A Bad Year of Good Words: 2020 in Links

Tolkien’s fiction reminds us that power cannot be controlled; it enslaves you. To act freely is to acknowledge your limits, to see the journey as a long road that includes dozens of future elections, and to fight against the temptation for power.

If the American people care about the family, it’s high time we start to act like it because, as two recent books show, the American family is struggling.

As a reporter, it is my job to follow along as individuals and communities try to figure out who they want to be and how they want to live.

Which justice? There have never been stronger calls for justice than those we are hearing today. But seldom do those issuing the calls acknowledge that currently there are competing visions of justice, often at sharp variance, and that none of them have achieved anything like a cultural consensus, n…

The Christian call to care for the vulnerable starts with facing the heightened needs in our own communities.

The architecture of the modern web poses grave threats to humanity. It’s not too late to save ourselves.

How online life breaks the old political order

The search engine dedicated almost half of the first page of results in our test to its own products, which dominated the coveted top of the page

A quarterly journal of essays about domestic policy, political economy, society, culture, and political thought.

There’s Bandcamp, beloved by artists. There’s Spotify, very well-liked by listeners. And then there’s that big question mark. The artist Damon Krukowski takes a look.

Subscription services aren’t an escape from shopping, they’re a surrender to brands

The newsletter service is a software company that, by mimicking some of the functions of newsrooms, has made itself difficult to categorize, Anna Wiener writes.

By forcibly breaking some of our technological habits, Covidtide creatively destabilizes others.

Moving to a Rust Belt town taught me that real solidarity is harder than it looks.

Chernobyl has acted as a reminder to me that social media hasn’t made people crazy, paranoid, or stupid—people have always been willing to spread misinformation, lies, and conspiracies when it suits an agenda like a political or religious ideology.

Governments stopped the world in its tracks during the pandemic—and our relationship to the economy will never be the same again.

Wonder is the birthright of every child and yet the vast majority of contemporary children’s lit is designed to beat wonder out of even the smallest child.

Power is no thing to love, only to bear with, as Tolkien teaches us.

A mochi seller in Kyoto, and many of Japan’s other centuries-old businesses, have endured by putting tradition and stability over profit and growth.

In this reflection on the thought of Ivan Illich, L.M. Sacasas writes that there can be no substitute for the work of rediscovering our common humanity in the practice of hospitality, which, insofar as it flowers into friendship, will be the starting point of politics.

Our trees are unlikely to make a measurable difference in global carbon dioxide levels, and they will not do anything to hasten the end of the coronavirus pandemic, but according to Wendell Berry, these facts have nothing to do whatsoever with whether or not our decision to plant trees is, as Kersti…

To make promises, to stand by one words, to be answerable for them, is to open oneself to blame.

Herbert Blau and the actors he was directing were nervous. Standing backstage before their performance

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