Greetings from the Porch,

FPR Books has a new title out, and we published an excerpt from it Monday. Will Hoyt's Fear and Trembling in Las Vegas probes the promise of the American dream. We've got several more excellent books coming soon, so stay tuned for more on this front.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about Chesterton, Lukacs, and Joe.

• Teddy Macker turns to David Orr for wisdom in our political and cultural moment: "A healing vision for America, Orr suggests in his writings, is one faithful to the great nearby, to the gospel of the local."

• Ryan Davis focuses on what he's most responsible for: "Whether we realize it or not, the two most essential elements by which our lives are daily defined is by our presence and attention. Or, to put it another way, through our incarnation and embodiment. Look and see, as Wendell would say."

• Jackson Greer considers what messages parents send children when they turn to AI for guidance: "Altman, while acknowledging that people can and have parented before AI, stated that he cannot imagine parenting without it."

• Steve Knepper reviews Fred Chappell's last book of poetry and marvels at its musicality: "What is the ideal that we sometimes glimpse within the world and which thus inspires our own attempts at order-making, at meaning-making?"

• Will Hoyt reads Cormac McCarthy in this excerpt from his new book: "McCarthy, a little before the rest of us, had caught a glimpse of Western Civilization’s end."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about sincerity this week.

One of the great pleasures of teaching Environmental Ethics is the opportunity to reread some of my favorite books and essays. Berry’s “The Pleasures of Eating” is deservedly a classic.

But if there is a food politics, there are also a food esthetics and a food ethics, neither of which is dissociated from politics. Like industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor, and paltry thing. Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels. "Life is not very interesting," we seem to have decided. "Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast." We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to "recreate" ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation — for what? To eat the billionth hamburger at some fast-food joint hellbent on increasing the "quality" of our life? And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in this world.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro