Articles Archive

To plant and cultivate good seed is perhaps the best response to this reality.

The vast majority of the past has dissolved into a state of prehistory, forgotten because there was no one who thought it worthy of recording.

Australia is a parched land where every drop of water is valued as gold.

Though I’ve left the Army, it hasn’t left me.

We’re listening to songs about distance this week, and I managed to make it not just long-distance love songs. Send your song recommendations to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com!

Paul Pastor describes his beloved home state as the end of the West.

Our increasingly obvious failure to make anything like “progress” is part and parcel of our failure to conserve the order from which all progress comes.

The agrarian voice reveals Nolan’s most significant and disappointing departure from Homer’s epic.

In American society, computers are never required to prove their worth.

Artificial intelligence gets the best of me most days. It demands too much. It takes a profession that I love and turns it into a soul-crushing curse.

I’m back from my vacation and ready to play songs about perseverance. Hot funk, cool punk--we've got it all. Send your song suggestions to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com!

The moment, while small and perhaps unimportant, stayed with me and was a beautiful example of the great conversation with the stranger.

Eric Adler praises Patrick Deneen’s new book on how Homer’s Odyssey reveals the character of America’s tensions.

Moms and dads know the feeling when a child first goes off to school. It’s the end of the happy chaos of raising children. But grandparents know that feeling too.

There’s a harmony between wilderness, city, and farm that Bates captures exquisitely. Separate any one from the other, and you have a diminished America.

If we cannot tell the difference between ourselves and machines, it may not be that the machines are “that good.” It may be that our lives are that bad.

Hren addresses our cultural moment through the idiom of corrective: great literature can help restore things that Western societies are losing.

I know that the Greenbrier represents more than potential horror—it represents what Americans hope to preserve: our beautiful nation, one worth preserving.

I'm taking the month of July off from making new episodes of A Symposium of Popular Songs and taking the opportunity to replay some of my favorite episodes from last…

Luke Allen describes what it’s like to live in northern Michigan, a place that’s increasingly oriented toward tourism.

We take beauty for granted, yet it keeps coming at us in an endless display of divine grace and power.

After the cold and dark of a long Russian winter, spring had arrived.

Sometimes the things one encounters change the person doing the choosing.

To me, his body of work for CBC Radio’s Ideas is the most remarkable sustained achievement in public intellectual life in the last half-century.