Greetings from the Porch,

Although Will Bardenwerper has convinced me intellectually that I shouldn't root for any MLB team, I remain nostalgically fond of the Seattle Mariners, whose games I grew up listening to on the radio. So it was a disappointment that once again their playoff ambitions were thwarted this year. But I like to think that being a Mariners fan gives one the pure baseball experience as described by the great Bart Giamatti: "It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops."

• In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about populism, Substack, and education.

• Nina Tarpley challenges us to reimagine college education from the ground up to counter the system's tendency to displace students from their homes: "We must begin to see and name how deeply the modern higher education industry subverts the very nature of embodied, placed, limited humans."

• Brandon McNeice considers how the humble lost-and-found box might educate us in communal responsibilities: "A box by a door. A hand that picks up. A name that calls an object to account."

• T.M. Moore celebrates the great value of a humble notebook: "It may be surprising to think that a notebook—or a collection of notebooks—could help us pay more attention to our surroundings, but it’s true, as I’m sure many readers have already discovered."

• Jessica Burke reflects on childhood relics, parenting, and the passage of time: "Eventually, Big Brother and Little Sister outgrew White Mouse and Baby Purple. I found them discarded underneath the couch one day and realized they hadn’t been played with for a while. Their appearance caused a surge of delight, and it was then that I realized that parenting is made of its own fleeting moments."

• Jenna Robinson recommends that colleges focus on forming humans who can discern wisely: "Colleges and universities should focus on forming the uniquely human attributes that AI cannot replicate."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about work and complains about the locations of FPR conferences.

I’m not sure how it’s taken me this long to read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, but it was worth the wait. It’s an account of their family’s effort to eat local food for a year and an exploration into the economics and culture of American food. It’s almost twenty years old, and reading it now gives a window into both how far food culture has come and also, of course, how far we still have to go:

The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint—virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if they wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value. “Blah blah blah,”hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can’t even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now. We’re raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro