“Against Killing Children.” In a new essay, Wendell Berry speaks against the violence on which our machine age runs and invites us to imagine an alternative way of relating to one another: “From the beginning, Jews and Christians are given a definition of ourselves—made in the image of God—which imposes upon us a burden, requiring much but not too much if the best of us have becomingly borne it, and by its requiring it teaches us much about the world and about ourselves. The problem with this, in addition to its hardship in an age devoted to comfort, is the mystery of it. It belongs to the mystery of existence, ours and that of everything else. Why are we here, in a world somewhat uglified by us but still to many of us mainly beautiful? That it was once said on highest authority to be good is, even now, not an opinion altogether lonely. But such perceptions do not lead to questions that lead to answers. They simply stall us in the presence of mystery. In a materialist age, mysteries are embarrassing, even threatening, and they have to be ignored or worked around.”
“Commit Lit.” Joseph Keegin draws on his intellectual autobiography to think about what opportunities colleges, particularly non-elite and non-prestigious ones, provide (or provided?) to pursue the life of the mind: “It was not only the career aspirations of the quit-lit authors that struck me as alien; it was also their experience of humanistic education. Whereas the quit-lit canon depicted the academic humanities as a charnel house of competition and hopelessness, it was to become for me an oasis: a place where I could observe and contemplate, from however small a remove, the riddles of existence revealed in everyday life.” (Recommended by Scott Newstok.)
“The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” I’m pretty sure that students who can’t read books aren’t “elite” students, but Rose Horowitch reports from Columbia and other institutions where professors are pandering to students whose high schools failed to teach them how to read. While some of us (myself included) still assign Moby-Dick, others do not: “Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American-studies professor at Columbia, now teaches a seminar on short works of American prose instead of a survey course on literature. The Melville segment used to include Moby-Dick; now his students make do with Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” There are some benefits—short works allow more time to focus on ‘the intricacies and subtleties of language,’ Delbanco told me—and he has made peace with the change. ‘One has to adjust to the times,’ he said.”
“Redefining ‘Academic Excellence’ Will Not Save Colleges.” Jeffrey Polet warns that colleges can’t jettison their academic standards without compromising their missions: “I present you with Hope College’s new definition of academic excellence: ‘Students reflect, examine themselves, examine the world, and connect their new self [sic] to enhance the physical and spiritual lives of their community.’ The alert reader will notice right away that the definition says nothing about either academics or excellence, nor is there any expression of a discernible or measurable standard.”
“George Grant and Conservative Social Democracy.” George Dunn recalls the work and wisdom of a brilliant twentieth-century critic and philosopher: “George Parkin Grant, who died in 1988 at the age of 69, was world-famous in Canada—at least, that was the jest frequently made at the philosopher’s expense. The joke reflected his status as a public intellectual who made frequent appearances on Canadian Broadcast Corporation radio programs but never attracted much attention south of the 49th parallel. There are many reasons for his obscurity outside his home country, but one cause was surely his intense Canadian nationalism, coupled with his outspoken criticism of the form of liberalism he saw embodied in the hegemon to the south.”
“The Internet’s Sins Are Our Sins. But It Shouldn’t Escape All Blame.” Bonnie Kristian reviews Jeff Jarvis’s new book and finds his account of technology as neutral and inevitable baffling and unconvincing: “I came to The Web We Weave to encounter a more considered tech optimism than the basic American instinct and to give that optimism a fair shake. Jarvis does make vital, if occasionally inconsistent, points about individual responsibility and state regulation. But his defense of the internet also wrongly presumes that technologies are neutral tools, uncritically embraces online living, blurs the line between journalism and advocacy, and misunderstands the biblical idea of covenant.”
“Something Out of Nothing? Not So Fast.” Elizabeth Stice challenges us to take a long, hard look at the longterm waste our lifestyles pile up: “The handful of products that take what seems to be waste and turn it into something valuable are not reflective of general trends. It may be 2024, but not everything can be turned into something else. Not everything can be made from just anything. We do not have a complete plan for all the things we are doing. We are moving ahead with electric vehicles, without sufficient plans for how to recycle the batteries, for example. We are running out of helium, but we keep using it for birthday party balloons.”
“Looking for Optimism.” Marvin Olasky reflects on Ross Douthat’s comments Friday evening at the FPR conference: “In Grand Rapids last Thursday to do some public speaking, I hung around the next two days to visit homeless shelters and drop in on the annual meeting of the Front Porch Republic, a small group of localists that includes Wendell Berry fans, libertarians, and a democratic socialist. Maybe they’d give me some optimism in a dismal election season.”
“Helene: The Haves and Have-nots.” Brian Miller reflects on resilience in the wake of Helene: “We have backup generators to power both the well for fresh water and the freezers for our produce and meat. But when our limited supply of gas runs out, all the bridges are gone (and the truck is on the wrong side of the creek anyway), and the general store five miles away that now offers gas is no longer standing, then how do-it-yourself are we? And just how tight is the community—that utopian entity that gets paid lip service but is seldom nourished, which literally overnight becomes mighty important in a crisis?”
“The Pawpaw, a Beloved Native Fruit, Could Seed a More Sustainable Future for Small Farms.” Ben Seal reports on the continued enthusiasm over America’s best native fruit: “Pawpaws are America’s largest edible native fruit, and their ineffable mystique will bring thousands of visitors to the farm’s annual pawpaw festival in late September. They grow abundantly in the wild here in central Pennsylvania and across much of the fruit’s native range, which spans 26 states as far west as the Great Plains and from northern Florida to Maine. But the pawpaw’s two- to three-week harvest window, short shelf life, and delicate skin still make it anathema to the rigid needs of grocery stores and a rare find even at farmers’ markets.”
“Another Reason to Hate Ticks.” Sarah Zhang’s reporting on Alpha-gal syndrome is quite disturbing: “In recent years, the lone-star tick has been creeping northward and westward from its historical range, in the southeastern United States. (Oklahoma is in fact right on the edge; ticks are more prevalent in its east than its west.) Alpha-gal syndrome, too, is suspected to be on the rise. Farmers who spend their days outdoors are particularly exposed to lone-star ticks, and repeated bites may cause more severe reactions. And so, Giles is among a group of farmers who have become, ironically, allergic to the animals that they raise.”
“Clearly It Is Ocean.” I suppose I should begin by saying that Madeleine Watts’s review of Richard Powers’s Playground contains spoilers. But it’s a thoughtful meditation on the novel’s form and whether it’s equal to its subject: “Powers’s novels have long been interested in technology. . . . The revelation that the novel we’ve been reading has been an AI hallucination has the underwhelming it-was-all-a-dream quality of The Wizard of Oz or Lost. It not only invalidates everything that came before, it confronts the worrying power of AI with no more nuance than you’d encounter on the average leftish Twitter feed.”
