Articles Archive

Hardship fades from memory with each generation. Those who lived it remember the weight of it. Those who didn’t often forget.

Generative ai systems, like drugs, impact cognition directly.

We start with some songs about faithful women this week before moving on to some more abstract examinations of constancy. Send your song suggestions to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com!

Are our first principles as Americans, as humans, as creatures, sifted and rightly laid down?

James Rebanks warns of the fragility of a food system that prioritizes efficiency above all else.

The saddest pair of words in the English language is the phrase never again.

“Relationships” between human beings and machines are not real relationships because machines cannot relate to the experience of living a human life.

To truly listen to locks requires the love of a locksmith.

When the scoreboard lit up at my son’s game yesterday, it felt like a small miracle.

To gaze into the eyes of a helpless baby was to see my actual condition as a creature laid bare.

It’s songs about salvation this week on A Symposium of Popular Songs—and not nearly as much Christian rock as I was afraid I’d play! Send your song recommendations to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com.

Nate Halverson has a level-headed and disturbing report on the use of glyphosate to manage US forests.

As one Kentuckian wondered, why would he give up the “glitz and glamour” elsewhere to come back home to farm?

Once, a very long time ago, man and woman lived in a garden and walked with God.

So many before me have made this crossing. So many died for control of these waters.

The only area in Green Valley that has escaped urban sprawl is Mr. Henry’s Farm, at which stands an old oak tree named Birch.

Just in time for summer, it’s a bunch of songs about falling in love. Send your song suggestions to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com!

Universities are peculiar institutions, and they need peculiar leaders.

Alexander Sammon narrates the incredible, complicated, tragic story of Florida’s dying crop.

Nostalgia, properly speaking, is homesickness. In its etymologically precise sense it is a longing not for a time but for a place.

The prose in As I Lay Dying simultaneously provides a mirror for and an escape from my experience.

We often find ourselves fleeing “forward,” one might say, to escape the meaninglessness that forever snaps at our heels.

Make sourdough: as an act of love for your body and your friends and family, and as a remedy against the ills of non-embodied life.

What might be gained by viewing Nisbet’s different forms of community as being in a conversation, rather than in a competition?