Dinosaurs, Screens, and Symbols

“Dinner with Dinosaurs.” In a wide-ranging and probing essay, Lauren Spohn considers what kind of narrative we need to motivate human action and guide our technological and cultural project: “It’s partly thanks to the success of Bacon’s program that we are here: paying attention to empirical reality worked so well that we have more or less forgotten to pay attention to anything else, especially the moral and spiritual realities that go unseen. But if it’s Bacon’s rejection of Aristotle that helped bring us to this point, maybe it’s the recovery of Aristotle, in some sense, that can help us get beyond it.”

“Why Farmers Use Harmful Insecticides They May Not Need.” Lisa Held reports on the widespread use of chemical coatings for seeds: “While the agrichemical industry claims farmers ‘carefully select the right pesticide for each pest and crop at issue’ and ‘only use pesticides as a last resort,’ when it comes to neonics, that is false in most cases. Nearly all commodity corn farmers receive seed coated with neonics at the start of each season; many cannot identify the chemical that’s in the coating and don’t even know if another option exists.” Yet as one researcher discovered, these coatings aren’t always helpful; in one case, “neonics were killing the beneficial beetles that prey on the slugs destroying Pennsylvania farmers’ yields—but not the slugs themselves. The discovery led her to a research trial that ultimately found that in their specific region, neonic treatments could actually reduce yields.”

“The Governor Is Calling.” Brian Miller defends his decision to pardon the Thanksgiving turkey: “I’ve worked out a simple justification—a rationalization, the more jaded of my readers would say—for not butchering the birds for our holiday dinners.”

“The People Who Don’t Read Political News.” Olga Khazan reports for the Atlantic on people who have realized, rightly, that obsessively following political news is worse than pointless: “Jarrell represents a set of Americans who, out of anxiety, exhaustion, or discouragement, are mostly tuning out campaign coverage yet will ultimately participate in the election. They’re political ostriches who, at the last minute, will take their head out of the sand. . . This tendency escalated with the increasing ubiquity of both online news and Donald Trump, [Ken] Doctor said.”

“The Abandoned Americans.” Peter Savodnik visits East Palestine, Ohio, and Flint, Michigan: “One was a cause célèbre on the right; the other, a symbol of systemic racism, championed by the left. They were both useful to their respective political beneficiaries, who liked to swoop in and give solemn, impassioned speeches and wag their fingers and conduct investigations and sprinkle other people’s money around—but were ultimately incapable of pushing back against the tectonic forces that had conspired against the American heartland.”

“A Vision for Screen-Free Church.” Brad East has some radical and wise recommendations for churches: “As Marshall McLuhan observed 60 years ago, the ‘conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.’ . . . Technology use requires discernment, spiritual and otherwise. Christians, especially evangelists and evangelicals, are quick to see potential uses to advance the gospel but slower to see the long-time formative impact of a technology on a community over time. If, though, we become what we behold, then we’d better be shrewd about adopting new objects for beholding.”

“Bruce Springsteen is the Last American Liberal: He’s Still Proud to be Born in the USA.” David Masciotra urges his fellow American liberals to take Springsteen as a model: “As unlikely as it might seem, then, Springsteen and Coates personify a crossroads for the American Left. Liberals and ‘progressives’ can choose a humanistic, big-hearted liberalism, one that seeks common ground in the pursuit of personal freedom and social progress for minority groups. Or they can crawl into a sewer of a narrow delusion, one that pits ‘oppressors’ versus ‘victims’ and ‘colonisers’ against ‘the colonised’ — and where some people, no matter how much they’ve suffered or the grace that they’ve shown despite their suffering, are hardly human at all.” (Recommended by Matt Stewart.)

“Lost in the Forest of Symbols.” Jeff Reimer isn’t sure Charles Taylor’s new book really works as a book, but he finds it illuminating nonetheless: “Without his ever stating that this is the case, the book feels very personal to Taylor. It is a plea for the legitimacy of what he has found most moving, most nourishing, over the long decades of his life: The longing to create art and to encounter it and to discover meaning in it, whether it takes the form of a symphony by Beethoven or a landscape by Pissarro or a sonnet by Rilke. And his working theory seems to be that he has found in the poetics of cosmic connection a deep sense of significance, and he wants for us to find it too.”

“What Everyone Should Know about Rural America Ahead of the 2024 Election.” Anthony F. Pipa and Zoe Swarzenski distill the economic state of rural America: “The picture is mixed, but portions of rural America may be better off than the public perceives. Rural America is home to some of the most disadvantaged and some of the most advantaged places in the country.”