"You do not find your way back to the real by striving for it but by receiving it." | Continue reading
Sam Kriss visits San Francisco and talks to highly agentic people burning through a lot of cash to do stuff. | Continue reading
Now, what might a nobler, healthier American dream look like? | Continue reading
What we love is who we become, to the exclusion of who we do not become. | Continue reading
My background had taught me to view the labels, the deficits, first, yet Mason was pointing me towards the person... | Continue reading
On June 2, 2023, an Ocala, Florida woman named Susan Lorincz fired a shot through her locked and dead-bolted front door, killing her neighbor... | Continue reading
The more I came to know my students, the more the songs I formerly despised emptied themselves of their triteness. They became, in their own way, sacred. | Continue reading
I promised it in our very first episode, and now I’m finally delivering: here are some songs all about not being able to get to sleep. Send your song recommendations to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
Brad East reviews Ross McCullough’s new book, This Body of Death, and captures its uncapturable wonders as well as anyone could do. | Continue reading
Since the birth of public health in nineteenth-century rationalism, the profession has been tempted by gnostic seductions. | Continue reading
The novel’s chief strength, in other words, lies in its presentation of Anna and Tom’s struggle against . . . something. | Continue reading
We ought to see localism not as an accomplice to the tribalism that’s everywhere rising, but as an antidote to it. | Continue reading
Milton may displease, offend, or disrupt, but he rarely leaves a reader unmoved. | Continue reading
We’re listening to songs about America’s “city of record,” New York. I like it a lot more than Los Angeles! Send your song recommendations to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com. | Continue reading
He begins the story cradling his father’s headstone, a symbol, as there is no body, and prepares to set it next to his mother’s grave. | Continue reading
In an absolute barn burner of an essay, Matthew Walther asks hard questions about our obligations to those rendered passive, distracted, and poor by our technological society. | Continue reading
Immigrants have always arrived this way: quietly, uncertainly, carrying their losses, adding their weight to the ground. | Continue reading
To state the obvious, college football is no longer “so college.” | Continue reading
A riddle, like all metaphors, stains various window panes so that we can see a picture. | Continue reading
The puzzle pieces lie waiting, and with guidance and help from the teacher, the wonder and joy of reading can come alive. | Continue reading
We’re listening to songs about my favorite animal today, so maybe you’ll forgive me for getting a little self-indulgent. Send your song recommendations to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
While the book has moments of clarity, it is ultimately frustrating and unpersuasive. If I were to add a subtitle, it would be Post-Liberalism: A Guide for the Uncurious. | Continue reading
“Big Ag Has Corrupted Our Food System. Here’s How We Can Rebuild.” Sara June Jo-Sæbo talks with Austin Frerick about how to fix America’s broken food economy: “The first antitrust laws in the world come out of Iowa. It was Iowa farmers mad against the railroads and grain elevator … | Continue reading
You can’t have a farm divorced from community, and you can’t have community without people. A farm isn’t a farm without a farmer. | Continue reading
We may ask ourselves how we can defend academic integrity from AI, but we should first ask how we became so vulnerable to AI in academia. | Continue reading
The path to a more moral society begins with bringing a neighbor a meal. | Continue reading
This is not an attempt to paganize the faith, but to re-situate it. “Inhabit the Time and Genesis of your Original Home,” he urges. | Continue reading
We’re listening to songs about angels today on A Symposium of Popular Songs, and trying to get to the bottom of how they became such sentimentalized beings. Completely accidentally, there are a lot of songs from 1998 on today’s show. I wonder if the popularity of Touched by an An … | Continue reading
The film's mystery is a satisfying one, but its pleasures are secondary to the consideration of the larger mystery of the Christian faith. | Continue reading
Charles Carman reviews Kingsnorth’s new book, and while he finds some flaws that frustrates him, he also argues that it has warnings we should take seriously. | Continue reading
Lamentations 5:4 bewails, “We must buy the water we drink; our wood comes at a price.” In exile, Israel mourned the loss of free access to the land’s gifts. Today’s homesteader echoes that grief—not in a foreign land, but on his own acreage. | Continue reading
Clavier introduces a colorful cast of characters in the first few chapters of the novel. Luckily, we’re given a character index at the beginning of the book, so if you get a little lost, simply flip back a few pages to reorient yourself. | Continue reading
She cares for the Kid until he mends. And what does the Kid do to her in return? “He has no money to pay her and he leaves in the night.” The first explicit charity given to him, and the Kid turns from it. This will become his pattern. | Continue reading
Like most of my colleagues, I routinely familiarize myself with the iPatient before going to meet the real patient. Their story is told in numbers, flowsheets, radiology reports, and poorly written, heavily templated clinical notes. | Continue reading
While Moses was on the mountain, the people below grew restless. They melted their gold, those quiet tokens of comfort and memory, and shaped a god they could see. Their faith didn’t collapse from doubt but from discomfort; they simply could not endure the waiting. | Continue reading
We’re listening to songs about crime this week, although I am saving songs about murder for a future episode. Along the way we’ll try to figure out why people commit crimes, though I wouldn’t hold out much hope that we’ll solve that particular mystery. Send your song recommendati … | Continue reading
Saahil Desai reports on the dangers of prediction markets. | Continue reading
Let’s examine some practical possibilities. | Continue reading
Through short and accessible chapters, Crosby makes a case for the inspiration that comes through reading. In Part 1, he lays the foundation—the why and what of reading, from stories to scripture. In Part 2, he welcomes us to the wide, wild, wonderful world of reading. | Continue reading
When the fall semester began, several classes attempted streaks. No one expected all the classes to succeed, but it seemed especially unlikely that underclassmen would. Yet they succeeded. | Continue reading
What should we make of a marionette production? What should we make of an artificial park? | Continue reading
From loneliness to suffering—at the very least, you’ll have to admit that we’re covering winter themes. Send your song recommendations to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
It’s gray, flat, dim, quiet, and temperate, and I’m looking at all that gray, flat, dimness, while it’s quiet and temperate. | Continue reading
James Pogue, one of the best journalists writing today, profiles a Washington representative with an unconventional approach. | Continue reading
When the same symbol keeps emerging in such different scenes—Hebrew scripture, neighborhood storm drains, progressive street theater, alt-right image boards—it is worth asking why. We are not choosing frogs at random. We keep summoning them because they fit the job we need done. | Continue reading
Accessible and hospitable. | Continue reading
This critter is quickly overpopulating the public square, apparently lacking a natural predator. | Continue reading
A Proposal of Possibilities for the Next American President | Continue reading