“Technological Poverty.” In an absolute barn burner of an essay, Matthew Walther asks hard questions about our obligations to those rendered passive, distracted, and poor by our technological society: “the technologically poor do not experience their poverty as such. Once upon a time when a hungry boy saw a well-fed one he might have envied him. Today he may not even see him. A seven-year-old boy spends five or more hours a day at school interacting with a laptop or tablet device before going home to waste time in front of the ‘smart’ T.V. or a phone or a video game console. In a few years he will become one of the forty percent of Americans who suffer from prediabetes. By age twelve at the latest he will become addicted to online pornography. In adulthood he will be on insulin (his doctor will recommend an app for monitoring his blood sugar; a pharmaceutical company will bill insurance). He will take other medications. He may get a job. He may father a child. He will not kick the porn habit. He will watch four thousand hours of YouTube. He will not think of himself as poor. No one will tell him that he is. One day he will see a man who is looking at a bird. Will he envy him?” (Recommended by Timothy Hofland.)
“They Went to the Woods Because They Wished to Live Deliberately.” Dorie Chevlen talks to some of the many people who have built replicas of Thoreau’s Walden cabin. A couple of years ago, I was speaking at the Van Eerdens’ church and they let me sleep in their cabin, which is highlighted here. They were excellent hosts, and it was a treat to hear about and experience their efforts to make Thoreau’s project come alive: “Today, it seems quaint to imagine a man so overwhelmed by 19th-century society that he’d seek such extended retreat. There was no electricity back then, no cellphones, no nudifying A.I. chatbots. But Thoreau’s prescription for a life lived more simply, one more attuned to nature, is an enticing response to this unmatched moment of political, social and technological chaos. It’s likely why his legacy has survived so long; perhaps why he’s far more popular a writer today than he ever was in his own life.”
“Alasdair MacIntyre’s Philosophy in Practice.” Philip Bunn traces some of the many ways that MacIntyre has been taken up by—and perhaps even appropriated by—those outside his discipline: “His intellectual trajectory showed a willingness to enter into conversations with rival traditions, to take their insights into account, and to, most importantly, change his mind.”
“The Future of Intellectual Conservatism.” Law and Liberty has an excellent symposium on the prospects for robust intellectual life in conservative circles. All three essays are worth reading, but here’s a taste from near the conclusion of Jeff Polet’s contribution: “My hope results from the fact that a good life must ultimately be harmonious and coherent. A person’s fundamental commitments and deeply held ideas ought to coincide with their modes of living. What do we know about conservative religious people? First, they tend to get married at higher rates. Second, they have children at higher rates. Third, they are more intentional about the way they educate their children, being less inclined to leave them in the hands of a corrupt public system. Fourth, they tend to invest more in their local communities than in national politics and elections. Fifth, career and mobility matter less to them than community and stability do. These are the people who will raise the next generation of conservative intellectuals.”
“The Problem With ‘Edgy’ Conservatism.” In a similar vein, Sarah Reardon makes a similar point about the need to pursue substantive, cultural goods: “This edginess, which relies on shock value and subversiveness, is a far cry from the ideals of conservatism. Russell Kirk, philosopher and author of The Conservative Mind, wrote that ‘the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night.’ . . . Virtue, beauty, and the permanent are out; transgression, shock-value, and crudity are in.”
“Why Pastors Should Question AI for the Sake of Their Souls.” Daniel Nealon wrestles with the ways that his dependence on AI malforms him: “What troubles me most is not that generative AI ‘works,’ but that it only works until the moment pastoral ministry must be exercised in real time, face-to-face, without prompts or buffers (i.e. how pastoral ministry has been conducted for two millennia). A tool that smooths written communication can quietly weaken the very relational and spiritual muscles required when a pastor must speak, listen, and discern in the presence of another human being.”
“A.I. May Put Progressives to the Test.” Ross Douthat poses hard questions to progressives about our future with AI: “I want a left that believes that human selves exist as something more than just systems of neural circuitry offering responses to stimuli, that our art and creativity have more value than a machine-generated simulacrum, that we should prefer a future world where the human race remains in charge. But there may be strong pressure to go the other way — to surrender, in the name of autonomy and equity and anti-speciesism, to a future where humans and bots are treated interchangeably, where simulated relationships are assumed to be equal to real ones if enough people prefer them, and where the post-human ambitions of some technologists are taken up by the would-be spokesmen for the masses.”
“Writers Against AI.” Paul Kingsnorth invites writers and readers to shun AI-generated words and stories: “This essay, then, is the launch of a campaign of refusal and resistance. I have no funding and no plan, and I don’t intend to run anything – but I don’t need to. Like the Internet itself, resistance to AI is decentralised. Each of us is a campaign hub. Saying no to AI and yes to human stories can happen anywhere. It costs nothing. You can start right here, right now, if you haven’t started already.”
“Stop Meeting Students Where They Are.” Walt Hunter shares classroom experience that matches my own—if you invite students into the wonderful world of reading and hold them accountable, most embrace the challenge with enthusiasm: “The iterative process of confusion, endurance, and incremental understanding is what literature professors teach when they assign whole books. This march toward understanding doesn’t have a great name other than reading. We need to help students grow into the difficulty of reading. The best way to do that is not to ‘meet them where they are,’ a bromide that has become doctrine for higher education. We have to do as Whitman says instead: Stop somewhere ahead and wait for them to catch up.”
“The Death of Book World.” Becca Rothfeld makes a case for newspaper book reviews, and more broadly for publications that aim to cultivate a certain kind of reader rather than merely appeal to consumers: “What people click—and what they think they like—is largely a matter of what is available to them. Publics are made and maintained, not discovered preformed, like rock formations. It is a sign of a fatally limited imagination to assume that we can only ever desire the pittance to which we are currently reconciled. It is par for the course that, in a woefully limp statement on the carnage, the Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, referred to the paper’s subscribers not as ‘readers’ but as ‘consumers.’ A consumer is a person whose preëxisting tastes you strive to satisfy over and over; a reader is someone you hope to change, convince, and surprise.”
“The Therapy of Symbols.” Josh Hochschild begins with Musk’s view of language and then draws on Walker Percy to pose a different understanding of language and its value for humans: “From Musk’s pristine Cartesian perspective, we aren’t essentially embodied creatures, but more like angels, capable of purely spiritual apprehension, once freed from the awkward and purely accidental constraints of beastly biology. Invoking Descartes highlights the fact that Musk envisions only a new technological path to an old dream of mind-body separation.”
