“The Berry Center Journal.” The fall issue of the Berry Center Journal includes an opening letter from Mary Berry, a 1989 speech by John M. Berry Jr., and more, including a new short story by Wendell Berry: “it is a prayer also for his home country and his home history. For if Wheeler had gone away to make his life in Chicago, an incalculable difference would have descended into his absence. Many lives that have been lived and are being lived could not have been, and many yet to be lived could not be.”
“‘Here I Gather All the Friends’ Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study.” Andrew Hui considers the meaning of a place where one person can cultivate friendship with the long dead: “Petrarch inaugurated the idea of reviving classical antiquity as a transhistorical conversation between the living and the dead. The studiolo thus becomes a sort of chronotope, an ingathering of time and space, where the perception of the past, present, and future accelerates or dilates at the will of the reader. In their tiny corners of the world, Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Du Bois each in their own ways conjure a utopia of friends, binding together the far and near, the long-ago and recent past into the plenitude of the here and now.” (Recommended by Scott Newstok.)
“The Book Screwtape Feared Most.” S.J. Murray suggests one way to shame the devil: read Boethius. “Boethius’s teachings about the trappings and distractions of worldly success ring as true today as they did when he set down his pen to face his executioner. The book he left behind can still challenge us to pray and pursue wisdom as doggedly as he did, to live our lives as if avoiding distraction really matters—because it does.”
“Teachers Against the Robots.” S. A. Dance suggests that AI could be a provocation for schools to return to their etymological origin and cultivate leisure: “An education should have nothing to do with negotiating our share of work with robots, however necessary the task may be in the world of labor. Education, though, is not labor; it is a spiritual pursuit. Its goal is to cultivate and nourish our interior lives. As a uniquely human endeavor, it should refine our capacities to think rationally, contemplate reality, appreciate beauty, and feel gratitude. To truly cultivate these capacities, schools must safeguard and encourage what Josef Pieper calls ‘leisure.’”
“The Great Grocery Squeeze.” Stacy Mitchell looks at the legal reasons that grocery chains have consolidated and gained market share: “Food deserts are not an inevitable consequence of poverty or low population density, and they didn’t materialize around the country for no reason. Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the 1980s. It was supposed to reward the biggest retail chains for their efficiency. Instead, it devastated poor and rural communities by pushing out grocery stores and inflating the cost of food. Food deserts will not go away until that mistake is reversed.”
“All the Little Data.” Nicholas Carr describes how living in a world of data changes how and who we are: “Measurements and readings. Forecasts and estimates. Facts and statistics. Yet it’s the little data, at least as much as the big stuff, that shapes our sense of ourselves and the world around us as we click and scroll through our days. Our apps have recruited us all into the arcane fraternity of the logistics manager and the process-control engineer, the meteorologist and the lab tech, and what we’re monitoring and measuring, in such exquisite detail, is our own existence.”
“Ethics Won’t Save Us From AI.” R.J. Snell isn’t impressed with Brendan McCord’s “rational” approach to AI ethics: “The view from nowhere, the tennis umpire in his high chair watching rather than playing and contesting the match, is all but doomed to fail, just as the Enlightenment moral project, McCord’s inspiration, was doomed from the start. The Enlightenment attempted ethics without teleology, disdaining telos — the human good — as a superstitious and irrelevant remnant of the medieval schools.”
“Dear Journalists: Stop Trying to Save Democracy.” Yascha Mounk assesses the debates in recent years over whether journalists should take on a more activist role and argues that such efforts consistently backfire: “Journalists vastly overestimate their ability to influence their readers. Ordinary people are able to sense when journalists frame every news story in the hopes of leading them to some predetermined conclusion. And rather than falling for that conclusion, many of them take that as a reason to stop trusting—or reading and watching—mainstream journalism.”
“Zoning the Family-Friendly City.” Nadya Williams reviews Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World by Sara C. Bronin and argues that recovering a clear understanding of the purpose of cities could guide better zoning rules: “This question of function is, of course, inextricable from a consideration of people and their well-being: Who are cities for? We don’t think about these questions sufficiently today, as we take cities for granted. Still, we spend a lot of time complaining about common problems in modern cities like traffic, scarcity of housing, and parking where (and when) we want it, the need to drive absolutely everywhere in too many areas, and dangerous intersections or street crossings that, we think, could be improved.”
