Greetings from the Porch,

The spring issue of Local Culture is off to the printer. If you want a copy to show up in your mailbox, subscribe in the next week.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about chop saws, oranges, and Gemini.

• Jason Peters introduces the Place and Pastime issue of Local Culture: "Nostalgia, properly speaking, is homesickness. In its etymologically precise sense it is a longing not for a time but for a place."

• Mina Menyhert found Faulkner's prose surprisingly healing: "It’s disorienting to read Faulkner. That’s part of the point. It’s also what makes As I Lay Dying impossible for me to put down in this disorienting season of medication withdrawal."

• Aaron Weinacht reviews a new collection of essays on Philip Rieff: "We often find ourselves fleeing 'forward,' one might say, to escape the meaninglessness that forever snaps at our heels."

• Jordana Rozenman celebrates making good food as an antidote to the temptations of AI: "Make sourdough: as an act of love for your body and your friends and family, and as a remedy against the ills of non-embodied life."

• Gene Callahan draws on Robert Nisbet to consider how we might orchestrate the competing goods of human communities: "What might be gained by viewing Nisbet’s different forms of community as being in a conversation, rather than in a competition?"

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about nostalgia this week.

I’ve been reading Jared Cooney Horvath’s new book The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning—and How to Help Them Thrive Again. I’m basically in agreement with his conclusions, so I was expecting to appreciate it, but it’s been a disappointment. It’s self-published, and that shows up in the layout and editing. And the prose reads like AI, by which I mean it’s clichéd, alarmist, and reductive (and sprinkled with misattributed quotations). If I have to choose, I’d rather read AI-sounding prose arguing against screens in schools than endure Sal Kahn’s terrible AI prose arguing for education by chatbot. But really, I’d rather read robust arguments for good pedagogy. To give a taste for what I mean, consider these summaries from his chapter about AI in education—they make fine points, but they do so in catchy-but-abstract “distinctions” that paper over the real intellectual work that needs to be done:

Cognitive offloading isn’t a shortcut to learning—it’s a detour around it. The ease of AI comes at the cost of building the mental muscles needed for independent work. That’s not a problem for experts aiming to produce, but it’s a serious problem for students trying to learn. Without the background knowledge to vet output, students can’t reliably spot errors, ask meaningful questions, or improve over time. And without genuine effort, our children risk tethering themselves permanently to an imperfect machine.

And

Higher-order thinking skills don’t emerge from thin air—they grow from deep knowledge stored in long-term memory. Without that grounding, students may find answers, but won’t be able to truly understand, question, or build upon them. If we want our children to develop real skills for the future, the answer isn’t to hand them futuristic tools; it’s to make sure they’ve done the foundational work that will empower them to use those tools well.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro