The Water Dipper 328
Life, Death, and Branding Day
“The Good Life, According to Gen Z.” Maya Sulkin talks with several Gen Zers who, in good Porcher fashion, left the big-city corporate rat race to move back home: “In…
Land, Cheating, and Work
“How Major League Baseball Lost its Soul.” Bill Kauffman may be biased, but at least he’s honest: “I highly recommend Homestand, Will Bardenwerper’s new book contrasting the community-enhancing qualities of…
Cancer Cures, Manatees, and Enology
“We are Letting Schools Poison our Children.” Hadley Freeman has some harsh (but accurate) critiques of ed tech: “You don’t need to be Mr Gradgrind to be repulsed by this…
Handshakes, Extinction, and Chess
“The Intellectual Virtues of the Small Magazine.” Jeff Reimer brilliantly narrates the joys of an intellectual life and the role that small magazines can play in foster this: ‘Now remember…
Seasons, Steel, and Profit
“In Due Season.” Chris Gregorio reviews and praises Matt Miller’s Leaves of Healing: “As he reflects on each slice of liturgical time and the period of garden time in which…
Dumber Phones, Godric, and Hiroshima
“Can Using a Dumber Phone Cure ‘Brain Rot’?” Bryan X. Chen tells readers of the New York Times that there’s nothing we can do in the face of our society’s…
Luddite Pedagogy, Robert Moses, and Blue Labour
“Can We Go to the Neighbourhood?” Amber Lapp has a lovely essay on how her daughter helped her live in her neighborhood: “The sight of this toddler in a sparkly…
Baseball, O’Connor, and Nostalgia
“Play (and Watch) Ball!” Bill Kauffman praises baseball as a community-building pastime, and he highly recommends Will Bardenwerper’s new book: “I started going to ball games with my parents and…
Thinking, Baseball, and Eggs
“Have Humans Passed Peak Brain Power?” John Burn-Murdoch points to several indicators that humans across the world are simply thinking and understanding less now than happened ten years ago. The…
Journalism, Fractures, and Trash
Save the date for our fall FPR conference at Baylor! “The Tacit Dimension of Shop Class.” Mars Hill Audio is publishing an audio version of this classic Mark Mitchell essay.…
Boys, Suburbia, and Repair
“Larry Ellison’s Half-Billion-Dollar Quest to Change Farming Has Been a Bust.” Tom Dotan reports on one tech titan’s efforts to remake agriculture from his base on an Hawaiian island: “Little…
Pilgrimage, Translation, and Control
“Sexuality After Industrialism.” James Wood urges conservatives to learn from Ivan Illich’s analysis of gender: “Illich forces us to reconsider the very foundation of our gender debates. Targeting the sexual…
Stuck, Mud, and Gentleness
“How Progressives Froze the American Dream.” Yoni Appelbaum’s essay, drawn from his new book Stuck, has some fair critiques of NIMBYism and thoughtful reflections on the tensions inherent in zoning,…
Hacking, Splendor, and the Dakotas
“Salesforce Is Using A Hallucination To Sell AI.” Alan Kluegel turns an analysis of a dumb AI commercial into a meditation on the likely social effects of AI adoption: “The…
Matter, Gurus, and Lambing
“Matter Matters.” Paul Kingsnorth kicks off a new series at his Substack exploring ancient holy sites in Europe: “I’ve always been fascinated by how humans interact with their landscapes: what…
Hospitality, AI, and Rivers
“How do I Kill my Microsoft Copilot?” Sam Leith is not particularly fond of Microsoft’s new AI helper: “As far as Big Tech is concerned, no crap idea is so…
Media, Meat, and Life
“Last Boys at the Beginning of History.” This essay by Mana Afsari defies summary. Let me just say it is very good: “I was begging to be given values, community,…
Seamus Heaney, Isolation, and the Catholic Worker
“Educating Humans.” I’m relishing the new issue of Plough. Alex Sosler has a great essay on trade schools, Tim Maendel describes one teacher’s creative ways of teaching his students to…
Milton, Babbitt, and Auden
“AI and All Its Splendors.” I continue my mulling on AI and its underlying temptations in this lengthy essay for Christianity Today. I aim to craft a book proposal this…
Progress, Tyson, and Messiah
I'll be taking the next couple of weeks off for the Christmas holidays. Look for these to resume in January. “Can a Phone-Free Learning Environment Work? This College President Emphatically…
Civilization, Family, and Charity
“Against Christian Civilization.” Paul Kingsnorth’s Erasmus Lecture is now out in essay form: “I believe there is wisdom to be found for us, in this disintegrating age, not in crusading…
Wheeler Catlett, the Study, and Democracy
“The Berry Center Journal.” The fall issue of the Berry Center Journal includes an opening letter from Mary Berry, a 1989 speech by John M. Berry Jr., and more, including…
Local Sports, Being Homeless, and the Reading Wars
"An Education in Thanksgiving." Rachel Alexander Cambre gives a very perceptive reading of Hannah Coulter: "Stories that bring the past to life, on the other hand, pass down memories of…
RFK Jr., Hunting, and Prison
“The Moses Option.” Paul Kingsnorth writes against the dangerous allure of activism: “What is the ‘solution’ to our modern ‘problem’? For a start, it is to stop thinking like that,…