News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
This week we had the opportunity to watch a black-crowned night heron eat a five-inch catfish. It took the bird quite awhile to work the fish into position to go down his throat, but once he got it lined up, it went down quickly. It was a pretty remarkable meal to observe.
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In a dispatch from the Treasure State, Jesse Russell writes about the "palpable tension between the townies and the newcomers." What might it mean to love one's new neighbors in a time of migration and its accompanying economic, ethnic, and social divisions?
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John Murdock watches some cartoons and wonders about the meaning of words like "family": "For those who still stand by the essential limiting power of words, these are trying times."
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Naystneetsa Katharsia reviews Steak Barbare, in which the Frenchman Gilles Luneau unravels the industry that depends on promoting a vegan diet and post-animal agriculture. His book sheds light not only on how labs grow protein, but also on the ways investors market a technological ideology.
What's on the docket for next week? A report on the wild world of elite college admissions, a consideration of the cultural and theological meaning of food, and a review essay on Josh Hawley's The Tyranny of Big Tech.
A friend recently gave me Peter Wayne Moe’s Touching This Leviathan, a book about whales, language, Melville, Jonah, and the quest to handle and articulate profound mysteries. It’s an unusual book. It’s also a very good one. One of the questions he ponders is “how to inhabit inherited words”:
When I was writing my dissertation, my adviser told me every good thing he’d ever written began with him sitting at his desk with three or four passages from books he’d copied onto sheets of paper. A writer’s job, he said, was to figure out how to make those passages speak to each other. The etymology of composition is important here: com- a prefix meaning “together,” and position a variation of the Latin ponere, “to place.” A placing together. Saying something new isn’t a matter of inventing ideas from scratch but of composing those gathered.