The Editors
Articles by The Editors
Cutting a Farm into a Forest
A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke of the axe he is writing his signature on the face of the land. --Aldo Leopold, Sand County…
The New Yorker’s Latest Contribution to Trumpian Populism
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. --George Orwell, Animal Farm This past Thursday, I opened my mailbox and saw a naked President Trump staring…
Identity and Ethnos in Socrates’s Athens: A Response to Jordan Wales
Jordan Wales has recently gifted the conservative movement a sober and justly-timed critique of Richard Spencer and the alt-right. Unfortunately, much of the analysis of Spencer and the movement Spencer…
Communal Self-Reliance: A Tie to Bind Black and White
Two recent incidents have made clear to me how the culture wars can stultify the fecund complexity of our common life. Recently, my wife and I attended a lecture on…
Learning from The Left Behind
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Robert Wuthnow's new book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America, is the best book I've read on the rural-urban divide in the…
The Practice of Attachment and A Comprehensive Social Order
Shortly after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Columbia University professor Mark Lilla took to the pages of the New York Times to offer an edifying perspective as to why…
Reading Chatwin in Silesia
When I moved to Poland it was the first time I had left Britain. I have lived in the same town for four years and a month. Tarnowskie Góry is…
Joyless Moderns
The modern age, in almost every detail, began with the flat rejection of joy. And the modern condition consists in alternately lamenting that there is nothing in which to take…
Feeding Pigs and Solving for Pattern
Oakland Township, MI My small, exurban farmstead is sustained, in part, by the relationship I forged with my local feed store. To help the reader appreciate the practical and economic…
Reviewing Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts
Taking up a craft—such as knitting, woodworking, or gardening—restores focal practices, re-connects us with the physical world, and provides the satisfaction of self-reliance. These benefits are good news to a…
Good News and Bad News
As always, the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. On the good side of the ledger, the facts seem incontrovertible: more and more people riding bikes when they decide…
Captioning Over our Grief
In the spirit of Oscar season, we do well to look back at what the 2017 ‘Academy’ ignored. One such film is this fall’s Wind River, the directorial debut of…
Prairie Fires and Prairie Romances
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Caroline Fraser's wonderful Prairie Fires is many things. Primarily it's a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the justly famous Little House books, and…
Love the Evangelist, Not the Evangelism
Most of the reactions to Billy Graham's death yesterday have been, as you might expect, positive, which is welcome considering the way every day brings some news of how hypocritical…
Letter from the Electronic Jail
From a jail cell in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr. charged us to acknowledge our “inescapable network of mutuality.” Fifty-five years later, our networks of mutuality remain inescapable. And they’re…
Urban Questions (and Responses) for Krugman
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Over a month ago, Paul Krugman used his space at The New York Times to ask "what, in the modern economy, are small cities even…
Catalonia Could Happen Here
As a scholar of Regional and Place Studies and a historian of secessionist movements I believe Catalonia’s brand of separatism could come to the United States, and sooner than Americans…
A Call for a Politically Inclusive Classroom
Teaching Tolerance in a Time of Trump sounds like a short-course a firebrand professor might offer, though I mean it in a more comprehensive way than one might imagine. While…
As North Korea Goes Nuclear Far East Ambassadors Must Speak Up
I lived much of my adult life under Terry Branstad’s multiple tenures as governor of Iowa, and I think he did a “pretty fair job,” as farm families are wont…
Breaking Through the Screen Door: The Jayhawks’ Hollywood Town Hall, Twenty-Five Years Later
A couple of years ago my wife had a minor accident, the kind that results in an older car being mysteriously “totaled.” Before the man came to ferry our 2005…
A Rebirth of Midwestern Regionalism
My review of an important new book by the midwestern historian, Jon K. Lauck, appears in the new issue of National Review. I'll have more to say on western and southern…
To Bail or not to Bail
Recently David Brooks posted a New York Times op-ed lamenting an increase in “bailing,” which he defines as “flaking” on social commitments. The title of the article was “The…
The Dryers are Coming! The Dryers are Coming!
South Korea lives on the cutting edge of technology -- just ask the young smart-phone zombies that slowly roam the campus where I teach. On second thought, better to send…
Sitting on the Porch
“I cannot separate it [watching the world go by] from the porch where it occurs. The action and the space are indivisible. The action is supported by this kind of…
