The Nightstand

In some ways Good Husbandry stands as a kind of bildungsroman for Essex Farm and, by extension, the support-your-local-farmer movement.

Bromfield, like many farmers interested in sustainability, did not desire mere primitivism in cultivation, but a more intelligent way of farming that did not degrade the resources the farm depends upon.

In our current moment of social media activism, we must ask ourselves what kind of learning, real learning—the kind that involves your body and takes root in your soul—can take place without embodiment? And what kind of real embodiment takes place without participating in the grief and suffering of another?

Those who do know her work might be a bit surprised if I suggest that Le Guin has a real porcher sensibility.

One need not be a Nietzschean to recognize that something is rotten in the states of America and in the West more broadly. It was Nietzsche’s view that the civilization could not be saved, even if pieces of it could be salvaged.

There are second chances for some of us, but even second chances bring new losses. For me, it is the grace and hope of these stories and others like them in the work of Berry and Berger that has earned them pride of place on my shelves and in my life.

The lens through which Eric O. Jacobsen views the three pieces of glass that serve as the basis of his book—the windshield, TVs, and phones—is in need of a good polishing.

One of the spiritual dangers of Trump is that he can come to be seen as the only danger. Such “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic then leads to the temptation to overlook the problems posed by the other side.

James Howard Kunstler follows the first commandment handed down to all of us at birth: “Thou shalt not be dull.”

At their best, local papers “help provide a common reality and touchstone, a sense of community and of place.”