“Hope in an Age of Enclosure.” Joe Knight looks to an English folk hero who fought against enclosures to imagine how we might resist digital enclosures today: “This story, where a clash of rights and ideas led to the growth of a local legend, sums up for me the story of the Forest of Dean. For centuries this place has been a microcosm of a much larger struggle. The writer Paul Kingsnorth notes that the English rebellions against enclosures were not only about resisting the mass land grabs or the influx of industrialism. They were about safeguarding ‘a way of life.’ Hope and belonging are rooted in common life. They are qualities that arise when this common life finds a home in our imagination, stirring memory and meaning, expectation and aspiration.”
“The Alpine Neighbors of Stehekin, Washington.” I write about the remarkable people who live in a spectacular place: “Yes, the landscape makes this place remarkable, but so do the people, and it’s this interplay between the wild topography and the hospitable human community that prevented me from ever being comfortable with the human vs. nature bifurcation that marks American environmentalism.”
“Mark.” Jeremy Stern talks with Zuckerberg, his family, his parents, his rivals, and tries to make sense of the person who has created a technological empire: “Perhaps it is that simple, intolerable fact—that new technologies are always being invented; what remains broken is us—which requires a scapegoat. And who could ask for a better one than him? He is, for millions of people, a hideous mirror of both modern technological capitalism, and the resistance of history and human nature to perfectibility by it. He is seen at once as shrewd and naive, calculating and lucky, too powerful and too craven. Unlike the boomers and Gen X, he is the only trillion-dollar founder of his generation, and millennials are cringe. He is Jewish and uncool, yet impervious to humiliation. He is, in one man, the personification of responsibility for alt-right populism; left-wing authoritarianism; the death of journalism; polarization; political propaganda; political censorship; the dangers of free speech; human rights violations; teenage depression; body dysmorphia; and male loneliness. He is an emperor for life. He is, in a word, an easy mark.”
“In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” It’s hard for me to fathom a seventh-grader who cares about school rankings and getting into an “elite” college. But Nikole Hannah-Jones writes a courageous essay that second-guesses the difficult choices she and her husband made when deciding where to send their daughter to school: “Glancing between her and the road, I told her everything that I had said a hundred times on stages, in interviews, in discussions since I had made her a symbol of how the choices we make can help sustain — or dismantle — educational inequality. I talked about the deep inequality in New York’s schools and how, like those Black families who came before us, we had an obligation to be part of the struggle of our larger community. Even if her schools were not academically the strongest, I explained, her father and I knew that we could provide for her tutoring and any other assistance to make up for what her school may have lacked. But my child just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.”
“Why I Do Not Have AC.” Clare Coffey calls for innovative AC, and in the meantime, she will endure the heat: “I do not eschew cooling technology for the sake of the climate, although you are welcome to tell people that if they ask. It is not the perverse need to prove that I could hack it, if suddenly dropped into various harrowing historical scenarios including but not limited to the Donner Party and the Vietnam War. It is not even for vague but strongly felt notions of seasonality and the importance of experiencing the sensory fullness of life’s offerings. It is because window air-conditioning units — the type of air conditioning to which I could, under real-life constraints, aspire — are ugly.”
“The One, the Many, and the In-Between.” Luke C. Sheahan writes an incisive review of Luke Burgis’s new book, and along the way he identifies why so many have found FPR and other likeminded institutions to be crucial in navigating the insanity of the online swarm: “Dissenters from totalitarianism often had around them a group of friends and confidants who gave them psychological and spiritual succor, establishing the ‘solid self’ in the presence of other souls. Intermediate associations, social structures that mediate between the larger world, including the national government, and the individual members, are essential to broad social and political health. Burgis writes, ‘The crisis of modern politics [is] not too much government, but too little community.’”
“Anthropic Quietly Sets Up Biology Lab as it Ramps AI Drug Program.” Jeffrey Dastin and Michael Erman report on Anthropic’s new venture. What could go wrong? “At a time when fears of AI are gripping the public, the startup has built a wet lab, or place for physical experiments, in the San Francisco Bay Area, two people familiar with the matter said. Anthropic has said it wants to unlock treatments for rare diseases, and its biology work has gone beyond ‘in silico’ or computer evaluations.”
“The Desert of the Real.” Antón Barba-Kay distills a lot of important debates in this marvelous essay: “Virtue ethics, educational theory, and media studies all converge on the question of what kinds of embedded social pressures are organizing the development of our characters. Aristotle was only dimly aware of what we call the “information ecosystem,” because the notion became salient only through the acceleration of technological history. And yet to the degree that the virtues are matters of formation—of what kinds of qualities our field of possibilities is actively selecting for—and to the degree that the thinning out of our local embeddedness is a direct consequence of our technological practices, it’s clear that questions of virtue ethics cannot help but be questions about technology. Digital technologies are now the single most powerful formative influence on most young people; anyone who grows up as a habitual user of certain products and platforms is being acculturated into a set of dispositions of attention, memory, argument, and moral responsiveness that sharply mark them off from those of previous generations.”
