“Grief Goes Hand in Hand with Gratitude.” Matt Wheeler writes a wonderful appreciation of Wendell Berry’s newest novel: “As an avid appreciator of Wendell Berry’s work and admirer of his refreshing and grounding way of telling the interwoven stories of seemingly ordinary people beautifully, I genuinely hope that he has many years, and the writing of many further Port William stories, ahead of him. Whether he does or not, though, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story stands as a concise and masterful culmination of the narrative of the Port William membership. It would be a fitting and compelling sign-off, if it is that. Though I’m hoping for a further epilogue.”
“Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Jamais Vu.” Kevin Nance profiles Meatyard, the Kentucky photographer who was collaborated with Thomas Merton and Wendell Berry before his untimely death: “His black-and-white prints, seen by relatively few during his lifetime, are now collected and exhibited in major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Meatyard has also had major retrospectives at the Akron Museum of Art in the early 1990s and the International Center of Photography in New York from 2004 to 2005. And more than a dozen books have been written about his work by scholars and curators throughout the art world.”
“How JD Vance Lost the Foreign Policy War.” Sohrab Ahmari, who as he acknowledges in this essay has changed his own political stance several times, tries to make sense of how Vance went from Never Trumper, to “thoughtful populist,” to an enabler of frequent and foolish foreign violence: “somehow Vice President JD Vance, a fierce Trumpian critic of the neoconservatives, ended up in government at the highest levels, only to help implement the foreign-policy preferences of, say, John Bolton or Elliott Abrams. The Vance who once sharply critiqued a foreign policy of “moralizing” is overseeing strikes explicitly aimed at freeing the people of Iran.”
“’No controlling legal authority’ Goes to War.” Tim Carney makes the good-yet-doomed case for congress to claw back power from the executive branch: “Congress, not Trump, rightfully has the power to enter the U.S. into a foreign war. Congress, not the courts, is responsible for enforcing its rights. That’s why Congress, specifically the Republican majority, deserves opprobrium right now.”
“Bad Philosophy Won’t Help Us Make AI Good.” Nathan Beacom argues that Anthropic, despite its public image, is no more moral or prudent than other leading AI companies because it insists on treating its model as a person: “There is something that Anthropic could do to make its AI moral, something far more simple, elegant, and easy than what Askell is doing. Stop calling it by a human name, stop dressing it up like a person, and don’t give it the functionality to simulate personal relationships, choices, thoughts, beliefs, opinions, and feelings that only persons really possess. Present and use it only for what it is: an extremely impressive statistical tool, and an imperfect one. If we all used the tool accordingly, a great deal of this moral trouble would be resolved.”
“In Ukraine, ‘Simple Believers’ Shun the Modern World.” Yurii Shyvala visits a small religious community in western Ukraine and describes their way of life: “Most members of their Christian community shun images of any kind. Their homes contain no pictures or icons. They believe that creating images of people, or of God, violates the Second Commandment and distracts from the true faith. They call themselves simple believers—viruiuchi prostaky, in Ukrainian—or just believers. They strive to live by biblical law and remain apart from the modern world. Its members’ houses have no electricity, and instead of cars they use horses and wagons.”
“Finding Our God-Terms.” Joshua Hall profiles Mark Edmundson and ponders the value of words: “His general unwillingness to resolve the question of God (he calls himself a ‘longtime agnostic’), as well as his seemingly endless fascination with dialectical reasoning, often drives my students crazy. Their internet-addled nervous systems cannot tolerate uncertainty, tension, or doubt—a condition that prevents them from reading deeply and thus grasping Edmundson’s central message: however tech-saturated and ruthlessly transactional the modern American college experience has become, a university education is still the best escape route, maybe the only enterprise in American life that allows you to ‘gaze out onto the larger world and construe it freely.’”
“The Old Man and the Social Ills of Gambling.” Elizabeth Stice draws on Ernest Hemingway to articulate the grave social harms of gambling: “Most of today’s gambling is for things that can be fixed—a point spread, a number of minutes in a press conference, an uttered phrase. This kind of gambling spreads far more corruption than just wasteful spending and the risk of addiction, it reduces the amount of trust we can have in everything and everyone around us. Even someone succeeding in the game, like Joe’s father, turns a child to a cynic and contributes to the corruption of the things they love, like sports.”
“It’s Time to Play.” Instead of talking politics with your neighbors, David Demaree recommends playing with them: “Play is capable of opening us up and enriching us through genuine connection. When we allow ourselves, alongside others, to become completely engrossed in the competition, we experience joy and find respite from the weight of our daily lives. Play transports us to a world free of politics and economics. It gives no mind to who you are – when people of different faiths or political parties delight in playing together it cuts through the personal pedigrees or beliefs that too often divide. Play holds the power to restore our childlike verve.”
