“How a Vermont Cheesemaker Helps Local Farms Thrive.” The essay up on FPR’s front page right now by Lenny Wells describes some possibilities for small farmers to find a “seam” in the global farm market where they can thrive. Jake Price profiles how Jasper Hill Farm has created a seam for the dairy farms in their Vermont community by paying local farmers above-market prices for their milk: “Many here have benefited from their collaboration with cheesemakers Mateo and Andy Kehler, founders of Greensboro’s Jasper Hill Farm. The Kehlers pay their suppliers nearly twice the global market rate for milk, and they source exclusively from within a 15-mile radius of the creamery. This commitment both sustains local agriculture and reinvigorates the community by fostering an interconnected local economy. The Kehlers’ business model has proven remarkably successful: 82 cents of every dollar of profit stays within Vermont, with 62 cents staying in Greensboro itself, making it one of the most financially rewarding places to be a farmer in the United States.”
“Philosophy of the People.” Joseph M. Keegin looks at two nineteenth-century American groups that formed to encourage normal people to philosophize seriously and weighs the prospects for such associations today: “These were movements of amateurs in the fullest and best sense: their ranks were composed of non-professional students of philosophy – lawyers, doctors, schoolteachers, factory workers and housewives – motivated by personal edification and the earnest pursuit of truth rather than professional achievement or status-acquisition. They conducted their activity against the backdrop of a country reeling from a bloody civil war, tenuously unified and engaged in an energetic campaign of westward expansion and industrialisation.”
“The Word within the World.” James Matthew Wilson reviews four recent books about poetry and its uses and ponders how poetry might help revive a functioning culture: “The richness of all four of these books derives from their authors’ persuasion that poetry is a way of knowing, and that to read good poems is at once to know the world better and also to enter into a world more profound.”
“‘Out of the Vortex.’” Jared Marcel Pollen celebrates the power of David Jones’s marvelous epic In Parenthesis: “It is precisely through the historical imagination that a transformation can take place, giving battle back its metaphysics and its spiritual dimension, connecting the experiences of soldiers across ages. Poiesis thus becomes the force by which memories associated with mass slaughter (“a whole unlovely order”) can be lifted above earthly misery and transubstantiated into a true memorial.”
“Edith Schaeffer Versus the Tradwives.” Gretchen Ronnevik describes how Edith Schaeffer “taught me the purpose of homemaking: to remind people of their humanity. That description is not just for men or for women, but for us all. A home is where we rest and receive care, can be vulnerable, and find intimacy.” Hence, contra some online influencers, “homemaking isn’t about role-play or fulfilling some nostalgic ideal that never was. It’s about loving the actual people in your actual home, not the ideal people in your ideal home.”
“The World Isn’t Ready for What Comes After I.V.F.” Ari Schulman considers the prospects for new reproductive technologies that would produce children from the genetic material of any number of people and suggests “the prophets of inevitability are wrong, and the public mood toward assisted reproduction could still turn sour. But we shouldn’t wait for the messiness of a tech backlash. Instead, we must let ourselves see the little ways that we are already living in the world sci-fi writers imagined — a world where we persuade ourselves that designing children to match our dreams is something we do for them rather than for us — and begin setting limits now.”
“Whose Culture? Which Solidarity?” Christopher Shannon probes James Davidson Hunter’s reliance on the term “solidarity” and considers that term’s history and prospects: “I certainly do not wish to affirm any solidarity with the vision of the good life promoted by contemporary secular elites. I am sure they would not wish to live in a world guided by CST, at least with respect to the issues relating to sex, marriage, and family. How do people with such different beliefs live together? They don’t. And this underscores another part of the problem with Hunter’s argument. Despite his repeated appeals to localism, he seems to think that solidarity must be national.”
“Staying Human in the A.I. Mega-Machine.” Dan Churchwell’s good review of Christine Rosen’s new book, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World concludes with a sober reflection that recalls the opening of Alan Jacobs’s essay “From Tech Critique to Ways of Living.” This is the problem that I have been mulling a lot in recent days, with no resolution as yet: “an uncomfortable truth emerges when confronted by these arguments: in one form or another, they’ve all been expressed before. And this isn’t necessarily a critique of her book. I think Rosen combines some familiar ideas in ways that are truly thought-provoking and necessary. You will be challenged to think about what it means to be human in this hyper-efficient age. But I’m coming to the conclusion that these arguments are deafeningly obvious to a small remnant but becoming less convincing to mass-man. The hype cycles in the history of technology are well documented, and yet cunning marketers continue to find ways to convince us to call the Artificial Intelligence used in certain applications at work as our ‘colleagues’ and to frame boredom as the enemy of personal fulfillment.”
“Yuval Noah Harari’s Apocalyptic Vision.” Daniel Immerwahr isn’t that impressed with Harari’s new book or his intellectual approach: “All of this derives from Harari’s broad reading. Yet, like a chatbot, he has a quasi-antagonistic relationship with his sources, an I’ll read them so you don’t have to attitude. He mines other writers for material—a neat quip, a telling anecdote—but rarely seems taken with anyone else’s views. Nearly all scholars, in their acknowledgments, identify the interlocutors who inspired or challenged them. In Nexus, Harari doesn’t acknowledge any intellectual influences beyond his business relationships: Thanks go to his publishers, his editors, and the ‘in-house research team at Sapienship’—that is, his employees.”
“Richard Powers is Back. Prepare to be Awed.” Ron Charles is impressed with Richard Powers’s new novel: “But even with faith that its parts would at some point cohere, I wasn’t prepared for the astonishing resolution that Powers delivers. In the now-vast library of fiction and nonfiction books reminding us of the planet’s imperiled condition, I can’t think of another novel that treats the Earth’s plight with such an expansive and disorienting vision. In the end, “Playground” is unspeakably strange. Powers manages to entwine our longing for friendship, paradise and immortality with the algorithms of artificial intelligence that surpass all understanding.”
“The Open Road.” Christina Cannon contemplates freedom and limits on a road trip: “I had recently been spat out of college and into the ‘real world,’ where freedom apparently abounded. But, a little reluctantly, I found myself less interested in claiming this concept for myself and far more in need of attaching myself to something, finding something I could root myself to. For orientation, I chose to trace the final miles of the American pilgrimage to California, to join the decades-long caravan headed west on Route 66.”
