Saving String, Kicking Leaves: Donald Hall’s Elegies

Hall’s elegiac poetry and prose teach grim lessons that are worth heeding, but there is also a sort of unsentimental, necessary hope—a hope for continuity and unexpected rebirth, a hope that keeps open a sense of possibility—that shines obscurely beneath their grief.

Max Picard’s Silence

Perhaps, without silence for a reference point—something out there that reminds us of our place in the big order of things—the masters of information feel free to shade, obscure, or otherwise manipulate their messages.

Re-membering the Body: A Review of What It Means to Be Human

This book at least provides a compelling diagnostic starting point, calling us back to our own networks of dependence and encouraging us to pursue friendship, particularly in the most challenging and vulnerable contexts.

“Seventy Years Ago”: A Review of Red Stilts by Ted Kooser

Ordinary and unrefined, Kooser's poems suggest the steady hand of a craftsman who doesn’t need to go looking for the next big thing.

More than a Step on the Boss Man’s Ladder

If Dolly Parton left the Smoky Mountains, it seems to have been on a hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell would have recognized. She came back, bearing gifts.

Introduction to Real Characters

"What we have for neighbors out here is–well–more interesting. We have way more folks who are just themselves and nobody else.”

Jacques Barzun’s 1937 Critique of Race-Thinking

On the heels of a consequential election, and the accompanying commentary demonstrating the continued pervasiveness of race-thinking, Barzun’s message of honoring each human individual’s value while recognizing our shared common humanity is a timely and timeless message.

What is Beauty? A Review of The Father of Lights

The idea that “no arguments or reasons have to be given to enable the experience of beauty” is dearly hopeful in a time when arguments and reasons are largely impotent in reaching people.

It’s a Federalist’s World, After All

Amidst the ongoing chaos and conflict over the 2020 presidential election, and vote tabulating methodologies in particular, let’s remember—and celebrate—that so far it is really only federalism that has won the day.

A Country Boy Can Thrive

You can leave your corner of the country without escaping it. And these memoirs testify to the importance of bringing something back.

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From the Archives

From the Editor–Local Culture 2.2: Christopher Lasch

Over and against manifest follies that characterize American life in the first quarter of the twenty-first century there stands the wide-ranging work, keen and voluminous, of the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch.

Monopoly House Rules

I love board games.  Truth be told, I am a sucker for games of all types, but there are a number of aspects to playing...

Giving Thanks for Russell Kirk’s Long Shadow

And what there is to conquer By strength and submission, has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope To...