business school. After McDaniel’s class, he said, ‘I got into a rhythm: Every night before bed, I put my phone in another room and I knocked out one chapter.’”
“AI’s Memorization Crisis.” Alex Reisner reports on findings that many LLMs reproduced copyrighted text and images from their training data: “On Tuesday, researchers at Stanford and Yale revealed something that AI companies would prefer to keep hidden. Four popular large language models—OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok—have stored large portions of some of the books they’ve been trained on, and can reproduce long excerpts from those books.”
“Home Electricity Bills are Skyrocketing. For Data Centers, Not So Much.” Karin Kirk breaks down the numbers showing that residential customers are subsidizing the data center power usage: “the data suggests that everyday people are footing the bill while companies that consume ever more power are paying less. At a time when corporations seem to enjoy many structural advantages over consumers, from lower tax rates to relaxed pollution requirements, the burden of rising energy bills can make one feel powerless. And yes, the pun was intentional.”
“A Study Is Retracted, Renewing Concerns About the Weedkiller Roundup.” Hiroko Tabuchi reports on a paper that’s finally been officially retracted: “In retracting the study last month, the journal, Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, cited ‘serious ethical concerns regarding the independence and accountability of the authors.’ Martin van den Berg, the journal’s editor in chief, said the paper had based its conclusions largely on unpublished studies by Monsanto. There were indications that the authors had received financial compensation from Monsanto for their work, he said. There was no disclosure of a conflict of interest on the part of the authors beyond a mention in the acknowledgments that Monsanto had provided scientific support.” (Recommended by Adam Smith.)
“To Be a Christian Is to Sanctify the Machine.” Wyatt Graham’s review of Kingsnorth’s book has some good observations yet is marked by a dangerous—and all-too-common—confusion of thought. He seems to be drawing on a particular Reformed tradition of thinking about technology and the Creation mandate (see Al Wolters’s Creation Regained) that fails to make crucial distinctions between the goodness of our human capacity to create technology and the purported goodness of all the technologies that humans do in fact create. See Graham’s odd use of I Timothy 4: “Christians have known that food and cloth dedicated to the altar can be sanctified, dedicated toward a good use: ‘nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving.’ Even the Machine’s all-enframing (Gestell) and all-pervasive scope in our lives does not mean it cannot also be ‘sanctified by God’s word and by prayer.’” In a word, no. God does not sanctify the Tower of Babel, he thwarts it. We need to have debates about which technologies are demonic and which are redemptive; we can’t naively pretend they are all neutral and simply have to be directed toward sanctified ends.
“Dogs, Deer, Herons, and the Promise of Beauty.” I’m enjoying the new issue of Plough, which Peter Mommsen introduces: “Linguists say the word for dawn is among the oldest in the Indo-European languages; she’s a goddess, whose reconstructed original name, Ausōs, gives us Easter. Ancient humans must have felt what we can feel now: dawn is so beautiful, she must be holy. The animals are so beautiful too, so akin to us and so unlike, that their beauty must mean something. What?”
“A Brilliant Warning about the Gamification of Everyday Life.” Tim Clare praises C. Thi Nguyen’s new book The Score: “Our uncritical reverence for metrics allows for what Nguyen calls ‘objectivity laundering’ – bureaucrats disguising their agency in decisions regarding our schools, hospitals and wellbeing, by evoking ‘the numbers’ as impartial arbiters. Those in power choose which metrics to champion, then claim actions driven by those metrics somehow transcend ideology.”
“The New American Small Town: A Review.” Andrew Baker reviews Jennifer Mapes’s new book: “The thread connecting these chapters is Mapes’ conviction that we will better understand “rural and small-town” America if we disentangle the two. If Mapes is right about this, then why should people committed to the social, economic, and spiritual health of rural America care about small towns? Put more directly, why should you care about small towns? To be honest, it doesn’t seem to be a question that Mapes has considered. Reading between the lines, she seems to want to distance the small towns she loves from rural America. That may be healthy in some cases. I have my doubts. As someone who has spent a lot of time living in small towns and studying rural history, however, I finished the book with a renewed sense of the potential, and, perhaps, unavoidable interdependence between town and countryside.”
“On the Road to Higher Learning.” Jeff Reimer’s moving essay starts off by contrasting liberal arts colleges to those that offer professional credentials, but it ends up musing on the challenges of letting your children grow up and make their own decisions: “My son doesn’t care about trends in higher education; he doesn’t think about university administrators or institutional models or the marginalization of the humanities. He just wants to go to college and make new friends and learn interesting things and see a slightly different part of the world and figure out who he is. While he is making a very grown-up decision, he is in significant ways not yet an adult, nor should he be. This decision is part of what will make him one. And so I must concede, as every father eventually must, that my son is not me. He will have his own ideas, his own hang-ups, enthusiasms, and ambivalences, and certainly his own battles to fight.”
