News, Notes, & Podcasts

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.…

“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…

“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…

“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,…

“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 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…

“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…

“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,…

“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…

FPR's own Jason Peters will be giving an Agrarian Voices Lecture later this month at the Berry Center. If you're near New Castle on Jan. 23rd, consider going in person…

“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…

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…