“Play (and Watch) Ball!” Bill Kauffman praises baseball as a community-building pastime, and he highly recommends Will Bardenwerper’s new book: “I started going to ball games with my parents and brother at Dwyer (née MacArthur) Stadium as an eight-year-old boy in 1968, and except for years when I lived in Washington, D.C., and Southern California I never stopped going. I don’t think I could name more than ten major league players today, but I can still reel off at least half of Batavia’s starting lineup in 1968. Yet the play—or, rather, the players—is not the thing.” (Recommended by Dave Lull.)
“A Century of Flannery O’Connor.” Jessica Hooten Wilson commends O’Connor’s relevance as an author precisely because O’Connor pushes past the issues of her day to probe underlying questions: “Whereas these popular writers mostly wrote about politics and current events with skepticism about the human condition, her writing turns the gaze on the reader and says, ‘Who are you—good or evil? Human or demon? Selfless or Selfish? What have you got to say for yourself?’”
“Immigration’s Complicated Costs for My Town—and My Soul.” Carrie McKean tries to get beneath the political rhetoric about immigration by attending to the immigrants in her Texas community and pondering the many dimensions to the changes they are bringing to this place: “Here’s where I’ve landed in my months of paying attention: I want to welcome immigrants, but I also want to be honest about the meaningful costs borne by our schools, hospitals, and small businesses and about the demographic shifts that make what was once familiar seem a bit foreign. And as I’ve paid closer attention, I realize that maybe most of all, I want to take care and responsibility for how living here and now is shaping my soul.”
“The Evolution of Nostalgia.” Daniel Woolf reviews Tobias Becker’s Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia: “If the past is no longer a temporal ‘place’ in defined position ‘back there’ (the ‘foreign country’ of The Go-Between author L.P. Hartley’s massively overquoted remark) but many different times indiscriminately and simultaneously available to us in the present, how is it possible to be nostalgic about it? With the past so constantly and indiscriminately accessible, it seems we must now become nostalgic for nostalgia itself.”
“Schools Are Banning Phones. What About Laptops?” Sylvie McNamara makes the bold choice to stop trusting the edtech industry and actually look at the evidence regarding whether computers help students learn: “Tech boosters tend to frame universal laptop access as a victory for equity, ensuring that all children and teens—regardless of their means—are equipped with similar devices. The assumption is that distributing technology helps vulnerable students, but what if it does the reverse? What if spending the school day on a laptop hurts weaker students without benefiting stronger ones? What if laptops are actually bad?”
“AI Chatbots for Kids: A New Imaginary Friend or Foe?” Emily Harrison suggests that maybe, just maybe, AI chatbots are also bad for children (and perhaps the rest of us too): “While sticking our heads in the sand does sound appealing, parents should instead exercise extreme caution and be hyper vigilant about child and teen AI chatbot use in online games, apps, and direct web sites. Previously, tech experts have called for a slowing down of AI development and more regulations in this field, though little has changed. While we wait, parents must become more educated on AI chatbots and speak to their children and teens about why steering clear of this functionality is the most prudent option.”
“Burnt by the Rabbis: Lessons from the Supernatural Yeshiva.” Rabbi Yonah Lavery-Yisraeli probes the fraught relation between teacher and student in the rabbinic tradition. Incidentally, this relationship shows why the teaching that matters can never be conducted by an AI bot: “the Talmudic term for a wise student is tsurba merabanan: literally, one burnt by the rabbis. Revealed here is a push-and-pull. The instinct of the student is to get closer to the human source of Torah; they sense that its location in a person is critical rather than incidental. The instinct of the teacher is to push away; they sense that Torah transcends their personal quirks, and that the student has something to lose from too close an association. What ensues is, inevitably, disaster. But the disaster itself creates a eucatastrophe of wisdom, because, impossibly, both sides are right.”
“A Marxist Theory of DOGE.” David Calnitsky draws on Marxism to argue that DOGE represents capitalists against capitalism: “Marxist theories of the state have long recognized that, for capitalism to sustain itself, the state must act on behalf of capitalism as a system, not merely at the behest of individual capitalists. When the state abandons its role in overseeing capitalism’s long-term viability and instead caters narrowly to specific firms (or individuals), the results can be ruinous.” (Recommended by Dominic Garzonio.)
“Three Cheers for the Third Place.” Addison Del Mastro reports that some businesses are trying to reclaim their status as a third place: “The pandemic first necessitated a move away from in-store lingering, saw an explosion in quick app-based transactions and brought new life into the drive-thru business. But the rise of more permanent remote work means that more people need somewhere to sit and work and just get some air or some low-stakes human contact that isn’t their office or their home. Which is precisely what a third place is.”
