The Nightstand

Reviewing Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of...

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...

Learning How to Think with Alan Jacobs

Last fall Alan Jacobs published a slim book with a bold title: How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds. Jacobs...

Telling the Stories Right

Though he may be better known as an essayist or poet, Berry calls himself a storyteller, and the best introduction to his agrarian vision is his fiction.

What Wendell Berry’s Brush Teaches Us About Capitalism, Community, and “Inevitability”

The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings, the latest collection of writings by Wendell Berry, isn't a perfect book, nor the perfect expression...

Whither Liberalism?

We live, to borrow the title from Daniel T. Rodgers’s excellent 2011 book, in an age of fracture. Whether any time in history has been...

J. Drew Lanham’s Clear-Eyed Vision of the Land

“I think of land and hope that others are thinking about it, too.” Those of us who try to think about land have much...

At Last, the FPR Manifesto

... where human affairs are conducted as if place really matters, where economic affairs are conceived as if limits really matter, and where political power is exercised as if liberty really matters.

“Go Talk with Those Who are Rumored to be Unlike You”

On October 2, 2009, the International Olympic Committee met in Denmark to vote on which city would host the 2016 Summer Olympics. Despite President...

Review of Suicide of the West

Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy, appearing on Amazon and...

Catastrophe, Technology, Limits, and Localism

Charles C. Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet, published earlier this year, is a fabulous book. Not a perfect book; sometimes, in order to...