“Face It. You’re Addicted to Politics.” Arthur Brooks draws on Eitan Hersh and others to remind people that following politics like it’s entertainment erodes civic virtue: “Does this modicum of abstinence mean you will be bereft of political opinions? Not at all. It just means you’re no longer willing to turn the management of your emotions over to professionals. Instead, you can insist on thinking critically for yourself about whether, and when, to have a strong opinion about something. What do we call that kind of person? Free. And happier, to boot.”
“Thousands of Colorado Meatpacking Workers Are on Strike.” Alex N. Press reports on a strike at a plant that processes 5% of all US beef and relates how the meat industry became so concentrated: “The dispute at the Greeley plant is a local fight. But it’s unfolding inside one of the most concentrated industries in the American economy. The modern American beef industry is extraordinarily concentrated: by 2019, the four largest meatpacking companies controlled about 85 percent of US steer and heifer slaughter. When production runs through a relatively small number of enormous plants owned by a handful of corporations, disruptions at one facility can ripple through the system.”
“The Magic Valley’s Next Trick.” Mark Dee reports on the tensions in Idaho farmland as big capital seeks to build data centers here: “To some, southern Idaho’s future isn’t sprouting beneath rolling sprinklers, but pulsing through those wires. The same characteristics that make this land ideal for agriculture make it appealing for developing data centers. Open land, approachable climate, cheap power and sufficient water drew cattlemen from Southern California to southern Idaho in the 20th century. In the 21st century, it’s tech giants and investors eyeing ready returns. Technology, data and power are staking claims on land that has never seen a building larger than a milking barn. The result is competing visions for the West: industrial or agrarian, data centers or center-pivots.” (Recommended by Bill Kauffman.)
“How America Learned to Love Barnes & Noble Again.” Henry Grabar reflects on why the chain bookstore is making a comeback: “Distinctions between chain and local have been superseded by the split between online and in-person shopping. Book-buying Americans, whose support for indie shops was one of the hallmarks of a progressive anti-chain movement that flourished in the 2000s, seem to be less discerning than they used to be. They’ll browse where they can. Consumer politics may have mattered less than good business decisions, however. Barnes & Noble found its form in part by learning from its eternal rival, the local bookstore. The corporate stores, with their forest-green signs and scratchboard illustrations of famous authors, used to be cookie-cutter copies of one another. Now they come in all sizes, and the books inside vary from place to place according to the tastes of each store manager. What’s more, they sit in a commercial landscape that, though thoroughly suffused with national brands, has been losing exactly the type of middle-class, something-for-everyone store that Barnes & Noble tries to be.”
“With Living Hearts.” Mary C. Tillotson unfolds the wisdom that Rerum Novarum might have for those of us confronting the promises and dangers of AI: “Leo’s goal is not to eradicate poverty, but to grow in love. Tech may be a helpful tool for some of the material challenges involved in helping the poor, but it can never replace a living heart.”
“The Presence of Power.” Shomik Dasgupta looks to the Indian thinker Rammohun Roy for political wisdom: “In a world increasingly defined by distance, between citizen and state, between policy and experience, between law and justice, Roy offers a reminder that good government is not only a matter of laws or statistics. It is a matter of presence. His insistence that rulers live among the ruled, listen to them in their own languages, and remain morally accountable to them, is a principle that transcends his time.” (Recommended by Dominic Garzonio.)
“The Human Skill That Eludes AI.” Jasmine Sun talks with writers working with AI companies to investigate why AI has difficulty generating interesting prose. To my mind, this is related to the loss of local accents and coherent regional communities. There are overlapping forces pushing people—and now machines—to all sound alike: “When a practiced human writer reaches for a particular turn of phrase, they aren’t aiming for some single standard of great writing. Rather, the best metaphors come from the author’s specific blend of experiences or expertise. A writer’s diction, their citations, and the stories they share all reflect a singular, irreplicable perspective. Authorial voice emerges from the specificity of a life.”
“Is AI Making Us Stupid? Cal Newport Is Worried.” Evan Goldstein interviews computer scientist and productivity researcher Cal Newport about AI: “Universities need to explicitly portray themselves as citadels of concentration. The life of the mind is critical to the human experience. It is why you come to a university, just like the entire purpose of a Navy SEAL boot camp is to get ready for the physical hardships of war. Academic institutions need to demonstrate that the life of the mind is hard and worth it. We need to think about cognitive fitness the way we think about physical fitness. There should be a simple rule for being a thinker in an age of AI: Don’t let AI write anything for you. Writing is to cognitive health what steps are to physical health. Write that email from scratch. Write that memo with the bullet points from scratch. Don’t flee that strain. You need it as much as you need those 10,000 steps a day.”
“Saint Ludwig of Cambridge.” Paul Griffiths meditates on Ludwig Wittgenstein and what we do when we think and speak: “As a thinker he has always had both acolytes and enemies. His life as it appeared to those who knew him, and subsequently to those who read him and read about him, also contributed. It was a life that intersected with the great events of the twentieth century, and it showed many of the characteristics of saintliness: radical asceticism, carelessness of the opinions of the world, single-minded focus on how to live well in response to the gifts given him, desire to communicate those gifts to others, and a mode of living for which eccentricity is too moderate a word. Wittgenstein’s life was, in short, one of surprising holiness.”
“The Poet’s Vision.” Ryan Wilson considers how poets might teach us the gratitude and hospitality proper to creatures: “Creation cries out with myriad tongues for us to pay attention, to behold its splendor and the majesty of its Maker. And we do not. We refuse the gift; we wave away the bounty like Herods of cynicism. ‘What is all the world to us?’, we sneer. In this, we fail at what the Greeks called xenia, meaning ‘hospitality,’ that hospitality between guest and host that is the fundament of all civilization. The exchange of gifts is a customary rite of hospitality. But for the inexhaustible gift of Creation’s Beauty we repay nothing, too lordly even to deign to pay attention.”
