“Quit Trying to ‘Fix’ Baseball: Its Leisurely Pace Is Just What Our Society Needs.” Gregory Hillis tells Rob Manfred (and the rest of us) that we need what baseball offers: “the cyclical rhythms and pastoral pace of a game that doesn’t entertain so much as provide opportunities for training the contemplative gaze.”
“Sabbaths.” Wendell Berry has a series of new sabbath poems in the latest issue of Oxford American.
“A Gun Debate Compromise: Let Cities and Rural Areas Pass Different Laws.” Joseph Blocher argues gun control shouldn’t be decided on a national level: “If we are stalemated at the national level, might we pursue gun regulations tailored to local experiences, preferences, and needs? Thoughtful policy suggests, and our traditions and Constitution support, this kind of ‘firearm localism.’” (Recommended by Gracy Olmstead.)
“Will Philanthropy Finance Farming’s Future?.” Gracy Olmstead considers how local philanthropists might help young people establish viable farms.
“How a Michigan Botanist Helped Modernize American Farm Life During the Turn of the Last Century.” Liberty Hyde Bailey was born 160 years ago. Who was he? If listening to this conversation sparks your interest in Bailey, his book The Holy Earth is a good place to go next (and this edition includes a foreword by Wendell Berry).
“It’s Time to Reckon with Celebrity Power.” Andy Crouch on celebrities who fall: “Among the many dark gifts of power is distance—distance from accountability, distance from consequences, distance from the pain we cause others, distance from self-knowledge, distance from friendship, distance from the truth.” And digitally-mediated celebrity has made that dangerous distance particularly toxic: “Celebrity combines the old distance of power with what seems like its exact opposite—extraordinary intimacy, or at least a bewitching simulation of intimacy.”
“Vows of Digital Poverty.” L. M. Sacasas reflects on the recent #DeleteFacebook discussion: “What if we imagine the decision to delete Facebook, or to abandon social media altogether, as something like a vocation, a calling not unlike the calling to the monastic life?”
