Greetings from the Porch,

This week, Nina Tarpley wrapped up her time serving as our managing editor. She also drew the icons for the sections on our website and helped out with Local Culture. Doing the behind-the-scenes website work can be thankless, but we're very grateful for Nina's help. Omar Drissi is stepping in as our next intern, and it's great to have him on board.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about economic republicanism, the second amendment, and isolation.

• Holly Stockley critiques regulations that prevent commonsense uses of local resources: "This is the quiet republic slowly fading away, one unpermitted beam, one prohibited steer, one empty rain barrel at a time. When stewardship gives way to enforced dependence, the fabric of community frays, and citizens of particular places are turned into mere consumers in a placeless system."

• Peter Biles reviews Mark Clavier’s historical novel Tillers of the Soil: "This is a fitting book to read for a people who today, some 1,600 years later, feel themselves to be living in civilizational decline as well. What forces must we moderns contend with and what culture and place ought we to defend?"

• Mark Botts meditates on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: "She cares for the Kid until he mends. And what does the Kid do to her in return? 'He has no money to pay her and he leaves in the night.' The first explicit charity given to him, and the Kid turns from it. This will become his pattern."

• Will Lyon wrestles with the pressures doctors are under to turn from the patient and gaze at the digital stream of data about the patient: "The correct diagnosis was available through observation. I still think of Opa’s case when I get lost in the weeds of chart review and need to remember that sometimes, the most valuable information is gathered from the patient by using our eyes, ears, and hands."

• Colin Gillette wonders if gardening might help pull us away from idolatry: "We melt our attention, scrolling and buying and upgrading until our anxiety cools into distraction. Our screens become the new golden calves, hammered from rare earth and precious ore, each one humming with the same ache that forged the idol in the desert: the longing for something bright and immediate to obey."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about crime (but not murder!) this week.

I’ve been enjoying Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Whimsy mysteries. The second one, Clouds of Witness, is particularly well constructed. Her extensive learning shines through in her literary references, and the prose is delightful. In this one, I appreciated the way that she portrays the fog as a key character:

Now, had Lord Peter taken his brother’s advice, and paid more attention to English country sports than to incunabula and criminals in London—or had Bunter been brought up on the moors, rather than in a Kentish village—or had Wilkes (who was a Yorkshire man bred and born, and ought to have known better) not been so outrageously puffed up with the sense of his own importance in suggesting a clue, and with impatience to have that clue followed up without delay—or had any one of the three exercised common sense—this preposterous suggestion would never have been made, much less carried out, on a November day in the North Riding. As it was, however, Lord Peter and Bunter left the trap at the foot of the moor-path at ten minutes to four, and, . . . . like two Cockney innocents, . . . set forth at a brisk pace down the narrow moortrack towards Grider’s Hole, with never a glance behind them for the great white menace rolling silently down through the November dusk from the wide loneliness of Whemmeling Fell.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro