Greetings from the Porch,

This weekend is the opening day of trout season for youth. It's also 24 degrees. We will be out regardless.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about baseball, gardening, and the Metaverse.

• Joshua Pauling reviews Carl Trueman's new book The Desecration of Man: "If desecration is the pervasive problem our day, then nothing less than consecration is the answer."

• A.A. Kostas commends Josh Nadeau’s Room for Good Things to Run Wild: "This is a book for every young man who has ever hit a crisis of meaning or purpose, despite possessing boatloads of knowledge."

• Jacob Spry imagines a conversation about politics, energy, and self-denial: "What if instead of nuclear power plants and radioactive waste to dispose of we just consumed less electricity?"

• Griffin Gooch situates James K.A. Smith's new book on mysticism in the context of his previous work (and his social media posts): "By embracing the discomfort of unknowing, we come into a more profound awareness of love in all its splendor."

• Christian Holmes wrestles with the benefits--and limits--of efficiency: "Modernity lays at your feet hundreds if not thousands of tools to make our lives cleaner, smoother, and more efficient."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about happiness this week.

David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 is a fascinating counter-history of technology. The organization is eclectic, but his perspective reveals the unpredictable and strange ways in which cultures interact with technologies. For instance, Germany poured immense resources into building the V-2s even though they were a terribly inefficient weapon, “Very crudely, it took two human lives to make a V-2 and each killed one person. It is estimated that instead of [6,000] V-2s Germany could have built 24,000 fighter aircraft.” Or on a more encouraging note, cars and bikes were produced in roughly equal numbers between 1950 and 1970, but then global demand for bicycles soard so that “in recent years around 100 million bicycles were produced every year and only about 40 million cars.” He sums up his approach near the end of the book:

Getting away, as this book has, from the conflation of use and invention/innovation will in itself have a major impact on our thinking about novelty generation. The twentieth century was awash with inventions and innovations, so that most had to fail. Recognising this will have a liberating effect. We need no longer worry about being resistant to innovation, or being behind the times, when we chose not to take up an invention. Living in an inventive age requires us to reject the majority that are on offer. We are free to oppose technologies we do not like, however much interested pundits and governments tell us it is essential to accept, say, GM crops. There are alternative technologies, alternative paths of invention. The history of invention is not the history of a necessary future to which we must adapt or die, but rather of failed futures, and of futures firmly fixed in the past.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro