Contrary U, New Verse Review, and Vinyl Records

“Captive Users.” Alexander Stern pens a thoughtful review essay that puts Cory Doctorow’s The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation in conversation with Antón Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation to try to identify better ways of building and navigating the Internet: “since we are in the middle of one of the most confusing, transformative, and destructive technological shifts in human history, it is worth asking: Should we put our highest hopes in changing the internet or in changing ourselves?”

“Strength to Stay.” Carla Galdo describes the real courage required to be faithful in little tasks: “the everyday trials of family life are . . . my greatest challenges. They are the sparks that can either flame into virtue or kindle sudden blazes of vice.”

“Still the Jeremiad.” Christopher Shannon reviews James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis and finds its analysis quite helpful but its positive vision lacking a transcendent grounding: “Drawing on Niebuhr, he calls for a renewed “moral imagination”; drawing on King, he calls for a ‘reconstituted humanism’ open to all the great humanistic traditions of the world. It is hard to deny that such things are needed. Yet it still rings hollow coming from the perspective of Hunter’s soft Deweyan pragmatism.”

“Contrary U.” Matt Bonzo and Michael Stevens are starting a promising educational venture, inspired in large part by Wendell Berry: “In an age when higher education has been reduced more to technical proficiencies answering the clarion call of market-efficiency, ContraryU stands in constructive opposition, offering instead a communal, slowed down, intentional approach to learning, with the flourishing of the whole person as the root motive and final aim. All communities have boundaries. All communities pursue some vision of the good life. ContraryU is a community that is attempting to answer the need in our current social order for deep connections with one another and with the truth.”

“New Verse Review.” Steve Knepper has launched a new poetry journal, which “features work that renews the ancient affinities among poetry, song, and story.” The first issue is a feast.

“The Blessings of the Unplugged Life.” Sarah Reardon describes the fruits of pushing screens and the Internet to the margins of her life: “I have not lived this relatively-unplugged life long enough to testify with certainty to these results, but I expect that one of the greatest blessings of an unplugged life is a well-trained habit of devotion, a readiness for affection.”

“Why No President has Slowed the U.S. Oil Boom.” Even though each presidential election seems to be the most important election in the history of the nation, it’s good to remember that, in fact, many of the most important federal policies don’t change much from president to president. Maxine Joselow details the bipartisan support for oil production: “The Biden administration has now outpaced the Trump administration in approving permits for drilling on public lands, and the United States is producing more oil than any country ever has. The unplanned fossil fuel boom reflects an uncomfortable truth for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris: It is difficult for any president to stop the spigot of U.S. oil production, a leading driver of both the economy and climate change.”

“Democrats Have a Rural America Problem. Calling them ‘Weird’ Won’t Help.” Nathan Beacom warns against the resentment that animates the book White Rural Rage and much of the political discourse in the run-up to the presidential election: “This ridicule of our fellow Americans isn’t healthy for anyone. It merely amplifies the already existing distrust between different corners of America. Too many Americans on both sides of the political divide have walled themselves off in their separate worlds, convinced that the other guys are an existential threat. Dialogue becomes impossible for all, and defensive verbal combat the only alternative.”

“A New Hope for Saving the Universities.” Yuval Levin describes how the US academy has shifted in recent decades and points to several recent signs that there is renewed interest in refocusing these institutions on the formation of persons capable of pursuing the truth together: “The university cannot be understood as just another platform for saying anything you want. We have a lot of those now. What we don’t have enough of are venues for engaging in teaching and learning in pursuit of knowledge of the truth. Not all expression serves that purpose, and so not all expression belongs in the university.”

“A Little Less Industrious.” Taylor Reed models the kind of thinking and work needed to work with what is at hand rather than impose one’s imagined order on a place: “A milkweed pod is a small thing. So is a scythe. I’m only beginning to grasp the possibilities of both. It’ll take some learning and practice to understand how they fit into our lives. But a whole lot of small things, appropriate for different situations and contexts, sure add up.”

“When Older Is Better.” Jonathan Coppage reflects on what it might mean that more vinyl records than CDs are now being bought: “Our society’s understanding of technology is usually a Whig history, a story of one accomplishment built upon another, inexorably improving, potentially pursuing ultimate perfection. Yet the arts are giving us an opportunity to reconsider that assumption with their own evidence, as artistic mediums we once thought lost are now experiencing marked recoveries in their marketplace fortunes. The analog, long since seemingly surpassed by digital successors, is being rescued from history’s obscurity and organically rehabilitated into a reborn time of growth.”

“The Sturdiness of Things.” Brandon Daily looks at the replacement of machines and material tools with electronics and screens and considers what we may be losing: “the shift from the physical to the digital realm destabilizes our lives and weakens us.”