The Nightstand

U.S. Marshal Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn and Mattie bring a type of vigilante justice to Tom Chaney, and we are glad, but Portis doesn’t allow us to be easy about it. There is always a poison fit for the avenger, even if she is a mere child.

It’s true that we don’t yet have a colony on Mars. But countless people are living very ordinary lives and doing very ordinary things that are true, good, and beautiful.

There is much to admire in Bouma-Prediger’s approach to environmental ethics. If practiced within the context of a robust Christianity, the virtues he recommends would certainly help readers become better stewards of the earth.

Deep within the Western psyche and tradition is this yearning for return. Horace, more than any other of the grandiose poets of antiquity, captured that call, that cry, for return—a yearning for a restored Eden where the peaceful harmony of life in a garden would be our eternal home.

For those tired of the fake news and play hate, who are convinced by Austin and their own better natures that accomplishing something better is actually still possible within the American system, Hersh provides a detailed, 21st-century appropriate, set of his own "rules."

In short, we need to rely less on building rigid ideological superstructures and more on our guts, guts kept healthy by a diverse diet of conversation and friendship. We need to have more personal encounters and trust in the general “goodness” of people. In other words, we need to take the seriousness with which we treat this Left-Right stuff down a notch and lighten up!

We don’t have to escape to a new and better location with more perfect neighbors. We need to lovingly attend to the ones we have.

For farming to exist sustainably, even from an economic perspective, it must be re-imagined.

More interesting than the big-name hits and misses, though, are the everyday but often extraordinary people that she meets along the way. Some are firmly in the Trump camp; some are frustrated by their friends who are; and some are somewhere in the complicated middle.

Something has gone seriously wrong, and no one seems to have any idea how to fix it—including, alas, Michael Lind.