Michael Leroy Oberg—

Margaret Elm, a young Onondaga girl, began attending the Lincoln Institution in Philadelphia in December of 1902. She was five years old. Soon, Lincoln, an Indian boarding school originally built for the orphans of Union Army soldiers, would become a “White Boys School.” Margaret was left in need of a new educational home, so her mother sent her to the famous Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Margaret was not dragged away to boarding school against her will—she was sent there by her widowed mother who had her hands full enough at home.

Margaret remained at Carlisle from late November 1907 to June 1914.  She then attended Cazenovia College, not far from her home on the Onondaga Nation Territory. She graduated from college and returned to the Onondaga Nation Territory, which housed the central council fire of the Iroquois League of Six Nations, or the Haudenosaunee. She married, becoming Margaret Elm Wheelock, but lived an uneventful life until her name appeared in the newspapers in the late 1920s.

Onondagas, during these years, tolerated the presence of missionaries so long as they behaved well. Margaret had faced unwelcome sexual advances from a Seventh-Day Adventist Missionary named J. W. Davis. Her husband understood perfectly well why his wife “did not intend to go to services any longer.” He told the Onondaga sachems about Davis and they in turn told the missionary to leave. Davis defied the men who held titles that originated in the mythical past.

When Margaret saw Davis on the Nation Territory, she approached him angrily. “I told you to stay off the reservation,” she said. Davis said something back and Margaret began throwing rocks, shattering the windshield of Davis’s car. The county sheriffs came to arrest her.

“There is not a word of truth in anything this woman may have to say against me,” Davis told them. 

Margaret made it clear that she looked forward to her day in court. “I will have a whole lot to say about the minister.”

At her arraignment the next evening, “a crowd of 100 persons, most of them Indian women from the reservation, and including about 25 children,” showed up to support her. Onondaga women stuck together. They heard Margaret plead not guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct. Davis could see that the Onondaga women knew all about him, and that they stood behind their friend, their kin, and their neighbor. David had seen enough. He chose not to appear at Mrs. Wheelock’s trial two weeks later, and all charges against her were dropped.

Three decades later, at nearly sixty years old, Margaret Elm Wheelock appeared in the Syracuse newspapers once again. She wrote a letter in September 1956 to the editor of the Syracuse Post-Standard defending the Onondaga Nation from outside critics who described it as a backwards and violent place. “Ever since the white man isolated the American Indian people on this small tract of land, we have done our best to carry on a profitable existence,” she wrote. The reservation had four Christian churches, but also “the Indian faith, a splendid fire-proof school, which supplies a fine gymnasium and other equipment to train our children and youth into proper citizenship.” The Onondagas also had a community building, a health center, a recreation hall, and a fire department that has “been the means of saving many of our homes and also helping the other nearby fire organizations.” Margaret, who expressed her own deeply held Christian beliefs, asked her readers to be less harsh in their critiques of the Onondagas. “Yes, we do have our social problems…and we, too, have a class that calls for mercy and tolerance, but these problems, though magnified by the white man’s law, are still minor compared to the crimes committed off the territory of the Reservation.” There was alcohol abuse. There were unwed mothers, “but the problems were not worse on the reservation than elsewhere.” White people came to the Nation Territory to “carry on their beastly crimes,” she said. “White people,” she wrote, “far outnumber the American Indian in their search for lust and debauchery.”

From Onondaga to Philadelphia, and then to Carlisle, Cazenovia and home again, Margaret Elm Wheelock was a woman whose life was shaped by American efforts to control the Onondagas and transform Indigenous people into something approaching the white middle-class ideal.  Over their long history, Onondagas faced military invasion of their homelands, waves of epidemic disease, and systematic efforts to erase their language, destroy their culture, eradicate their traditional laws and governance, and seize their lands. If any number of people had their way, Margaret Elm Wheelock’s powerful letter could never have been written, for her people would have been gone. Margaret Elm Wheelock’s life story shows that Onondagas were so much more powerful, as individuals and members of an Indigenous nation, than the force directed toward their destruction.

Michael Leroy Oberg is distinguished professor of history at SUNY Geneseo and founder of the Geneseo Center for Local and Municipal History. His books include Peacemakers: The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794 and Uncas: First of the Mohegans. He lives in Rochester, NY.

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Holly Stephens—

The above photo depicts a noticeboard erected by the local financial association (K. kŭmyung chohap;J. kin’yū kumiai) in Kŭmsan county, in southern Korea. The financial associations were government-backed rural banks, established in the early years of the Japanese colonization of Korea, and they were one of several semi-governmental organizations through which the colonial government implemented its agricultural policies locally. During the Program to Increase Rice Production, for example, the financial associations distributed loans for the purchase of tools and fertilizers, while other organizations distributed high-yielding seed varieties, hosted lectures on new agricultural techniques, or managed the joint-sale of members’ crops. The text on the Kŭmsan noticeboard hints at the connection to colonial policies. On the left, the financial association shared information about how to become a member of the association and the interest rates that it offered on its loans, while on the right it displayed slogans commonly found in colonial campaigns—encouraging diligence, thrift, and savings.

In the colonial setting, coercion was one tool that the financial associations and other semi-governmental organizations could, and did, fall back on. Especially in earlier and later periods of colonial rule, it is not hard to find examples of forced savings targets or measures that directed the sale and circulation of farmers’ crops through the associations. However, coercion was not the only method that the financial associations employed, especially when colonial agricultural policies encompassed more intangible goals such as encouraging savings, the appreciation of profits, the desire to sell more crops, and—by extension—the desire to produce crops with the tastes of commercial purchasers in mind. For much of the colonial period, the financial associations also aimed to persuade their members to adopt new behaviors that aligned with colonial campaigns. The Kŭmsan noticeboard appears in this vein, with slogans promoting the virtues of diligence and thrift, while also enabling the financial association to advertise itself in the local area as a place where like-minded members might find resources and financial credit for the improvement of agriculture.

The photograph of the Kŭmsan noticeboard captures a further dimension: the perspective of the residents of Kŭmsan who the financial association hoped would join as members and adopt some of the practices outlined above. This perspective is easily overlooked in accounts of colonial agriculture. Most remaining documents are produced by the financial associations and similar organizations themselves, and as such are unsurprisingly celebratory about the effectiveness of the associations’ activities and their impact in the local area. Indeed, even this photograph was printed in an official history of the financial associations, included in a section encouraging best practices alongside photographs of a membership ceremony at the Kŭmsŏng association (raising members’ sense of affiliation with the association) and a meeting for members’ wives at the Ulsan association (spreading the associations’ messaging more broadly within villages). All the same, the view of the noticeboard “in action” raises important questions about how the financial associations operated within local communities. What did the people walking along the path think about the noticeboard and the financial association? Were they interested in the information on the sign, and could they even read it? Or did they ignore the noticeboard as irrelevant to their day-to-day activities? If so, where were they going and what were they doing instead? To be sure, a single photograph is not sufficient to answer these questions. But such questions can be an important first step in thinking about the broader history of agricultural change in modern Korea, and the experiences of Korean cultivators who lived through colonial rule.

Holly Stephens is a lecturer in Japanese and Korean Studies in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

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Emily Apter: You’ve mentioned the importance of your mother in the book, which uses the second person of address “You.” As we know, when you’re addressed in writing as “You,” it’s a complex you. Here, it’s the reader, it’s your mother, but it’s also you [the author]. The book is organized into case studies of clinics that alternate with letters or “epistles,” which, of course, have this sort of biblical resonance, referring to the letters written by Apostles or early church leaders. We think of Paul, the letters to Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians. They’re often about a kind of practical wisdom, how to live and be a good Christian. Why the epistle, the letter?

Benoît Loiseau: I originally wrote early drafts referring to my mother in the third person, but I quickly realized it was too weird. I felt like I was objectifying her. So, I started writing in the second person, and it kind of worked for me.

Of course, there are many examples of literature written in the second person; for me, the most direct influences at that time were Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body (1973) and Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2008). In fact, Preciado is an avid reader of Wittig, so his second-person writing might have been influenced by her. These influences got me thinking about what the text could look like if written in the second person.

Philosophically, one source that really helped me make sense of the second person was Martin Buber’s I and Thou (1923), in which he differentiates the “I-Thou” and the “I-It,” arguing that the second person allows a dialogic form of relation that isn’t possible with the third person.

It is interesting to me that Buber was a close friend of Gustav Landauer, the anarchist thinker. To my knowledge, Buber never publicly identified as an anarchist, but some scholarship argues that his philosophy is deeply influenced by anarchism, and, to me, I and Thou resonates with this idea of horizontality: the second person as a horizontal mode of relation.

The reason why I called the autobiographical interludes “epistles” was kind of a joke, really. I liked this sort of Christian connotation. There are a lot of references to Christianity in the book, particularly Catholicism. And not to spoil the whole thing, but my mother, when she wasn’t busy protesting the state of healthcare, she was invested in protesting the Catholic church, particularly later in life. So, the “epistle” to me was a tongue-in-cheek way to reference the inevitable, but burdensome presence of religion in the context of medical discourse.

I also like that the epistle, in the Christian tradition, is written as a direct mode of address, often in the second person – if you think of Paul’s letters to Titus and Timothy—but it is assumed that it will be read out loud to a community, like a collective experience of sorts, which is kind of what you do when you write a book in the second person. Like Martin Buber says, “You has no borders.”

EA: In the book, we get a glimpse of the boy who, in childhood, had a difficult time with language. You were brought to a speech therapist who diagnosed you as having a problem with authority. You write about the deterritorialization of speech and body function, and this striking phrase: “word production replaces food absorption,” which connects to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea that “To speak is to fast.”

BL: As a young child, no one seemed to understand my speech except my brother, and I enlisted him as my private interpreter. My mother was Flemish, and even though her French was perfect, she occasionally spoke Flemish. We grew up in my parents’ clinic in Liège, Belgium, where they relocated in the early 1980s. My father was, and still is, a dentist, and had become involved in what he calls dentisterie sociale, or social dentistry. They opened their clinic at the peak of deindustrialization, and Liège being a mining region, a lot of people were losing their jobs and being aggressively disenfranchised, particularly migrant workers from Italy and Morocco—countries where Belgium actively recruited workers to do the jobs white Belgians were no longer prepared to perform. These communities faced all kinds of barriers to accessing basic health services, whether financial, cultural, or linguistic. So, I grew up in an environment where many different languages were spoken, many of which I could not understand, which I think informs my early experiences with language.

This is relevant to the idea of the deterritorialization of the mouth, which Deleuze and Guattari describe in their book, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975). They look at Kafka as a Yiddish-speaking writer who wrote in German, the language of bureaucracy, and argue that, by doing so, Kafka deterritorialized and minorized a major language: German.

There is this beautiful passage in which Deleuze and Guattari argue that, if the primary function of the mouth—the teeth, the tongue, the lips—is eating and absorbing food, then speaking is a deterritorialization of the mouth that shifts its function. They conclude that, “To speak, and above all to write, is to fast.” This became significant to me in thinking about writing as a continuation of the hunger strike my mother staged in 1992 to protest the introduction of restrictive welfare policies that would have excluded segments of the population from basic health services.

EA: What we see in some of these clinics is a blend of psychoanalysis, Marxism, and radical aesthetics. We think about outsider art, anti-colonialism and Fanon, liberationism, feminism, gay rights. There’s a fascinating chapter, especially to me personally, about the clinic of La Borde – an example of Institutional Psychotherapy – which Félix Guattari was very active in. How do you explain the surge of interest in figures of Institutional Psychotherapy and anti-psychiatry? What was the difference between these terms?

BL: Maybe I’m deluded, but I don’t think the interest ever went away. La Borde is a place that has continued to fascinate a lot of people, for better or for worse. Jean Oury, who founded La Borde in 1953, despised this kind of fascination, which he found distracting from the care work he was so committed to. That’s a point where they clashed with Guattari.

When La Borde first opened, the state of psychiatry in France was horrendous. Tens of thousands of patients had died during the war, supposedly due to a lack of resources, but mostly because the Vichy regime aligned itself with the Nazis and didn’t think that the “unfit” deserved saving. So, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, you have a new generation of psychiatrists like Jean Oury, who wanted to do away with psychiatry as they knew it and create something new.

Oury trained with François Tosquelles, a great, quite eccentric, anarchist Catalan psychiatrist, who had relocated to Saint-Alban hospital in the South of France. Oury ended up there as an intern, and many of the strategies he put in place at La Borde – horizontality, patients’ free circulation and active participation – derived directly from his training with Tosquelles.

Oury put together a team and raised funds to buy the then-decrepit château of La Borde for not much money. Félix Guattari, the philosopher and psychoanalyst, got involved early on. He had been a family friend of Jean Oury—his brother, Fernand Oury, had been Guattari’s teacher. From the beginning, Oury and Guattari had an arrangement by which Oury, as a psychiatrist and a trained doctor who could prescribe, was going to be on site and dedicate himself to his patients, while Guattari was going to do everything else: all of the political and intellectual networking, building a constellation of like-minded people and practitioners. And they did just that. It was a sort of marriage that worked very well for a long time.

Then, in the aftermath of May ’68, Félix Guattari meets Gilles Deleuze and they start working on this strange book called Anti-Oedipus that would really shake things up in the French intelligentsia when published in 1972. Anti-Oedipus was essentially an attack on structuralist Lacanian psychoanalysis and the familial, heterocentrist framework it both relied on and enforced.

Oury was really upset when Anti-Oedipus came out. First, because Lacan was his analyst and a major influence, and second, because Oury feared Guattari was getting too close to the anti-psychiatry movement. Oury despised anti-psychiatrists because even though he wanted to take psychiatry down and build something new, he was deeply committed to caring for his patients, in ways that he didn’t feel anti-psychiatry could allow. So, even though they remained friends and colleagues, 1972 was a moment of rupture between Oury and Guattari.

EA: You talk about “anarcho-organicism,” which is a real theoretical punch. Maybe you could tell us what that is?

BL: I was working on the history of these clinics, some of which were very different. I knew there were certain principles that I was looking for from the beginning, such as anti-hierarchy, anti-authority, and horizontal modes of organization. There was a point when I had to ask myself: how is it that these clinics operating at very different times in different countries seemed to have a shared understanding of these principles?

Two intellectual sources of influence became evident to me. One was anarchist thought, which was explicit for some of these clinics, including La Borde, through the influence of Tosquelles, as well as The Peckham Experiment, which prided itself on its anarchist tendencies.

The second one was organicism, a biological paradigm that emerged in the early twentieth century and crystallized around the 1920s. Simply put, organicism is the idea that living systems are organized as independent yet interconnected wholes, that the parts are interconnected, and that the whole is connected to the environment.

Different scientists and thinkers were interested in organicism, including the Scottish physiologist and philosopher John Scott Haldane, who was the first to coin, or at least to call himself an organicist, at a conference at Yale in 1913. Organicists were interested in moving away from the long-standing dichotomy between mechanism—the belief that living organisms function like machines – and vitalism – the belief that life is driven by a special, non-physical force.

When I started thinking about these two influences, anarchism and organicism, it was interesting to me that, even though they take various forms, they were both deeply concerned with hierarchies and how parts of a whole coexist, politically, biologically, or both. The early twentieth century was ripe for this kind of encounter, partly thanks to the anarchist and geographer Peter Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid.

So, anarcho-organicism, as I present it, evolves and takes different forms across the book’s chapters. But it was useful to me to have this framework and concept. Also, because I’m a bit of a Deleuzian, I like to think philosophy is the creation of concepts, so I asked myself what concept I wanted to propose in this book, and anarcho-organicism became that concept.

EA: There’s an interesting ambivalence towards the disciplinary regime of the Clinic, which I think is central to the book’s thesis and subject matter. You write, “to kill the clinic, by which I mean to dismantle the disciplinary regime upon which it relies, is a Kamikaze operation, like an act of matriphagy, it entails the risk of a double death.” The clinic is a site of political resistance, of reordering the social, and yet, it is also a disciplinary apparatus of an institutional history in the marginalization of the sick. So, it’s very ambivalent.

BL: I was grappling with the idea that, of the five clinics in this book, only one—La Borde—is still open, and just about. The other clinics shut down in pretty dramatic circumstances. The Institute for Sexual Science, of course, was raided by the Nazis, and its contents were burned. Others shut down, maybe not as dramatically, but always under financial or political pressure, and often these two forces worked together.

These grassroots clinics wanted to take down the universalist institution of the Clinic as we know it, but doing so was often a suicidal mission, because they became ostracized, marginalized, bullied, and often lost the support of their peers or their funding.

So, when I say that “to kill the clinic as a kamikaze operation,” what I mean is that it is at once necessary and impossible. But, to end on a positive note, what I argue in the book is that even when these radical clinics do shut down, they leave traces, instructions, models for us to continue the work.

For instance, it was such a joy to meet and interview Pati Garcia, a queer Latinx doula from Los Angeles who, decades after the dissolution of Geneva’s Dispensaire des Femmes, found a book co-authored by its co-founder, Rina Nissim, and the Indian feminist collective Shodini, ultimately becoming the inspiration to create a queer reproductive health network of activists and health workers in California. It goes to show that even when these radical clinics die, they leave traces, like scratches on the surface to be carried forward.

Benoît Loiseau is a writer, critic, and academic of French and Comparative Literature. He holds degrees in philosophy and cultural studies from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and Goldsmiths, University of London, and earned his PhD at the University of Edinburgh. He is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellow at University Paris 8 | Vincennes – Saint-Denis and NYU’s Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture. His research explores gender and sexuality through the lenses of medical humanities, contemporary philosophy, and aesthetics. A founding editor of the queer anthology The BitterSweet Review, his art writing and criticism has appeared in Art Monthly, Art Review, Frieze, The Guardian and The New York Times, among others. With William W. Burton and Ilana Eloit, he co-edited a special issue of L’Esprit Créateur dedicated to the lesbian feminist writer and theorist Monique Wittig (2025). His first book, The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine, is out withFitzcarraldo Editions in the UK, and Yale University Press in the US. His next book, The Queer of Autofabulation: Disobedient Self-Fictions After HIV/AIDS, is forthcoming with NYU Press.

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For many cultures across the world, throughout recorded history, the natural environment has been inherently enchanted. The form of the landscape held hidden meanings, the weather was determined by the gods, and the behavior of plants and animals (untainted by human manipulation) was a direct sign of divine and supernatural influence in one form or another. In these ways, the workings of the natural world, and the ability to decipher it, were understood to hold the keys to human fortune.

We understand from ancient Greece that caves, woodland groves, and pools were portals to the worlds of gods and spirits and, therefore, specific locations where humans could commune with the divine; but the form of the landscape itself could also provide clues to future wellbeing and prosperity. The ancient art of feng shui (literally meaning “wind and water”), which continues to be an important influence in societies today, is the most obvious example of this. While often labeled as geomancy, feng shui in its simplest form can more accurately be described as topomancy—that is, divination from the shape and contour of the land. While numerological, calculative aspects of feng shui also developed, in its topomantic form, it was originally associated with divining the best place to build palaces, altars, and tombs. It was later used as a means of ensuring good fortune for more humble domestic dwellings.

The first record of the term feng shui is found in the Zang Shu (Book of Burial) by the Daoist scholar Guo Pu (276–324 CE). He describes how positive energy (qi) is drawn by the wind and rests with water, and how the skilled diviner can read the landscape to identify propitious spots or shape artificial landscaping to enhance beneficial energy flows to desired locations. It is evident that Pu drew upon much older ideas about topomantic protection. Other ancient Chinese manuals, for instance, state how the beneficial energy and spirit of a place could be divined by planting a seed and observing how it grew. The development of topomancy peaked during the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE), when the proliferation of manuscript guides written by Buddhist priests and Daoists led to a wider public engagement with the tradition. One enduringly popular guide was Huangdi Zhaijing (The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of House Sitings or Book of Dwellings). The Yellow Emperor, Huangdi, was a legendary sovereign, thought in folklore to have been a great inventor who was wise in all things, including feng shui. Advances in mapmaking during the Song period also led to a genre of topomantic-inspired artistry. One treatise on painting states: “Those who paint monasteries, temples, and Daoist temples should be located in places that embrace secluded valleys, deep rocks, and cliffs”. The suggestion being that the artist should paint in situ, rather than from memory.

Feng shui’s “wind and water” also implied the reading of weather for signs. This was sometimes considered to be like divination rather than actual divination since it was based simply on informed conjecture regarding natural processes and relationships. This was a matter of debate among Roman intellectuals, including the issue of whether some animals could instinctively sense changes in the weather—as distinct from human deduction or through divine inspiration. Bees’ foreknowledge of rain or frost, demonstrated by their remaining in their hives, was one example, as was swallows flying low in anticipation of rain. Other instances of this ancient animal instinct for weather included the belief that spiders did not spin webs on clear days, meaning a sudden profusion of spiderwebs heralded bad weather and rising rivers, while a heavy storm was likewise in the offing if weasels and mice squeaked softly. Plants were also observed for signs, though much less so than animals. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder (23/24–79 CE) noted that the leaves of clover became erect, and its flowers bristled, at the approach of a storm. Much of this lore from antiquity can be found in nineteenth- and twentieth-century folklore collections. Some of these classical notions spread with the advent of the printing press. Parts of Pliny’s huge encyclopedic Naturalis Historia (Natural History), which was completed around 77 CE, was translated into English in 1601, and was used as a source in popular divination manuals and almanacs. The influence of print translations of Pliny in other languages can be seen in European folklore more generally regarding the natural world. Yet, much lore collected by folklorists was also culture-specific and unconnected with classical sources. A recent survey of “folk botanical meteorology” in Bulgaria discovered that some thirty plants are thought to have forecasting properties, though there are two broad categories of signs. An abundance of fruits or nuts in the fall, such as crab apples, hawthorns, and hazelnuts, heralds a severe winter, while the second flowering of plants, such as the horse chestnut, in the summer or fall, is a sign of future cold and snow.

Owen Davies is professor in history at the University of Hertfordshire and an expert in the history of magic, witchcraft, ghosts, and popular medicine from the ancient world to the modern era. His many books include Art of the Grimoire: An Illustrated History of Magic Books and Spells.

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John Leshy—

I last blogged here on my favorite subject, America’s public lands, three years ago. Since then, so much has happened, especially once President Trump’s second term began in January 2025. The scale and the pace of change during his tenure have been breathtaking, like nothing I’ve seen in my 54 years of engagement on the subject. Indeed, my book that Yale Press published in 2022, Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands, shows nothing comparable for well over a century.

The second Trump Administration’s initiatives can be summarized this way: First, opening tens of millions of acres to industrial uses like drilling for fossil fuels, mining, and logging, often through shady arrangements with wealthy Administration donors and friends. Second, shrinking or gutting protected areas like national monuments, parks, wilderness areas, and wildlife refuges and repealing or watering down generic regulations that protect recreation and sensitive wildlife species. And last but hardly least, slashing the budgets, staff, and expertise of the agencies that manage these lands—the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Fish & Wildlife Service—with the cynical objective of undermining public support for keeping them in national ownership, held for the benefit of all.¹

America is in another Gilded Age like the one that characterized the decades after the Civil War. Mark Twain gave it that name because it mocked a classic golden age: a thin bright cover that masked vast wealth disparities and fed corruption and plunder at the expense of ordinary people. That plunder was especially pronounced on the lands the U.S. government owned in the West, and it eventually provoked a powerful countermovement by ordinary Americans that led, beginning around 1890, to the parks, monuments, wildlife refuges, and wilderness areas we treasure today.

Along with my old friend and fellow public land aficionado Bill Hedden, former Executive Director of the Grand Canyon Trust and a former official in local government in Utah, I spent much of the past year making a podcast about all this, as we believed that what’s happening to our public lands has not been fully grasped by many Americans. We talked with hunters, anglers and other recreationists, ranchers, Tribal leaders, local government officials, scientists, and public servants who devoted their careers to caring for these lands. What struck us most was the conviction, shared by so many of different backgrounds, that these places are worth keeping and protecting in U.S. ownership.

Opinion polls bear that out. Virtually every survey taken in recent years of people from across the political spectrum in states with abundant public lands shows how popular these lands are, and how widely people believe more of them should be protected.² This should not really be surprising, because these lands are essential to the quality of life of both local residents and visitors, while generating genuine economic benefits.

In an era when most Americans agree on almost nothing, that near-unanimity is itself remarkable. But that does not mean these lands are safe. Nothing in the Constitution requires that public lands be protected in any way, or even held in public ownership—in other words, Congress could privatize every acre, including places like Yosemite and Yellowstone, by a simple law. And indeed, in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress wrote into law many of Trump’s efforts to throw open a big chunk of public lands to the mining and logging industries, on a strictly partisan vote.³

Moreover, most current Supreme Court Justices have been reluctant to curb the current Administration’s initiatives. The Trump attacks are, in other words, unlikely to be significantly slowed or weakened in the courts. Nor could a more public-lands-friendly administration easily undo the hollowing out of the federal agencies that is now underway—it’s not like a light switch that can simply be flipped back on.

Which is why it matters, more than ever, that people who love these places — however much they may disagree among themselves about how particular tracts should be managed—make themselves heard now. Especially younger people, because a big chunk of their future is at stake. So, find out what is happening on the public lands you treasure, because decisions that bind future generations are being made practically daily. Tell the people who represent you, from either party, that you care and are closely watching them. Enlist others who care about these places, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum, to do the same. Public lands will remain ours only if enough of us insist on it.

Finally, there is another potentially huge benefit if more people are engaged in public lands policy. Public support for protecting the planet, especially by curbing greenhouse gas emissions that are destabilizing our climate, has been declining in recent years. The environmental protection movement’s emphasis on climate protection—while understandable given the growing magnitude of the problem—has drawn public attention away from places, from landscapes. This has, as one astute observer recently put it, “unmoored” the movement “from nature,” even though nature is what gave the movement “its purpose and its founders their calling.”⁴

Concern about public lands is, by definition, place-based, rooted firmly in people’s experience with nature. A renewed focus on protecting landscapes held in public ownership can bring new strength to the broader movement to protect the environment. This is not mere conjecture, because something like this happened around the turn of the twentieth century. Then, in reaction to the plunder of the first Gilded Age, when the U.S. began to hold onto and protect increasing amounts of public lands, it helped forge a more general shift of public opinion in favor of protecting the environment in all sorts of ways. 

1. On Shaky Ground: America’s Public Lands Face an Uncertain Future, 37 Envt’l Law Review 245-300 (2026). https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1919&context=celj ︎
2. On Shaky Ground: America’s Public Lands Face an Uncertain Future, 37 Envt’l Law Review 245-300 (2026). Pages 8-9, 152. https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1919&context=celj  ︎
3. On Shaky Ground: America’s Public Lands Face an Uncertain Future, 37 Envt’l Law Review 245-300 (2026). Pages 248-255. https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1919&context=celj  ︎
4. John Reid, How Nature Lost its Calling, Atlantic Magazine, May 2026.  ︎

Besides writing Our Common Ground, John is emeritus professor at U.C. College of the Law, San Francisco and former Solicitor of the U.S. Department of the Interior. His and Hedden’s six-part podcast On Common Ground: An American Inheritance, is available now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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Christopher Freeburg—

In my town of Champaign IL, Alyssa Buckley writes for our local online publication Smile Politely. I see Alyssa at the YMCA, Avionics Coffee, and other places. I marvel at how many people read and discuss her carefully crafted stories on where to meet, eat, and fellowship around our college town. In our contemporary world, which is routinely described by the media (and social scientists) as desolate and lonely, Alyssa’s columns and other writings in Smile Politely urge us simply to show up and enjoy each other’s company. In recent years, in Black cultural studies there has been a special emphasis on coming together to enjoy each other’s company over savory, rich, well-seasoned food. These gatherings originate in the simplicities of a meal or a coffee but in times of great social need they become so much more for us.

According to the reels, threads, and short videos that circulate on social media, a familiar joke about to food gatherings at homes, work or restaurants, is that white Americans don’t season their food like people of color who generously flavor their food. What’s funny about this neat way of thinking is that it rings untrue. After consuming the groundbreaking and visually stunning documentaries, like High on the Hog (Netflix, 2021–2023) and other original stories from national news programs, the Black cooking style shows that Black seasoning is not an aberration from American cooking, but what defines it.

Black-owned and Black-inspired restaurants in Chicago, Savannah, Houston, and Los Angeles, foreground how the history of soul-food-style cooking, from slavery through emancipation, is a crucial part of the story of American food. The rich and savory fullness of soul food dishes is the result of Black people creating new forms of sustenance and community under often awful historical conditions. Whether on the plantation during slavery, or in their homes after emancipation, the creations of Black cooking and gathering impacted American food more than we realize. I see the conversations, whether through comedic bits on social media or elaborately researched stories on Netflix and the national media, as evidence not of the isolation and uniqueness of Black cultural difference, but rather, the power and impact of Black culture on everything around it.

This is a wonderful time, whether in the trivialities of social media or the depths of scholarly history books, where we can take this opportunity to sit with how recent conversations on Black cooking came about.

The last decade 2010–2020 had record coverage of events of violent deaths of Black people at the hands of the police. The Black Lives Matter movement reached its height and so did the message of “All Lives Matter” from those who disagreed with it. These debates and outcries were loud, and sometimes, amid the noise of competing groups, the individual stories from our neighbors get lost. In the volume of our national voices, the warring between left and right, black and white, cultivate real feelings of anger, which left unattended can crystallize into bitterness. The restaurants, kitchens, and communal spaces where people come together over food offer an opportunity to move beyond the abstractions of these national conflicts to sit with one another, listen, share, and remember our common humanity.

Stories about The Grey in Savannah, Virtue in Chicago, Dooky Chase in New Orleans, or of equally importance, family food gatherings, can show us spaces where the noise of the ever-encroaching world can fall away and people can remind each other of the beauty they create by making space to listen to one another. Black, White, and the Grey: The Story of an Unexpected Restaurant (2021) foregrounds the difficult conversations about race that we find ourselves confronted with but often struggle to have. High on the Hog contains lush threads of African heritage delicacies, the intricate processes of Black artistic food creations, as well as the colors and sounds and confessions of Black communal gatherings. All of this, the unraveling grief and racial conflict, and methods and practices of soul food making, is part of the tragic beauty and transcendence of black cultural heritage that soul food gives us access to.

Delicious food and alcohol can also be an escape or distraction, but what restaurants and home building in this way provides are opportunities to explore the intimacies of moral courage, self-expression, warm embraces, and the healing possibilities of company. This force and life of well-seasoned food matters. What ties West Africa, coastal Georgia, New Orleans, Oakland, and Philadelphia is that Black people have decided that community, the colorful, lovingly seasoned tasteful food, nourishes us through the sacrifices of time and treasure, and the talent it took to prepare and share it. In the midst of suffering, we affirm occasions of gratitude and love; we have the power to remake any space we so choose through these generative acts of care. This is the soulful seasoning in soul food.

Christopher Freeburg is the Presidential Humanities and Social Sciences Chair in English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His most recent book was Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death.

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Phillip Freeman—

Aristotle is one of the best-known names from ancient times. Along with Plato, Homer, and a handful of others, almost every educated person has heard of this fourth-century BCE Greek philosopher. But Aristotle is also in many ways one of the least-known figures of antiquity. His writings undoubtably changed the world since he practically invented many of the subjects studied in modern universities—biology, logic, literary criticism, political theory, and much more—but even most philosophers and historians would be hard-pressed to say much about his life.

Dozens of scholarly books and hundreds of academic articles are written every year about the ideas of Aristotle. There are also several recent books on the philosophy of Aristotle for a popular audience, such as Edith Hall’s wonderful Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life (Penguin, 2018). But for someone looking for the story of Aristotle’s life, there isn’t much available. The reasons for this are mostly the scarcity and obscurity of ancient and medieval biographical sources. Aristotle simply didn’t interest most writers in classical times—he was never as famous as Plato or Pythagoras or Epictetus. Those few who did write about Aristotle tended to love or hate him, especially detractors from rival philosophical schools who delighted in making him seem foolish. A few more-or-less reliable writers from ancient times such as Diogenes Laertius give us some reliable facts about the life of Aristotle, but there are certainly many imaginative episodes even in their descriptions. Fortunately, we have a few other sources including inscriptions and medieval Arabic works that have often been neglected. Studied together and used with care, all these sources tell an incomplete but fascinating story of a man who shaped the modern world like few others.

Aristotle was a brilliant, driven, and complicated man who lived most of his life as an outsider and wanderer. He was born in the small colony of Stagira on the northern edge of the Greek world but spent his childhood and youth in the wild and tumultuous kingdom of Macedonia where his father served as court physician. Orphaned as a teenager, he traveled to Athens to become a student of Plato at the newly-founded Academy. Sources describe him as one of the best students there, though he frequently disagreed and argued with his teacher. Plato was a master theorist and abstract thinker, but Aristotle loved practical observation and experimentation. When Plato died, Aristotle traveled to the Aegean island of Lesbos and spent several years in the area wading through marshes collecting and dissecting specimens he found there. Then he travelled back to Macedonia to become the tutor of Alexander, who would one day be known as the Great. When after a few years Alexander crushed opposition to Macedonian rule among the Greek cities, Aristotle returned to Athens to establish his own school, the Lyceum. Tainted by his connections to the hated Macedonians, Aristotle conducted his groundbreaking research and teaching among the hostile Athenians. When Alexander died in Babylon and his empire collapsed, Aristotle fled before he could be killed by anti-Macedonian forces in the city. Sailing into exile on the island of Euboea, he died the next year in his early sixties.

Aristotle’s works survived his death, but by the end of the classical age all that remained were the books we have today. These aren’t polished dialogues like Plato’s, but mostly dry lecture notes made by him and his students. Aside from the Nicomachean Ethics, they aren’t that easy to read—and even that short book can be tough going. But in spite of the difficulties of reading Aristotle, his legacy grew over the centuries. Medieval Muslim writers called him “the first teacher,” while the Italian poet Dante celebrated him as “the master of those who know” in his Divine Comedy. His best and most careful student, Thomas Aquinas, adapted his ideas to revolutionize Christian theology. Until modern times, Aristotle continued to be the ultimate authority on countless subjects. Even today, his ideas on ethics and other subjects are profoundly formative for students and continue to be taught in universities around the world. Aristotle’s ideas are worth anyone’s time to investigate and his life is a remarkable story of discovery that should inspire anyone in their own journey.

Philip Freeman is Fletcher Jones Chair of Western Culture and professor of the humanities at Pepperdine University. His books include Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor; Hannibal: Rome’s Greatest Enemy; Alexander the Great; and Julius Caesar.

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Allison Schrager—

Young Americans are too afraid to take economic risks. Compared with earlier generations, they are less likely to move, change jobs, start a family, or even move out of their parents’ homes. We tend to think that’s because they’re overwhelmed with risk—student debt, unstable jobs, or the possibility that AI may change everything. But the opposite is true: the problem is they aren’t taking enough risk. That dooms them to stagnation and feeling like they’ll never reach their full potential. No wonder they feel shut out of the American Dream.

That is why we need a risk reset. We’ve raised each generation to take less risk than the last. My work as a financial economist is about risk. But the lessons from financial markets can be applied to any risk we take.

For example, in finance, safety defines risk. But if we don’t define safety correctly, we take the wrong risks. This is part of what went wrong in the financial crisis of ‘08. It also explains the overwhelming amount of student debt. Young people were told education is a risk-free bet. If that’s true, any amount of debt can be justified because it will always pay off. College is a good investment, but it is not a guarantee—although it is priced like one. Not all degrees are equally risky, either. But when we convinced ourselves otherwise, we ended up with too much debt and earnings that did not pan out.

We also tell young people the world is much riskier than it is. In fact, the world has never been safer. We look at the world and feel like things are so risky: politics seem crazy, AI may take all our jobs or kill us all, and financial markets are volatile. Yet from an economic perspective, the opposite is true. The world has never been safer—not just compared to the olden days when people died at 50, but even compared to 50 or 15 years ago. Wages are more stable, the chance of job loss is lower. Health care is expensive but also more likely to save your life.

Not only is the world objectively safer; we take less risk. Normally, risk-taking is something we associate with young people, but each generation is taking less risk than the last. This is part of becoming richer and having new technology. We are also less exposed to risk when we are young, and that impedes development and learning how to be smart risk-takers. This may explain why, on the one hand, we see more risk aversion from younger Americans, but they are also more likely to take big risks that won’t pay off, like sports gambling.

It’s true we live in times of big risk-takers—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos—who have all become wealthy by taking risks. Meanwhile the rest of us are shut out from taking risks, and it shows up on our balance sheets. This is in part because we’ve made risk-taking so expensive, but also because of the idea that you can’t take a risk until you’re in a secure place. Young people feel like they need a certain bank balance or to own a home before they can take on bigger risks or start a family. But everyone is entitled to risk and needs it at all points in their life. Often the best risks are taken when we are down and have less. Our best businesses were founded during a downturn or a job loss. Youth is the ideal time to experiment and take risks because risk is an important motivation—it is our superpower. We are motivated by the resolution of uncertainty. We need it in our lives to get out of bed in the morning.

Believe it or not, we are also good at risk-taking. We are often told we have biases that keep us from making good decisions when faced with uncertainty. But it is not risk that we’re bad at. The risks we face are often new or unfamiliar to us, or information about how risky the situation is gets presented to us in ways we can’t understand. We are built to take risks. We have thrived as a species under risky conditions for thousands of years. But in a modern world where risks are new and data can be presented in confusing ways, we can make mistakes. We can still make great decisions—we just need to learn more about how to translate risk into terms we understand. With AI and more big data, this skill will be more important than ever and should be part of our education.

Every generation complains that younger people don’t get it or have it easy. But young people today genuinely face many challenges. We’ve told them to avoid risk and made it harder for them to take it. The result is more stagnation and feeling shut out of the economy. We aren’t bad at taking risks, we’ve just been misled and shut out of taking the right ones.

Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a regular columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. She is the author of An Economist Walks into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk.

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Your book argues that public concerts can reshape our understanding of the Enlightenment. What made the Concert spirituel such an innovative revolutionary institution?

Andrei Pesic: We are so accustomed to going to concerts that thinking about their origins can seem a bit strange. But when the Concert spirituel was founded in Paris in 1725, it was the first institutionalized and lasting concert series in Western Europe (as opposed to the short-lived concerts that emerged at the end of the seventeenth century). Public concerts like this one were revolutionary in putting music alone at the center of an entertainment, whereas previously it had accompanied political or religious ceremony (e.g. court or civic music), theater (opera) or dance. The Concert spirituel also had a distinctive repertoire and reason for being: it mostly played religious music during its early years, which was deemed appropriate during church holidays when other entertainments were closed. But over the course of its sixty-five-year history, the Concert spirituel gradually stopped playing religious music, which led many observers to wonder whether this reflected broader cultural changes, or even a decline in religious belief. Explaining some of the reasons for this decline in religious repertoire is the puzzle I set out to explain in The Enlightenment in Concert.

Grand motets (grand religious music) dominated the Concert spirituel’s early repertoire, yet some critics argued that performing sacred music in a concert hall made it spiritually dangerous. Why did the concert setting provoke such concern?

AP: Yes, it was initially surprising when I found a few instances of religious rigorists (from a current of reforming Catholic thought called Jansenism) who criticized playing religious music in a commercial spaces, saying that it was like bringing the body of Christ to the opera house and was an offensive mixture of the sacred and the profane. This contrasted with most other religious writers that I found, who thought that the Concert was relatively innocuous in comparison to theater and opera, with dancing and singing women, plots with adultery etc., which were clearly immoral to contemporary religious authorities. But to the Jansenist critics, it was this very consensus about the Concert’s inoffensiveness that made it so “dangerous,” lulling people into a sense of false security by seeing religious music on the program, then gradually corrupting them into becoming (horrors) opera-lovers!

What can the rise of ticketed concerts tell us about the relationship between art and commerce during the Enlightenment?

AP: The conventional narrative of music history trends rightly to emphasize the novelty of composers, musical genres, and performers. I wanted to add to this by exploring how commercial innovations changed the musical landscape. In the case of the Concert spirituel, it presented a novelty, because anyone with the money to buy a (quite expensive) ticket could enter into a space where music and elite socialization combined, a concert hall where one might find people as oddly assorted as dukes and actors, Thomas Jefferson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What united all these people was a desire (and the ability) to spend a significant sum to hear music performed. On the other side of the curtain, the fact that the Concert spirituel was a business meant that it had to sell tickets to stay afloat. Its impresarios tried to perform music that would attract an audience, even though it wasn’t always easy to figure out what the audience wanted. Eventually, the more successful impresarios of the later decades of the concert settled on trying to present musical novelties to the audience (new instruments, virtuoso performers, new genres like symphonies and instrumental concertos), but this search for novelties led them away from the original repertoire of grand motets. I ended up developing a concept that I call “inadvertent secularization” to describe how these commercial motives ended up acting on the concert’s religious repertoire.

Many people think of the Enlightenment as a movement of philosophers and political thinkers. Why is music just as important to understanding this period?

AP: Ideas are important, but sometimes we let them capture too much of our attention when trying to understand an era of great cultural change like the eighteenth century in Europe. Initially I set out to answer a puzzle: why did the Concert spirituel stop playing religious music and start playing symphonies? I expected to find the concert organizers taking part in a secularizing wave linked to declines in belief, which is how previous historians had described such changes. But instead, I only found musician-businesspeople trying to make sure that they sold enough concert tickets to cover their expenses. This opened a new avenue for studying the Enlightenment as a time of changing practices and unintended consequences, rather than just being in the realm of abstract ideas.

Your research spans places including Paris, Berlin, and Haiti. What surprised you most about the similarities—or differences—in how music shaped public life across these regions?

AP: All three cities had concerts that called themselves “concert spirituel” at various points, with the concerts in Haiti (then the French colony of Saint-Domingue) and Berlin created in emulation of the one in Paris. I was surprised by moments of convergence between the repertoires of the concerts in the three cities, but then also by how much each city’s concert series differed because of the local audience’s taste, limitations to the size of the orchestra and availability of singers, and especially the fascinating re-interpretation about what “spiritual” meant in the context of a concert. Each city’s concert spirituel ended up showing something interesting about what was going on in the eighteenth century—in the case of Haiti, the much earlier breakdown of religious constraints among the French colonists, and in Berlin the fascinating interplay between cosmopolitan and specifically Prussian currents of Enlightenment-era artistic and intellectual culture.

In 1783, Johann Friedrich Reichardt introduced some of the earliest concert program notes to help educate audiences. How did these notes change the way people listened to music, and what do they reveal about Enlightenment ideas of “good taste”?

AP: The idea that knowledge should be democratized was a central tenet for many Enlightenment thinkers. In the case of the arts, systematic treatises attempting to distill “taste” have long been studied as an important characteristic genre, but there has been less attention paid to how figures like Reichardt, who created a short-lived imitation of the Concert spirituel in Berlin, used printed program notes in an innovative way to try to educate his listeners. His idea was that listeners could learn something before coming to the concert, and that this would improve their experience at the event. Nowadays this is a widespread practice, so it was an innovation that had a long afterlife!

Rather than seeing secularization as simply “less religion,” your book shows how it transformed religious practice. What’s one example of how music at the Concert spirituel reshaped the way people practiced religion?

AP: By the end of the eighteenth century, some writers were drawing on religious vocabulary to explain the closer attention and emotional investment that audience members expressed at musical performances. The historian James Johnson identified a shift when people started ostentatiously crying in public performances as characteristic of the age of sentiment (think of tearjerker novels by Rousseau and others) taking root in opera audiences and concert halls alike. What I add to this story is an examination of how various observers weighed the religious changes going on alongside the huge expansion of commercial entertainments during the same time—and I try to show that these two things had a lot to do with each other.

The Concert spirituel helped redefine how people experienced music. What do you think it still has to teach us today?

AP: I think that learning about the hybrid experience that listeners experienced in the eighteenth-century Concert spirituel, which combined sacred music and secular entertainment, might teach us something about the deep roots of the later cult of inner experience and artistic rapture that characterize the age of Romanticism in the nineteenth century and beyond. The contrast between the banal purchase of a concert ticket (just like any other commercial good) and the sometimes sublime experience of an artwork is still something that many people experience today. The origins of the elite concert series as a kind of stopgap religious observance sheds light on the experience that I think still characterizes a lot of concerts of all kinds today—they are still places to see and be seen, to experience new music and great performances, and perhaps the occasional moment of bliss, whether sacred or not.

Andrei Pesic is assistant professor of French and Italian at Stanford University. His research has been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Fellowship, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

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