Two Cheers for E-Bikes
Automobiles shield you from the outside world, its sounds, its colors. But on my bike, I encounter my environment directly.
The Middle Ground of Wit and Insult, Considered Together With Their...
In other words, knowledge and reason are no match for our gargantuan vices. The giants passion and pride cannot be held at bay by the ignorance that prevails in public discourse and certainly not by the bluster it hides behind.
Figures of Death and Deathlessness
But our culture’s celebration of Halloween suggests that we know yet more. We sense not only that we are dust and will return to it; we also sense that life exists beyond death.
Boarding House at the End of the World
Zoning laws, housing codes, and a culture marked by suspicion and antisociality make it difficult to revive the boarding house, a living arrangement that once applied to nearly half of the population.
Unpacking My Library (Again)
Maybe, in the end, a home library does what a long-inhabited home does: charts a middle ground between the chaos of the world and the hyper-rationality of modernity.
Hunting Silence
To find these deeper wells of silence, however, we must seek them out, whether in the woods or the deserts of our own shut doors.
On Not Losing Our Minds to Technology
A machine can read books out loud to the baby. A machine can rock the baby to sleep. Smart devices and apps can do these and many other things. But they can do none of them in love.
The Uglification of Michigan Lake Towns
America is known for its English-Protestant roots, for the pilgrims who settled the Eastern seaboard and the Anglos who descended from them. But America has a French-Catholic history, too, and Northern Michigan is a central location in that history.
Medieval Hillbilly Kings, Priests, Pagans, and Poets: Beowulf, Johnny Cash, and...
Cash may as well be situated in an Anglo-Saxon mead hall, a broken ring-giver, a pagan, who for all his good intentions, cannot heal that which infects his people and himself.