No readings this week—just fifteen songs about landlines, and some musing on why there aren’t any great songs about cell phones. Send your song suggestions to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
Trump, in his crude way, is forcing us to confront the false stories we have told ourselves about who we are. | Continue reading
Roosevelt Montás articulates the effects reading has on individuals and societies. | Continue reading
There are problems that we do not have the luxury of waiting for lab-grown burgers to solve. | Continue reading
And then I noticed that she had a Children’s Hospital visitor sticker on her sweater and that, hardly before I finished my admonishment, she began to sob. | Continue reading
Hardship fades from memory with each generation. Those who lived it remember the weight of it. Those who didn’t often forget. | Continue reading
Generative ai systems, like drugs, impact cognition directly. | Continue reading
We start with some songs about faithful women this week before moving on to some more abstract examinations of constancy. Send your song suggestions to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
Are our first principles as Americans, as humans, as creatures, sifted and rightly laid down? | Continue reading
James Rebanks warns of the fragility of a food system that prioritizes efficiency above all else. | Continue reading
The saddest pair of words in the English language is the phrase never again. | Continue reading
“Relationships” between human beings and machines are not real relationships because machines cannot relate to the experience of living a human life. | Continue reading
To truly listen to locks requires the love of a locksmith. | Continue reading
When the scoreboard lit up at my son’s game yesterday, it felt like a small miracle. | Continue reading
To gaze into the eyes of a helpless baby was to see my actual condition as a creature laid bare. | Continue reading
It’s songs about salvation this week on A Symposium of Popular Songs—and not nearly as much Christian rock as I was afraid I’d play! Send your song recommendations to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com. | Continue reading
Nate Halverson has a level-headed and disturbing report on the use of glyphosate to manage US forests. | Continue reading
As one Kentuckian wondered, why would he give up the “glitz and glamour” elsewhere to come back home to farm? | Continue reading
Once, a very long time ago, man and woman lived in a garden and walked with God. | Continue reading
So many before me have made this crossing. So many died for control of these waters. | Continue reading
The only area in Green Valley that has escaped urban sprawl is Mr. Henry’s Farm, at which stands an old oak tree named Birch. | Continue reading
Just in time for summer, it’s a bunch of songs about falling in love. Send your song suggestions to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
Universities are peculiar institutions, and they need peculiar leaders. | Continue reading
Alexander Sammon narrates the incredible, complicated, tragic story of Florida’s dying crop. | Continue reading
Nostalgia, properly speaking, is homesickness. In its etymologically precise sense it is a longing not for a time but for a place. | Continue reading
The prose in As I Lay Dying simultaneously provides a mirror for and an escape from my experience. | Continue reading
We often find ourselves fleeing “forward,” one might say, to escape the meaninglessness that forever snaps at our heels. | Continue reading
Make sourdough: as an act of love for your body and your friends and family, and as a remedy against the ills of non-embodied life. | Continue reading
What might be gained by viewing Nisbet’s different forms of community as being in a conversation, rather than in a competition? | Continue reading
We’re looking back with a golden haze this week on A Symposium of Popular Songs, listening to songs about nostalgia (and its high-class cousin, antiquarian feeling). Send your song suggestions to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
If you think an algorithmic function can have a moral character, I’m not sure you’ll have a productive conversation about aligning AI with human goods. | Continue reading
There is no substitute for long-term volunteer commitments. | Continue reading
My real fear is not so much that the Internet makes us bad readers, but that it makes us bad writers. | Continue reading
What will it take to sustain the remnants of a contemporary republic of letters on the margins of a public square blasted by machine-speak? | Continue reading
Hope remains, and it is the hope of the incarnation, which the Archbishop describes as the “technology of Catholicism.” | Continue reading
This week on A Symposium of Popular Songs, we’re listening to songs about success—its joys, its sorrows, and its dangers. Send your song recommendations to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
Maybe my reading taste buds are dull. Maybe I’m in a lazy slump. Do I need more books? More appealing choices? Am I even asking the right question? | Continue reading
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn expresses gratitude for Wendell Berry’s latest novel and his faithful voice speaking truth over many decades. | Continue reading
A healing vision for America, Orr suggests in his writings, is one faithful to the great nearby, to the gospel of the local. | Continue reading
Maybe we ought to use our being and thinking not to decide what our lives should be “for” or “against,” but rather what we would like our lives to define. | Continue reading
Altman, while acknowledging that people can and have parented before AI, stated that he cannot imagine parenting without it. | Continue reading
What is the ideal that we sometimes glimpse within the world and which thus inspires our own attempts at order-making, at meaning-making? | Continue reading
Boy, I had very little idea what I wanted to say about sincerity when I started recording, so you’ll hear me sincerely try to figure it out as we listen through these ten songs together. Send your song suggestions to symposiumofsongs@gmail.com! | Continue reading
McCarthy, a little before the rest of us, had caught a glimpse of Western Civilization’s end. | Continue reading
This excerpt from Christopher Beha’s new book draws on John Stuart Mill to probe the flaw at the heart of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s technocratic vision of liberalism. | Continue reading
For humility, there is nothing like gardening. | Continue reading
Emerging tools have to justify themselves to us more than we have to justify ourselves to emerging tools. | Continue reading
Land is only going to become more expensive and thus ever more unaffordable and inaccessible for the agrarians of the future. | Continue reading