A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent America,
Mom’s two pennies, added to the three already in hand, proved enough for a Whammy Stick (the singular of “Stix”), this being the hot summer of 1967, the cold, cost-a-nickel prize wrapped in white paper, its flavor a mystery, a hit-or-miss. This long-ago afternoon on Katonah Avenue, it was a miss: root beer. Bleah!, to quote Snoopy. But that frosty bar of sugary whatever was stoically consumed. Flavor be damned: This was a unicorn event when you were one of the have-nots. Be of good humor!
(Recently, pal Jake was treated to dinner and then dessert at the local frozen-yogurt joint. Do-it-yourself soft-serve fell into a large cup, the hill becoming a mountain, then carpet-bombed with extras, the final product landed on the scale and—$14-plus. Please tip too. As Bob Dylan crooned, the times they are a-changin’.)
Back to good humor: That’s not something Steven Colbert had, or has, if one is allowed to share a personal opinion. Yet in the announcement aftermath of his looming downsizing from his late-night CBS perch, the fan base has blitzed to social media to extol his alleged comedic brilliance, made brillianter it seems by the de rigueur potty-mouthing that is effing part-and-parcel of the Colbert mojo and sh*tick.
Left or right (there is a lot of bleeping on Gutfeld! too), all the prevailing comedic effery—as if deploying this noun/verb/adjective is a kill-shot intensifier or force-multiplier of some already profound or absolute position—has gotten pretty tiring and tasteless. Eff it!
It leaves a bad taste, no? Sort of like . . . root beer. But unlike a Bronx seven-year-old’s boobie prize, we’ve reached the point where we as a society don’t have to swallow it no more.
By the way, about that flavor: If you’re ever asked how to make a root beer float, just say, “Give it a lifejacket.”
The Square Root Beer of Fourteen Suggestions is 3.74165738677
1. At The American Mind, fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney sizes up the transformation of modern American conservatism. From the assessment:
In truth, however, whatever the virtues of the old consensus, its adherents were far from perfect or imitable in important respects. They were slow to resist “the culture of repudiation” (in Roger Scruton’s arresting phrase) that had colonized the educational and entertainment worlds, as well as the commanding heights of civil society, including large swaths of the business sector. In recent decades, these quarters hectored Americans and instructed them to hate themselves. Much of our elite class obsessed about race and gender in ways that undermined self-respect and propagandized groups based on accidents of birth to give themselves over to anger and despair.
Market fundamentalism and a one-sided affirmation of globalization and trade arrangements that were far from free or fair replaced a prudent and principled defense of an opportunity society. The needs of human beings struggling with the loss of manufacturing jobs and the hollowing out of social and moral norms in the decades after the 1960s were often casually dismissed. A blind and self-defeating economism led conservative elites to downplay the revolutionary import of same-sex marriage, which severed human sexuality from authoritative norms rooted in the nature of things, and the excessive valorization of autonomy, which made individual and collective self-government all but impossible.
2. At The Free Press, Maddy Kearns, new mother, reveals alternatives for fertility difficulties. From the article:
In America, around 13 percent of women struggle with fertility issues. Up to half of couples seeking treatment for them are labeled as having “unexplained infertility” by doctors—and therefore go untreated. Many of them will try IVF, which risks being unsuccessful, because the underlying cause of their infertility has not been addressed. Revolutionary though it has been, IVF does not restore a would-be mother’s body to optimal health; in fact, IVF is often a profoundly uncomfortable experience for women, not to mention an expensive one. It’s no wonder that many women with “unexplained infertility” are left feeling that mainstream medicine has failed them, subjecting them to stressful, painful interventions, while leaving them in the dark about the mysteries of their own bodies.
But there is another way.
It’s called “NaPro Technology,” which is short for natural procreative technology. Until recently, it was seen as an obscure set of medical ideas designed for practicing Catholics, for whom IVF is morally unacceptable. The church recognizes, among other things, that human life is sacred and not ours to create in a lab.
The godfather of NaPro is Dr. Thomas Hilgers, a devoutly Catholic obstetrician and gynecologist. In 1985, he founded the Saint Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction in Omaha, Nebraska—a medical research, education, and service center, which to this day investigates, diagnoses, and treats the root causes of infertility. NaPro also teaches fertile couples how to avoid pregnancy without the need for contraception, by accurately tracking a woman’s cycle.
3. At The Catholic Thing, Fran Maier investigates the heart, and the capacity to love. From the piece:
Each summer, Fish for Life, a nonprofit dedicated to serving children and adults with special needs, does exactly what it claims to do. It takes members of the special needs community, along with their parent or guardian, fishing on the ocean for a day. There’s nothing quite like spending five hours on the open sea with a boatload of the cognitively and physically disabled.
All of them have challenges. All of them have unique personalities. All of them expect to catch a fish. And some—like my own son Dan, who has Down syndrome—simply won’t accept the claim that fish don’t line up and volunteer to be caught. Dan caught four. It wasn’t enough.
Together on a fishing boat, reality gets real – fast. Disabilities are hard. The persons who bear them deal with frustrations and limits the rest of us don’t have, and often can’t understand. Transforming their burdens into joy takes serious devotion.
So my eyes kept turning that day to the boat’s parents and volunteers: their patience, their good will, their humor, their generosity. The parents at least had the family instinct. The volunteers had no skin in the game. Yet there they were.
4. At World, Carl Trueman says the time has come, honestly dictating, for the Church of England to change its name. From the article:
When the procreative and unitive act that is a seal upon a unique, lifelong monogamous relationship is trivialized, then the relationship itself, along with the parties involved, is trivialized too. When sexual union is detached from the specific differences of male and female bodies, the significance of sexual complementarity is eliminated. The stage is then set for confusion over such basic questions as “What is a woman?” That means that any move such as this is incompatible with Christianity. But the church conceded those things many years ago and so its claim that this does not change its doctrine is true. It has not maintained orthodoxy on these points for many years. This move makes almost no difference—to its lasting shame.
There is one last action the Church of England needs to take in order to bring its paper orthodoxy into line with its practices: Drop the word “Church” from its name. It is very clear that it has found orthodox Christianity to be an embarrassment for some time now. That is inevitable when a culture that excludes the biblical anthropology of dependence upon and accountability to God collides with a religion that includes all without exception who seek to be truly human—sinners in need of God’s grace. A decision must be made, and the Church of England decided to pursue unbiblical exclusivity long ago. It is now time to carry through to its conclusion the process of which this latest move is but a minor part: the complete detachment of the organization from historic Christianity.
5. Department of Heathcliff: At Front Porch Republic, Raleigh Adams finds Wuthering Heights to be a primer on, among other things, localism. From the critique:
Neither fully villain nor tragic hero, Heathcliff embodies a radical individualism so absolute that it corrodes every relationship and every patch of land he touches. His love, fierce and possessive, curdles into hatred; his longing for belonging twists into a campaign of generational revenge. In Heathcliff, we confront the terrifying specter of a soul severed from the common good—a man who forsakes reconciliation and stewardship for the consuming fire of his own wounded will. Through Heathcliff’s alienation, Wuthering Heights serves as a dark meditation on what happens when personal grievance overtakes the common good, echoing contemporary concerns about atomization and social fragmentation.
In an Anglo-Saxon world, Heathcliff is an outsider. Alluded to be of Romani or otherwise “foreign” descent, he is originless—as Mr. Earnshaw exclaims upon introducing him: “See here, wife! I was never so beaten with anything in my life: but you must e’en take it as a gift of God; though it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil.” This dark complexion and diabolical framing underscore his otherness, further reinforced by the boy’s linguistic “gibberish,” sullen demeanor, and lack of recognizable lineage.
Through Heathcliff’s lack of belonging, Brontë underscores the importance of rootedness and communal acceptance. As Nelly recounts: “Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors… asking how he could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house when they had their own bairns to feed and rear,” and he “seemed a sullen, patient child; hardened, perhaps, to ill-treatment: he would stand Hindley’s blows without winking or shedding a tear.” Thrust into a home that never truly receives him, Heathcliff internalizes cruelty until it calcifies into lifelong resentment.
6. At The James G. Martin Center, George Leef looks at a book which bemoans the declining academic quality of an “Ivy League” education. From the piece:
But is there really anything so wonderful about the education students receive in the Ivy League? The new book Slacking: A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation will cause readers to be skeptical about that.
Authors Adam Kissel (with the Heritage Foundation), Madison Marino Doan (also with the Heritage Foundation), and Rachel Alexander Cambre (on the faculty at Belmont Abbey College) examine the undergraduate offerings at each of the Ivy League schools and conclude that it is easy for students to coast through to their degrees without having to do much demanding work. Students accumulate many of their credits in soft and fluffy courses (such as pop-culture studies) or ones that are meant to impart ideological beliefs—courses that don’t entail the study of any body of knowledge but merely require students to parrot back the correct opinions.
In short, graduating with an Ivy League degree does not guarantee that a student has received a superior education, or even anything approaching a respectable one. Students may leave their illustrious schools with little improvement in knowledge and skills from their high-school days, while having acquired a lot of misinformation—all at very high cost.
7. At National Review, Moira Gleason wonders if the essay has gone kaput. From the article:
Even the more conscientious students may soon struggle to write for themselves as companies embed LLM technology into email platforms, word processors, and writing-assistant software. As I type, Google Gemini occasionally suggests the possible next phrase as a phantom in front of my cursor.
In the AI age, college humanities departments face a choice: Either openly incorporate AI into class writing assignments or ban the technology and figure out a way to prevent students from using it.
To find out more about how colleges are handling the problem, I talked to a handful of humanities departments and asked how they are—or are not—incorporating the use of AI into humanities courses and academic writing assignments. The professors I spoke with spanned the spectrum of tech adoption, from instituting no-tolerance policies to actively working to incorporate AI in the classroom. They all agreed, however, on what’s at stake: At its most fundamental level, writing is thinking—something chatbots can only simulate but threaten to displace.
8. At The Daily Yonder, Jared Ewy reveals there is one linotype machine still at work putting out a newspaper. From the beginning of the story:
The last linotype machine newspaper in America is the Saguache Crescent in Saguache, Colorado. It’s a story worth printing, although publisher Dean Combs doesn’t need to. News outlets from around the world have come to visit and pay tribute to the century-old linotype machine. He can focus on tip-tapping area events into the hot metal typesetter.
Looking like a church employee at a massive pipe organ, Coomb’s keystrokes set off a chain reaction that, to be honest, I still don’t entirely understand.
Anything with molten lead, however, should get your attention. The tiny smelter behind his keyboard maintains 500 degrees while his keystrokes burn for a metaphor of changing times. Today, on a modern keyboard, each touch is translated into a signal that a computer’s processor interprets. At the Crescent, a keystroke sends us through time and into an America dominated by heavy, hot industry. When even the words were made of molten labor. Letters and characters are hammered with Steampunk gusto on different size mattes and assembled into information.
9. More Printing: At First Things, Mary Harrington warns that digital is defeating ink. From the piece:
Though many still believe in Whig history, it is already over—a casualty of the post-print counter-Enlightenment. For while believers in Whig history generally recognize the contribution made by the printing press to their story, most assumed the advent of digital culture would continue this trajectory. They were wrong. The digital revolution is profoundly reactionary. The transformations it brings are less revolution, in the laudatory Whig sense, than putsch—one that critically undermines every presupposition underpinning Whig history.
The end of print culture is already upon us. With its end, we are already witnessing the disintegration of modernity’s load-bearing foundations, including the valorization of facts and objectivity, and a conception of the individual subject as a universal model of human personhood. This reality-picture, which crystallized in the seventeenth century, is already well on its way to dissolution in the solvent bath of digital media, a process radically accelerated by the spread of AI.
It is perhaps too neat to say the transition from print to digital forces us to replay the seventeenth century again, but in reverse. And yet much that is happening today makes sense, seen in those terms. And perhaps its most momentous effect is to undermine the cultural norms and habits of thought that form the bedrock of modern liberal democracy.
10. At Civitas Outlook, Samuel Gregg pays tribute to the late Ed Feulner, the “Movement Man.” From the remembrance:
The application of good ideas to politics and economic policy requires strategy, and Feulner was in the business of thinking strategically about how to advance the modern conservative agenda in light of the constraints imposed by political realities and the need to build coalitions. To that end, Feulner excelled at smoothing over the tensions that inevitably arise within any group of highly motivated individuals who agree on many things but not everything. Many was the occasion when I saw Feulner serve as a peacemaker between individuals who had declared war on each other over the 10 percent of things they disagreed about.
Being a peacemaker requires a great deal of optimism. That is an outlook that some conservatives and classical liberals struggle to maintain. After all, when you are constantly emphasizing the limits of human rationality, or forever warning against the folly of utopianism, or deeply aware that many progressives seem uninterested in history’s lessons, it can be challenging not to have a gloomy view of the world.
Feulner, however, was the polar opposite of the frustrated classical liberal or melancholic conservative who constantly bemoans the state of affairs in America. While a realist in his understanding of human nature, Feulner never lost sight of the possibilities for advancing the principles that underpin a free society. That optimism could be infectious. There were many instances when I emerged from a conversation with Feulner feeling much better about the past, present, and future.
11. At Bloomberg, Donald Kerwin laments US foreign-aid cuts and their consequences. From the article:
The impact of the US cuts will be felt for generations, undermining the possibility of a constructive immigration policy at home and diminishing US power and standing abroad. Meanwhile, China has exploited the situation by funding aid and humanitarian programs of its own, particularly in the strategically vital Indo-Pacific, as well as in Africa and South America.
I work with the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS)/USA, a branch of a 45-year-old nongovernmental organization that has aided refugees from 57 nations. It serves some of the world’s neediest people, including unaccompanied children, the severely handicapped and the chronically and terminally ill. Its work, and that of similar NGOs, has promoted a secure and productive world that values human life and dignity.
Feed the Future worked in 20 countries to lift 23.4 million people out of poverty, relieve 5.2 million households from hunger, and remove 3.4 million children from the threat of stunted growth caused by malnutrition. In the 2024-2025 school year, JRS Chad served 32,975 Sudanese children in 21 refugee camps, offering them educational support and, by extension, child protection. The US President’s Malaria Initiative, launched under the George W. Bush, has helped save 11.7 million lives and has prevented 2.1 billion cases of malaria since 2000, primarily among children under the age of 5 in African countries.
12. City Journal, Robert Henderson checks out the political divergence of the sexes. From the article:
In relatively rich and free societies, people are better able to express their underlying traits and preferences. In contrast, less affluent and less egalitarian societies tend to impose stricter behavioral expectations, which compress sex differences. Psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams has summed up this dynamic succinctly: “Treating men and women the same makes them different, and treating them differently makes them the same.”
Even sex differences in height, BMI, obesity, and blood pressure are larger in countries with more egalitarian sex-role socialization. Across societies, men tend to be taller and heavier and to have higher blood pressure than women—but these differences are especially large in wealthier nations. In materially scarce environments, men’s physical development is more constrained relative to women’s. Put simply, men have greater physical capacity for growth and change, and material abundance—particularly adequate food and nutrition—allows those underlying traits to emerge more fully.
Many in Western societies assume that treating men and women the same will naturally lead to convergence in their interests and preferences. But the world doesn’t work that way. The freer people are and the more fairly they’re treated, the more their differences tend to emerge rather than disappear. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that young men and women are diverging politically more than previous generations did.
Lucky 13. At the Portland Press Herald, Anita Randall tells of fleet feet helping to support the library in the Maine vacation home of presidents. From the story:
Because of your incredible support, Kennebunk Free Library’s 28th Edition 5K and online auction brought in over $76,000 to support our library. More than 80 local businesses sponsored the event, and over 100 businesses and individuals donated fabulous items for the online auction, showing how much our community cares about the library.
It truly was a joyful day as nearly 400 runners and walkers took to the course, cheered on by a wonderful crowd of enthusiastic supporters. Both our top male and female finishers set new course records.
Henri Rivard, of South Berwick, finished in 16 minutes, 9 seconds, while Saeger Fischer, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, crossed the line in 19:39.
Bonus. At Verily Magazine, Susanna Parent takes and shares some tips from the French about living well. From the piece:
I was recently sharing with an older and wise friend about how I avoid using my seasonal table runners because I’m worried my toddler or one-year-old will spill something on them. She responded, “Go ahead and use them! Why do you have them if they’re just going to sit in storage? Some stains fade out or blend in, and if it looks really bad, just buy a new one.” This friend uses her china regularly, rather than letting it collect dust in her basement. I love her challenge to use what we love, and the French would join her in making it.
What things do you love that you have in your home? Do you have a beautifully patterned tablecloth or an intricate vase you keep somewhere safe? Use it! Rather than only taking your favorite things out for special occasions, bring them out a few times a month. For me, this means unfolding my table runners on our dining room table, pouring drinks into the crystal coupe glasses my parents gave my husband and me for our engagement, and wearing a few of my favorite articles of clothing more often. Think about what you love and make a plan to incorporate more of it into your life.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Karl Hahn tells how fundraisers and nonprofit leaders have to shun comfort and confront “The Resistance.” Read it here.
Due. The Center for Civil Society firmly contends it is important to make much about the Semiquincentennial, for a host of reasons (such as revitalizing our necessary love for civics). Which is why on November 5–6 in Philadelphia it will be hosting an important conference on “Civil Society and America at 250: The Past and Future of What Has Made America Exceptional.” Learn more about it right here. And do sign up!
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: What happened to the man the day after he ate five servings of alphabet soup?
A: He had a big vowel movement.
A Dios
Plenty of recent cross-country travel has proven once again that many of the lame who enter a plane à la wheelchair seem to have miraculous cures by the time they arrive at their final destinations, where they sprint from the gate. How so? It could be mid-flight proximity, at 30,000 feet, to angels and saints. Or it could be convenience handicapping (which sounds like something that happens at the racetrack). By the way, it was recently the birthday of this missive’s editor, Lorna B., and felicitations were forgotten, so mea culpa, and the hair shirt now being worn, let the news be known, and expressions of well-wishing be made to this loveliest of souls, because it is quite true: Better late than never.
May We Know Tender Mercies When They Come,
Jack Fowler, who having just chased the Good Humor truck, can be found huffing and puffing at jfowler@amphil.com.
