“Happy Meals.” In a thoughtful, beautiful essay, Hannah Rowan describes her visits to “farms across Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania to see whether regenerative agriculture was a Luddite purity dream, a reactionary response to the inevitable forces of technological progress that would never be more than a niche market for crunchy consumers, or instead a prophecy that my local Safeway would soon stock tomatoes that taste like the ones grown at the Foot of the Mountain. I had to see for myself whether this kind of agriculture could feed America, and how.”
“Could Britain Run Out of Food?” James Rebanks warns of the fragility of a food system that prioritizes efficiency above all else: “Modern agriculture requires a safe and stable flow of fossil fuels, and so is deeply affected by what is happening in the Middle East. Two of the biggest costs for British farmers are fuel and fertilizer, and the prices of both are soaring. Growing crops requires a lot of fuel — whether you’re plowing, drilling and spraying crops or harvesting, drying and refrigerating them. Farmers are given some duty-relief on fuel in the form of red diesel, which helps to keep food prices down for consumers. But in wartime, this is not enough. Red diesel for my farm was 70-75p per liter before President Donald Trump sent in the first missiles. It is now more like £1-£1.15 per liter.”
“Common Life After Social Collapse.” Andrew Spencer reviews Chris Smaje’s Finding Lights in a Dark Age and weighs the merits and limits of the society he envisions: “Most of us don’t live an agrarian lifestyle because we don’t want it badly enough. I’ve got a collection of the Foxfire books on my shelf, with their instructions for rustic Appalachian living. I toy with the idea of homesteading in some mountain valley, but the truth is I like my weather-tight home and indoor plumbing. I don’t want to give up the gadgets that make me comfortable. I also realize that to carve out that lifestyle requires a strong support network of similarly minded neighbors.”
“Palantir Comes to Campus.” Alex Bronzini-Vender reports on a small conference at Yale where Palantir and its fellow travelers imagine a future governed by AI: “[Maya] Sulkin tried again: She asked her panelists to consider the ‘permanent underclass’ scenario, the possibility that AI concentrates all wealth among ‘like 19 people in Silicon Valley.’ Neither editor seemed very troubled by this. ‘A rising tide lifts all boats,’ [Roger] Kimball responded. [R.R.] Reno reached for scripture — ‘I mean, Jesus said, “The poor you shall always have with you.”’ He predicted that there might eventually be ‘a kind of aristocracy of the intellect’: ‘the people who wind up feeding the new thoughts to the large language models’ at the top and then everyone else would be ‘just consumers’ Looking around the room, there was no need to worry where folks here would end up.”
“It’s Time to Regulate.” Michael Toscano ponders the possibilities for judging which technologies we want to adopt: “We keep hearing in the news that the CEO of some big AI company is worried he is making a god, or threatening all life on earth — but the work must keep going. Even the most publicly-minded AI company, Anthropic, cannot quit. The best it can do is commit to study its own progress as it develops technology that its CEO fears will cause mass unemployment, or worse. Only wise government can constrain home faber, but today homo faber holds almost all the power.”
“Justice is Geometric.” Likam Kyanzaire talks with Ron Eglash about the fractal patterns apparent in some African settlement patterns: “The larger promise of fractal design,” he writes, “is to build nested, connected structures in which value can circulate back to the people and places that created it.” (Recommended by Dominic Garzonio.)
“Jonathan Swift’s Last Joke.” Ed Caesar follows up on some fine amateur sleuthing by David Kenny into the original context of Swift’s epitaph, which seems to have been a jab at a man he loathed: “Swift’s will was written after Marsh’s vanity project took up residence in the cathedral. It was notable to Kenny that Swift had stipulated that his monument be “deeply cut” in black marble, to contrast with Marsh’s. In Kenny’s mind, the placement was a jab at his old rival’s vainglory: the ultimate satire. If Swift had asked for his monument to be placed next to Marsh’s, why were they now separated by a distance of some fifty yards? Further inquiry led to another thunderbolt.”
“Capitalism Was Built on the Ruins of the Commons.” Daniel Denvir talks with Peter Linebaugh about the long and fascinating history of the commons. I would narrate some aspects of this story differently, but Linebaugh surfaces some important yet neglected themes: “commoning is a deeply human activity in relationship to one another and to the world around us. And that relationship begins with — now I’ve got to use a four-letter word — work. How we work together is the basis of the commons. And since work changes depending on who and what we’re working with, the definition of commoning will be different for the hunter, the farmer, the cobbler, the software engineer.” (Recommended by Gillis Harp.)
“How the Far Left Tapped into a Money Machine.” Ruy Teixeira describes how online, small-donor fundraising can lead to more partisan candidates: “The recent breakthrough in small donations will not be lost on aspiring Democratic politicians nationwide. Scheming and plotting to get into that online progressive Democratic discourse will increasingly replace worrying about call time and other traditional fundraising tools. Naturally, this will advantage hard-edged progressives who are adept at rhetoric that attracts attention and are more than willing to take positions that excite the online Democratic community. For these politicians, there is little to lose and much to gain.”
