What I read in the office in August

First, some local news – Baltimore is infested with hipsters (Mohammed); our arrabers visit Mennonite farms for their produce (McFadden); suburb-dwellers are racist, lying fools (Graves); sometimes small good things happen (Lanahan):
Sagal Mohammed, Evening Standard, Why Baltimore is the coolest city on the East Coast
David McFadden, Baltimore Sun, How Mennonite farmers are helping to keep Baltimore's arabber tradition alive

Lucia Graves, The Guardian, ‘Addicts, crooks, thieves’: the campaign to kill Baltimore's light rail

Lawrence Lanahan, Baltimore Fishbowl, State awards $23 million in financing to develop low-income housing in Baltimore’s suburbs and downtown

Some stuff for conservatives (kind of) – disenchantment is the water we swim in (Sikkema); when we try to make politics secular, it institutionalizes the dismissal of religious belief (Meadowcroft); many young people are more apathetic than vehement in their disbelief (Brian/Sixsmith); conservatives find life more meaningful than liberals, although none of those words have any fixed meaning at this point (Khazan); a definition of conservatism that actually remembers it's supposed to conserve something (Stangler):
Doug Sikkema, The New Atlantis, Disenchantment, Actually
Micah Meadowcroft, Washington Free Beacon, Sacred Politics
Paul Rowan Brian & Ben Sixsmith, The Public Discourse, Apatheism Is More Damaging to Christianity Than Atheism and Antitheism
Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, Why Conservatives Find Life More Meaningful Than Liberals

R M Stangler, The American Conservative, Aldo Leopold's Ecological Conservatism

Hopefully, the Left learns something about morality soon; currently, they seem to be on the same trend of factual relativism (Gray) and moral libertinism (Williamson). There is some movement to return to a place of moral clarity, but it's not particularly convincing, tending towards "quantum oneness" (Smarsh) or outright witchcraft woowoo (Yar). A more critical view of our modern world and institutions must account for the things lost by whatever gains have been made (Gurstein), but real moral clarity isn't going to be likely until one realizes they are going to die (Arieff).
John Gray, UnHerd, The rise of post-truth liberalism

Kevin D Williamson, National Review, The Psalmist and the Sex Doll 
Sarah Smarsh, The Guardian, How the American Left is rediscovering morality

Sanam Yar, NYT, Witchcraft in the #MeToo Era
Rochelle Gurstein, The Baffler, Self-Invasions and the Invaded Self

Allison Arieff, NYT, Life Is Short. That's the Point.

Technology! IT IS TERRIBLE. I mean, some/most of it, at least. Tufecki gives a brilliant history of the effects of social media on social movements from the Arab Spring through the 2016 elections, and how the once-hopeful benefits of democratizing technology were monetized, then co-opted by authoritarians in the absence of stronger guardrails. Jackson provides a similar history of lies and vitriol among the actual users of the Internet. Emba reads Neil Postman and questions whether the Web is as morally neutral as we think. Glaser criticizes the one-dimensional morality of Twitter's new policy towards trolls. Jacobs reads an oral history of Silicon Valley and longs for a shower of disinfectant afterwards. Wiener looks at her own data and finds a bizarre but beautiful nostalgia. Peterson is no longer willing to commoditize his family to build his online brand: 

Zeynep Tufecki, MIT Technology Review, How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump
Gita Jackson, Kotaku, We Can't Fix the Internet
Christine Emba, WaPo, Is the Internet evil?
April Glaser, Slate, Fighting “Dehumanization” Is Not Good Enough to Fix Twitter
Alan Jacobs, Weekly Standard, Land of Forever Tomorrow
Anna Wiener, The Atlantic, What It's Like to Wallow in Your Own Facebook Data
Andrew Peterson, Rabbit Room, Wrestling the Giant: Why I Deleted Instagram

Institutional decline was on my mind a lot this month – perhaps the Internet's physical infrastructure will just wash away in rising sea levels (Borunda); we need Wendell Berry's 50-year Farm Bill more than ever (Atkin); public school history leaves a lot to be desired – specifically, truth (Wong); the bridge and pier collapses will continue until morale improves (Bogost); writers on the Right and Left agree that democratic norms are in trouble (Shenk); our economy doesn't know how to recognize non-material goods (Gates); cars suck and should be banned (Atkin again); local politics are turning into the same sewer as national politics (Luttrull); in short, everything is terrible, even though we should still work to make it better (Olmstead):
Alejandra Borunda, National Geographic, The Internet Is Drowning
Emily Atkin, New Republic, Trump’s Farmer Bailout and America’s Broken Food System
Alia Wong, The Atlantic, How History Classes Helped Create a 'Post-Truth' America
Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, More Bridges Will Collapse
Timothy Shenk, New Republic, Is Democracy Really Dying?
Bill Gates, Gates Notes, Not enough people are paying attention to this economic trend
Emily Atkin, New Republic, The Modern Automobile Must Die
Daniel Luttrull, Front Porch Republic, The Facebookification of Local Politics: Extending the Wall of the Bathroom Stall
Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative, Our Civic Institutions Are Self-Destructing

Two more fantastic pieces by the same author about two pretty charged issues (gun control and climate change) that are just gorgeously written, showing the human side of both subjects and refusing to dismiss the people on either side as monsters or deserving of judgement for a difference of opinion:

Elaina Plott, The Atlantic, The Bullet in My Arm

Elaina Plott, Pacific Standard, The Country's First Climate Change Casualties?

Another declining institution: fertility. Kilpatrick argues that a liberal viewpoint that despises children will never make a safety net that cares for the vulnerable. Gorvett reveals the masculinizing effects of hormonal birth control on women; Halpern examines the feminizing effects of BPA, phthalates, and other endocrine disrupting chemicals on men (more articles like these two will necessitate the initiation of a new section, "Chemistry: Everything is Terrible":

Connor Kilpatrick, Jacobin, It's Okay to Have Children
Zaria Gorvett, BBC, The Strange Truth About the Pill
Daniel Noah Halpern, GQ, Sperm Count Zero

And, of course, unfortunately, there's the President. Tomasky analyzes the Russia investigation and asks what Trump knew and when he knew it. Rucker & Costa look at the new Woodward book and some of its wilder stories of the frustration of the White House staff with their foolish boss; one of them wrote an unsigned op-ed for the Times to share their work in opposing him. This is no true courage, but an act of some Republicans being so unwilling to cling to power that they will cling to it unconstitutionally rather than take action to remove an unfit President (Frum & Judge).
Michael Tomasky, NY Review of Books, Hail to the Chief
Philip Rucker & Robert Costa, WaPo, Bob Woodward’s new book reveals a ‘nervous breakdown’ of Trump’s presidency
Anonymous (TBD), NYT, I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration
David Frum, The Atlantic, This Is a Constitutional Crisis
Monique Judge, The Root, You Are Not Part of the 'Resistance' If You Are Hiding Behind Anonymity

However, he's the leader we deserve (Olmstead), pointlessly cruel and eminently thoughtless (Bruenig). The white evangelicals who elected him still cling to him (Wagner) – where does their faith truly lie (Horton)? They may say or even believe it is with the God of the Bible, but the words they use are empty symbols, no longer referring to anything concrete (Hawthorne). Meanwhile, their true leader's appropriation of religious language turns off those outside the Church, and makes even believers uncomfortable in bringing up their now-politicized religion.
Gracy Olmstead, The Week, Trump is the navel-gazing president for our navel-gazing society
Elizabeth Bruenig, WaPo, Cruelty without consequence is Trump's way
Alex Wagner, The Atlantic, The Church of Trump
Michael Horton, CT, What Are Evangelicals Afraid of Losing?
John W Hawthorne, Sociological Reflections, Evangelical Simulacra
Jonathan Merritt, The Daily Beast, Trump’s God-Talk Is Turning America Off Religion

He is not the only barrier to belief, however. Many Catholics have found the child abuse and clerical coverup within the Roman Church an insurmountable obstacle to their continued membership (Linker); the loss of them and uncountable future members as a result of this is tantamount to soul murder (Blanchfield). Questions remain about which accusations are true – another case of "who knew what, and when?" (Bruenig) In the meantime, we should mourn with the victims (Tushnet) and be thankful for those who have faithfully sounded the alarm on this for years (Ruse).
Damon Linker, The Week, The unbearable ugliness of the Catholic Church
Patrick Blanchfield, The Revealer, Soul Murder
Elizabeth Bruenig, WaPo, Catholics face a painful question: Is it true?

Eve Tushnet, Patheos, A Cloud of Witnesses

Austin Ruse, Crisis, Rod Was Right and I Was Wrong

Much of the Church – Protestant and Catholic alike – is in a state of disunity, whether as a result of sexual abuse or the pursuit of power. At the root, it's that desire for power all the way down, of course (Beaty), and we must think about how to organize our polity in such a way that ensures individual accountability without allowing the structure to grow so as to seek primarily its own preservation (Warren). In such a time, we must look to our suffering Savior, remembering that at His own hour of reckoning, His response was not a strong defense, but a willing acceptance (Harding). Rather than fight each other, we must long for one another's salvation, knowing that our own is bound up with it (Hill):

Katelyn Beaty, Religion News Service, As Willow Creek reels, churches must reckon with how power corrupts

Tish Harrison Warren, Mere O, Why Evangelicals Should Care More About Ecclesiology

Leander Harding, Covenant, Being Disarmed
Wesley Hill, First Things, No Salvation Without the Other

Thankfully, there are witnesses left to the holistic Biblical vision of personal and societal righteousness (Ellis). This may be the history of Christian political activism for AIDS victims (Igoe) or the conversion and repentance of an avowed racist (Franco/Radford). But there are still plenty of opportunities for Christians to work for repentance and reconciliation between races (Tuininga), better understanding and ordering of human desires (Anderson), or protecting the liberty and security of our Muslim neighbors (Belz):

Carl Ellis, TGC, Biblical Righteousness Is a Four-Paned Window
Michael Igoe, Devex, Christians and the new age of AIDS

Aaron Franco & Morgan Radford, NBC News, Ex-KKK member denounces hate groups one year after rallying in Charlottesville
Matthew Tuininga, The Witness, Have We Already Gotten Over Charlottesville?
Matthew Lee Anderson, Mere O, Assorted Thoughts after Revoice
Mindy Belz, World, A space for freedom

On that note, a whole bunch of Christian living/theology stuff – too much to list individually:

Michael Rhodes, CT, God's Battle for Your Bank Account
Brandon McGinley, Scottish Catholic Observer, Being Catholic means sharing in both the joy of life and the grief of death
Jasmine Holmes & Lisa Fields, CT, Rethinking Apologetics for the Black Church

Angela Franks, Plough, What's a Body For?

Collin Huber, The Village Church Resources, Decrease Your Vision

Mark Galli, CT, In the Beginning Is Silence
Jen Wilkin, CT, Heaven Shines, But Who Cares?

Ashley Hales, CT, What We Lose When Hymnbooks Disappear

Trillia Newbell, TableTalk Magazine, Store Up the Truth

Daniel Hyun, Facts & Trends, When People Leave

Two more related theological pieces, both on the silence of God (not surprisingly, Fleming Rutledge comes out on top in my opinion, but both are worth reading):

Fleming Rutledge, Christian Century, Divine absence and the light inaccessible
Rowan Williams, Christian Century, Silence in the face of mystery

Some more lovely thinking, from Christians with a more philosophical bent, thinking about how we know what we know – how we organize our knowledge (Marble), how we draw connections within it (McEntyre), and who we trust to provide knowledge (Schiess). Even conspiracy theories and cryptozoological craziness reflects a desire to understand things, to know and love the world we inhabit (Coffey). The world does much to discourage us from applying these lenses to ourselves with the same rigor (Jacobs).
Joshua Marble, Front Porch Republic, The Names of Things
Marilyn McEntyre, Comment, Held in Common
Kaitlyn Schiess, Christ & Pop Culture, The Bible, Explained

Clare Coffey, The New Atlantis, The Joy of Cryptozoology
Alan Jacobs, Comment, Outside In

Two sets of linked pieces: Maryanne Wolf with a piece on her new book about digital reading, and Micah Meadowcroft's fantastic (mostly positive, though more pessimistic) review; an interesting piece by Abigail Murrish on organic vs. industrial agriculture, GMOs, and what farming might look like on the New Earth, and a response by Jeffrey Bilbro which drills down into the moral roots and goals of different farming technologies by way of John Milton's Paradise Lost:

Maryanne Wolf, The Guardian, Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound.
Micah Meadowcroft, Washington Free Beacon, War in the Heaven of Our Minds
Abigail Murrish, CT, Do All Plants Go to Heaven?
Jeffrey Bilbro, Front Porch Republic, Learning to Distinguish between Demonic and Redemptive Technologies

Reviews, interviews, and other pieces related to books by people I like a lot:

Berny Belvedere, Arc Digital, Disruptive Witness: An Arc Conversation with O. Alan Noble
Jake Meador, Mere O, Book Review: Disruptive Witness by Alan Noble
Alan Noble, Christ & Pop Culture, YouVersion Bible Lens App: Mediating the Bible through Your Life
Karen Swallow Prior, CT, Why You Can't Name the Virtues
Joseph Wiebe, Front Porch Republic, Love in the Place of Almost Death
Ross Douthat, NYT, Oh, the Humanties!
Jeffrey Bilbro, Front Porch Republic, Educating Humans to Subvert Technocracy
Robert L Kehoe III, The Point, When the Ship Has Sailed: Alan Jacobs on Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis
Mark Gordon, Plough, Getting Practical with the Benedict Option

Some more reviews – first, one of Steven Pinker's new-ish book that is absolutely savage (Guilhot), and a throughly baffling one of Patrick Deneen's that is just about incomprehensible, full of assertions that seem obviously wildly untrue (no one is alienated in modernity? our products are increasing in quality without any tradeoffs? increasing per capita income is a clear indicator of a better society? come on), but with a useful reminder that some order is indeed spontaneous, and that no one's opinions should be taken for granted as unflawed (McCloskey). Thankfully, the next two are comfort food for me – a ruinous takedown of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (Eagleton), and a long reflection on Christopher Lasch's classic critique of the cult of progress on the Right and Left (McWilliams):

Nicolas Guilhot, H-Diplo, Enlightenment Now Review
Diedre Nansen McCloskey, Modern Age, Why Liberalism's Critics Fail
Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books, Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching

Susan McWilliams, Modern Age, The True and Only Lasch: On The True and Only Heaven, 25 Years Later

More reviewish things, but now for poetry and TV and film: 

Clive James, The Guardian, Clive James on his new epic poem: ‘The story of a mind heading into oblivion’
Laura Turner, The Outline, Are You There, God? It's Me, The Good Place
Emily Nussbaum, New Yorker, Dystopia in 'The Good Place'
Alissa Wilkinson, Vox, With Eighth Grade, Bo Burnham gives the selfie generation the portrait it deserves
Charles Bramesco, Vox, Eighth Grade’s R rating deters actual 8th-graders from seeing it. What a shame.

Some wonderful jazz writing – a review of Nate Chinen's new book (Wilson), an interview with him on reviewing live jazz and the economic struggles of jazz journalism (Cassel), and a piece he wrote on Aretha Franklin's jazz background (Chinen); a lovely history of Bill Evans through the lens of his (and the author's) obsession with the song "Nardis" (Silberman); a review of the lost Coltrane tapes that situates the recently-discovered music in his musical progression, and does some great rumination on Trane's later career and the idea of "progress" in music (Green):

Carl Wilson, Slate, Just Behind the Beat

Matthew Cassel, Longreads, The Last of the Live Reviewers: An Interview with Nate Chinen
Nate Chinen, NPR, All the Things You Are: Aretha's Life in Jazz

Steve Silberman, The Believer, Broken Time

Dominic Green, Weekly Standard, John Coltrane and the End of Jazz

And a bunch of miscellaneous stuff that doesn't fit particularly well elsewhere, as usual:

Bradford William Davis, Sojourners, Football 'Is Not of God'

Priscilla M Jensen, Weekly Standard, A Trip to Milledgeville
Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement, Where do the books belong?

John Wilson, First Things, Thinking Under the Influence
Catherine Addington, Weekly Standard, The Fashion of This World Passeth Away

Ian Frisch, Longreads, Anthony Bourdain and the Missing Piece
Sandra M Gilbert, Paris Review, The Treasures That Prevail: On the Prose of Adrienne Rich
Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative, The Art of the Stroll
Jim McDermott, America, How newsletters can help you find your tribe and escape the chaos

Sabrina Little, I Run Far, Joy in the Storm
Rachel Manija Brown, Archive of Our Own, No Reservations: Narnia