Worth your time. Noah Eckstein, Harvard 2026:
ideas
The older concepts of civic virtue emphasized self-mastery, conquering your impulses to serve a higher cause. Today’s politics treats self-mastery as suspect, a form of fakery or selling out, while asinine self-exposure is proof of depth and authenticity. The older republican tradition asked whether a man could govern himself before entrusting him with power. The new authenticity politics asks whether he seems sufficiently ungoverned to be trusted. [See, e.g., Graham Platner]
“Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law” is the line from “America the Beautiful.” That idea is a joke…, increasingly, in Washington.
N.B. The next line, “Thy Liberty in Law,” is also a (cruel) joke in Washington these days.
A very David-French-y column (that’s a positive adjective in my personal dictionary):
In fact, as the show [Hacks] illustrates, concentrating on differences and even mutual interests is a bit beside the point. The question isn’t “How much are we alike?” Rather, it’s “Can I appreciate and even love the person you are?”
Matthew Crawford, via Damon Linker
Capital is concentrated to the point that it operates in quasi-governmental ways, abetted by ever more powerful information technology. Arguably, one of the most important functions of the (actual, elected) government, now, is precisely to restrain and regulate the explosion of unaccountable governmentality in our dealings with outsized commercial enterprises.
Ah! If only…
" … there are these rules that we think of with literature, but in picture books they’re all broken. The main character can be eaten in the middle.”
“What Adults Lose When They Put Down Children’s Books” by Anna Holmes, The Atlantic, May 9, 2026
Moment by moment by moment, lived gracefully and honorably, makes a life.
My first job downstairs is to open the back door and get a big breath of fresh air - rain or shine, winter or summer - I just copy the cats and dog, that’s what they do - that’s how the ‘read’ the day, nose up, what’s in the air? What smells different? Clear out the night-lungs. Start again. Meanwhile the kettle is boiling. I grind the beans. That smell of fresh ground beans. Oh wow! Then I am at the back door again, or in the yard, in my pyjamas and wellies, just with a little time to align myself with myself - and to align myself with this different, new day. It’s a little bit of Tao. –Jeanette Winterson: Mind Over Matter (Substack) - “Spring Equinox”. Hat tip to Austin Kleon.
This “almost” phase [of machine autonomy] isn’t a brief transition. It’s the product—one that will be with us for years, maybe decades. So it’s important to notice the patterns. When an AI system never admits uncertainty, or when a car’s marketing says “self-driving” but the fine print says “driver responsible,” that’s a warning sign. When you realize that you haven’t really been paying attention for the past 10 miles, or the past 10 auto-composed emails, that’s the trap.
Things don’t have to be this way, but they won’t change unless consumers see the situation clearly and refuse to accept it. We should reject the deal we’ve been handed—the one where the terms of service become a shield for companies and a sword against users. We should demand that companies share the risk they’re enticing us into taking. If they design for complacency, they should get some of the blame when their product fails. – “My Tesla Was Driving Itself Perfectly—Until It Crashed” by Raffi Krikorian, The Atlantic, April 2026
This, when someone says AI-governed stuff (cars, research, whatever) is more reliable than humans. Even if that’s true, when AI fails, the AI merchants should bear responsibility for the resulting damage.
I immensely enjoyed this 2017 article about Tanya Amyx Berry and her life in Kentucky with Wendell Berry and their family and community.
As for “wild,” I now think the word is misused. The longer I have lived and worked here among the noncommercial creatures of the woods and fields, the less I have been able to conceive of them as “wild.” They plainly are going about their own domestic lives, finding or making shelter, gathering food, minding their health, raising their young, always well-adapted to their places. They are far better at domesticity than we industrial humans are. It became clear to me also that they think of us as wild, and that they are right. We are the ones who are undomesticated, barbarous, unrestrained, disorderly, extravagant, and out of control. They are our natural teachers, and we have learned too little from them. The woods itself, conventionally thought of as “wild,” in fact is thought of and used as home by the creatures who are domesticated within it.
Wendell Berry, This Day - Sabbath Poems, 1972 - 2012 - Introduction