“The End of the West Near Portland, Oregon.” Paul Pastor describes his beloved home state as the end of the West: “The story of the West is simple. The thing you are looking for is always just a little bit farther than wherever it is that you are. This is the story of the Aeneid, of the Odyssey, of the biblical Exodus, of all colonial ventures, of Little House on the Prairie, of all scientific progress, of the Atomic Age, of Silicon Valley, of Boomer optimism and Zoomer optimism and doomer optimism. Keep going! You’re almost there! But eventually, no matter how bright your hope or how long your journey, you come to the end of the trail, and at the end of the trail is Oregon, and at the end of Oregon is Portland. And what then? See, that’s what nobody really knows. While you’re getting here, you’re a pioneer, an explorer.”
“I Love My Emotionally Stunted Friendships.” Tyler Austin Harper thinks men don’t need to talk about their feelings to have good friendships: “It is possible that I am repressed, bottled up, too shriveled to realize that I would be better off if I spent more time talking about feelings. But it’s also possible that my emotionally reticent male friendships are fine, actually—and that the people telling men to open up if they want to avoid dysfunctional relationships are pathologizing perfectly normal forms of sociality. The issue, as I see it, is not so much that men need to embrace a different style of friendship, but that men need more opportunities to have the kinds of friendships that they generally gravitate toward in the first place.”
“Picnicking in the Park on July 4.” Bill Kauffman talks about a small town’s celebration of the nation’s birthday and a small town’s political life: “First person I saw at Picnic in the Park was my friend Richard, an old hippie, the former chairman of our very small local Green party in a county that goes two-and-a-half to one for Donald Trump. Richard ran for library trustee a few months back, while a US flag flew upside down on his porch in protest at the war on Iran. Richard won the election easily – because people really know him. He is a neighbor. Organizer of the community garden. Buyer of coffee and donuts at the historical society’s lectures. Season ticket holder to Muckdogs baseball games. The upside-down flag-flying is just one feature in a rich, full picture.”
“The Christians You Need Might Be the Christians Next Door.” I review Charlie Cotherman’s new book, Strip Mine Jesus, in which he commends a life of faithful service in exploited or forgotten places: “In reacting against the compromises or even hypocrisies of normie Christianity, we need to avoid being infected by a culture that has confused radical obedience with celebrity, cool aesthetics, and outward success. Wanting to be a radical Christian is a good thing! But let’s be truly radical, putting down deep roots where we are, motivated by the conviction that God’s great glory manifests in the ordinary love and suffering that marks life in places the world deems insignificant.”
“Conspiracies of Learning and the Catherine Project.” Zena Hitz pops the myth of inevitable, monolithic systems, drawing on her experience with the Catherine Project to demonstrate that yes, you can conspire against big, entrenched systems: “The global scale of the monolith, its massiveness, is part of what makes it powerful. Yet that same scale is a vulnerability. After all, you and I are not global beings. We live in a dwelling with somewhere between one and twelve residents. That dwelling adjoins some others, either nearly or distantly. We walk in increments measured in fractions of meters. We speak to people face to face, at best, or screen to screen, at worst. Even in these days of automated humanity, we usually interact with individuals, with people.”
“Willa Cather’s Pioneering Women.” Sarah Reardon praises Willa’ Cather’s heroines, arguing that her “prairie women echo the book of Proverbs, wherein Wisdom is portrayed as a generous woman who presides over a feast, and the ideal woman is praised for her fruitfulness in every sphere of life.”
“Skill Nostalgia.” Joshua Habgood-Coote contrasts different forms of nostalgia for skilled human work: “Will our desire for a lost age of skilled work curdle into technophobia, a distrust of social change, and a desire to return to the ‘way things were’? When we fetishise the skills and objects of the past, are we falling into a reactionary form of Luddism that resists all change? . . . More than a century ago, sickened by the factories and slums that mechanical looms had built, John Ruskin and William Morris looked back, reaching past the Spitalfields weaver to something older: the medieval artisan. There, they found a dream of skilled labour, which they used as a tool to indict the present and imagine a fairer future. Their skill nostalgia became radical. Could ours do the same?” (Recommended by Dominic Garzonio.)
“The House Does Not Need You.” Nic Rowan turns to Ray Bradbury and two recent books—one about living with AI and one about social media—for help in making sense of the strange machine world we’re building. Bradbury nails “the frantic anxiety of post-war American life, the crazy-making suspicion that in our national race for progress, we had misplaced our purpose.”
“The Great Books for You and for Me.” Nadya Williams mulls the similarities between right and left defenses of the Great Books and considers why they seem to be trending across the political spectrum: “As a classicist, I will say that this concern with practical considerations is a very modern question. Rather than accusing Great Books advocates of being impractical, perhaps we should see together with them just how recent these concerns are. The whole point of Great Books is that we need timeless things to shape our modern brains.”
“Local News Is Dying. This 25-Year-Old Bought His Hometown Paper Anyway.” Frannie Block talks with the twenty-five-year-old owner of a local paper in southern Georgia: “The absence of a strong local paper can be profound. A lack of local coverage means people across town don’t have access to information about what’s going on in their community: a string of robberies, new job opportunities, a back-to-school rally where free backpacks will be handed out. Consumption of local news is strongly linked with a sense of community attachment. Those who read local news are more likely to vote in elections. And local news can serve as an antidote to the polarization roiling American communities. In counties with more robust local newspapers, voters are less likely to vote based solely on political party and are more likely to see issues through a nonpartisan lens.”
“Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and the self-mythologizing Beat Generation.” James Campbell reviews Gordon Ball’s Ginsberg & Beat Fellows and takes stock of this literary group and its legacy: “The most extraordinary event recorded here is the visit Ginsberg made in February 1991 to the Virginia Military Institute, where Ball worked as a teacher. Can there be a better emblem of what the anti-militaristic bard stood for than Ball’s photograph, ‘Cadets Read Howl’?”
“Bound for College.” Mel Livatino gives his granddaughter some advice as she heads off to college: “As you go off to college, I’d like you to think about these other ends of education. What does the word ‘education’ mean at its root? What do you think are the other ends of education? This isn’t a grilling. But it is something I think should be very much on your mind during these next four years. What exactly are you pursuing? And what in fact are you actually getting?”
