“Remembering Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025).” Christopher Kaczor remembers the life and legacy of his teacher: “I have never met, nor do I ever expect to meet, a philosopher as fascinating as the author of After Virtue. If we are waiting for Godot, he may well arrive before another—doubtless very different—Alasdair MacIntyre.”

“The A.I. Mind Meld.” Nic Rowan describes the positive impact that using AI has on those who leverage it to double-click on the challenges that keep them from maximizing their potential: “And yet the more I talked to my (soon-to-be former) colleague, the more I suspected that a human being could have produced this work, and, for all I knew, perhaps one had. After all, my colleague’s syntax and word choices in his emails, his texts, and even in his speech were not all that different from those of the L.L.M. He, too, spoke of ‘key points’ and ‘actionable items’, not to mention ‘sustainable models.’ When I talk to other young people in a professional context—or, as is often the case, overhear their job interviews while I work at the university library near my house—I am often treated to a similar show. If these instances are any guide, the brightest members of my generation want ‘to dive into their work’; ‘to boldly navigate’ its ‘landscape’; ‘to enhance,’ ‘to emphasize,’ ‘to revolutionize’ their ‘industries’ with ‘hard-hitting solutions,’ often all at once.”

“ChatGPT Is a Gimmick.” Jonathan Malesic has sat through enough technology workshops and sales pitches to recognize a gimmick when he sees one: “The infrastructure demanded by AI is neither neutral nor cheap. It has well-known environmental costs, given the vast amount of electricity and water its data centers demand. Nor is the infrastructure only physical. It has already been built in the minds of students, who are becoming informational lotus-eaters, addicted to immediate, effort-free homework answers and adequate-seeming essays on demand.”

“Why Most No-Till Agriculture Is Not Actually Regenerative.” Nate Powell-Palm warns against fixating on a single practice—like plowing—as the root problem: “This means the majority of no-till farming in this country is focused on herbicides, not regeneration. These chemicals devastate soil life—the microbes and bugs that farmers need to regenerate soil and to build resilience to droughts and floods. And they threaten our health, with scientists linking them to cancer, birth defects, infertility, and more. . . . The key question is not ‘to till or not to till.’ A narrow focus on single practices like tillage is misleading.”

“Building Drones—for the Children?” Emma Green profiles Katherine Boyle, a venture capitalist who sees tech acceleration as pro-family: “she’s a devout Catholic in the often secular, left-leaning world of tech. She’s a friend of the pro-family world, while steering clear of Silicon Valley’s tendency toward tech-driven pro-natalism (attempts to invent artificial wombs that could fully gestate babies, that sort of thing). She spent years in D.C. as a reporter for the Washington Post, and brings her understanding of Washington culture to her work with startup founders. Above all, Boyle is the face of American Dynamism—not just as an investment portfolio but as an ethos.” These are complicated questions, but Boyle’s focus on building tech to amplify power and pursue limitless growth doesn’t sound like a path toward human virtue.

“Do You Actually Know What Classical Music Is? Does Anyone?” Matthew Aucoin proposes a capacious definition for classical music—music whose authoritative form is written: “what I love about the act of writing music down is precisely the freedom it affords. Though a piece of music is a temporal structure, composing it takes place not in real time, but outside time. The process is one of unearthing sound by delving into silence. A composer can make certain musical discoveries only after weeks or months spent inhabiting an imagined sonic world, just as a writer might experience certain epiphanies only years into work on a book. In music, as in language, you can learn a lot about yourself by wrestling with a blank page.”

“Confessions of a Striver.” Bonnie Kristian wrestles with the goods—and temptations—of ambition: “So what of my striving? Is it harmless, or perhaps a neutral tool to be turned toward good or ill? A mere matter of taste and talent? Or is it, as Aquinas holds, an inordinate desire, a longing for honor for myself ‘without referring it to God’ or ‘the profit of others’?”

“Can a Government Be Pacifist?” John Shelton considers the example of what Stanley Hauerwas calls the “‘only successful Christian experiment in government’: Quaker Pennsylvania. Even Christians who, like me, lack firm pacifist convictions can learn much from the efforts of Pennsylvania’s founder, William Penn.”

“Diapers of Glory.” Sophia Lee probes the significance of a humble, faithful life: “The desire for a blaze-of-glory death—or rather, a life lived greatly—was serious. I was in my 20s at the time, still fresh into adulthood after a childhood of listening to sermons exhorting me to live passionately for the mission of God. I wanted to live that life. I wanted to do great things with my one chance on earth. Today, I am a 37-year-old stay-at-home mother to a 3-year-old boy and an 8-month-old girl, and I’m living in an expansive, shallow suburbia called Los Angeles. It’s been six months since I made the decision to quit my job as a journalist and become a full-time homemaker. This is not the blaze of glory I had envisioned for my life.”

“A View of Pittsburgh and its Politics From a Townie Bar on the Edge of the County.” David Mills talks with some folks at the local bar about what it means to be a Pittsburgher: “I might call myself a Pittsburgher, in talking to an outsider who doesn’t care about distinctions, but the place I most care about, that I identify with, is this little borough on the edge of the county, and the bar that’s what the English call a public house, and the people I know in the bar and the neighborhood. I think that’s a gain.”