Hannah Rowan:

If all of this sounds like a lot of work, it is. But to [Joel] Salatin, it’s only natural — and beneficial — that regenerative farming would lead to a need for more farmers. “Duplication is the way nature increases stuff,” he explains. “If nature wants more humans, it doesn’t make a bigger human, it makes babies. If nature needs more tomatoes, it doesn’t make a monstrous tomato plant, it expects people to plant more tomatoes.” The analogy with small-time farmers versus massive industrial operations is obvious. The former is healthy, the latter is abnormal — farming like Frankenstein.

Rita Koganzon:

Everything Sargeant calls on the state to do is of a piece with the standard demands of her analogues on the left. Indeed, if what we are seeking is a society oriented around dependence and care, the left offers to provide even more fully for the beleaguered modern woman by deconstructing capitalism and replacing it with a need-based economy that socializes the “burdens of care.” Sargeant wants the state to limit the tyrannical demands of private employers on workers’ time and to subsidize the non-market care work of (mainly) women. This would “accommodate the exuberant outpouring of love and risk-taking so many of us want to undertake for the sake of another” without imposing all the economic disadvantages that absence from the labor force now entails for women. But why not do women one better and replace the tyrannical private employers hamstrung by a benevolent state with a benevolent state employer that ensures everyone has the time and resources to exuberantly pour out their love on whomever and in whatever way they wish?

That is one of the dumbest paragraphs in what has to be the worst piece I have ever read from The New Atlantis. When Koganzin says “why not do women one better,” there is no conceivable way to understand what she could possibly mean by “one.” Nothing in the gap between Sargeant’s plea and the full blown erasure of private employment could ever be reduced to “one” anything — even for the sake of a poorly chosen idiom.

Yesterday On Monday, while I was trying to think of a satisfyingly sarcastic parody of Koganzin’s logic, I came home to find the summer issue of the magazine on the counter, which includes a little tit for tat between her and Sargeant.

Here’s Sargeant:

If Koganzon is looking for a defense against totalizing solutions, she will find it in my book’s praise of embracing the natural volatility of life. Fertility and family life cannot be made tame or trivial. As I write, “A woman’s fertility and biology generate friction in a world that demands smooth stability.” Women should not accept demands to flatten ourselves to better fit standardized solutions, whether from the state or society at large. I prefer the approach of disability activists, who push for adaptive designs, which can adjust to suit the user.

And here’s an example from Sargeant’s book:

Reform is disruptive as well — just as it is when a home is flooded with sewage after a storm and all the drywall must be ripped out and reset. But there’s no health that comes in living in denial amid the debris. Day by day, the most vulnerable bear the costs of living in a society that is delusional about dependence.

The alternative is actively choosing the disruption that allows [economic] growth to occur. As Sharon Rose Christner observes amid the nightly pilgrimage of the poor to the Italian policlinico, a “yes” to need is a step into the unknown. “We must know, when we call ourselves merciful, when we designate ourselves as people or institutions of mercy, when we display our neat, quick, beautiful merciful acts in the day: people will see them and come to us for mercies we have not yet shown. Mercies that, like the night, are longer, quieter, stranger.”

Clearing away the laws that limit care and beginning to treat dependence as ordinary and expected will involve costs and benefits we cannot yet anticipate. A person pinioned by chains will long for freedom without being able to fully imagine it. The aim is more than ending the hostility to and degradation of the vulnerable and those who love them. Our society should make a positive and generous shift. We need to go beyond neutrality to anticipate and accommodate the exuberant outpouring of love and risk taking so many of us want to undertake for the sake of another.

As Freddie deBoer has argued, you don’t need “rabid socialist sentiments or anti-capitalist assumptions. You can get here purely through a pragmatic consideration of the underlying reality.” The difference is that, unlike deBoer, Sargeant doesn’t seem to me the least bit interested in “socialism.” And unlike Koganzin, Sargeant seems perfectly capable of an aim toward social legislation that appreciates the human being for what it is without getting bogged down in — or, more accurately, spooked by — “socialism.”

A brief look at Koganzin’s resume makes me think she’s still someone I would take very seriously. But my goodness what a bad faith review she offers.

Kevin Williamson:

This is not really about Niño Guerrero. This is about the United States of America, what kind of government we mean to have, and what kind of nation we mean to be. The question is not: “What would we do if faced with a lawless president who is willing to carry out crimes up to and including murder and who attempts to stay in office when voted out?” The question is: “Now that we have a lawless president who is willing to carry out crimes up to and including murder and who already has once attempted to stay in office when voted out, what are we going to do?”

I suppose we could sit around and wait for the great patriots and constitutionalists such as Sen. Ted Cruz to rediscover their manhood, but that is a long wait for a train that ain’t coming.

Sadly, the answer is that we are going to complain about it, write about it, and, yes, wait.

Thinking of picking up Slobodian and Tarnoff’s Muskism. Which means the random toddler-inspired bookshelf grab this morning is timely. Here’s Wendell Berry in The Need to Be Whole, describing a sympathy I have never moved past:

With us, so far, states of mind cannot be out-lawed. But we need to pay some attention to unprominent prejudices that are merely habits of ordinary life: prejudices, I mean, against farmers, country people, people of small towns, white southerners, white people, white men, men, Kentuckians, Kan-sans, manual workers, poor people, people who have not attended college. Some intellectuals are prejudiced against anybody of any religion, and this they see as honesty and courage.

Lately among leftish politicians, intellectuals, and journalists, another prejudice has been revealed: a half-hysterical fear and hatred of a country called Rural America, which they have not seen except distantly and swiftly from the interstate highways or from thousands of feet in the air. Seen thus “objectively,” Rural America is filled only with Trump voters, disbelievers in science, climate change deniers, racists, sexists, homophobes, backward “non-college” country people, manually working white people with dirty hands and blue collars. The further revelation is that when urban Americans speak of “our country” they are using a metaphor; they mean the government, the economy, the military, the transportation system, and the more spectacular parks and wilderness areas; they don’t mean the actual country from which they mine their food, clothing, shelter, fuels, and ores. Their own actual country is to them a foreign and an alien land.

Richard Wilbur:

One of the tragedies of modern life is the division of intellectual labor into disciplines. “Tragedy,” though, is probably not the right word, for, while this situation is self-inflicted and filled with irony, it allows neither expiation for practitioners nor catharsis for readers. Rather, the rendering of thought and writing into discrete fields of study appears to be welcomed since it affords multiplied opportunities for cognoscenti to exclude uninitiated outsiders, aspiring authorities to set up fiefdoms, and the programs of annual learned societies to parade the latest fashionable clichés. The greatest loss occasioned by acquiescing to rigid disciplinary boundaries is the distortion of reality. In fact, poets pray, biophysicists take their kids to the movies, novelists cash their checks, financiers bake bread, missionaries propagate the species as well as the gospel, jocks read books. No single vocabulary, no single set of intellectual insights, can encompass the breadth and depth of lived existence. When academic discourses deny or underestimate the wholeness of life, they cheat their adepts. And they cheat the rest of us, for readers need all the help we can get, and from every resource imaginable, if we expect to have even a chance to understand even a portion of the world that whirls about us.

— Mark Noll, foreword to Roger Lindon’s
Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, 1998

Driving home from a party, parsing
conversations, car windows down
to greet first real summer heat,
we pass through zones of peeper—

not song, not chorus, though
scientists no doubt find pattern
in the high-pitched whatever it is.
Nor peep, which reminds you of

silly chicks falling over each other
in an incubator. Every moist venue
between Pretty Marsh and Somesville,
every hundred yards brings

this antic singing, somewhat
alien in tone, magical too,
like fireflies but auditory,
not synthesized but a perfect

cacophony of the higher ranges,
tiny frogs doing their spring thing,
flinging music into dank milieu
of pond edge and marsh, inspiring

a certain joy in our recap of the evening
as if every fault could be forgiven
when you consider the rest of the world
wild and wet and flipping out.

— Carl Little

Miloš Miljković:

Yes, OpenEvidence, “the default operating system of medical knowledge in the United States” (their words, emphasis included), is a tech startup zipping through the first phase of enshittification, i.e. attracting users with a high-quality offering. …

I won’t cry for the billionaires involved. I will, however, mourn the opportunity cost of so many smart physicians and programmers on their medical and technical teams spending their time on point-one-percenter enrichment instead of truly building our generation’s PubMed. It would not even require compute! The true value of OE is the curated collection and unrestricted access to peer-reviewed journals, treatment guidelines, and systematic reviews, supplements and all. Let me google all that — or better yet, look it up on Kagi — and I will not care at all for the LLM-generated veneer glued onto man-made knowledge. But good luck having NEJM, JAMA et al. open their vaults without the VC-backed carrot of (I suspect) God knows how many millions of dollars for access rights combined with the FOMO stick that Anthropic and OpenAI’s PR teams have been so diligently whittling.

… the mounds of AI slop added to OE search results aren’t just wasteful, they are dangerous. Back in the Triassic era when shmucks like yours truly were nursing their middle-finger calluses writing progress notes by hand you knew that every part of that note contained useful knowledge. With the electronic medical record mandate — thanks, Obama — much of it became an unreadable mix of computer-generated charts and copypasta; you had to look at the end of the note to find actual human thought, whether it is in the Assessment and Plan or the Attending Addendum section. Well, I can report from the front lines that much of the time even that one meager paragraph has become a copy/paste job carrying with it that distinct LLM waft.

I am not against using LLMs for progress notes — we have been using human scribes for decades to write up the facts of the doctor-patient encounter. But those are costly and your rural primary care physician certainly won’t have one, so why not delegate that work to AI? The assessment and plan, however, are where you infuse those facts with meaning and then act on them, which is the entire purpose of the physician’s job. Writing is thinking and millions of US medical professionals have decided to delegate the one job they have to AI while keeping all the moral and legal responsibility, reverse-centauring themselves willingly and with eyes wide open.

Jason Peters:

These reminiscences and the search for lost times I witness in others suggest to me that the means of passing the long days of a child’s American summer varied little from place to place. What differences there were owe to the places themselves, which all play and all pastimes, whatever their similarities, must suit themselves to. And this is as it should be: let the place decide. Our pond in the field out back meant skates and hockey all throughout the winter. The elementary school on our side of town sat on a good-sized hill, and so when the snow fell we went sledding all day long and into the night if we could get away with it. (You were king of the hill in those days if you owned a Brunswick Snurfer.) We sailed homemade boats in the cold tempestuous ponds of March and April. The place decided as much as we did what we would do, though what we did in our place was being duplicated wherever climate, landscape, and imagination permitted.

•

Christopher Lasch once suggested that nostalgia is a falsification of memory. My quibbles with Lasch are few, maybe next to nil, but here I must dissent. If for the moment we leave aside the complicated business of memory—and I am not alone in taking the Augustinian view that memory is, inter alia, the human faculty that reveals divine intention in the world—we are nevertheless obliged to treat nostalgia with some strictness of expression. Nostalgia, properly speaking, is homesickness. In its etymologically precise sense it is a longing not for a time but for a place. Odysseus is nostalgic for Ithaca. The wild civility of Ogygia and the island goddess won’t do for him.

Those who would avoid a proper understanding of nostalgia have the usual routes available to them: a careless and slovenly use of the mother tongue, the lethargy of custom, a weak capitulation to convention, an indifference to the rich history in words that waits patiently, like a genie in a bottle, to be set free. (There are wishes that that rich history fain would grant.) What I have so far been recounting, what I have been remembering, certainly qualifies as nostalgia, but it is not nostalgia in the sense that its future-mad naysayers mean by it: a “longing for a past that never existed,” which is a phrase nearly as idiotic as “the right side of history.” Nostalgia provides occasion for the attentive man, thinking back on his past and on his pastimes, to be a worthy pupil of his recollections.

Consider for the moment Wordsworth’s proposition that the child is father of the man and that any of us might wish our “days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety.” Does it not seem that children—I mean children set loose into the given world, not into the world dominated by the devices and diversions emanating from hell and Silly Con Valley—does it not seem that they will perforce adapt their play to their places? This assumes, I grant, that they have actual places to be set loose into. … But it is not only for children to honor the law of local adaptation. It is for children to father such men and women as are likewise capable of such honor.

And grownups are, or at least were, capable of it. […]

In all things and in all matters the place decided ere the place-snubbing screens and smartphones came along to import a snobbish coastal monoculture, to banish meaningful pastime and elide the textured places we remember and practiced those pastimes in. These plug-in imps are a veritable scourge, lips dripping honey but tasting of wormwood. Let the upright turn away from them like pious Joseph from Potiphar’s slutty insatiable wife.

I’m not partial to the harsh language at the end there, but I don’t blink if someone wants imply that “Silly Con Valley” (how have I never heard that before?) has a nature that is both politically slutty and economically insatiable.

Let the upright men — someway, somehow, please — let us turn away.

Peters:

I recall seeing my older son, now perpetually within earshot of all the culture’s many sirens, and like all of his peers and most of their sorry parents perilously skirting those sirens’ treacherous shores, nary a mast to bind themselves to I remember seeing him pull on a ball cap, pluck a stalk of green foxtail from the ground, put it in his mouth, and head down a trail out back of our house, making for the woods, BB gun in his hand and his dog a few paces ahead of him. Maybe he will remember this. Maybe the memory will save him for the given world. Maybe the child will be father of the man, his days bound each to each by a natural piety.