“God Remembers in Our Dementia.” Jen Pollock Michel describes what she’s learned while caring for her aging mother: “Dementia, at the very least, reminds us of what it means to be human. We are fragile, finite creatures. We cannot self-exist or self-sustain. We depend on God for our very lives, but we are also deeply dependent on each other to offer the companionship and care that helps us both live and die.”
“How to Build the Perfect City.” Chris Arnade imagines what a perfect city would provide for its inhabitants: “I came to this conclusion during my decade talking to Americans. What I’ve seen over my last four years walking the world—from one of my first walks in Vietnam to a more recent one in Lombardy, Italy—has supported it, and provided me with evidence for a stronger version, which is this: Human despair is no longer primarily a result of economic destitution; rather, it is due to a lack of functional and healthy communities, and the current challenge for most of the world’s political class is understanding that.”
“Students Want the Liberal Arts. Administrators, Not So Much.” Jennifer Frey wonders why student hunger for genuine, liberal learning is not supported by so many college administrators, including hers: “An unpleasant truth has emerged in Tulsa over the years. It’s not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it’s out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, and an administrative class that won’t fight for the liberal arts even when it attracts both students and major financial gifts. The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.”
“Eat Your AI Slop or China Wins.” Robert Bellafiore provides a grim analysis that suggests America can either sacrifice its citizens on the alter of AI, or it can be dominated by China. In my book, any geopolitical victory that requires you to lose your soul is no victory at all: “As every modern society has come to experience, technological innovation, despite the countless ways it has improved our lives, can also bring not just short-term economic instability and job loss, but also long-term social fracture, loss of certain human skills and agency, the undermining of traditions, and the empowerment of the state over its own people. In what we might call the ‘technological security dilemma,’ each nation faces a choice: either pursue technological advancement to the utmost, forcing your competitors to reciprocate, even if such advancement jeopardizes your own citizens’ wellbeing; or refuse to do so — say, out of a noble concern that it threatens your people’s form of life — and allow yourself to be surpassed by an adversary without the same concern for its people, or for yours.”
“Mercy, Attentiveness, and Alyosha.” Joshua Heavin considers how we might cultivate embodied love even amid an AI-fueled flight from reality: “Though we live in an age hurtling toward a digital elision of reality and illusion—especially with respect to education, mortality, and the existential threat to humanity posed by AI—we need stories and embodied habits that form our imaginations to remember that not only another way of life but another world is both imaginable and realistically possible.”
“Can Americans Love Poetry Again?” A.M. Juster mourns the loss of poetry as a vibrant and popular art: “We have a small number of poets doing wonderful work that is not embedded in our culture, and we have poets whose work has connected deeply with some particular constituency. But mostly, we have professional poets who do not think it is a problem that their work bores and frustrates Americans who love poetry.”
“Paint It Black.” Bill Kauffman praises the artists and writers who cheerfully abjure government largess: “I fully realize how terribly quaint this all sounds today. Abjure power? Nah—the dead-eyed bores of the woke left and the rough boys of the nationalist right fetishize power, and when they achieve it they damn sure intend to use it. Conscientious objectors who wish neither to wield nor submit to power are as impractical as unemployed poets, whiskey priests, and dandelions.”
“Fair Markets for Rural America.” Claire Kelloway highlights three policies that could make rural markets more fair: “A post-neoliberal economic platform demands new labor, trade, and tax policies; but in this essay, I will focus on examples of state-level anti-monopoly policy. Rural voters across the political spectrum disdain monopolies and corporate greed, particularly in agriculture, and support government action to promote fair competition. From cracking down on repair monopolies to leveling the playing field for independent grocers, state lawmakers have many options to combat corporate consolidation and exploitation in rural America.”
“Private Equity Now Owns More Than 40 Minor League Baseball Teams, And The Number Keeps Growing.” Jen Ramos Eisen reports on the development that Will Bardenwerper warns about in Homecoming: “Private equity is the steamroller that crushes all your favorite things. Journalism, for one, and also a once iconic toy store; even bowling these days. Now it has come for minor league baseball, where in little more than three years one private equity firm has managed to buy up a healthy percentage of the MiLB teams in the United States.”
“Learning to Love Food.” Sarah Reardon describes how an eating disorder provided an opportunity to cultivate a genuine love for creation—and food: “Food, too, is a good part of God’s created order—not merely for sustenance or even for its symbolic, spiritual significance. Bread and wine are not only good because they can provide energy or because they represent our Lord in the Eucharist. They are simply good. Not instrumentally, but in itself, food is good. That is how God created it: to strengthen and gladden our hearts.”
“The King and the Swarm.” Mary Harrington makes a bold case, drawing on the work of media ecologists from Elizabeth Eisenstein to Walter Ong, that liberal democracy won’t work in a post-print culture, and monarchical forms of government may be preferable to the available alternatives. I would hope for something far more decentralized, but her argument that digital swarms can’t sustain the democratic institutions developed for a print culture seems unassailable: “As AI agents improve to the point of shrinking the administrative class, we may find that what actually has the power to destroy the twentieth-century technocracy is not free markets and personal responsibility, or even anons posting memes, but developments in AI. If so, classical liberals may be disappointed to discover that just as “civil discourse” is not coming back, what comes after the deep state will not be a return to small and limited republican government. It is more likely to be big government mediated by big data, crunched by machine agents in a now almost entirely digital swarm. Should this outcome be realized within the legacy democratic paradigm, it will inevitably result in governance that is still more impersonal, less accountable, and less capable of friendship for those ruled, than the impersonal, unaccountable bureaucrats it has rendered obsolete. If this happens, and I think it will, the return of the king will be not only possible but urgently necessary.”
