“Vice Cannot Build Virtue.” Nathan Beacom considers two different accounts of the role that virtue plays in public life: “The health of our polity, of our republic, will depend upon those who are willing to be called naïve, people who will not do a thing they think is wrong for the sake of political victory. Men and women who will not give up their integrity are like a ballast by which the ship of state keeps an even keel. Without them, the Scylla of civil strife or the Charybdis of tyranny will bring a republic to its end.” (Recommended by Adam Smith.)
“The Enduring Value of Math, in an Age of AI.” Francis Su explains to his new students why they should want to learn math: “Virtues, on the other hand, are aspects of character that you build. These are habits of mind or dispositions that become second nature as a result of doing math regularly—like being creative, or seeing a problem from multiple points of view, or being persistent in problem-solving, or being less fearful of getting stuck and knowing how to chew on a hard problem for a while. Or experiencing joy when you see a beautiful idea.”
“An Ominous Warning of Tech Takeover.” Farrah Jarral reviews Jill Lepore’s new book on AI and governance: “By her own admission, Lepore has written ‘a grumpy book’. Almost every chapter ends with a deeply ominous line. However, she is not a true AI doomer at heart. She clarifies that it is not the technology itself that is the problem, but our lack of a coherent, democratically forged strategy about how to develop and use it.”
“At the Zoo.” Adam Smith visits a zoo and reflects on how healthy human societies are not like zoos (he also informs us that his children poop more than once a week, which seems good): “The truth is that while we are certainly animals with material needs, we are also animals who need to meet them by exercising our own powers, and who languish when our powers are no longer necessary – and perhaps even no longer welcome – because the system can take care of us more efficiently than we can take care of ourselves. We take natural pleasure not so much having our needs met but in actively meeting them, and in ‘wasting’ our energies on projects that go beyond our ‘needs’ to encompass our need for play in all its forms.”
“Can This Little Bookstore Save a Rust-Belt Town?” Will Bardenwerper visits Steubenville’s BookMarx to assess the odds for renaissance in a town that’s fallen on hard times: “A local bookstore in a place like Steubenville can’t survive on nostalgia alone. Why, after all, would anyone choose to go and pay $30 for a book Amazon can deposit on your doorstep for $15 tomorrow? Perhaps the answer is simple: In an era marked by loneliness and discord, we need places like BookMarx to bring us together. It’s hard to quantify the value of that sort of thing, but I’d wager it’s worth more than other things we thoughtlessly spend money on, like overpriced coffees or fast-food meals.”
“Groups Sue Trump’s EPA Over Fast-Track Approval of Toxic Datacenter Chemicals.” Tom Perkins details the EPA’s approval of two new chemicals: “Despite the photoacid generators’ toxicity and persistence in the environment, there are likely no requirements for a semiconductor plant in the US to limit discharges, said Lenny Siegel, executive director of the Center of Public Environmental Oversight, which advocates for stronger regulations around the industry’s chemicals.”
“The Restless Odysseus in All of Us.” Luke C. Sheahan praises Patrick Deneen’s new book: “This book is about the soul, especially the American soul, and the tensions within which we abide. Deneen sees The Odyssey as a story about the fundamental nature of human existence: our longing for home and the desire to desert it, our mortality and the temptation to transcend it.”
“Arriving Home.” Terence Sweeney reviews To Arrive Where We Started By Ian Marcus Corbin and wrestles with the right way to recover a sense of home in a homeless world: “For Corbin, our need for home and relation gets transposed in modernity into our need to own and exclude. Lacking communities of participation, we direct our innate longing for them into owning things in such a way that we lose connection instead of gaining it. Rather than belonging to communities, we belong to possessions.”
“Storytelling with Martin Shaw.” Frank Mulder goes to Walsingham, England to talk with Martin Shaw about the power of telling the right stories: “With his large gray beard and inseparable hat, Shaw is a bard, a seanchaí as the Celts called it, who, with his warm, weathered voice, knows how to transport his listeners into a world of half-girls, wolves, talking swans, and evil princes. He tells the story of the half-girl on his YouTube channel Jawbone, which deals with stories of crisis, wilderness, and transformation. Shaw is a master storyteller; his sentences are beautiful and vivid. His books are bestsellers. As a mythologist, he teaches students at Stanford and Cambridge, or at his own School of Myth in Dartmoor, Devon, where he lives. But he prefers taking people into the wilderness, in Dartmoor or Wales.”
“Undermining Babylon System.” Alan Jacobs outlines his case for Christian anarchism: “So what is required in order to offer meaningful resistance is to stop treading the wine press — to decentralize, to disaggregate, to localize, to refuse and disobey.”
