News, Notes, & Podcasts
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News, Notes, & Podcasts
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,…