“Captive Users.” Alexander Stern writes a thoughtful review essay that examines Cory Doctorow’s The Internet Scam: How to Acquire Computing Power in conversation with Antón Barba-Kay’s A web of our own creation: The nature of digital education to try to find better ways to build and navigate the Internet: “As we find ourselves in the midst of one of the most confusing, disruptive, and destructive technological upheavals in human history, it is worth asking: Should we place our greatest hopes in changing the Internet or in changing ourselves?”
“Strength to persevere.” Carla Galdo describes the true courage required to be faithful in small tasks: “The daily trials of family life are… my greatest challenges. They are the sparks that can either flare up into virtue or ignite sudden flames of vice.”
“Still the jeremiad.” Christopher Shannon reviews James Davison Hunters Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis and finds his analysis quite helpful, but his positive vision lacks a transcendent basis: “In line with Niebuhr, he calls for a renewed ‘moral imagination’; in line with King, he calls for a ‘refashioned humanism’ open to all the great humanist traditions of the world. It is hard to deny that such things are necessary. But from the perspective of Hunter’s gentle Dewey pragmatism, it still rings hollow.”
“Contrary U.” Matt Bonzo and Michael Stevens launch a promising educational project, largely inspired by Wendell Berry: “At a time when higher education is increasingly being reduced to technical skills that answer the call of market efficiency, ContraryU stands in constructive opposition, offering instead a communal, slowed-down, goal-oriented approach to learning where the flourishing of the whole person is the basic motive and the ultimate goal. All communities have boundaries. All communities pursue a vision of the good life. ContraryU is a community that seeks to meet the need of our current social order for deep connections with each other and with truth.”
New Verse Review. Steve Knepper has launched a new poetry journal that “presents works that renew the ancient affinities between poetry, song, and story.” The first issue is a feast.
“The blessings of unplugged living.” Sarah Reardon describes the fruits of pushing screens and the internet to the fringes of her life: “I haven’t lived this relatively unplugged life long enough to be able to testify to these results with certainty, but I believe that one of the greatest blessings of an unplugged life is a well-trained habit of surrender, a readiness for affection.”
“Why no president has slowed the U.S. oil boom.” While every presidential election seems to be the most important election in the nation’s history, it’s important to remember that many of the most important federal policies change little from president to president. Maxine Joselow describes the bipartisan support for oil production: “The Biden administration has now overtaken the Trump administration in permitting drilling on public lands, and the United States produces more oil than any other country before it. The unplanned fossil fuel boom reflects an inconvenient truth for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris: It’s difficult for any president to turn off the spigot of U.S. oil production, a key driver of both the economy and climate change.”
“The Democrats have a problem with rural America. Calling them ‘weird’ won’t help.” Nathan Beacom warns of the resentment that animates the book White rural anger and much of the political discourse in the run-up to the presidential election: “This ridicule of our fellow Americans is not healthy for anyone. It only reinforces the mistrust that already exists between different parts of America. Too many Americans on both sides of the political divide have closed themselves off in their own worlds, convinced that the other is an existential threat. Dialogue becomes impossible for everyone and defensive verbal confrontations are the only alternative.”
“A new hope to save the universities.” Yuval Levin describes how the American academy has changed in recent decades and points to several recent signs that there is a renewed interest in reorienting these institutions towards training people capable of searching for truth together: “The university cannot be understood as just another platform where you can say whatever you want. There are many of those now. What we lack are places where you can teach and learn to gain knowledge. the truth“Not every expression serves this purpose, and therefore not every expression belongs in the university.”
“A little less industrious.” Taylor Reed is a model for the kind of thinking and working needed to work with what’s at hand, rather than imposing one’s imaginary order on a place: “A milkweed is a small thing. So is a scythe. I’m only just beginning to understand the possibilities of both. It will take some learning and practice to understand how they fit into our lives. But a whole lot of small things, appropriate for different situations and contexts, surely add up.”
“When older, it’s better.” Jonathan Coppage reflects on what it might mean that more records are bought today than CDs: “Our society’s understanding of technology is usually a Whig story, a story of one achievement building on another, improving inexorably, perhaps striving for ultimate perfection. Yet the arts give us the opportunity to rethink that assumption with their own evidence, as artistic media we once thought lost are now experiencing a significant recovery in their market value. The analogue, seemingly long since overtaken by digital successors, is being rescued from the oblivion of history and organically rehabilitated into a reborn era of growth.”
“The robustness of things.” Brandon Daily examines the replacement of machines and material tools with electronics and screens and considers what we may be losing: “The shift from the physical to the digital world destabilizes our lives and weakens us.”
