The Stump

If there ever comes a true accounting of the costs we’re racking up for making, using, and discarding our mobile (de)vices, we will be obliged to admit that there has been no net gain. The withdrawals from the account exceed the deposits in both number and in sum.

You don’t have to be normal. You don’t have to be weird. You just have to be a person – which is a moral ideal, not a fact of nature – and let the chips fall.

If we choose to befriend our many obligations—to connect with other people, to love, to serve, to create, to borrow, to lend, to repair, to celebrate, to support—instead of buying a product or a service—then we are cultivating fertile ground for a healthy form of gendered cooperation to (perhaps) re-emerge.

It is a reality not frequently enough acknowledged: like so many other things in life, the love of reading is caught, not taught.

The future of our built environment is in our hands. We can reject the alienation of modernism and instead foster spaces that cultivate connection, celebrate history, and create a sense of belonging.

If we don’t experience full, unqualified “concrete, historical community,” then we won’t experience full, unqualified “genuine deliberation.”

These questions would cause little debate or consternation without the importance of place tethering them. And, despite the erasure of communitarian mindsets and regional identity, place still matters.

While it is impossible to be sure what the ultimate cultural importance of this movie will be, I do think Walsh has hit a nerve.

Contemplating this turn of events in our politics reminds me that we human beings have a strong desire for tidy coherence. Sometimes this desire can be a kind of sickness.

Society needs its most talented individuals to not just dive into the fray of politics and policy but to build the institutions that shape culture.