Greetings from the Porch,

Omar Drissi has been FPR's editorial intern for most of this year, and he's been a big help keeping the website running smoothly. Thanks, Omar! His time working with us comes to an end this week, and we'll introduce our new intern soon.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about zoos, bookstores, and stories.

• Robert Miner exhorts all of us, and teachers especially, to not bow down to the AI idol: " An education in untimeliness teaches its recipients to regard themselves not as children of their age, but as their stepchildren. It is not a course that can be completed in three weeks. It is an adventure that, unfolding over the course of a life, affords some protection against technocratic tyranny."

• Elizabeth Stice remembers Dolly Parton: "In our polarized times, people have recognized that somehow everyone seems to like Dolly Parton."

• Russell Arben Fox contemplates teaching and tools: "An education in the human arts and sciences involves a present, embodied, non-automated engagement with art, ideas, and the written word."

• Paul Kearney reflects on the importance of shaping childrens' affections: "Children laugh, after all, long before they understand or speak words."

• Geoffrey Kurtz argues education should enable students to put down roots: "Albert Camus once wrote: 'We must imagine Sisyphus happy.' I would rather imagine Icarus landing."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about spiritual vision this week.

As you might expect, I enjoyed reading Wendell Berry’s new collection of essays, Dispatches from Rural America. It’s vintage Berry, and he tackles a range of topics, from drones to war to imagination to sheep. I wrote a review of the book for the fall issue of Local Culture (to which you should subscribe!), but I didn’t have a good place to work in this passage from his essay on John Lukacs (originally published in Local Culture) about the importance of having a sense of humor:

Humor is a necessary part of intelligence. I don’t mean, though I don’t exclude, the ability to tell a funny joke. I mean the sort of buoyancy, coming from self-knowledge, that keeps thought in the light of day, safe from the undertow of political idiocy. John Lukacs had this sort of humor. I think his sense of humor, as much as anything, must have turned him against the “conservative” and anticommunism of the 1950s: “the opposition of the two stupidities does not mean that the truth is somewhere in the middle.” Imagine Joseph McCarthy—or, for that matter, about any of our current “influencers”—with a sense of humor.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro