Dumber Phones, Godric, and Hiroshima

“Can Using a Dumber Phone Cure ‘Brain Rot’?” Bryan X. Chen tells readers of the New York Times that there’s nothing we can do in the face of our society’s expectation that everyone has an internet-enabled smartphone: “While I admire the goal of the Light Phone, my experience demonstrates there’s nothing we can realistically do or buy to bring us back to simpler times. So many aspects of our lives, including getting around town, working, paying for things and controlling home appliances, revolve around our highly capable smartphones.” He’s certainly right that smartphones are gaining a radical monopoly, but some of us continue to reply, “I would prefer not to” when told we must scan a QR code or download an app. It’s also telling that while he says it’s work we need a smartphone for—“I can’t think of many people whose jobs would let them realistically use a Light Phone as their only phone. Too many of us rely on tools like Slack and email to communicate”—his examples of inconveniences have nothing to do with these tools, which can be accessed from a computer, but are choices he’s made, like using a phone to control his garage door and hold his train ticket. There are alternatives.

“Are You Ready for the AI University?” Speaking of the myth of techno-inevitability, Scott Latham has drunk the AI kool-aid: “AI is not going away, and is likely to upend every facet of how universities function. Enrollment managers will use it to increase yields; counselors will rely on it to address student mental health; student advisers will use it to boost retention; and financial analysts will use it to model and mitigate risk. It should go without saying that AI will continue to insert itself into the classroom, forever altering the relationship between students and professors.” The whole piece is an unending stream of techno-addled non sequiturs, like the claim that educators should simply supply amusement because that’s what students want: “Having grown up with Amazon, Netflix, and Google, students expect a speedy, on-demand, and low-friction experience. Moreover, they increasingly view college through a transactional lens: They pursue a degree to get a job. So they regard college much like any other consumer product, and like those other products, they expect it to be delivered how they want, when they want. Why wouldn’t they?” I imagine that Dr. Latham lost a lot of money on some MOOC startup and is hoping to recoup his losses. (Recommended [by which I mean sent in utter disbelief] by Aaron Weinacht.)

“Richard Wilbur’s Answer to Dionyesian Hedonism.” Collin Slowey and Isabella Hsu turn to Wilbur’s great poem “A Baroque Wall-fountain in the Villa Sciarra” for wisdom in disentangling the West from Christianity: “some of the right’s neoreactionary influencers are explicitly opposed to what they consider the emasculating effects of Christianity. Where the Gospel celebrates self-mastery as a means to Christ-like selflessness, post-Christian conservatives celebrate it as a means to worldly greatness.”

“Hiroshima 2025.” Eric Miller wraps up the four-year run of Current with reflections on his recent visit to Hiroshima: “Clearly it is not ‘strongmen’ we need. Rather, it is strength we need, strength sustained by structures. In the devastating decades of the rising industrial, imperial order, after all, it was strongmen who led us toward Hiroshima. That Putin has threatened to crown his mounting atrocities with nuclear attack tells us everything we need to know: With everything we have, we must move in the other direction. If our own leaders fail to guide us there, how can we not turn against them? Should we fail to do so and instead take the way of the strongman, the imperial savagery that decades ago led to war will look genteel compared to what lies ahead. Hiroshima stands today to tell of a failed way. But also of another way.”

“Yankee, Stay Home.” Bill Kauffman has some advice for President Trump: “I daresay not a soul in a million who voted for Donald Trump last November did so because he or she wanted to buy Greenland, annex Canada, seize the Panama Canal, or ‘own’ Gaza and displace 2 million human beings. This expansionist frenzy isn’t America First: Trump’s land-and-people grab is to the historic political tendency of America First as murdering the adulterous lover whose inheritance you stole is to the Ten Commandments.”

“The Bad Fruit of Demonizing Government.” Gillis Harp distinguishes libertarianism from populism: “Earlier forms of American populism did not view government as the enemy. One should take care to distinguish late nineteenth-century populism from its recent right-wing variety. The Populist Party of the 1890s did not demonize an activist state. Indeed, the original Populists saw government as a duly elected but potent popular agent to battle huge concentrations of private corporate power. As long as the government faithfully represented America’s majority producer class, these populists weren’t afraid of the state asserting its authority.”

“USDA Cuts Hit Small Farms as Trump Showers Billions on Big Farms.” Kevin Hardy reports on cuts to a USDA program: “The federally funded Local Food Purchase Assistance and the Local Food for Schools programs, both begun during the pandemic, focused on small, local farms in aims of building stronger domestic food supply chains. Grants allowed schools and food banks to buy meat, dairy and produce from small farms — including many healthy products that are often too expensive for those institutions.”

“Prose and Principalities.” Paul Kingsnorth ponders what a “Christian novel” might be: “Godric is a small book, in its scope if not its concerns—or its writing. Buechner sets out to tell the story of one obscure saint in one period of time in one particular place, and through that to illuminate the spiritual struggle that is the Christian Way. He does so, in my opinion, with great success. When I put this book down, I remember feeling like I had an answer to my question. This is one example of how to write a genuinely powerful Christian novel—or rather, a novel by and about a Christian which could be read just as easily by an atheist or a pagan, and appreciated for its storytelling ability and philosophical depth.”

“The Morons Wanted Violence. The Bartender Said No.” David Mills describes our need for those who defend community: “My local place is a townie dive bar, rough, loud, sometimes obscene, with some serious drinkers, but not dangerous. A lot of different people hang out here, many of whom would not know most of the others except here, their worlds being worlds apart. They hang out despite differences, political for example, that in other places would be fatal to friendship. . . . It stays that way by the bartenders’ vigilance.”

“Capitalism, Baseball, Community, and Loss.” Timothy Carney reflects on the tensions in Will Bardenwarper’s new book: “And Homestand isn’t only about baseball, either. It’s also about capitalism and community—and about the complicated relationship between the two.”