Greetings from the Porch,

Through the end of the month, all FPR books are 50% off and come with free shipping with code "CONFSHIP". This may be a good time to stock up on Christmas gifts. And stay tuned for more FPR Books news, as we have several good books whose publication we'll be announcing soon.

• In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about crypto, abundance, and robots.

• Alisa Ruddell examines the many deaths that accompany all efforts to cultivate new life, whether a farmer trying to raise crops or parents trying to have children: "How should we morally evaluate or rank the various choices we make that lead to embryo death?" Next week, Alisa will offer an Illichian response to the tragic reality she describes here.

• Donald Antenen turns to Ezra Pound for insight into how local communities might become thriving intellectual and artistic centers: "The task of local culture is to create places and situations where neighbors can gather for good literature, music, and art with no mind to changing or challenging the Age and without any reference to national or international politics whatsoever. The task demands modest means and ends, and there is nothing, truly nothing, in the way of our beginning immediately."

• Elizabeth Stice reads an old dystopian novel and finds uncanny parallels to the techno-utopia being sold today: "What made the Isle of Pines an instance of regression is being sold to us as progress."

• Bill Kauffman remembers his youthful experience umpiring baseball games and expresses his disdain for robo umps: "One of the adult managers lacerated me throughout the next six innings. I finished the game, probably shading calls against the abusive prick’s team, and as I unburdened myself of mask and chest protector I swore I would never again gainsay a ruling, no matter how dubious, of the fellow behind the plate."

• Elizabeth Newman reflects on how a technological society makes it difficult to recognize and enjoy leisure: "Leisure is not entertainment, play, or a chance to catch your breath in order to return to work restored."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about memory this week. Given that "thinking is thanking," this is a good episode to prepare you for Thanksgiving.

I’ve been meaning to read Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See for a while now, and I’m glad I finally made time for it. The characters and story are gripping, but what makes it particularly brilliant is the way he structures the novel as a meditation on the mysteries of waves—light waves, sound waves, radio waves, ocean waves, historical waves. The characters are caught in these, scrabbling for understanding and relationships as war and violence tear them apart. And Doerr’s lyrical prose is delightful. Here is an account of how a blind girl perceives reality:

To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro