Joel Miller, “Bookish Diversions: The Bits We Usually Ignore” (Miller’s Book Review)

“Footnotes also provide the perfect place for the snide aside. Take a famous example from Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In the main text, Gibbon makes a winking, oblique reference to the claim Origen of Alexandria had castrated himself. ‘The primitive church was filled with a great number of persons of either sex, who had devoted themselves to the profession of perpetual chastity,’ he says. ‘A few of these, among whom we may reckon the learned Origen, judged it the most prudent to disarm the tempter.’”

Samuel James, “Female Culture Is Being Pornified” (Digital Liturgies)

“Here, and in the surrounding promotional commentary around her new book, Hatmaker makes one thing clear: She’s done taking orders from the Bible about how to be a woman. From the beginning of the piece, Hatmaker makes her complaints clear. Purity culture horribly twisted her mind, to the point where she wore a one-piece swimsuit on her Mexican honeymoon. Grim stuff, indeed. ‘These misogynistic narratives kept the men in power and the women subservient,’ she writes. Those narratives include the pro-life narrative; being brainwashed by the patriarchy is the only reason any woman would oppose ‘reproductive rights.’’

Alan Jacobs, “Towards Old Man Willow” (The Homebound Symphony)

“I’m reminded of that passage in The Fellowship of the Ring where the hobbits are trying to get through the Old Forest, and the one way that they don’t want to go is down into the valley of the Withywindle. But they keep being forced down there. The lay of the land, the affordances of the land push them towards the place they’re trying to avoid. And eventually they discover that resisting those affordances is just too exhausting. And that’s what it’s like when we use social media, and when we use chatbots: it’s characteristic of all of our currently dominant technologies to force us to become devices. The entire system is oriented towards the transformation of what had formerly been human beings into devices.”

Cory Turner, “In Reading, the Nation’s Students Are Still Stuck in a Pandemic Slump” (NPR)

“When it comes to reading, the nation’s third- through eighth-graders are still mired in a pandemic-era slump, according to new testing data. In math, the news is only a little more heartening: Student achievement in those grades either held steady or improved slightly, though all grades remain behind performance levels of same-grade students in 2019.”