Greetings from the Porch,

The second issue of Gift showed up in my mailbox this week. The publisher and editor of this print magazine retired from tech to live offline earlier this year, and he puts the magazine together with a typewriter and photocopier. Its mission "is to encourage and support Orthodox Christians who want to connect with God, their neighbors, and one another through offline living." It's a fascinating project. There's no website for the magazine, but if you want a copy or want to write to Chad, his address is P.O. Box 200, Sewickley, PA 15143.

And if you want to hang out with a group of Porchers offline, come join us in Indianapolis in a couple of months. It's shaping up to be a great gathering.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about picnics, conspiracies, and skills.

• Adam Smith ponders how we might work toward the common good with help from Nolan's Odyssey and Patrick Deneen's new book, American Odyssey: "We can only find our way back to the common good if we sustain that Odyssean tension between the desire to explore and the desire to settle."

• Jacob Adkins contrasts Wendell Berry's reading of Homer's epic with Nolan's version: "The Odyssey has lasted three thousand years because, while Odysseus wrestles with his longing for adventure and glory, he comes to realize the inestimable value of a rooted household."

• Daniel Vollaro asks some Berryesque questions about today's digital technologies: "In American society, computers are never required to prove their worth."

• Barbara Castle confesses her frustrations as a teacher: "Artificial intelligence gets the best of me most days. It demands too much. It takes a profession that I love and turns it into a soul-crushing curse"

• Samuel Schaeffer praises Meaghan Garvey’s Midwestern Death Trip and describes how reading it challenged his view of strangers: "The moment, while small and perhaps unimportant, stayed with me and was a beautiful example of the great conversation with the stranger."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about perseverance this week.

I’ve been reading through some Gene Logsdon. What a delight the self-titled “contrary farmer” is. Living at Nature’s Pace: Farming and the American Dream collects essays on a variety of topics related to his life on a small farm in Ohio. If you want advice on stocking a farm pond (and lighting it at night by setting oil-soaked straw bales on fire so you can play hockey games) or judging new technologies or dealing with prejudice against rural people, this book may be for you. Here’s Logsdon on why individual homesteaders often fail:

Providing the technical information from tradition that would help forge a modern sustainable agriculture is not the most difficult task. Much of the technology is there waiting to be reimplemented. What we lack most is the traditional farmer and a culture that could nourish him.

Before the industrial revolution, corn shocks were hauled in good weather to the barn, and then in harsh winter, the young people went from farm to farm in the evenings making a party out of the husking. The person who husked a red ear—and there were many red ears in the days before standardized hybrid corn—got to kiss his or her sweetheart. This was the cultural, even cultured, way of making work pleasant. It was replaced by a farmer husking corn alone in a cold December field, day after day—a misery, one he was driven to when technology made communal work impossible and obsolete, and when traditional social rituals had lost their significance. Humans are social animals, and it is as community, not as individuals, that they will accept a life that eschews the consumerism, leisure, and delirious pursuit of novelty that characterize our society today. Only as a community will people rediscover the unique kinds of pleasure and satisfaction that the traditional farm provides.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro