The Stump

Alone Together on the Internet

The happy traveler is apt to become even happier as he crosses a state line into Vermont or Maine. These two misfits of the...

Big Other is Watching. Hallelu!

All hail Big Other, in whom we live and move and have our being. All hail Big Other, from whom so many blessings flow. All hail...

The Irony of Twitter

Several years ago I followed an exchange on Twitter between two academics. Both were lamenting the (in their view) low quality work done by...

Stop Talking about Wendell Berry on Twitter

Editor's Note: Matt's piece kicks off a mini-symposium on the question of whether localists should use social media, and if so, how. As a...

Whither Liberalism?

We live, to borrow the title from Daniel T. Rodgers’s excellent 2011 book, in an age of fracture. Whether any time in history has been...

The Triumph of the Datum

The middle of the twentieth century abounded with writers who simultaneously analyzed their own times and predicted ours: Daniel Bell (The Coming of the...

What is Truth?

A year ago, as President Trump launched yet another salvo of tweets whose express purpose was to correct allegedly "false news" with a new...

Why Anti-Liberalism Fails

The Failures of Liberalism The intellectual critique of liberalism is coextensive with liberalism itself, going back at least as far as Giambattista Vico’s dispute with...

What Wendell Berry’s Brush Teaches Us About Capitalism, Community, and “Inevitability”

The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings, the latest collection of writings by Wendell Berry, isn't a perfect book, nor the perfect expression...

The New Yorker’s Latest Contribution to Trumpian Populism

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. --George Orwell, Animal Farm This past Thursday, I opened my mailbox and saw...