Our Times
This is the era of no good choices. Take schooling, for example. Keeping children home robs them of education and socialization. It scars their futures, steals their joys. It makes it impossible for their parents to work, or even to rest. But sending them to school endangers their health, and that of their teachers and their families. The argument
... See moreEzra Klein • There Are No Good Choices
We of the age of the machines,” Henry Beston wrote in the 1920s,
“having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of the night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhap
... See moreL. M. Sacasas • What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars? - The Convivial Society

Paul Bogard’s 2013 The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light is probably about as a good a survey of the consequences of light pollution as you’re likely to find. Bogard traces the rise of the regime of artificial lighting and its less than benign consequences for both humans and non-humans, from the well-docume
... See moreL. M. Sacasas • What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars? - The Convivial Society
Narratives may not be adequate for understanding the complex reality that confronts us, but they may nonetheless be necessary to get us to do act responsibly in the face of that reality. In other words, we’re now operating at a scale for which our most basic cognitive tool may no longer be adequate.
L. M. Sacasas • Narrative Collapse

“Bad times! Hard times!” — this is what people are saying. But let us live well, and the times shall be well. We are the times. Such as we are, such are the times.
—St. Augustine of Hippo, a sermon on prayer during the slow collapse of the Roman Empire
But the economics of new books have nothing to... See more