I’ll be taking a break from the internet for a couple of weeks to recreate (and to get some writing done). I’m not sure when I’ll resume these weekly Water Dipper posts, but it will likely be the beginning of August. In the meantime, feel free to email me any worthy essays that are published while I’m away.
“Inside a Texas Building Where the Government Is Holding Immigrant Children.” Isaac Chotiner interviews attorney Warren Binford about the egregious—and illegal—conditions in which immigrant children are being held.
“Christ in the Camps.” Caitlin Flanagan describes how her experience as a child of liberal atheists attending a Catholic school shapes her response to the suffering of migrant children. If you read one essay about the complex situation on the US border, make it this one.
“Finding Wisdom at Dusk.” Scott Beauchamp commends Roberto Calasso’s unusual book, The Unnamable Present, as a dramatization of what our modern, secular culture tends to forget.
“Who Gets to Own the West?” Julie Turkewitz writes about the “gentrification of the interior West”: “Today, just 100 families own about 42 million acres across the country, a 65,000-square-mile expanse, [and] the amount of land owned by those 100 families has jumped 50 percent since 2007.”
“Justice Dept. Intervenes in Major Poultry Price-Fixing Case.” Leah Douglass explains the developments in the antitrust case against the major poultry companies.
“Book Review: My Father Left Me Ireland by Michael Brendan Dougherty.” Hannah Anderson reflects on what Dougherty’s memoir might teach us about nationalism and the common good, history and reconciliation.
“The Easy Way Out.” L.M. Sacasas warns that our desire for convenience can lead us to make dangerous bargains with technology. Convenience always has a cost.
“Abortion and the Establishment Clause in the New York Times.” Jeff Polet corrects some New York Times authors who believe the “government must restrain religion, to the point of purging it completely from national life.”
“Friends Like These: On Thoreau and Emerson.” Daegan Miller reviews Jeffrey Cramer’s Solid Seasons: The Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and suggests that “a purifying friendship, in which each one of us is the best we can possibly be, is at the root of Thoreau’s environmental and social ethic, not wilderness nor misanthropy nor even individualism.”
“Ten Fun Things to Do This Summer Other Than Go to War with Iran.” If you don’t think that war with Iran is a good idea, the folks at Mere Orthodoxy have come up with a list of alternative summer plans.
