News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
As we've been working on projects and making plans, FPR editors and board members decided it would help us if we knew a bit more about you. Who are our readers? What do you value about FPR? We'd be grateful if you took a few minutes to fill out this brief survey (as a small thank-you, we'll send copies of Localism in the Mass Age to two of the people who fill that out).
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In my weekly Water Dipper, I recommend essays about Jane Austen, the artistic economy, and St. Junipero Serra.
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Heather Herrick Jennings reviews Christopher Hall’s Common Arts Education and calls it a "practical how-to for renewing a comprehensive range of embodied skills" in the classroom.
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James Gallant ponders some of the ambiguities in American community life: "'Organized leisure' might or might not engage citizen participation very fully, and it might amount to just symbolic assurance that the “community” was still there, like the American flag at Fort McHenry after the bombardment by the British navy."
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Elias Crim describes the background of Pete Davis's new book Dedicated and affirms Davis's argument that we need more "long-haulers."
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I review Nick Ripatrazone’s new book, Wild Belief: Poets and Prophets in the Wilderness, and take the occasion to probe some of the paradoxes inherent in the wilderness.
What's on the docket for next week? A consideration of why elite institutions like Princeton have a hard time forming their members to live out their purported values, an essay on the joys and challenges of teaching students to inhabit their places well, a meditation on the very American tension between belonging to a community and escaping from it, and an argument for why Lincoln might help resolve a disagreement between Hamilton and Jefferson regarding political economy.
Sometimes while researching nineteenth-century reading practices, I come across descriptions that seem eerily contemporary. For instance, Dr. James Henry Clark, in a book on how to take care of one’s eyes and ears, warns against reading on trains. Newspapers are particularly dangerous:
Reading by fire-light or feeble light, and especially reading in railway cars and carriages, are to be most carefully avoided. A large number of persons in the neighborhood of New York spend from one-half to two hours every day in riding. Coming into town from their suburban homes, they buy the paper at the earliest moment possible, and read it on the way to their place of business. . . . Thus their eyes are taxed to read a faintly, closely-printed column, as it dances before their eyes, during an hour or two every day, greatly perilling thereby the usefulness of organs upon which they greatly depend. Observe the passengers in the train, on any of our public routes. . . . [B]efore all eyes, young and old, spectacled and otherwise, there oscillates some kind of printed page. Opportunity for fresh air is lost at the stopping-places, while the eyes are eagerly strained and worried over the plot of some novel, or a column of the details of some foreign intelligence, the gist of which could be written in a sentence or two.