Short 494
Volunteering, Urban Farms, and Grocery Stores
We’ve now posted the FPR conference schedule. Based on feedback from recent conferences, we've built a bit more elbow room into the schedule to allow for more mingling and discussion.…
Kirk Center Visit after FPR Conference
Russell Kirk, perhaps more than any self-described conservative thinker of the past century, celebrated the virtues of place, limits, and liberty. His ancestral estate in Mecosta, MI has long been…
Contrary U, New Verse Review, and Vinyl Records
“Captive Users.” Alexander Stern pens a thoughtful review essay that puts Cory Doctorow’s The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation in conversation with Antón Barba-Kay’s A Web…
Nisbet, Fact-Checking, and Leopold
“Robert Nisbet for the Present Age.” Kirstin Birkhaug describes the experience of teaching Robert Nisbet’s The Present Age and watching her students respond to his analysis of America’s twinned statism…
Wendell Berry, the Pioneer Fire, and Idols
“‘Your Friend, Wendell’: A 90th Birthday Tribute to Wendell Berry.” To mark Wendell Berry’s 90th birthday, The Library of America published a set of reflections by several of the people…
Motherhood, Rural Decline, and Phoenix
I’ll be logging off the internet for a few weeks and thus pausing these Water Dippers. I aim to resume them in early August. In the meantime, make plans to…
Maurin, Partisanship, and Myth
"Ideas and Historical Consequences." Mars Hill Audio released the full version of an old interview with John Lukacs. FPR readers can up for a free FPR affiliate membership at Mars…
Math, Antitrust, and Work
“Computers Can’t Do Math.” David Schaengold has a clear and provocative essay on the differences between computer “thinking” and human thinking: “we can be sure there are world states beyond…
COVID, ChatGPT, and PFAS
“The Cultural Roots of Our Demographic Ennui.” Patrick Brown argues that affluence—what regular FPR contributor John de Graaf labeled “affluenza”—lies behind many of our cultural ills: “A world of creature…
Lobsters, Resilience, and Scouting
“DIY.” Bud Smith details the joys of fixing anything that’s broken with the help of the Internet: “YouTube has all the right answers and all the wrong answers. All you…
Patriotism, Realtors, and Men
“The Big AI Risk Not Enough People Are Seeing.” Tyler Austin Harper draws on Ivan Illich to distinguish between technologies that empower us and those that erode our human nature:…
Reading, Undset, and Tariffs
“Hope for the Organization Kid.” Joshua Hochschild revisits David Brooks’ classic 2004 essay on college students and considers what’s changed in the two decades since: “I doubt that the keenest…
Andrew Petiprin On Popcorn With the Pope
Andrew Petiprin is co-author of a new book from Word on Fire called Popcorn With the Pope, which examines all the movies on the 1995 Vatican movie list. Did you…
Reading, Chatbots, and Home
“Our Draymond Green Problem.” Elizabeth Stice draws on Draymond Green and Hannah Arendt to consider what responsibilities we might have for our allies: “What we need then is not exactly…
Ghost Stories with Nancy French
Longtime ghostwriter Nancy French tells her own tale in Ghosted: An American Life. French was raised in rural Tennessee and would later provide the words behind famous talking heads but found…
Hipsters, Cellphones, and Mondragón
“Is Ethical Shopping Only for Hipsters?” Kate Lucky wrestles with ethical shopping, effective charity, and the upside down extravagance of the Kingdom of God: “We anticipate an abundant new earth,…
The Midwest, Adderall, and Avian Flu
“Ending Agriculture isn’t the Climate-Crisis Solution Some Think It Is.” Taras Grescoe weighs in on the debate about lab-grown protein and makes a sensible defense of farming: “we need to…
Joel Miller on Books & Reading
Joel Miller of Miller’s Book Review Substack reads and reviews a prodigious number of books for this regular Substack. Joel formerly served as vice president of acquisitions for Thomas Nelson…
Conservation, Inflation, and Boeing
“‘This Will Finish Us.’” I finished reading Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America this week with a group of students, so this heartbreaking essay by Stephanie McCrummen about how the Tanzanian…
Refuge, Levitation, and Hospitality
“The Liberalism of Refuge.” I think that Bryan Garsten’s notion of “refuge” isn’t robust enough to do all the work he’s asking it to do in this account, but he…
Hands, Surveillance, and Church
“Angry Farmers Are Reshaping Europe.” While this New York Times article predictably frames European farmers’ frustrations through the lens of the “far right” and its rising political power, Roger Cohen…
War, Conversation, and Regrets
“In ‘Barons,’ Austin Frerick Takes on the Most Powerful Families in the Food System.” Twilight Greenaway interviews Frerick on the depressing stories of corporate power and government capitulation that his…
Family Time with Timothy Carney
Timothy Carney, an AEI senior fellow and the author of Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, talks about the village it…
Doubt, Fungi, and Water
“What New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman Gets Wrong About Rural America.” Wendell Berry responds to Krugman’s column about a new book on “white rural rage”: “A person who has…