If we assume that the inescapable goal of the farmer, especially in the present economy, must be to reduce costs, and, further, that costs are reduced by local adaptation, then we can begin to think about the problems of livestock breeding by noting that corn, whatever...

Despite my crusade to place Wendell Berry’s work and thought in the largest possible context, the stubborn truth is that he’s an agrarian fighting for small farmers and local economies.  Strangely, however, he’s still my guy.  

There’s nothing from my life exp...

People who love Wendell Berry like I do, must wish, like I do, that more people really loved him.  What a world this could be. What a better society we could make. The Berryist believes, in full earnestness, that we can still make a lasting peace on earth if we could j...

This letter is adapted from Wendell Berry’s 2000 essay “Going To Work,” published in Citizenship Papers (2003).

Dear Facebook Programmer:

To live, we must go to work.  We are all the same this way.

Obviously we work in different places, all of us, but it should also be ob...

Wendell Berry published Thoughts in the Presence of Fear shortly after 9/11.  The second piece in Citizenship Papers, it’s a tabulation of 27 short exhortations that link together Berry’s reaction to the 2001 Al-Qaeda attacks on the U.S.  

The first of these is a rarity...

What gave the president of the United States the right to shut down my government? 

There was something really weird about the shutdown, now finally over after 35 days.  Somehow, somewhere along the way, the federal government became the property of the president, and i...

There’s a story in The Big Short, Michael Lewis’ chronicle of the recent U.S. housing bubble, about a guy named Michael Burry.  Burry, the Christian Bale character, if you saw the film, managed Scion Capital -- a small hedge fund he started with some savings and a smal...

To mark the two-year anniversary of WWW, I want to say more directly something I’ve mostly just implied in these monthly posts.  If we want to change how things are going, we ourselves are going to have to change.  “Be the change you want to see” is a Ghandism, and a g...

Sometimes I have to work pretty hard to tie the laces between a Wendell Berry essay and the news of the day.  But that wasn’t going to be a problem with the penultimate piece in Imagination in Place.  My pulse quickened when I glanced at the title: “The Uses of Adversi...

How many times a week do I hear someone declare that “communication” or “education” is the silver bullet that, if only done better, would cure whatever particular problem we happen to be discussing?  It might be peculiar to my field, but predictably, when the bottom is...