“Left Behind in Grimsby.” Simon Cross narrates the tensions he experienced ministering in a neighborhood where he wasn’t stuck: “There’s a feeling of inadequacy that comes with knowing how little you can do to help people. Social pressures, lack of opportunities, chronic health conditions, and poor decisions made, or made for you, at formative stages of life represent huge, sometimes insurmountable, challenges. As I move on, like so many others who have the power to be mobile, Dillon and Jo are left behind, again. Abandonment is keenly felt in ‘marginal’ places like Grimsby, and often resentment builds, sometimes to a boiling point.”
“The New Pro-Life Playbook.” Emma Green talks to people trying to develop a new, pro-family conservatism: “Social conservatives within Trump’s coalition have been workshopping a new playbook. They have a much broader social-policy agenda in mind for his next term: overhauling the way Republicans think and talk about family. The campaign offered a preview during Vance’s debate with the Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Vance pitched a sunny vision for families: parents should be able to choose whether to stay home with their kids, send them to day care, or make another arrangement, like getting help from their church, all with government support.”
“The Real Problem with Chatbot Personas: In Response to Derek Schuurman.” Adam Smith warns about the ways that AI chatbots will form those who use them: “the question is whether, having spent a lot of my youth talking with chatbots, I would ever have been formed into enough of a person to care about something more than information.”
“What Trump’s Win Doesn’t Mean.” Yuval Levin invites us to “think about what isn’t all that different or surprising about the outcome”: “Approaching this election from that angle first of all clarifies the continuity of our peculiar political era. The 2024 election was very much of a piece with our 21st-century politics: It was a relatively narrow win owed almost entirely to negative polarization.” (Recommended by Matt Stewart.)
“Environmental Ethics and Evangelical Politics.” Andrew Spencer makes the important case that Christians can—and should—care about the environment: “In reality, theologically orthodox evangelicals have a robust doctrinal foundation for caring for the environment. Unfortunately, attacks on orthodox doctrine and political polarization often subvert environmental advocacy.”
“Beginning Again With Power: The Problem of Bureaucracy.” Myles Werntz takes a closer look at the mundane workings of empire: “consider the examples of Britain, Rome, or Egypt. What made them operate well was not overt repression, but the use of organizational technique to manage vast populations, through taxes, administrators, and labor laws. As David Graeber describes in his Utopia of Rules, the least interesting, but most ubiquitous part of most societies are the forms of organization, or more bluntly, the paperwork. Graeber’s contention requires us to reposition how we think about bureaucracies and their place in history: it is not that empires, governments, and institutions use bureaucracies, but that these more overtly forceful institutions exist to perpetuate bureaucracies.”
“Empty Words: Against Artificial Language.” Matthew Miller proposes that we think of—and care for—language as a garden: “Perhaps the metaphor that will best serve us, then, is that of a garden. Like a garden, language exists for human purposes and under human control—it is not the wild, in which human needs serve only a part. And yet in any sufficiently complex garden things are always happening that we don’t expect: new plants and animals appear, the soil composition changes, light and shade shift their balance subtly and without our notice. Properly speaking, we do not build or install or construct a garden: we plant and cultivate it.”
“How Tech Created a ‘Recipe for Loneliness.’” Brian X. Chen sums up his research on why digital technologies designed to connect people appear to be having the opposite effect: “The consensus among scholars was clear: While there was little proof that tech directly made people lonely (plenty of socially connected, healthy people use lots of tech), there was a strong correlation between the two, meaning that those who reported feeling lonely might be using tech in unhealthy ways.”
“The EdTech Revolution Has Failed.” Jared Cooney Horvath argues that the evidence suggests digital tools simply don’t help students learn, and some schools are acting on the evidence: “In May of 2023, schools minister Lotta Edholm announced that Swedish classrooms would aim to significantly reduce student-facing digital technology and embrace more traditional practices like reading hardcopy books and taking handwritten notes. The announcement was met with disbelief among pundits and the wider international public: why would an entire country willingly forgo those digital technologies which are widely touted to be the future of education?”
“It’s Another Brave New World.” Darin Davis has several suggestions for sustaining a healthy educational culture, including a wise word about words: “the language we use to describe what we are doing matters, because language powerfully shapes the imagination. The problem: Colleges and universities have adopted the vocabulary of the business world.”
“Universities Like Yale Need a Reckoning.” David Blight, the great biographer of Frederick Douglass and a professor at Yale, tries, somewhat successfully, to take a long hard look in the mirror: “The worst thing we university liberals could do right now is to keep wondering why ‘they’ hate us, why blue-collar workers seem to vote — as we understand it — against their own interests in sidling up to an authoritarian in a red tie who courts other billionaires, or why human nature itself did not come through for us and make the arc of history bend toward justice as we define it.”
“Homeschoolers Are Human.” Sophia Feingold surveys the growing number of homeschooling families to identify what attitudes and approaches correlate with raising well-educated and adjusted children: “In contrast to John Oliver, the Washington Post, Elizabeth Bartholet, and others, homeschooling’s real problems transcend religion and lie rather in the realm of psychology: in fears that lead some parents to overprotect (as opposed to age-appropriately protecting) their children, and (perhaps relatedly) in some parents’ lack of awareness of their own psychological needs and differences. The paranoid style in homeschooling is the product not of religion but of human nature, and the best way to strike at its root is not to regulate human failings into irrelevance but to find better ways to help homeschooling parents thrive.”
