The Barbershop
In Praise of the Inefficient
This year I’m renewing my commitment to the sentence.
More Articles in The Barbershop
Still Singin’
That this country boasts something called “The Great American Songbook” is one of the best jokes around. The Great American Songbook? Our songs—let alone songbooks—don’t stick around long enough to get great.…
The Beehive Plan
A folklife is made up of the food and craft, the local stories, songs, remedies and rumors—relationships that define a place as much as the geology and ecology do.
“Blackest Land, Whitest People”
From here in my long-time Midwestern location, these lots are unshakeable reminders of a place in Texas where a shameful darkness once surrounded a part of my childhood.
Mud: Our Alma-Pater
If the institutions that oversee our slow twelve-to-eighteen-year process of education are called our alma-mater (nourishing mother), why can’t the dirt-filled, dung-laden places that convey agrarian lessons taught over 20 years be…
The Price of Place: Oeconomia over Chrematistike
The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.--Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France On July 2nd,…
Rethinking the Good City: Vallejo’s Bold Vision
What Americans Want in Cities What makes a good city? I’ve been thinking a lot about this. What makes for a city people are happy living in, and want to stay in?…
Robo-umps and Us
As is so often the case when new technology promises to correct the errors of human fallibility, robo-umps could be bad for everyone involved.
Bringing Wendell Berry (and Business) to Sterling
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] A week ago I was able to organize a small group of friends to attend a fine, relatively intimate event at Sterling College, a small Christian liberal…
Solar’s Dirty Secret
In 2017 I moved back home to Livingston County after serving seven years in the United States Marine Corps. A father, a veteran, and a millennial, I spent the last three years…
Toward a Somewhere Suburb
In his 2017 book The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, British commentator David Goodhart seeks to understand the recent populist moments that have shaped the West, from…
The Power of Place
Review of “The Power of Place: KU Alumni Artists” at the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, KS. The exhibit runs through June 30, 2019. There is a line in Karl Ove…
Modest Proposal: Tobacco is Like Love
Among the legion of unjustly forgotten historical figures there’s an eccentric soldier and failed composer named Captain Tobias Hume. Unless you play the viola da gamba or you’re fond of Polish novelist Jerzy…
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