A Small Farm Future, by Chris Smaje (Chelsea Green Publishing; 320 pp., $22.50). Chris Smaje is probably the only sociologist-turned-farmer in England. This unusually ecologically-aware agriculturist hopes the sobering effects of COVID-19 will help reset society by restructuring rural areas. Food chains are fragile due to population pressure and economic and ecological challenges, and Smaje says there
READ MORE“COVID is where you die.” So said my three-year-old grandson, John Henry, when I asked him what he knew about COVID-19. Like many of my readers, I come across online articles warning of the negative effects of the virus on young people nearly every day. While only a tiny number of them have died from
READ MOREDuring the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump spoke and acted like every coastal globalist’s nightmare. Criticizing the European Union as America’s devious competitor, Trump called both the World Trade Organization and NAFTA “disasters.” NATO was obsolete, he said, Crimea was none of our business, and better relations were needed between Washington and Moscow. Advising Obama to stay out of Syria,
READ MOREHere’s the answer to that question right off the bat: Joe didn’t go anywhere. Instead, our culture, our lawmakers, our pundits, and others made him invisible. They have erased Average Joe. And Average Josephine too, for that matter. Who today really speaks for the barber in Weaverville, North Carolina who just spent eight hours on
READ MORE“The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States… does not challenge that position.” Thus did President Nixon, in the Shanghai Communique of 1972, accept China’s territorial claim to the island of Taiwan.
READ MOREFraser Myers recently asked at Spiked how blacks and Latinos could vote for Donald Trump and in some cases enthusiastically join demonstrations for him, given the supposedly obvious fact that that Trump is a white supremacist. According to Myers, New York University professor Cristina Beltrán answered this troubling question in the Washington Post in a memorable gloss on “whiteness”:
READ MOREI loved Little House on the Prairie when I was little, but as I grew older, my favorite story from this series of novels centered not on Laura Ingalls’ childhood, but on that of her husband, Almanzo. The youngest of four children growing up in 19th century New York, Almanzo and his siblings were once
READ MOREMy wife and I recently watched The Vow on HBO Max. It’s a nine-part documentary about NXIVM (pronounced “NEX-ee-um”), an organization that claimed to provide personal and professional development training programs. Think Scientology in its early days, when it was an unorthodox therapy program without all the sci-fi religious mythology. Like Scientology, its true nature
READ MOREWhat a glorious thing the reopening is! After nearly a year of darkening times, the light has begun to dawn, at least in the US. Given how incredibly political this pandemic has been from the beginning, many people smell a rat. Is it really the case that the reopening of the American economy, particularly in
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