“The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs.” Michael Powell visits several cities where “harm reduction” has led to endemic drug use and many overdose deaths. This is one of the issues (along with Canada’s MAID) where the shortcomings of the techno-liberal philosophy become most apparent. Sometimes—oftentimes!—individuals want what is bad for them, and technologies or policies that enable such desires are, in fact, harmful: “What harm was reduced, Nelson asked at a 2023 council hearing, by helping addicts get high? Amber Tejada, an employee of a health nonprofit that had partnered with the city, raised her hand to answer. ‘I know it can be a little controversial,’ she told the councilwoman, ‘but one of the key tenets of harm reduction that I see is that we want to be able to facilitate and champion autonomy of people who use drugs.’ Tejada added, ‘There are folks for whom abstinence is not something by which they measure their success in life.’”

“The Queer Case of Emily Dickinson.” Katherine Dalton wishes people would care, at least a little, about the facts of Dickinson’s life as we know them and not use her to playact their own fantasies: “These days, we have created a more useful Emily by stealing her life—an act that is all the worse given the sadly predictable confusion the TV-viewing public is going to have about what parts of the on-screen story are true, and what parts are not.”

“The ‘Country Hicks’ Who Refused $26 Million from an AI Data Center.” There have been several news stories about the two Kentucky women who are refusing to sell their land to a company that wants to build an AI data center. Erich Schwartzel reports on the details and how the controversy is dividing the community: “Several of Bare’s neighbors agreed to sell their land for millions of dollars, but others refused. An opposition movement formed, a bipartisan coalition in a county that has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1984. It’s hard to say how Maysville writ large feels about the data center, but McHugh believes the town splits this way: 20% are adamantly opposed, 20% are adamantly in support, and the remaining 60% “would like it to be done and dusted so they don’t have to hear about it anymore.’” (Recommended by Brian Miller.)

“What if America Went Completely Dark?” Christopher Cox paints a disturbing picture about the fragility of the cobbled-together power grid that distributes electricity in the US and the manufacturing challenges that make repairing it difficult: “‘It is the overwhelming tendency of our time to assume that a big problem calls for a big solution,’ the poet and environmentalist Wendell Berry once wrote. The best solution to a fragile grid may look like a lot of little interventions, distributed widely. That kind of bulk power system, Roberts said, will become ‘very boringly resilient and reliable.’” (Recommended by Jeff Polet.)

“Stack Underflow: Losing the Craft of Coding.” Jarett Malouf wrestles with how risky it is for software engineers to forget how to code and transition to being AI agent managers: “But how good will we be at our AI-supervision jobs if we lose the skills AI replaces? . . . . There’s an argument to be made — a bet, more so — that the hard skills we were once required to master are now and forever obsolete, and thus that the withering away of low-level competencies is unproblematic. But I would venture that what has always been true in software engineering will remain true: he who understands the layer beneath will thrive.”

“These Kids are Learning without Technology in Seattle Public Schools.” Claire Bryan talks with parents and students who are opting out of a school district’s computers: “Despite Seattle Public Schools’ district policy to issue devices to each of its nearly 50,000 students, some highly vocal parents are successfully opting their students out of technology altogether. These parents advocating for what they call “intentional technology” are on one end of a fierce debate happening nationwide: How can schools make sure students are equipped for success in a digital future while also retaining true life skills — like the ability to struggle and think critically in a world of easy AI answers, and to embrace the wonder of friendships, boredom and the real world beyond the dopamine hit of electronic screens?” (Recommended by Tom Bilbro.)

“A Giant on the Shoulders of Giants.” J. C. Scharl reviews A.M. Juster’s new translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere and makes a case for reading these poems: “This volume is not merely an excellent translation of an under-read poet; it is a reminder of why Petrarch was so acclaimed in the first place, and an argument that this early Renaissance humanist’s vision of humanity, love, forgiveness, sin, death, and hope can speak directly to our own twenty-first-century hearts.”

“A Vital Education.” Franklin Tucker Eccher considers the history and present of the microcollege movement that has coalesced around Deep Springs College: “The microcolleges are attempting to revitalize two distinct visions of education grounded in overlapping traditions of Progressive thought: Nunn’s work college and the folk school. One emphasizes the universality of the human condition, and the other, our rootedness—in places, in social and economic conditions, in history. For both, education is that which increases our power to bring forth what is vital in us and in the world, the life of things.”

“The Passing of the American Century.” Modern Age republished a penetrating review by Lee Congdon of John Lukacs’s classic Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century. His emphasis on the importance of accepting limits is particularly salutary: “In a defiant effort to assert their cultural-spiritual independence, [Americans] have stubbornly refused to affirm the truth—experienced by Europeans at the Marne, at Dachau, and at Munich—that man is finite and sinful. They are, that is, unwilling to abandon the nineteenth-century idea of progress, with its attendant idolization of science and technology.”

“Texans Revolt Against a Border Wall in the Wilderness.” Carrie McKean describes how, during the first Trump administration, “new barriers were erected and strengthened in the regions where authorities determined they were most needed, such as near ports of entry in El Paso, San Diego, and elsewhere. But the wild lands of the Big Bend region were safe. Eight years later, that common sense is gone. Grief and anger are rising among West Texans who are paying attention to what’s unfolding in Big Bend National Park, Big Bend Ranch State Park, and the surrounding wildlife refuges, wilderness areas, and private land that make up the 517-mile long Big Bend Sector border.”