“Sexuality After Industrialism.” James Wood urges conservatives to learn from Ivan Illich’s analysis of gender: “Illich forces us to reconsider the very foundation of our gender debates. Targeting the sexual revolution or feminist ideology is not radical enough. For Illich, the original gender catastrophe was the destruction of the productive household by the industrial revolution. An industrial society, Illich argues, separates the sphere of production from that of consumption, and in doing so pits men and women against each other.” For more on Illich and gender, see Alisa Ruddell’s in-depth essay. And for one fascinating example of a group of Americans in the early twentieth century who developed policies to bolster productive households, see my review essay on Land and Liberty: The Best of Free America.
“The Modern Voice of War Writing.” George Packer reviews a new translation of the classic All Quiet on the Western Front and reminds us that war is always horrible: “All Quiet on the Western Front has no clear politics; its pacifism, too, is never stated, only implied. ‘This book is intended neither as an indictment nor as a confession,’ Remarque declares in an epigraph, but as ‘an account of a generation of people who were destroyed by the war—even if they escaped its shells.’ The novel presents the Great War as a crime perpetrated by the old against the young, the powerful against the ordinary, and civilians against soldiers.”
“Following No Other Way.” Nathan Beacom goes on pilgrimage and describes the kind of posture and conversation that this activity fosters: “What was more striking than the content of this conversation, however, was the contrast it represented to those Father Reed and I sometimes encountered when we briefly stepped off the pilgrim way. In those cases the focus inexorably moved toward the newest TV shows, the most stylish restaurants, and the most fashionable causes. These conversations gave us a sense of drift, of malaise, of flatness and staleness, and in them we recognized the parts of our own lives that were stagnant, not reaching for something more. They seemed to us a manifestation of despair.”
“Bone Into Stone.” Jhumpa Lahiri reflects on the task of laboriously translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “what is translation, if not a pondering of words, implying a clarification of meaning?”
“Zen and the Art of Government.” Adam Smith draws on Robert Persig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to imagine a better way of participating in the work of politics: “the Internet has made all of us careless, left and right, technocrat and populist. It’s made all of us anxious to preserve whatever power we have against the political enemies who want to take it from us, and that same anxiety has made us less and less vigilant about the work of citizenship itself.”
“The Web of Narcissus.” In a very good essay, Brad Littlejohn reviews A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation by Anton Barba-Kay and asks whether we can unwind the tyranny of the digital: “Perhaps, like peak oil, peak digital will prove an ever-receding horizon. If future historians identify an inflection point in the linear growth of digitization, however, they are likely to find it in the year 2023.”
“The New Control Society.” Jon Askonas reflects at length on the striking blandness of life and art in the digital age: “As we approach the moment when all information everywhere from all time is available to everyone at once, what we find is not new artistic energy, not explosive diversity, but stifling sameness. Everything is converging — and it’s happening even as the power of the old monopolies and centralized tastemakers is broken up.” To explain this, Askonas looks to a surprising culprit: “It’s not obvious, but the secret sauce of the control society is the protocol.”
“The Strange, Strange World of Alignment Training.” Alex Tabarrok reports on the bizarre tactics, including what amounts to bribery, that programmers are using to cajole AI to behave itself: “Claude will fake alignment on the monitored channel in order to keep its true preferences from being modified.”
“The Banty, Blustering Genius of Earl Weaver.” Dwight Garner reviews John W. Miller’s new book on the manager Earl Weaver:“Most sports books are pop flies to the infield. Miller’s is a screaming triple into the left field corner. He takes Weaver seriously; he understands why his tenure mattered to baseball; he is alert to the details of the unruly pageant that was his life; he explains, a bit ruefully, why he was probably the last of his kind, an unkempt dinosaur who ruled before the data geckos came into power.”
“After 10,000 Years, Let’s Bury the Plow.” Dana Milbank may oversell the benefits of no-til farming, but he gives a good overview for why it’s become more popular and for the real promise it holds: “it is nothing short of revolutionary that, in our time, the plow is heading toward extinction, or something close to it.”
