“The Boiling Pot of Tourist Towns: Pt. 1, The Frog’s Perspective.” Luke Allen describes what it’s like to live in northern Michigan, a place that’s increasingly oriented toward tourism: “Frankfort is a small town. There are two churches in town, and they are both member institutions in my organizing, so I spend a lot of time there. There’s a couple bars, a handful of restaurants, and that staple of rural tourist towns, a brewery. Many places to buy a t-shirt or an ice cream cone. During the winter you can shoot a cannon down main street. But this time of year it turns into a sort of pulsating all ages frat party/outdoor mall. Someone I know who lives there told me it’s ‘sort of like living at Cedar Point.’” (Recommended by Dominic Garzonio.)
“All the Way Home.” Elizabeth Stice reviews Ian Marcus Corbin’s To Arrive Where We Started and weighs his argument for cosmic homecoming: “like Odysseus, Corbin believes that homecoming is possible. He emphasizes relationships with others and tending a world together, drawing heavily on Socratic dialogues and Aristotle’s thoughts on friendship and wisdom. Virtuous friendship helps us expand the self and blur our boundaries in healthy ways. Contemplation takes us further in our efforts to get away from an exclusively autonomous self. Through contemplation, we observe that the world around us—and our own inspiration—seems driven by ‘some mysterious subjectivity, some agent with awareness and intention.’ For Corbin, this connects to Christian belief, but he gives examples to demonstrate that this conclusion can be drawn by others, too. Ultimately, we develop a sense of ‘at-home-ness’ not from aligning our views well with other humans, but from aligning ourselves well with the wider universe (and its Creator).”
“The True History of New England’s Stone Walls.” Matt Seaton describes the interplay between manual and intellectual labor and the joys he discovered in building stone walls: “Bit by bit—which is the way with walls—my interest and knowledge deepened until what had begun as recreation morphed into a hobby job, mending other people’s walls. Eventually, I realized not only that I liked building walls, but also that I could scratch a subsistence living at it. In what probably struck friends and family as an act of lunacy, I quit my day job as an editor at this magazine and became a part-time waller.”
“Old School.” John Nagy describes Notre Dame’s “new” approach to their first-year experience course: “This thing is brand new, and it’s pretty cool. Notre Dame built it in-house and in 2025 began handing it out as a gift to every first-year student at the outset of each academic year, the way high schools pass out laptops. It weighs maybe a pound. It’s highly interactive, handcrafted and comparatively inexpensive. . . . It is exceedingly user-friendly. You spend time with it, you gather in a room with other human beings, open it before you and ask: What does it mean to live a good life, and how might I live one? ‘It’ is the commonplace book.”
“Why US Farms Increasingly Rely on Guestworker Programs.” Lisa Held looks at who is doing most of the work on American farms: “In 2005, about 50,000 individuals arrived in the U.S. to work on farms through the federal guestworker visa program, called H-2A. Ten years later, according to government data, that number tripled. Less than a decade after that, in 2024, it had nearly tripled again. Despite that explosive growth—from 50,000 workers to 400,000 in under 20 years—farms are struggling more than ever to find workers.”
“The Lettuce That Launched a Thousand Headlines.” Alex Berenson criticizes the politicized reporting around public health concerns and identifies the underlying cause of this summer’s cyclosporiasis outbreak: “Problems with American food safety, including outbreaks from contaminated meat and produce, long predate the current administration. These dangers are partly inevitable, reflecting the sheer complexity and vast scale of national and international food sourcing and industrialized agriculture, which depends largely on self-regulation by farmers and slaughterhouses. But they are also partly by choice. Americans like their food cheap, plentiful, convenient, and premade. They will tolerate some level of risk as the price.”
“One Tool to Rule Them All.” Brad Littlejohn draws on Tolkien to articulate how general-purpose technologies endanger those who treat them as neutral tools: “This end-less-ness of modern technology reflects the chief end of man as re-imagined by our postmodern politics: a vision of freedom as a choose-your-own adventure story. Forge your own path, make your own way, follow your own dream—these were the mantras of the 80s and 90s, within which the internet came of age. In other words, if a technology always inscribes a certain purpose in its design principles, the purpose of our digital world was to conform itself to your desires, whatever they might be.”
“Is Kansas Really Richer than Canada?” Kansan Jeff Reimer visits Canada to check out life north of the border: “two forces of entropy stymie civic renewal and growth in Hamilton in a way that seems unique to Canada and is in keeping with my pet theory. One is the residual high-minded moral earnestness that tips more often than not into virtue signaling, and the other is a love for enforcing such gestures through bureaucratic means.” You can then read Canadian Brian Dijkema’s account of his visit to Jeff’s Kansan home.
“The Disappearing Body.” Ragan Sutterfield ponders the significance of burial practices and articulates his hopes to be buried where he’s lived his life: “The body needs a place. We live, always, through the particular connections of a community of life – the one here, where we are. From our gut biome, which reflects our region and its soils, to our foot fungi, which we share with those with whom we live, our bodies are connected to the household of life. And the way we show up in relationship with other people is through our flesh. Though there may be soulmates, such close companions only know one another through the medium of skin, the vibrations of air formed from lung and larynx, the thumping of an ear drum.”
“Who Stewards the Vice President’s Soul?” Valerie Pavilonis reviews J.D. Vance’s new book and wonders about how lonely his faith seems: “I don’t want to be unfair to Vance here. There are certainly many cases of people being faithful Catholics without a strong Catholic community. But the community helps. More than a year ago, for this magazine, I wrote about the aspects of Catholic life beyond mass: how friend groups and Bible studies and church activities help circulate the profundity you’ve experienced in the Eucharist, how all of these things keep your head turned toward God and not toward His opposite. I could be Catholic in New York City without these things. But it would be much, much more difficult.”
