Articles Archive

The national dialogue has myopically focused on bringing back manufacturing jobs, which misses the point that the real goal should be stable communities.

Out here the road doesn’t speak theory—it breathes.

Phillips and Pauling help us to consider new emerging technologies and how we can avoid becoming cyborgs living off grubs and gruel.

We’re listening to songs about crying this week on A Symposium of Popular Songs, and there are so many of them that I’m only playing artists I’ve never played on…

Han turns so completely toward wholeness that his writing seems an alien arrival ... Writing, perhaps, not even to be read but simply to praise ...

Charles McNamara wrestles with how we might regain the virtues needed for real education.

The real work of judgment makes possible stability and repair, a work worth even one’s death, or, what may prove more difficult, a lifetime of obscure fidelity.

Brad Littlejohn’s recent book offers wise guidance for navigating our way through these times of rapid change.

Many are quick to posit that we have a wide range of rights, yet we are almost tongue-tied about our responsibilities.

Technology may assist the surgeon, illuminate the astronomer’s field, or console a mother in her sorrow. Yet it cannot give the soul the perfection it longs for.

Inspired by absolutely nothing in my personal life, we’re listening to break-up songs this week on A Symposium of Popular Songs. I’ll try not to make it too depressing! Send…

At its best, Krause’s writing reminds us that poetry is not a luxury but a vital mode of human knowing, one that can re-enchant our disenchanted age and direct us…

In a searing essay, Alvaro M. Bedoya, a former FTC commissioner, describes how he came to embrace populism.

We must begin to see and name how deeply the modern higher education industry subverts the very nature of embodied, placed, limited humans.

A box by a door. A hand that picks up. A name that calls an object to account.

Practicing the discipline of attention

A room once filled with my son and his belongings was mostly empty. It wasn’t the absence of his stuff that hurt; it was his absence. But as I ran…

In conjunction with the most recent issue of Local Culture and with FPR’s fall conference, we’re listening to songs about work on this week’s Symposium of Popular Songs.

Colleges and universities should focus on forming the uniquely human attributes that AI cannot replicate.

Charlotte Alden profiles the fascinating school that the brilliant Donald Antenen has started in his hometown.

Between places.

As Gurney’s family and friends wrestle with the loss of their friend, I hope they—or more accurately we—will lean into being lonely inside a web of love.

While I was talking with one Texan who was at her first FPR conference, she told me, "I think I've found my people."

My guest is my friend Andrea Kirk Assaf, whom I have known for, well, a few decades now. She is the author most recently of 365 Lessons From the Stoics…