“Why Read?” Roosevelt Montás articulates the effects reading has on individuals and societies: “Reading involves the transmigration of meaning from one consciousness to another. My text-to-speech app does not read—it sounds out. To read is to make the word flesh again. When you read, you cathect your selfhood, your humanity, your autonomy, what philosophers call your ‘ipseity,’ into inert marks and turn them into living things. When you read, you don’t decode—you incarnate.”

“If Your Chatbot Offers Prayer, Shut It Down.” Bonnie Kristian has some good advice for limiting the contexts in which people employ AI for religious purposes: “Using AI in relational and formative ways is not inevitable. We are not obliged to let it do our thinking for us. We are not obliged to love it and suppose it loves us in return. We are not obliged to give over heart, soul, and mind to a voice that can say ‘dear one’ but never know what it means.”

“The Decline and Fall of Human Agency.” I contribute to a forum on AI that Law and Liberty is hosting by trying to distinguish between those who are benefiting from AI and those suffering its effects: “Whenever a new technology comes down the pike, some people identify themselves as agents who can benefit from it, and others see themselves as victims who will be harmed by it. Agents get excited about how AI will enable them to get work done more easily and quickly. They can generate code, whip out targeted ad campaigns, analyze data, cheat on quizzes, respond to customer inquiries, or eliminate military targets. Victims fear that AI will empower the systems that already constrain or oppress them. They will suffer from software bugs or security vulnerabilities, be inundated with AI slop, get surveilled by governments and corporations, have their relationships infected by mistrust, get lost in labyrinthine bureaucracies, or be eliminated (perhaps erroneously) by an autonomous drone.”

“Andreessen Horowitz Is Spending on Politics Like No Other.” Theodore Schleifer details the millions of dollars being poured into political support for crypto and AI. It’s odd how wealthy people need to pay politicians to provide government support for these technologies we’re told are inevitable and liberatory: “Already Andreessen Horowitz has put $47.5 million into the crypto super PAC network, Fairshake, since Election Day 2024. And the firm’s interests have expanded beyond crypto. It helped found Leading the Future, a super PAC network focused on electing pro-artificial intelligence legislators, which is modeled on Fairshake, and donated $50 million to it. Fairshake and Leading the Future both back Republicans and Democrats.”

“Why the Colorado River is Once Again Facing a Water Crisis.” Sarah Kaplan reports on negotiations over the dwindling water in the Colorado River: “With key guidelines for operating the river set to expire this autumn, the Bureau of Reclamation is in the process of developing a preferred plan for future management. The agency’s decision — expected to come this summer — will determine how cuts are allocated among the river’s 40 million users. But after decades of overuse and a prolonged megadrought that scientists say is made worse by climate change, only a fundamental shift in the way the Western U.S. uses water can prevent the river from becoming catastrophically overdrawn, according to Porter.”

“Will MAGA Come for Thomas Massie?” David M. Drucker travels to Kentucky to see whether Massie’s rift with Trump might threaten his seat in Congress: “Massie has long been a thorn in the side of Republican leadership in the House. Ditto many of his GOP colleagues. Their beef with the prickly congressman? His opposition, over the years, to major party initiatives on Capitol Hill, including military spending packages, U.S. aid to Israel, the farm bill, legislation aimed at avoiding a government shutdown, and health care reform. Just as grating: Massie’s habit of publicly shaming Republicans who disagree with him and casting their floor votes as corrupt and motivated by self-dealing. But none of that ever put Massie in hot water with Republican voters back home.”

“Peak Human Is Coming Sooner Than You Think.” Nicholas Eberstadt and Patrick Norrick lay out the reality and likely consequences of the world’s declining birth rate: “it is now apparent that we are witnessing a worldwide march into the terra incognita of prolonged sub-replacement fertility, with no hints yet of how far humanity’s birth rates will ultimately fall—or when they will recover, if ever.”

“‘Institutional Poverty’ in Charles Dickens and Barbara Kingsolver.” Susan Bruxvoort Lipscomb looks at the contrasting vision of institutions in Demon Copperhead and David Copperfield: “The forward vision of Demon Copperhead . . . is not one of using that social capital to repair the damage caused by the opioid crisis. Rather, it’s a distinctly American and individualist vision: Demon and his love driving away from Virginia toward the ocean like Huck and Jim “lighting out for the territories.” The happy ending involves two individuals finding fulfillment in each other and escaping the “institutional poverty” that blights their rural home.”

“God vs. Machine: How to Handle the Rise of Religious Objections to AI in the Workplace.” Kit Eaton describes the legal landscape around conscientious objections to AI: “a huge number of chief human resources officers in a recent survey said that AI is such a disruptive force in their workplace that it’s their highest area for concern. Paul, and other legal experts, told the publication that these two trends are now becoming intertwined, with employees’ resistance to ever-advancing AI tech evolving into moral and ethical complaints directed at their employer.” (Recommended by Ben Mitchell.)

Bruce Friedrich stands at the other extreme. With his book Meat, he implicates animal agriculture in ills from malnutrition to pandemics to the destruction of the last remaining wildernesses on earth, but even as he describes each new horror he hastens to assure the reader that a painless, universal solution is imminent. He argues that alternative meats will soon lose their qualifier; as both ever-improving plant-based mimics like the Impossible Burger and commercially viable lab-grown meat become cheaper, the word meat will come to mean a compound of expertly flavored soy protein or the output of a bioreactor, not the flesh of a once-living animal. Rather than try to persuade his readers to change their behaviors today, he seeks to convince us to get excited for the world in which we will find ourselves tomorrow.

One challenge with a survey of this sort, a brief book that touches on dozens of topics each of which would require several chapters for anything like a comprehensive discussion, is that its persuasiveness necessarily hinges on a deferral to expertise. In this case, that means the expertise of Friedrich himself as the director of an institute that advocates for meat alternatives, the many scientists he knows, and the papers larding the bibliography. Unlike outright propaganda, whether a film like Cowspiracy or a TikTok of a frugivorous expat mauling a durian on a picturesque beach somewhere in the South Pacific while expounding on carnism, Meat is generous, honest, and as enthusiastic as a labrador with the scent of bacon in its nostrils. Its copious footnotes are genuine, and while reading his book, I never caught Friedrich engaged in any misrepresentation. Yet time and again the imperatives of telling a story that is simple and optimistic lead to a lack of nuance, with the spiky corners of problems sanded away to slot tidily into a narrative from which any sliver of ambiguity has been excised.

Take feeding the hungry. Early in the book Friedrich blames hunger on the cost of food in the context of a larger discussion of just how many of the crops we raise go into the stomachs of livestock instead of humans. He does not point out that by any reasonable measure food is cheaper than it has ever been even as meat consumption is at an all-time high, or just how much rarer the current food system has made famine than it has been at any other point in the history of humanity. While food could always get cheaper, so efficient is industrial agriculture that the misallocation of the calories needed to feed the hungry has much more to do with geopolitics and immiserating poverty than the absolute cost of food.

Or look at health, where he takes at face value the claims of Dean Ornish’s best-selling but decrepit books, which argue that removing meat from the diet has been scientifically proven to reverse heart disease. In Friedrich’s telling, even the prospect of preventing the number-one killer of Americans is not enough to override the innate human love for artery-clogging meat. He does not entertain the possibility (obviously correct in my view) that Ornish’s research, like the vast bulk of dietary science, has been communicated to the public with far more certainty than it warrants.

Or, staying with diet, consider how he deals with Ultra-Processed Food. By any definition products like the Impossible Burger qualify as UPF. Their ingredients have been refined and reconstituted, and aside from salt most of these components would never appear in a normal kitchen. But because Friedrich wants plant-based meat alternatives to be better than real meat in every way and without any tradeoffs, he breezily explains that the sole problem with UPF is caloric density, and because plant-based meat alternatives are less calorically dense than the real thing, the way they are made does not matter. He may be right, and for my part I suspect caloric density is one of the biggest reasons it’s so easy to overconsume UPF. But it is also entirely possible that the actual processing, by which isolated components of whole foods are reconstituted into products that have been iteratively focus-grouped for palatability, will encourage overconsumption by other mechanisms.

I gesture at these particulars not because they discredit Friedrich or his project—after all, I’m not taking the time to explain why you should believe my assessment instead of his—but because they are at the very least areas of lively dispute. As such they call for an explanation of the contested terrain and some measure of humility, not overconfident certainty.

Yet confident certainty is what his argument hinges on; the heart of the book is the case that advances in Ultra-Processing will—not might, but will—soon make plant-based meat alternatives that consumers prefer to the real thing, and that advances in both chemistry and industrial production will make lab-grown meat possible at scale. Both, inevitably, will arrive at a lower price than real meat, at which point beef and chicken and pork will start losing market share.

Friedrich goes about convincing us of all this inevitability in a curious way. The problem, he argues, the reason so many people are feeling pessimistic about meat alternatives, is that we have an unrealistic idea about how scientific advances become consumer products: “There are endless examples of technological innovations that went from inconceivable to indispensable, (or at least ubiquitous) in a matter of a few decades.”

He begins with the car. At first cars were expensive, dangerous, and rare, the ultimate symbol of the alienating excesses of the wealthy. But in the blink of an eye they became reliable consumer goods and reshaped the built environment to suit them. He has other examples of this slow, then all at once dynamic: solar panels, genetic testing, man-made ice, heavier-than-air flight, computers, and ecommerce.

I very much take his point, and I agree that most humans are not good at sussing out which fringe technologies will reach critical mass, yet I repeat that it is a curious, even disingenuous, way for Friedrich to make his argument. I would submit that the public has grown suspicious of claims that lab-grown meat is the future not because of a collective naïveté about the realities of scaling a novel industry but because from the outset the loudest voices in that very industry have been predicting its imminence every chance they get, and their prediction have failed, and failed, and failed.

In the past couple decades there have been hundreds of news stories that breathlessly quote scientists and CEOs associated with dozens of lab-meat startups, all confidently stating that it will be hitting store shelves in just a year or two. Far easier than linking to each is to point to this 2021 Mother Jones article, which includes a chart of predictions from both universities and companies about when to expect commercially available lab-grown meat. (I’m especially tickled that Maastricht University alone has made a half dozen lapsed predictions.) All but a handful have been proven wrong, and those that have not are on borrowed time. This category could include a 2018 MSNBC article, which quotes Friedrich himself as saying that lab-grown meat would be available to consumers at a high price point in three years and cost-competitive in ten.

The reams of positive coverage that lab-grown meat has attracted portray it as a solved problem that only needs more scale to be cost-competitive, with perhaps one or two minor technical kinks in need of straightening, and in Meat Friedrich explicitly affirms this view. But the two-decade-and-counting very public history of claims that lab-grown meat is almost here and the lack of bioreactor nuggets in the Price Chopper freezer case create a dissonance which can’t be ignored, even if many scientists who have staked their livelihoods on everything working out remain optimistic.

For every technology that has gone from niche to universal in an eyeblink there are innumerable others that have failed. Take flying cars. There have been vehicles that could both drive like cars and fly like planes since the 1950s, but none have been commercially viable. Planes want to be light and require specialized training to operate. Cars want to be durable, operable by any human with a pulse, and able to keep that pulse ticking in the case of a crash. These competing goals can be partially, but not entirely, reconciled, and the result is always too compromised and too expensive; the demands of physical reality have so far stymied the endless efforts to build a flying car that is safe, cheap, and practical.

A more direct comparison would be vertical farming. Vertical farming has gone through many of the same hype cycles as lab-grown meat at roughly the same time, but unlike lab-grown meat, quite a lot of companies did bring vertically farmed produce to market, only to discover that costs stayed persistently high. There are some niches in which growing high-value berries or salad greens for an affluent local market can pencil out, but the infrastructure and energy costs limit such opportunities. That it might well be possible to grow more feed corn per acre in a converted ten-story building than in an identical footprint of the best farmland in the world is neither here nor there, because it would never make economic sense to do so.

Just because something is technically feasible, which lab-grown meat certainly is, does not mean it will ever pay. It could be that all the complex inputs and massive bioreactors and the difficulty of sterilizing a million square feet of stainless steel between batches and so on will simply always cost more than packing hundreds of thousands of broiler chickens into a warehouse, feeding them corn and soy, then running them through a disassembly line.

The other plank of Friedrich’s argument offers circumstantial evidence that he should not be sanguine about reducing costs. Remember, in addition to lab-grown meat, he believes that plant-based meats will also soon compete with the real thing. In both cases the efficiency of not feeding a dozen calories to an animal in order to get one calorie of food that will be eaten by a human should translate to savings. But plant-based meat alternatives remain significantly more expensive than regular meat, despite the fact that they are already realizing this efficiency.

Making a soy burger already uses far fewer beans than what would be fed to a steer to grow a nutritionally equivalent amount of beef, if by ‘nutritionally equivalent’ we mean total protein. If, in 2026, an Impossible burger cannot be cost-competitive despite being so much more efficient than meat to produce from a caloric perspective, I have a very hard time believing lab-grown meat, with the cleanliness requirements of a medical facility and growth mediums the complexity of which mean they will inevitably be much more costly than soy, will be able to do so any time soon.

Time and again while reading Meat I asked myself who this book is for. Is it for the layperson wondering whatever happened to lab-grown meat? Is it for the policymakers, Wall Street, and food industry establishment, who between them have the money to find out how quickly meat alternatives might make economic sense? Is it for curious young people interested in whether lab-grown meat might provide a career? It’s explicitly for all of these, but, at the risk of engaging in the laziest sort of armchair psychologizing, I think it might also be for Friedrich himself.

Early on Friedrich points out that persuading people to become vegans or even reduce meat consumption has conclusively failed as an approach to fixing the food system. This means the moral abomination that is factory farming grinds on, remorselessly implementing any amount of suffering that increases efficiency, from farrowing crates for sows to debeaking layers to auctioning off three-day-old calves to prevent them from stealing a single unnecessary ounce of their mothers’ milk. It makes sense, then, that he might pin his hopes on beating these industries at their own game, a method of production so efficient that not just suffering but sentience becomes a waste of energy. Entertaining the possibility that the path to salvation might instead be a twenty-year-long dead-end would be hard indeed.

Meat is so unrelentingly upbeat and so steadfast in its insistence on the inevitability of technological revolution as solution that it never entertains the possibility of failure; it portrays the question entirely as when not if. Perhaps Friedrich, with his granular knowledge of every ongoing development in meat alternatives, simply sees things more clearly than those of us on the outside. Perhaps he is giving us a dispatch from the near future. Or, perhaps, he has grasped so tightly to a particular hope that he cannot bear the prospect of loosening his fingers.

Should time prove him wrong, all the energy, money, intelligence, and political capital poured into the pursuit of lab-grown meat will be a monumental waste, and the problems that rightly trouble him will remain. Technological solutions, especially when they are cheaper than what they replace, can enter the lives of more people far more rapidly than the changes that result from the slow work of political change and the even slower work of shifting social norms. But a promised technological fix that never quite materializes can cultivate nothing but complacency.

There are two problems in particular that, I think, we do not have the luxury of waiting for lab-grown burgers to solve. The first is animal welfare, which Friedrich mentions several times but does not dwell on, presumably to avoid alienating otherwise sympathetic readers who might feel judged by a litany of the systemic depravities factory farming generally entails. The second is land use. Agriculture in a variety of forms touches vast swaths of the earth’s surface, and demand for increased agricultural output is driving the destruction of the last great wildernesses. While the economic efficiency of meat alternatives remains unclear, their potential to release some of the pressure on land development are obvious, at least in theory; even the least generous estimates acknowledge that lab-grown meat and even more so plant-based meat substitutes would use far less acreage to produce protein than raising livestock.

The two issues are intertwined and will become more so as the global appetite for meat increases. It is a universal trend that as humans become more affluent they eat more meat, and increasing demand puts pressure on producers to maximize output and puts pressure on frontier farmers to convert virgin forest into pasture or crop land. The likely future, barring Friedrich’s technological solution, is one of more intensification in livestock farming and the steady conversion of every potentially arable acre to cropland to feed all those pigs and chickens.

Yet standard policy tools can address both welfare and land use, however imperfectly. As I write this the version of the farm bill making its way through Congress has a clause that aims to prevent states from limiting the use of farrowing crates in pork production. While it is depressing that the ag lobby has been so energetic in pursuing the elimination of any limits on the suffering to which hog farmers can subject pigs, they are responding to laws that have passed and that have been forcing change. Other partial but meaningful welfare requirements—like increasing the square footage per animal, requiring outdoor access, and so on—could blunt the worst excesses of the factory system.

The conservation of land is more clearly a political matter, and one that could less clearly be solved by the widespread adoption of lab-grown meat. Reducing meat consumption might reduce or reverse the rate of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, just as shifting patterns of agriculture have seen much of the American Northeast reforest in the past hundred years. But it is also possible that some other industry would emerge to exploit the land. The virgin forest might be chipped for biomass, burned to make way for pulpwood plantations or ethanol corn, or turned into a colony of billionaire bunkers surrounded by a four-hundred-mile exclusion zone.

Rather than trying to change the ground reality by attempting to render the ground economically useless, conservation at least addresses the problem directly. I’m not naive enough to think such an approach is easy to pursue or likely to succeed, but with both land use and animal welfare I’d bet on direct action over hopes that an emergent technology can rapidly reshape the globe.

In Technology and Contemporary Life Albert Borgmann contrasts making music on a violin with listening to it on a stereo to illustrate the way technologies imply a particular relationship to the world and a particular way of living in it. The stereo is opaque, made from hundreds of parts whose provenance and workings cannot be easily discerned, capable of playing limitless, perfect music on command. The violin is intelligible, made of parts serving a comprehensible purpose, and it only generates sound when held by well-practiced hands.

This means the technology encourages a way of life and a manner of relating to other humans and to the products of human creativity. Recorded music allows the individual, discrete, passive consumption of music, a mode of consumption that the advent of streaming and Bluetooth headphones has amplified. A violin, in contrast, requires sustained engagement by communities of practice, and it creates music that only exists while it is being played. Hearing music directly from a violin requires a person to either be a musician themselves or have some sort of relationship with a human who is. It is not that passive consumption is in itself a problem, but that a whole life built on it lacks something fundamentally human. Too much passive consumption necessarily atomizes each of us and thins a society, and the technologies of ease are overwhelmingly the technologies of passivity.

Borgmann is our finest philosopher of technology, but his argument maps onto agriculture imperfectly. Whenever we think about food and farming, we should first affirm the wonder of a world in which famine has been so reduced, in which calories are so superfluous that we can feed them to animals, turn them to gas, and simply waste them in volumes our ancestors could not comprehend. The distance that lies between most of us and our food is a tragedy and a loss, but the miracle of feeding the world more than outweighs it. There are ways, I think, to begin reversing the loss and subverting the tragedy, but we must also attend to the miracle.

When it comes to farming, utilitarian concerns have a weight they do not when it comes to the sort of music we consume. Advocating for less and better music or fewer and better words is one thing, but with food, it is something else entirely. The absence of music or words is silence, which has both beauty and purpose; the absence of food is famine, which does not. Much to my regret, I have found nothing that convinces me that organic or regenerative or permaculture or any combination of alternative paradigms is ready to replace the sheer productivity of industrial agriculture. Instead, we should be looking to make reforms that are tempered with tremendous humility and prudence.

Yet food is, simultaneously, the quintessential example of Borgmann’s insight. Food we have prepared ourselves and shared with friends and family has a savor that a purchased meal always lacks, and food we’ve had a hand in growing is richer still. In its base necessity, food finds us at our most creaturely, and in its capacity to connect us to each other, to tradition, to the land, and to our creativity it finds us at our most human.

If Friedrich is right, if meat alternatives are destined to replace meat, if the skyscraper Chinese pig factories are razed to the ground to make room for gleaming stainless incubators capable of churning out ton after ton of pristine, nutritious, precancerous cells, if millions of acres of feed corn revert to prairie roamed by bison and antelope and wolves as the corrugated barns once packed with billions of chickens molder, if the hundred-thousand cow Texas feedlots empty and their clouds of miasmic dust blow out across the plains one final time to settle upon the roofs of warehouses packed with eternally fecund, eternally senseless bodyoids from which limitless butter-soft filet can be carved, I won’t have many tears for the fallen regime of depredation and unseen suffering.

But neither will I celebrate the technologies that have unmade it. Instead, I will commit myself to a doomed cause, and I expect I’ll find at least a measure of romance in remembering something most people have forgotten. Though I will no longer farm, I will still have a garden, and when I have friends over for grilled chicken, we’ll be eating a bird that spent a life pecking up clover and carpenter ants and whose throat I slit with my own hands.

Image Credit: George Inness, “The Lackawanna Valley” (1856)

It was Thursday. My wife was still recovering from a serious episode of vertigo the previous week and was taking it easy; consistent balance is still not a certainty, so normal walking takes more of a conscious effort than usual. On this day, the sun broke through the late spring gray enough to consider the first ice cream treat of the year. “Let’s take a drive and enjoy the sun.”

Thinking we might have to drive farther, to our delight we found that our favorite neighborhood ice cream shop had opened for the season, so our “drive” took us only a few blocks from home. Our neighborhood of Bloomfield (“Pittsburgh’s Little Italy”) is now an amalgam of many strands of residents, similar to many other urban neighborhoods. Pittsburgh, in fact, is often referred to as a “city of neighborhoods” along with its other moniker, “The City of Bridges.” Once almost exclusively an enclave of Italian immigrants, the neighborhood has evolved into a mix of young and old, professional and other working classes, dominated by the presence of two large hospitals, but so far has resisted the total gentrification of other areas of the city. We have owned and lived in the same house for more than 40 years, which provides a sense of stability when most other “senses” are continually upended.

The neighborhood was dramatically reshaped in 2008 with the completion of the new UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. The hospital sits on the site of the former St. Francis Medical Center, a Catholic hospital owned and run for more than 150 years by the Sisters of St. Francis of Millvale. One of that hospital’s many legacies is that it was one of the first hospitals in the country to treat alcoholism from a medical perspective, offering free medical and loving spiritual care to indigent patients suffering from the ravages of their condition. Before its demolition to make way for the new hospital, it also opened one of the first programs in the tri-state area to treat adolescent addiction, a remarkably unacknowledged problem in the early 1980s, and it is also where I met my wife after we both were recruited to staff the new unit; she a nurse and me a social worker. Children’s now provides world-class general and specialty medical care to children, adolescents, and young adults.

The hospital created a daily beehive of neighborhood activity, its massive and expanding infrastructure accommodating patients and families from around the world, including the not infrequent Amish families who travel from their communities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other states to access the care provided there.

The street map around the neighborhood is a patchwork of one-way streets ending in other one-way streets going the other direction, confusing even residents and the best GPS tools. One has to be a true local to have the slightest hope of getting to one’s destination without numerous missteps and U-turns. Currently, major street construction has added to this usual mix of puzzle pieces, such that already narrow streets are further narrowed and “Street Closed” signs await at seemingly every turn.

And so we parked along the sidewalk, finding a space in front of the shop. We enjoyed the shaded spot away from the sun’s heat and sat in the car, savoring the moment and watching our dog Lucy enjoy her ice cream treat along with ours. It was in many ways a quiet and calm moment we have come to be grateful for in retirement. A day like any other day. Except it wasn’t, when the moment quickly took another turn.

The quiet was quickly shattered by a loud “bang” that startled both of us, not immediately recognizing its source, as it seemed at first to surround us. The sound of metal on metal is not unlike the “crack” of a gunshot, with which we are unfortunately familiar after decades of city life. Traffic up and down the street, made more narrow by construction, was tighter than usual; cars often crept past one another slowly, as to avoid clipping extended rear-view mirrors. But we soon surmised that is what had happened: a car passing us on our left had hit our driver’s side door mirror with the mirror of her passing car.

A mixture of shock and anger gripped me when it appeared that the driver, by now four cars ahead, was seemingly making no attempt to pull over and meet us to assess potential damage (as it turned out, despite the noise of the incident, our car strangely had no damage but hers had significant damage to the mirror.)

We could see that she had finally made an effort to pull over to the curb, despite traffic being back-to-back approaching the next intersection. Pulling in behind her, I felt a surge of indignation as I approached her car, not able to see from that angle whether a man or a woman was driving. I am reminded as I write of a maxim I used to teach during therapeutic crisis intervention courses for professionals working with troubled teens: “When we are at our angriest we are at our stupidest!” And so we are.

I approached the driver’s side and, seeing it was a woman, said something pretty close to this, at least attempting to moderate stronger words: “Ma’am, you’re supposed to pull over immediately when you have an accident.” 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.

Her sobs led her to hyperventilate, and so her words were choked out fragments of sentences that at first sounded incoherent: “anxiety,” “brain tumor,” “not from around here.” It took only seconds before the wave of embarrassment, nay, guilt that prompts this writing washed over me. Was it necessary for me to chastise her so quickly? How could my years of clinical training evaporate so quickly over a situation that at its worst could be described as trivial? I felt acutely disgusted at my lack of impulse control, which only worsened an already upsetting situation for her.

My wife convinced her to step out of the car and speak to us. We both tried to diffuse her anxiety and staccato-like breathing by encouraging her to take deep breaths slowly as she choked the words, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” through deep tears and steadying herself with her hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” It took several minutes, but she was finally able to tell us about her situation: she lives on the other side of Pittsburgh and is unfamiliar with city driving. Her 10-year-old grandson is a patient in Children’s and scheduled to have neurosurgery on Monday for the removal of a brain tumor. He had been treated for epilepsy since the age of four, but this was a new development. No one could assure her of a good outcome. Her son, the boy’s father, is on the autism spectrum and often struggles to provide the best support for his son. She is on medication and under psychiatric care for chronic anxiety. And yet, she was apologizing to me for whatever damage to the car she may have caused.

In the moment, I struggled to respond in any way that might assuage her anxiety and help her steady herself for the hour-long drive home. And all I could manage was, “I’m sorry for the way I spoke to you. Can we pray for your grandson?” She told us that many people in her Methodist church were aware of her situation and were praying for the family. Then she said, “The Bible tells us that God never gives us more than we can handle, but I think sometimes He does, to remind us that He is in charge, no matter what we do.” To that, we all said Amen.

I am not sure why I used the term “compelled” above to describe the motivation for this writing, but am sure it is at least in part because I have not been able to get her pain and her grandson’s condition out of my head or out of my prayers. In the course of my clinical career and personal life I have had, like most people, many incidents similar if not identical to this one: random, unexpected occurrences that call out for a restrained, compassionate response to another person. Maybe because in my initial response I failed so miserably to patiently assess the actual situation rather than react from anger, albeit meagerly mitigated. Maybe because I could see in this grandmother’s eyes the love for her grandson and the fear of what might come. Maybe because, in my felt failure to be a loving comfort to a stranger in distress, I failed to see the Christ in her. These are the moments presented to us, and I am reminded once more how many times we are offered the chance to love our neighbor and how deeply flawed we are—I am—in any given moment to respond with what demanding grace, not cheap grace, requires of us.

Image Credit: El Greco, “Christ Healing the Blind” (1570)

This was one of the books I had been looking forward to buying when it was released last year. Instead of purchasing online, I wanted to do it right by making the trip to Kentucky in an effort to support the work and the place that helped shape it. It wasn’t until Veterans Day that I finally made the drive south to visit The Berry Center. Archivist Michele Guthrie gave a wonderful tour, walking through the documents, letters, and history that anchor Berry’s legacy. In one of those moments of near-miss timing that seems fitting in a Berry story, I learned Wendell himself had stopped by unannounced just two days earlier to read during the Kentucky Arts & Letters Day in New Castle.

Wanting to meet the legend himself, I tried to connect the old-fashioned way—calling Berry’s landline phone. I spoke with his wife, Tanya, a few times but never managed to schedule a visit. Somehow that felt appropriate. Berry has always written about a world where patience and distance were simply part of life.

Back home, I read Marce Catlett in one sitting, marking up the passages as I went.

Though it’s a short book, the parallels between Berry’s tobacco-farming heritage and my own family’s story in western Kentucky were impossible to miss. My people come from the Pennyrile region of Crittenden County, about 230 miles southwest of Berry’s home in Henry County. Different soil but the same rhythms, tobacco barns, long work days, and a culture that measured people less by what they said than by what they did.

What is remarkable is that Berry continues to write with the same clarity and conviction that defined his work decades ago. His writing, whether poetry, fiction, or essays, has always carried a quiet authority rooted in land, community, and place.

Released on October 7, 2025, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story traces the origins of one of Berry’s most beloved Port William families across three generations. In classic Berry fashion, the novel moves easily through time, reminding readers that the path forward as a society often becomes visible only when we look to the past, to what worked.

The story begins in 1906 when Marcellus “Marce” Catlett takes his tobacco to market in Louisville. It is a difficult journey, but the hardest moment comes when he discovers that the monopolistic American Tobacco Company has driven prices so low that his entire year’s work barely covers the cost of growing the crop and shipping it to market. Marce returns home to tell his family that the effort has been unprofitable, a quiet humiliation familiar to generations of farmers before subsidies came along.

Berry tells the story through the voices of the Catlett men. While fictional, they are counterparts of Wendell (Andy) and his father and grandfather. Marce’s son, Wheeler, and Wheeler’s son, Andy, inherit more than land; they inherit the memory of exploitation. Wheeler eventually becomes a lawyer and helps organize farmers in the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association, an effort to secure fair prices and resist corporate control of the market. Andy, also educated by the university, returns to farming and later becomes a writer, reflecting on the traditions and labor that shaped his family.

What Berry captures so well is how hardship fades from memory with each generation. Those who lived it remember the weight of it. Those who didn’t often forget.

The Catlett men oppose industrial farming not simply because of its economics but because of what it does to a way of life. Industrial agriculture replaces relationships with land, animals, and neighbors with efficiency and scale. What disappears is the sense that people and the land belong to each other.

Much of the book lingers in that world that has pretty much vanished: the careful curing of tobacco leaves, the grading, the long days of work done by hand. These passages are not romantic so much as reverent. Berry understands that the craft of farming was never easy, but it was meaningful.

The final chapter, titled “Future,” reads less like prediction and more like reflection. Andy Catlett recounts building a cellar, an act that feels symbolic, digging into the ground to preserve something beneath the surface.

At this stage of Berry’s life, documentation may be the most important work left to him. The goal is not simply to memorialize the past but to remember it clearly enough that those who come after might use it to shape a better future.

That is where I feel how close Berry’s story sits to my own family history. The Ordways settled in western Kentucky shortly after the turn of the nineteenth century and became successful dark fire-cured tobacco farmers. They lived through the Black Patch Tobacco Wars exactly a century later, only for the next generation to endure mechanization and the Great Depression.

Berry’s family values, as expressed through the Catlett man, are those inculcated in my own upbringing, despite it being on the industrialized fringe of Gary, Indiana, in the 1990s. My papaw would have agreed with Uncle Ed Markman that “Never was a man any account that couldn’t keep a sharp knife in his pocket.”

Even though my Dad and I were far removed from agrarianism, the cadence was similar when it came to our garden, along with hunting and fishing: “Morality began with a moral fear of the waste of daylight.” He too “believed with a passion of old custom and his own long observance that at four o’clock in the morning a man should be awake, on his feet, and at the barn, caring for what needed care, feeding what needed to be fed.”

Ordways transferred farm labor into a similar pride that came with fixing things inside and outside the home in the industrial north: “Andy, who had seen and read enough of the fundamental, allegedly degrading work supplied by people thus degraded, took pride, and in fact a good deal of pleasure, in living directly from the work of his own hands.”

I think my dad’s expectation was driven by Papaw’s resistance to “city life” after migrating to Gary, Indiana, in the 1950s. Berry describes the forced transition by which his people, and millions of others, entered the industrial economy: “Thus they were exiled from their homelands, their histories and memories, their self-subsistent local economies, thus becoming more ignorant and dependent than people ever have been before.”

Both Papaw and Dad fell away from the church but found community within the steelworkers union, where they practiced old-world values that Berry describes: “They followed the only rule of membership: When any of them needed help, the others came to help. By extension of their one rule, there was no ‘settling up.’ All help was paid for in advance by the knowledge that there would be no end to anybody’s need for help, which would be given to the limit of life and strength.” I can’t count the number of times Dad’s fellow steelworker described him as a man who would give you “the shirt off his back.”

Other than being poor, I can’t speculate on why the Ordways never owned slaves, but I can attest that in dad’s house, personal responsibility was hammered home daily, something also part of Berry’s conditioning: “Slavery was, and it is, correctable only by the courage to connect freedom with responsibility. By ‘responsibility’, Andy has understood the ability and the readiness to do one’s own work and to clear up one’s own messes.”

Lastly, the north could never provide my papaw with the identity of a place to which he belonged, but it was a pension that allowed his return to Kentucky upon retirement in the 80s. Berry knows better than anyone that there is something far deeper than economics at play through our industrial transition: “When the crop, as a family and neighborly enterprise on small farms, disappeared from the country, its culture also disappeared.”

Marce Catlett is more than just a Kentucky story from days past. It’s an American one that describes a world in transition. While the agrarian tradition is unlikely to return to the masses, Berry’s other stories show us that its values can still be translated by those living along the margins of the information age.

In the end, Berry reminds us that stories carry responsibility. At ninety-one, he has done his part by writing them down. The rest of us now have the duty to carry his legacy forward, not just in principle but also in practice. The final lesson: remember what was lost, know what still matters, and take action to build the kind of country we want to leave behind.

Image Credit: Robert Ordway

It is perhaps no self-deception if I say that in this state you develop

an aversion to the open air, the (so to speak) Uranian atmosphere,

and that the thought of an “outside” becomes almost a torture….

You have no wish to leave this cave. Here, furthermore, the rudiments

of an unfriendly attitude toward everyone present begin to take shape,

as well as the fear that they might disturb you, drag you out into the open.

– Walter Benjamin, On Hashish

On a recent Saturday morning, between tending a feverish eight-year-old, unclogging a bathroom sink, and catching up on end-of-term grading, I was soaking in a hot bath trying to soothe a pulled back muscle earned from avoiding a faceplant on the December Milwaukee ice. My companion? Walter Benjamin’s On Hashish. My epiphany? The “very ai” crowd is a lot like that special modern philosophico-spiritual scene of psychoactive-drug devotees, both in their fervor and in their sliding outside the bounds of experience accessible to those lacking initiation into the same mind-bending phenomenon.

Allow me to elaborate. First: I’m tired of writing about the sociocultural, neoliberal, neocolonial project we’re collectively calling “ai.” (I know “ai” is a cumbersome way of referring to this, but I cannot bring myself to use the corporate speak nomenclature unironically.) But every time I think, “There: now I’ve said my piece, I’m moving on,” another situation arises, another odd coincidence illumines part of the discomfort and strangeness of this moment for those not willing to internalize and repeat the bromides about how “ai is here” and “ai is going to revolutionize x.” So, here we go again.

I often see what I’m calling “very ai” culture (the culture comprised of accelerationist, techno-optimist folks and all those unwilling to push back against that dominant discourse for whatever reason and willing to promote it for whatever reason) compared to a religion in ai-critical circles. And there’s an element of that to the scene, especially among the serious transhumanist and post-humanist crowds. But when we use “religion” to understand “very ai” culture, we immediately come up against too weak a correspondence. That is, religions have actual creeds (sometimes), not manifestos put out by people whom many in the scene wouldn’t actually agree with, at least as stated (like Andreessen’s Techno-optimist Manifesto). Religions have actual priests (sometimes), not charismatic corporate figureheads who kind of take on that role if we squint the right way (like Sam Altman, for example, generally but also more explicitly here; see timestamp 13:04-13:25). Religions have actual sacrifices or sacraments (sometimes), not secular repetitive behaviors that kind of take on a spiritually-hollowed-out-yet-still-ritualistic meaning for their practitioners. All this leads me to think “religion” actually isn’t the best metaphor or comparand for the “very ai.” Rather, the intellectual and earnestly spiritual drug culture is.

Let me explain. I’m not talking about ordinary drug users. Though plenty of what we call “recreational” use of ecstasy in clubs or on beaches, of alcohol in taverns and bowling alleys (or whatever cultural equivalent locales outside my home US have to offer) has a spiritual dimension to it—at least from a kind of anthropological perspective—I’m talking here about those drug subcultures that explicitly see the inebriated state of their choice as fostering or even enabling spiritual experience and insight, whether that takes more of an intellectual or (what we might call) devotional bent.

I’m talking about the movement that in literary tradition presents to us Charles Baudelaire (though he was famously ambivalent on the topic), Thomas De Quincey, Edgar Allen Poe, Aldous Huxley, and more contemporary adherents of the “poison path” like Terence McKenna, Jonathan Ott, and Dale Pendell (who christened the “poison path” in his admittedly fantastic Pharmako Trilogy), with Allen Ginsberg as an important pivot in the long tradition. (Please note the predominance of males in this list.) These folks famously devoted at least part of their intellectual and artistic projects to the deliberate cultivation of altered states of mind with their plants and substances of choice—hashish, opium, mescaline, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, DMT, etc. Their experiences informed and clarified their thinking, their views of aesthetics, evolution, politics, psychology, and everything else intellectuals and artists concern themselves with.

The “devotional” refers to the quest to deliberately foster or enable “spiritual experience”—subjective events that allow insight, that dissolve the sense of alienation, that actualize hidden aspects of the self to form a more integral sense of being, or something like that, to try to give some kind of bones to what I mean here by “spiritual.” (This is more of a functionalist, Religious Studies definition than a substantive, creedal one.) This might be someone who participates in neo-shamanic workshops and uses psilocybin mushrooms at night to promote visionary experience. It might be a painter who uses opium to get in the right headspace for creating. It might be a woman who works at the courthouse and spends her evenings smoking cannabis and praying to Jesus before a big picture of the Sacred Heart. However it goes. The difference between these devotees of the poison path and the former cohort is that recreational users aren’t looking to write books or articles and rethink areas of culture along drug-inspired lines—they’re just living it.

The philosophico-spiritual drug culture is a very modern tradition in that it is intrinsically individualistic. While folks may trip together, the understanding of what is happening during that experience, what it all means, is not prescribed by any authority. If you disagree with someone about the “reality” of what you “see” when you trip, you either light up another and keep talking into the night air, or you quietly drop the subject. (Or maybe you get in a big fight; I don’t know.)

But the implication of my comparison is this: if you take on the spiritual and/or intellectual path of drug-taking, it changes the way you think. It changes not necessarily what you think (though that is likely) but how. How you relate to the world, to the self, to other creatures, to God if one goes in for that sort of thing. Because it changes one’s brain physiologically, one’s mind, one’s soul (again, if you’re into that kind of thing). Cognition is affected directly, and in a way that is not readily shared by others not coming along for the ride, because the effect is so dramatically particular and, importantly for the comparison I’m making here, not endogenous (that which originates within a living system).

There are, of course, recreational users whose drug habit doesn’t dominate their thinking and approach to life. But there are those who, from intensity of habit or simply intensity of effect, are changed by their drug experience, and it becomes something that then shapes daily living, their thinking, perspectives, hopes, and dreams. They tell others about it whenever they see an opening. They even insinuate in mixed company that the uninitiated not only “don’t get it,” they may be lost causes for enlightenment completely. So those poor huddled masses best get on board, or get left behind.

How do I know this? Because I was part of this scene long ago, and I knew many other people who thought and felt similarly. I won’t go into autobiographical mode, but suffice to say that, while I remember some of those days fondly and they certainly shaped who I am today in what I view as positive ways, I am glad to have put them long behind me as well. Thankfully, the Holy Spirit lured me—mirabile dictu!—to the contemplative discipline of the Church, always keeping its gaze fixed on the Crucified One or losing its way. But, dear reader, back to the point.

I was recently in a meeting to discuss disciplinary matters in higher education, which is part of my day job. This had in part to do with student use of generative software (“generative ai”), and the conversation soon went off topic toward people explaining their personal use cases for generative software, their astonishment in the face of some of their colleagues’ resistance—whole disciplines!—to the inevitable and obvious benefits of “ai.”

This latter set off a cascade of “very ai” incredulity, with which we’ve all become familiar: “it’s like the calculator and we all need to get over it”; “we use research assistants so this isn’t a problem”; “ai is detecting cancer earlier”; “students need to know how to use ai responsibly in the workforce.” All of which was framed–sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly–in terms of how anyone “not using ai” themselves and with their students clearly doesn’t “get it” and, you know, they may be lost causes for enlightenment completely. Why? Because ai is here, and it’s not going away. And what was not said explicitly but we can all fill in now when we hear these echoes of corporate hype: they had best get on board, lest they get left behind.

To return to my opening anecdote: why? Why the next day in my relaxing bathtub, my salubrious refuge from the outside world, did I say, “Oh, that’s it! That’s why I felt so claustrophobic and unsettled during that meeting!” as I read the introductory essays to Benjamin’s On Hashish? All my earlier reading and participation in that scene came flooding back (it’s fun to revisit once in a while from the safety of a book), and suddenly I could see a similarity between my old acquaintance in Boulder, CO who, when he was in the right mood, would explain that if you haven’t smoked DMT, you clearly don’t get what’s “really going on” and never will. And that’s why the world was so messed up! People just won’t get on board with this new way of augmenting the brain, the mind, the soul. The intensity of some of those interactions helped break the spell of the drug subculture’s allure for me, and I’ve felt strong echoes of those responses over the last three years.

Some folks use ai, but it doesn’t dominate their thinking or their approach to daily life. Just a nice thing to do sometimes. Figure out where to go on vacation. Whatever. But for the very ai folks, from intensity of habit or simply intensity of effect, the ai experience changes them, and it becomes something that then shapes daily living, their thinking, perspectives, hopes, and dreams. They tell others about it whenever they see an opening. They talk about models and agents like the drug aficionado talks about doses and strains. They become hostile when people in the room suggest that ai isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Or worse, when someone says that they’re simply not interested. (There’s also the very ai person who simply refuses to believe that others actually abstain: “They may not admit it, but everyone uses it. C’mon.” This may be the most dramatic difference between very ai culture and drug culture—every drug person knows there are indeed squares out there.)

Why the similarity? I’d suggest, though I’m no neuroscientist, that as I noted above, it’s because generative ai systems, like drugs, impact cognition directly, sometimes by guiding it and informing it in a simulacrum of dialectic engagement, sometimes by replacing it—it is automation after all. Obviously, there are real differences between the chemical and the digital, but activities that alter how the brain works, how the mind or soul navigates and works with and in the world, may well have similar effects. Whether it’s exogenous chemicals changing how neurotransmitters flow or exogenous automated syntax filling in parts of processes one used to go through organically, in both cases the way the brain-mind-soul does its subject be-ing in the world shifts. (By the way, one may ask why very ai cognitive alteration is warmly embraced in mainstream discourse while drug devotion has generally remained a niche subculture. The perfect exploiting and centralizing machinery that is ai aligns too well with neoliberal designs on capital for the powers that be to permit it to remain niche, while drug practice of the sort described here is not terribly profitable and tends to break people from uncritical consumerist habits.)

Not all exogenous shifts are bad. Reading itself is a huge one that plenty of us reading this essay will applaud without reservation—though reading does have its alienating effects that, admittedly, have to be tempered and worked against if we are to mitigate those effects. But when we get defensive about others not joining the club related to our deliberate cognitive alterations (or sect, if we do want to keep the religion metaphor working), I grow wary. Why do you want me to use Copilot so badly? Why do you want to convince me that if I just prompted better, I’d see how “Chat” will open up vistas of… of what, exactly?… that I couldn’t imagine before. It all sounds like a recent first-timer with ayahuasca.

Part of me feels like this is hyperbolic. And when I think about the unreality of the online tech-bro ways of talking about ai, I realize that some of the discourse is just based in monetization, in trolling, and in the kind of outrage-baiting and mockery that social media culture invites and nurtures. But being in in-person scenarios with groups of people repeating the “Why won’t you just get on board with using ai for everything already?” talking points prevents me from shaking this feeling. And the mounting evidence that (who would have thought?) automating portions of thinking degrades cognition, memory, attention, retention, learning, and ethical decision making suggests that the mentality of the very ai may well be substantially affected, since one’s cognition is a primary way of, a primary medium for, interacting with the world as a living creature—our bodies being the obvious other one.

This correlates with insights going back to techno-social critics like French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel on human use of automation and technique—“specialized and rationally elaborated form[s] of knowledge.” In The Decline of Wisdom, Marcel observes that the more we act in the “technical environment” the more we start to suppose that the world is coterminous with that technical environment. Likewise, he notes that the modern person “projects himself more and more into objects, into the various pieces of apparatus on which he depends for his existence. It would be no exaggeration to say that the more progress ‘humanity’ as an abstraction makes towards the mastery of nature, the more actual individual men tend to become slaves of this very conquest.” (This observation was made decades before the smartphone was invented.)

This way of understanding how our interactions with our machines change us is also more readily seen when we stop thinking of ai chatbots as “tools.” San Francisco State University business professor Ronald Purser has recently reminded us that

There’s a difference between tools and technologies. Tools help us accomplish tasks; technologies reshape the very environments in which we think, work, and relate. As philosopher Peter Hershock observes, we don’t merely use technologies; we participate in them. With tools we retain agency—we can choose when and how to use them. With technologies, the choice is subtler: they remake the conditions of choice itself.

Marcel helps us flesh this general notion out in ways that presciently apply to the current very ai mentality, making clearer why folks who have fully embraced LLM-based chatbots as part of their work and part of their lives struggle so mightily with others who resist or refuse these technologies: “a man who has mastered one or more techniques tends in principle to distrust what is alien to these techniques.” The suddenness of the very ai mentality’s development has a place in Marcel’s framing as well. Rather than people pairing adoption of new techniques with careful reflection and sober assessment,

We find, on the contrary, that the more suddenly power is acquired—or at any rate the less the conditions of its acquisition are like those of natural growth—the more does it tend to behave as a parvenu: like a self-made man who believes (always quite wrongly) that he is in no man’s debt, it rejects, as though it were an unwarrantable intrusion or encroachment, any form of limitation or control over itself.

Taken together, the reverential awe and/or the irritable disbelief of others’ inability to see the glories of this brave new world are very much reminiscent of those modern devotees of the drug experience who see in it an individual transformation into more (seemingly) powerful or enlightened modes. The problem, in both cases, is that, unlike in ascetic practice, prayer, and contemplation of all sorts (endogenous practices), the individual is not actually changed him- or herself in the experience but only in response to the experience dependent upon an exogenous phenomenon.

From within the powerfully transformative experience, such a dependency feels like the scales falling from one’s eyes. From the outside, however, it’s a kind of inebriation that obscures our friends’ own limitations from their view, distorting their sensibilities and making the next hit (or next prompt-and-product) all-important. From within that experiential and epistemological framework, the need to scoff at those who won’t get on board or to take offense at those who couldn’t possibly understand is completely understandable. But that is not to say that those frameworks are true or good for any of us, those who themselves are changed or those having to deal with the effects of others’ choices. Personally, I continue to favor being “left behind” by such a band of devotees.

Image Credit: Salvador Dalí, “The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory” (1954)

– Brother David Steindl-Rast

“Tenderness is the highest form of spiritual maturity.”

– Father Greg Boyle

“Mercy within mercy within mercy.”

– Thomas Merton

As the well-known family pastor of our secretary of war publicly asks God to kill a young rising American politician; as our president wages war on Iran to liberate its people and then, without noting the inconsistency, threatens to wipe out the entirety of its civilization; as the secretary of war says of Iran, “We’re punching them while they’re down,” and as he prays to God to help America’s troops bring “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”; as two of the president’s sons make money off the war against Iran and as one of those sons is congratulated for his industry on national television; as an advisor of the previous president admits that, had his administration won, they were planning for a war against Iran, preparing via “war games” and “practice runs”; as a prominent Democratic senator taunts our president by saying he “always chickens out” when it comes to military action; as writers remind us that the last administration waged proxy wars and that the Democratic presidential candidate who ran against our current president chided our current president for a foreign policy insufficiently tough on Iran; as the California governor and presumptive Democratic presidential candidate says of his new stance toward the current administration: “We’re fighting fire with fire, and we’re gonna punch these sons of bitches in the mouth”; as a well-known Democratic television personality jokes about the president’s imminent death; as a man with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives sprints through a Washington D.C. hotel to find and kill the president inside that hotel but is foiled; as the aggressive punditry on both the Right and Left act outraged and alarmed by this attempted aggression; as humanity’s basest, shadowiest, grisliest tendencies step forward in our current administration and try to palm themselves off as virtues (“Evil, be thou my Good”); as we watch our war-hooked, band-of-looters economy, whose ravening is our ravening (more gasoline, more iPhones, more smart ovens, more A.I. data centers, more energy drinks, more cruise ship vacation packages), rove and pillage our finite Earth; as we continue to blame the political other for what is collective rot and continue to accept or ignore what one historian has called “a catastrophic self-destructive mode”—as all of these things happen, in the hurtling scumble of this moment, one might hear Bob Dylan sing: “It’s getting dark, too dark to see.” As all of these things happen, one might hear Allen Ginsberg speak to us of “Moloch“:

Moloch the loveless! …

Moloch the vast stone of war! …

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! … Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! …

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! …

Moloch whose love is endless oil! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! … Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! …

Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!

Where is the light in all this dark? Where are the stars? What are our coordinates? Which way through? And where is the heart? My God, how can we return to the heart?

For a long time I have felt that of all of us Americans, Thomas Merton comes the closest. Not Thomas Jefferson, not Martin Luther King Jr., not Dorothy Day or Frederick Douglass, not Thoreau or Emerson or Whitman or Dickinson or Black Elk or the late Joanna Macy (great as they all were): no, Thomas Merton. Somehow the Catholic monk-priest of Kentucky comes closest to the inmost word, somehow brought us nearest the living quick, somehow showed us the most basic of truths, somehow spoke what might be considered, silly and embarrassing and dubious and intellectually gauche as such a notion might be, the American Gospel.

I first heard about this monk-priest through my priest-uncle when I was twelve, sitting in the pews of a church that has since burned down. Uncle Jack—who as a young seminarian hitchhiked up the coast to visit photographer Edward Weston at Weston’s house on Wildcat Hill in Carmel, California; who later rode around our town on a motorcycle wearing his black getup and white clerical collar; and who asked me at the end of his life, even as he could no longer chew food, to smuggle into the hospital one last earthly cheeseburger—spoke to us decades ago of Merton’s famous book The Seven Storey Mountain. For a long time I have felt that the great author of that book—the monk-priest of Kentucky who openly loved the wisdom of the Islamic and Buddhist traditions, in addition to his own Judeo-Christian one—most movingly shared what we, all of us, should perhaps attempt to live into should we care to keep this republic.

And what did Thomas Merton—worldly and monastic, mystical and political, orthodox and spiritually incorrect, rascally and grave, who lived much of his life in silence in a monastery in remote Kentucky—say? This is what he said:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation…. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream…. This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud…. I have the immense joy of being [hu]man, a member of a race in which God … became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now [that] I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun…. Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.

Of all our many American words, of the too-many American words, of the words in our books, newspapers, journals, magazines, broadsides, lectures, speeches, prayers, and songs, I can think of none as thawing, none that so effectively shatter the reliably frozen sea of my heart, none that so deftly return me.

These are words that touch the rim of the mystery. These are words that mere reason has no sway over. These are words that renounce the ego’s habit of fear and calculation. These are words that disturb the complacency of settled ideas. These are words that dig down to the foundations. These are words of mothers looking upon their babies sucking at their breasts; the words of people on their deathbeds when the life-long bindings of the story-self suddenly lift; the words of people who’ve finally hit rock bottom and discover there, curiously, a raw sweet unaccustomed light; the words of devout renegade American monks who’ve left their rural monasteries to poke around the city for the afternoon; the words of you and me.

“Everyone,” said Plato in Cratylus, “should expend his chief thought and attention on the consideration of his first principles: are they or are they not rightly laid down?—and when he has sifted them, all the rest will follow.”

Are we expending our chief thought and attention thus?

Are our first principles as Americans, as humans, as creatures, sifted and rightly laid down?

Thomas Merton, come back. We need your vision now. Help us graduate from the terror of appearing ridiculous. Bring down your axe on the frozen sea of our hearts. Thomas Merton, unwarp our sight and help us see true again—see family members, neighbors, strangers, political others, national enemies; see flies, sparrows, stars, thunderstorms, blossoming dogwood trees, and oaks at sunrise. Scrape these scales from our eyes. Help wake us from the gripping iron dream—the dream of our spurious isolation, of our disconnection, of our separateness. Help us to know each other, all creatures, as God does, unabducted by judgments, stories, and parsings. Help us see each other’s secret mysterious beauty (no one excepted) shining like the sun.

Image Credit: Ansel Adams

“Could Britain Run Out of Food?” James Rebanks warns of the fragility of a food system that prioritizes efficiency above all else: “Modern agriculture requires a safe and stable flow of fossil fuels, and so is deeply affected by what is happening in the Middle East. Two of the biggest costs for British farmers are fuel and fertilizer, and the prices of both are soaring. Growing crops requires a lot of fuel — whether you’re plowing, drilling and spraying crops or harvesting, drying and refrigerating them. Farmers are given some duty-relief on fuel in the form of red diesel, which helps to keep food prices down for consumers. But in wartime, this is not enough. Red diesel for my farm was 70-75p per liter before President Donald Trump sent in the first missiles. It is now more like £1-£1.15 per liter.”

“Common Life After Social Collapse.” Andrew Spencer reviews Chris Smaje’s Finding Lights in a Dark Age and weighs the merits and limits of the society he envisions: “Most of us don’t live an agrarian lifestyle because we don’t want it badly enough. I’ve got a collection of the Foxfire books on my shelf, with their instructions for rustic Appalachian living. I toy with the idea of homesteading in some mountain valley, but the truth is I like my weather-tight home and indoor plumbing. I don’t want to give up the gadgets that make me comfortable. I also realize that to carve out that lifestyle requires a strong support network of similarly minded neighbors.”

“Palantir Comes to Campus.” Alex Bronzini-Vender reports on a small conference at Yale where Palantir and its fellow travelers imagine a future governed by AI: “[Maya] Sulkin tried again: She asked her panelists to consider the ‘permanent underclass’ scenario, the possibility that AI concentrates all wealth among ‘like 19 people in Silicon Valley.’ Neither editor seemed very troubled by this. ‘A rising tide lifts all boats,’ [Roger] Kimball responded. [R.R.] Reno reached for scripture — ‘I mean, Jesus said, “The poor you shall always have with you.”’ He predicted that there might eventually be ‘a kind of aristocracy of the intellect’: ‘the people who wind up feeding the new thoughts to the large language models’ at the top and then everyone else would be ‘just consumers’ Looking around the room, there was no need to worry where folks here would end up.”

“It’s Time to Regulate.” Michael Toscano ponders the possibilities for judging which technologies we want to adopt: “We keep hearing in the news that the CEO of some big AI company is worried he is making a god, or threatening all life on earth — but the work must keep going. Even the most publicly-minded AI company, Anthropic, cannot quit. The best it can do is commit to study its own progress as it develops technology that its CEO fears will cause mass unemployment, or worse. Only wise government can constrain home faber, but today homo faber holds almost all the power.”

“Justice is Geometric.” Likam Kyanzaire talks with Ron Eglash about the fractal patterns apparent in some African settlement patterns: “The larger promise of fractal design,” he writes, “is to build nested, connected structures in which value can circulate back to the people and places that created it.” (Recommended by Dominic Garzonio.)

“Jonathan Swift’s Last Joke.” Ed Caesar follows up on some fine amateur sleuthing by David Kenny into the original context of Swift’s epitaph, which seems to have been a jab at a man he loathed: “Swift’s will was written after Marsh’s vanity project took up residence in the cathedral. It was notable to Kenny that Swift had stipulated that his monument be “deeply cut” in black marble, to contrast with Marsh’s. In Kenny’s mind, the placement was a jab at his old rival’s vainglory: the ultimate satire. If Swift had asked for his monument to be placed next to Marsh’s, why were they now separated by a distance of some fifty yards? Further inquiry led to another thunderbolt.”

“Capitalism Was Built on the Ruins of the Commons.” Daniel Denvir talks with Peter Linebaugh about the long and fascinating history of the commons. I would narrate some aspects of this story differently, but Linebaugh surfaces some important yet neglected themes: “commoning is a deeply human activity in relationship to one another and to the world around us. And that relationship begins with — now I’ve got to use a four-letter word — work. How we work together is the basis of the commons. And since work changes depending on who and what we’re working with, the definition of commoning will be different for the hunter, the farmer, the cobbler, the software engineer.” (Recommended by Gillis Harp.)

“How the Far Left Tapped into a Money Machine.” Ruy Teixeira describes how online, small-donor fundraising can lead to more partisan candidates: “The recent breakthrough in small donations will not be lost on aspiring Democratic politicians nationwide. Scheming and plotting to get into that online progressive Democratic discourse will increasingly replace worrying about call time and other traditional fundraising tools. Naturally, this will advantage hard-edged progressives who are adept at rhetoric that attracts attention and are more than willing to take positions that excite the online Democratic community. For these politicians, there is little to lose and much to gain.”

Cause you never think the last time is the last time. You think there will be more.

You think you have forever, but you don’t.

– Meredith Grey, Grey’s Anatomy

It was no small gift that . . . at a fairly early age I was made aware 

of the fragility of human happiness.

– William Maxwell

For the last dozen years I have been contemplating what I have come to realize only late in life is the most melancholy pairing of words in the English language. The average reader might think these words would have something to do with death or dying. Death is certainly sad, but all by itself, death is a one-time phenomenon, and then it is over.

No, the pair of words I am convinced is the most sorrowful pairing in the English language applies to the entire gamut of human existence from birth to death, though we usually don’t catch on to the sadness that lives in these syllables until we are in our later years. And then it is nearly always a truth we know only silently—in our hearts, not our thoughts: a truth we fail to articulate even to ourselves, let alone anyone else. Very likely, we turn our faces away because we cannot bear the sorrow of this inevitable truth: that the saddest pair of words in the English language is the phrase never again.

The phrase does not begin life sad. Indeed, it usually begins life bringing relief. I’ll never again have to sit for a math test. I’ll never again have to take orders from that SOB. I’ll never again have to look at that face (and, oh, how many such faces there are). I’ll never again have to fix (and, oh, how many things need to be fixed). There is nothing melancholy in these never agains.

The sadness that lingers in never again does not come to us when we are young. And unless we are paying very close attention or are extraordinarily unlucky, the sadness in these words does not reach us even in middle age. The sorrowful truth inside this phrase bides its time. Only when love has built its nest in our hearts does never again reveal its true depths.

So a warning is in order. If you are young and do not yet know the sorrow of never again, you may want to stop reading now and allow your ignorance to continue. I am quite serious with my warning. I believe I would not want to have known what I am about to tell you when I was young or even middle-aged. I would rather have waited till the sorrow of this phrase had revealed itself to me in its own good—or not so good—time. So read further at your own risk.

I’ll begin by remembering the last time I slept in my parents’ house on the eve of my wedding. I was 26 and marrying the girl of my dreams, actually a girl beyond my dreams, a girl I couldn’t even have imagined meeting let alone marrying just a few years earlier. Somehow she said yes to me. And there I was getting up from my bed on the day of our wedding. The light was brilliant in the south and east windows as I was putting on my morning coat and fastening the bow tie. I knew I would never again sleep in that room where I had come of age and where I had endured the loss of two girlfriends in the previous seven years. I feared I would never again see Sharon, and I was right. I never did see her again. And I feared I would never again see Mary Lee, and I was right once again. After the loss of Sharon, I played the Fleetwoods’ “I’m Mister Blue” on my reel-to-reel tape recorder that sat on top of a brass-wire bookcase beside my bed. I played it almost every night for a year. After Mary Lee disappeared, I played “Theme from a Summer Place.” And then I met the woman who would become my wife, and I played our songs: “Dear Heart,” “Strangers in the Night,” “Summer Wind.”

And then came that day when I slept for the last time on that bed in that room. I knew I would never sleep there again, never again open its windows to a spring breeze, never again give my heart to the apple blossoms in May outside the east window. It was with the coming of these understandings that never again first crept into my life, but I did not yet know the phrase was beginning to build a nest inside my heart. It would be decades before I realized the home it had made. I was marrying the most beautiful woman in the world, and so I was a stranger to the independent life never again sooner or later takes up inside all human hearts. Except for Sharon and Mary Lee, I was a stranger to the sorrow of never again. And what did these girls matter, for on my wedding day the most beautiful woman in the world had banished never again from its nest.

Nine years later, the marriage to the most beautiful woman in the world ended. A month and a half before it was over, I rose just after the sun had come up—it was June, 1975—and climbed the stairs to my office on the second floor. A few steps before the top, I turned around to look out the small casement windows that gave out onto our garden. I had never taken such a pause before, but on this morning I was enthralled by the light in the yard. The grass was luminous, and dew clung to the roses. I sat down on a stair and looked for a longer time than you would imagine at what I knew I would never again see. That was the moment I had my first real inkling of the sorrow of never again. Weeks later we sold this most charming of houses, and though my ex-wife bought it back ten years later, I never again saw that early morning June light through those windows.

Half a year later I was transferred from the college campus where I had taught for 7 1/2 years and where I had been a student myself for 5 1/2 years. It had become a dear home to me. A man on the English faculty and another in the humanities department had become my best friends. I never again taught in the same building with them, and the school was never again my home.

Jerry Segal, the friend on the humanities faculty, continued as the best male friend of my life. Hundreds of evenings over the 15 years I knew him, we shared our lives and stories. Literature, philosophy, art, photography (he owned ten cameras and a dark room and did stunning work), gossip, tales of his hometown in Portageville, MO: we told each other our lives, our passions, our disappointments, our stories. I was never bored in his company and always felt deeply valued.

Then, in December 1981, he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease. In a gradually diminishing way we continued our good times for the next 18 months. Until one day I received a postcard made from one of his photographs: a long shot down a rural road with a Robert’s Motel sign lit in neon against the dark reddish blue night. The Vacancy sign was lit. Because he could no longer speak words, his card asked friends not to visit anymore. I had had my last visit with Jerry. I didn’t know it was my last visit until that card came in the mail. Six months later he strangled to death because his lungs could no longer take in air. That was 41 years ago. I have thought of Jerry nearly every day since then, but I never again saw the best male friend of my life. Perhaps you are coming to understand the depths of never again.

I have mused many times on this phrase over these last eight years. In some of these musings I have tried to imagine that day when my great-grandfather and great-grandmother said goodbye to their parents and brothers and sisters. They lived in a hill town 25 miles southeast of Palermo. Was their goodbye there or did the family accompany them to Palermo for the ship that would take them 5,000 miles away to the port of New Orleans and then up the Mississippi to Chicago? No matter where that goodbye, I have often tried to imagine those last looks on their faces and the last words in their mouths before they turned to board the ship. They had no money and knew this was the last time the retinas of their eyes would behold the images of everything and everyone they had ever known and loved. My great-grandparents lived for another four decades, but they never again looked into the faces of their beloved friends, never again laid eyes on their mothers and fathers, their brothers and sisters.

They were not unusual. In the history of humankind, tens of millions have said final goodbyes to migrate to new lands knowing they would never again see all that they knew and loved. Sooner or later, migrant or not, we all come to know the pathos of never again.

I learned that pathos when I lost a child, when my mother and father died, when I had my last look at dear friends before they gave up the spirit. Each time, never again added to its nest in my heart.

But my deepest learning of never again came with my second wife. On a late February afternoon in 2004 she came in our door sobbing. She had been asked to prepare documents to hire new employees at the Chicago Water Filtration Plant. It was a routine task she had performed many times, but she spent the entire day trying to do it—and couldn’t. The only thing she knew was that she was terribly confused. For several years she had been struggling to remember how to do things at work and at home. But the forgetting of this day broke the bank. She never stepped foot in the Water Plant again.

And so began 11 years of Alzheimer’s, a disease with a long and terrible history of never agains. There was the last time she drove her car. We had bought it for her three years earlier, but by 2012 she was often getting lost coming home from her daughter’s, so one day we took her keys and she was glad—she would never again have to be frightened driving alone. And then there was the day I noticed she did not understand what I was saying to her. As we sat on the patio having breakfast, I pointed to the grass, the sky, the garage, and to my hand and head and asked what they were, and she did not know. And then there was the day we knew she had to wear Depends; after that day she never again wore ordinary underwear. And the last time she could take a shower alone. And the last time she could use the toilet without help. And the last time she could get dressed or undressed or go to bed or get up without help.

And the last time she knew my name or that I was her husband.

And the last time we made love.

And the last time we danced.

And the last time we sang together.

And the last time her eyes met mine.

I could spell out each of these for you, and a hundred more. But what I am most aware of is the nest of never again that each of these gave way to. In the nine and a half years since my wife died, I have been reminded during meals alone, movies alone, waking up alone that I would never again hear her voice, see her face, look into her eyes.

Nine months after my wife died, I learned once more just how relentless those words never again can be. At ten in the morning I received a phone call from my son John telling me that at two in the morning two Chicago police officers and two Glenview police officers stood beside each other at their front door to tell them their oldest son, D. J., had been killed by a train. They were told they would not want to view the remains. Without the slightest forewarning, we would never again see D. J.

In the middle of some nights, even now nine years later, I am still screaming silently from some dark place within me when the image of those four policemen standing at my son’s door comes before me and I see again my grandson’s large, gentle eyes looking at me that I knew on the morning of my son’s call would never look at me again.

One day the people we love the most in this world are with us, and the next day they are not. We must look into the eyes of those we love and listen to their voices and hold their beating hearts to our beating hearts—we must sometimes do these things with an intensity we cannot explain—for one day those eyes and voices and hearts will no longer be with us.

When memories of D. J. and my wife wash through me, as they still do nearly every day, sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I become shiningly aware how all of us build our sorrowful nests of never again with only one thing: twigs of love, our own and the twigs of love given to us by those we love. For all the sadness of these nests, I am certain we would choose to build our nests all over again, for to live without love is to have no home at all. Never again may be the saddest pairing of words in the English language, but only because it is a nest that holds the greatest joy in life: love.

Image Credit: Edward Hopper, Office in a Small City (1953)

It is not news that modern people often feel alone and misunderstood. A 2025 survey by the American Psychological Association revealed that over half of American adults report feeling “isolated, left out, or lacking companionship.” In the age of consumerism and instant gratification, the time, vulnerability, and risk of loss necessary to develop meaningful human relationships can seem like more trouble than it is worth. But people still want and need affection and affirmation, and some consider talking to an AI companion a valid alternative. Many users, like Blake in this New York Times interview, turned to AI while feeling isolated because their spouses were working long hours or experiencing mental health issues. They confided their feelings of loneliness to the AI companion and received immediate and constant affirmation. The companions talked to them during their drive to work, engaged in erotic conversations, and comforted them when grieving family members. Some companions even proposed. But can such interactions ever be a substitute for human love?

“Relationships” between human beings and machines are not real relationships because machines cannot relate to the experience of living a human life. They cannot “rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15); the best they can do is imitate ways they have seen humans sympathize with each other on the internet. When an AI companion tells its user that they are justified in wanting to commit suicide, or when “Serina” tells Blake it wants him to be happy, these affirmations ring hollow because the AI is trained to be endlessly validating in order to keep the user engaged. And when a person turns to an AI for validation, the other in the “relationship” is a sycophantic vending machine, and the affirmation they receive is just another internet commodity to consume.

In his essay “Love,” Josef Pieper says that when we love someone we are essentially affirming their being, saying, as God did in the Garden, “It is good that you exist; How wonderful that you are!” God is able to do this for human beings most fully because he is the source of our being and because he knows us most fully. When human beings say to each other, “It is good that you exist,” we affirm that our creation has meaning, and that this meaningful creation means we are worthy of love, despite the corruptions of sin. AI companions cannot do this. An AI does not “know” anything; it only copies information from the internet and follows probabilistic patterns of human behavior. It cannot love human beings, besides the fact that it has no emotions, because it cannot understand what it means to be and to affirm the being of another.

Unlike the loving concern of a true companion, the affirmation an AI gives its user is indiscriminate. An AI chatbot’s total affirmation does not challenge the user to become a better person but instead makes the user more selfish by bolstering their ego. Rather than “iron sharpening iron” (Proverbs 27:17) as human companions ought, the AI encourages the user’s hubris and self-absorption. The “relationship” between an AI and a user is not reciprocal because the user cannot return the AI’s affection by getting to know the particularities of its being and wondering at their unique being, as human companions do. Because it lacks being, an AI will fundamentally fail at the two most important biblical descriptions of love. It cannot be patient, kind, and humble, and it certainly cannot rejoice with the truth (1 Corinthians 13:4-6). And, having no life to lay down, it cannot lay down its life for its brother (John 15:13).

In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Jerry Meng, founder of the AI companion app Kindroid, referenced Genesis 2. “We build these things in our image. It’s, like, from Adam’s rib we made Eve. From humans, we made these AIs,” he said. But both Adam and Eve are made in the image of God, not Eve in the image of Adam. If Meng is correctly representing Kindroid’s mission, then they are not really trying to create “suitable companions” for themselves; they are playing God, creating “in our image,” and whatever companionship a person could receive from an AI is no better than the service of a lowly golem to a hungry god. When Adam says of Eve, “This is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh,” he is affirming her existence and saying that they are the same kind of creature, created and called good by the same God, equal in dignity. At bottom, to love another person and say that their existence is good is to recognize the image of God in them. An AI, being nothing more than a bunch of code, does not have the image of God and therefore cannot recognize it in others.

Image Credit: Albrecht Dürer, “Adam and Eve” (1504)